From GENE LOGSDON

I’m thinking lately that a farmer can learn more about sustainable farming from history rather than from current science. Agriculture has been taking giant leaps “forward” and archeology giant leaps “backward,” both with intriguing and absorbing results. Both work under a handicap. Archeology studies a silent past and has to worry that it’s getting the story right. Agriculture assumes a future that may not turn out to be true either. The two sciences have markedly different philosophies. Agriculture is interested in making farming a money-profitable business. Archeology is interested in finding out why profitable farming invariably leads to wrecked civilizations.

Archeologists are discovering new information all the time, especially in Central America and in North Africa because in both cases the past is not so silent after all. Written records and datable non-written records are coming to light especially for the Mayan empire on this continent and the Carthaginian Empire and its aftermath in North Africa. For example, researchers are reporting new evidence indicating that the Mayan Empire was maybe a thousand years older than it had been thought to be. The Yucatan Peninsula supported a population of millions more people than historians previously had concluded. Supporting those millions was an extremely advanced maize or corn agriculture, the profit-farming of that time. But whenever the Mayans figured out yet more clever ways to increase corn yields, the population increased and that required yet more yield increases. One example: the people literally built upland fields for corn by carrying rich mud up from swamp land that they could not otherwise drain. Sadly, the Mayans used the wealth from their profit-farming to build gigantic pyramids and fortresses that required a certain kind of cement to erect, and the cement required the burning of vast amounts of wood to produce. What with burning wood and clearing the land for more farming, the forests were destroyed, and erosion followed. The wealth also tempted the people to engage in humans’ favorite sport: war. And the people started having diet problems from too much corn. Does any of this sound familiar? More Gene…

From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

Do you know how many pneumatic rubber tires you own? I bet when you count them up, you’ll be surprised. Even on my little one horse farm, there are 40 tires in use, not counting the ones on the car. And ten percent of them are flat at any given time. This is partly because most of my tires were vulcanized in the late Middle Ages or thereabouts. But it is also because there is something unsustainable and unnatural about riding around on air wrapped in a substance that comes from trees that grow half a million miles away.

This is the time of year when I fare forth to another season of mowing and planting. I know without looking, that my first chore, after getting all the motors (6) running, will be fixing flats. I thought maybe this year would be an exception. The green tractor started right up and the hydraulic system on it worked fine. I backed up to the disk to hitch up and the hole on the disk tongue lined up with the drawbar hole perfectly on the first try. Oh perfect joy.

One pass across the field and behold, the left tire on the disk was as flat as a pancake. I pumped it up (by hand) and proceeded on to the gardens which were actually dry enough to disk (the corn ground wasn’t) and worked up two of the plots before the tire went flat again. Pumped it up again and it lasted until I had finished the other two plots. I would not have been so stubborn about it except rain was threatening and it might be another two weeks before the soil was dry enough to work again.

Have you ever stopped to think just how dumb it is to have pneumatic tires on a disk? They are only in use when the disk is not disking and that would mean, in my “operation”, about three hundred feet a year at a speed of not more than two miles per hour. Those tires could easily be made out of metal or even some high grade plastic. I should never have gotten rid of my really ancient disk which had no tires at all, but an adjustment to swivel the disk blades straight enough so they wouldn’t cut into the dirt as they rolled along. More Gene Logsdon…

From GENE LOGSDON

Forgive me for returning to this topic again, but history is being made in the corn market and the mainstream press isn’t paying attention. Corn prices hit an all time high last week. As you pull on your boots and head for the garden or fields for spring planting, what are your plans? Are you ready for some seismic changes in food prices? Do you feel too helpless to do anything much but keep on hoeing? Am I overreacting?

Corn recently made it well into the $7.00 plus per bushel range, to an historic high, and a rise of about a dollar a bushel from the week before, indicating how eradicate the market has become. As I write this, the market is bobbing up and down around $7.50 like a basketball during March Madness. The USDA just came out with a report in which it said, much to the surprise of nearly everyone, that corn stocks remain unchanged. But then the experts came on with a litany of “it depends” about how one should interpret the meaning of “unchanged.”

We’ve heard for months now that corn was in short supply. There are a number of reasons, supposedly. The demand for ethanol was going up, supposedly. The ethanol plants were buying more corn, supposedly. Other countries were importing more corn, supposedly. Weather outlooks are iffy, supposedly.  I can write more sentences ending with the word ‘supposedly’, but what’s the use. Even the grain traders are saying they don’t know what’s happening.

You can read all this stuff in the farm news yourself. I don’t really care to hear any more ‘supposedlies’. I just want to know the what of it, not the how or why. At the livestock auctions in eastern Ohio last week, buyers and sellers were talking glibly of ten dollar corn by this summer, lamb prices over four dollars, and heaven help the cattle market. If you happen to be raising your own calves for meat right now, you could not have a better investment IF you aren’t feeding them seven dollar corn. More Gene…

Poison Hemlock

From GENE LOGSDON

I was thrown from a horse twice and tried to stop a runaway once when I was a boy, so I am not particularly enamored by the equine breed. But I worry about horses. I’ve been reading about plants that poison livestock and was surprised to learn that for as big and strong as horses are, they are rather fragile when it comes to eating their vegetables. Among the things that are supposed to be toxic to them are onions. Yep, says so right here in this scientific report I am reading. Also, red maple leaves, acorns, yew foliage, avocadoes (no wonder I don’t like them), hairy vetch, and many others, some of which really raise doubts in my mind, like black walnut foliage, black locust bark, and alsike clover. Alsike clover causes slobbers— excessive drooling— in horses. I sure wish my grandfather was around so I could ask him about that. He grew a lot of alsike clover because it survived on poorly drained soil and his landlord was too cheap to put in tile drainage. I remember when he still farmed with horses. Wonder what he did about slobbers?

There are many other plants that can poison farm animals. We all know that if a wild cherry limb blows down in a storm, it needs to be removed pronto from pastures because the wilted green leaves have cyanide in them in potent amounts. But I would argue that the danger to farm animals from wild plants is being overstated. Maybe red maple leaves when they are first falling from the trees in the autumn are toxic, but I’ve got red maples all over and our livestock have never been poisoned.  Acorns and oak leaves? My sheep love acorns, even red oak acorns which are very bitter, and devour any little oak seedling they find. Mine have access to black walnut foliage too but have never suffered from it as far as I know. The juglone in black walnut is toxic in some ways and veterinarians say that the trees and horses don’t mix. But my neighbor’s draft horse roams all summer in a woodlot full of black walnut trees. In fact, an old remedy for internal parasites in livestock is to soak black walnut hulls in their drinking water. If you think that sounds far-fetched, a much publicized control for internal parasites in humans is black walnut tincture, made from soaking particles of black walnut hull in vodka. Think I’m kidding, don’t you. Google it. More Gene…