From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

Working from the premise that we will eventually run out of plentiful supplies of  manufactured fertilizers, I have been reading old farming books written before artificial fertilizers became easily available. I am amazed at the sophistication with which science approached the subject of soil fertility once it become evident in the mid-1800s that farmers were rapidly depleting the native richness of their soils and had to find ways to restore it using livestock manure and green manure crops. In some ways, what science advocated then was more advanced than farming practices are today.

If we have to produce food for growing populations without large supplies of manufactured fertilizers, the science of a hundred years ago is going to be back in vogue. Even if we don’t run out of fertilizers, advanced manure science will be very useful for anyone wanting to avoid the high costs of commercial fertilizer. (Don’t laugh at the term, “manure science”— agricultural colleges are now conducting what they called Manure Science Review days.)

“Backward” farmers like myself may not look so backward after all in the future. Ralph Rice, who farms in northeastern Ohio, just emailed me a photo of his unbelievably  lush corn, unbelievable because it is an open-pollinated variety and has no chemical fertilizers on it at all. The reason I believe Ralph’s photo  is because I have similar corn and it is just beautiful. I hate to tempt fate by bragging— we could get a wind storm tomorrow and blow it all over. But the case just must be made. Granted that this is, so far, a very good year for corn, no one with an open mind can look at Ralph’s or mine and not wonder if maybe we backward guys are really going forward.

All the literature from about 1870 to 1910 states that four-fifths of the plant nutrients in animal feed is still in the manure when it hits the ground. With careful handling and application of the manure, most of those nutrients can go back to the soil. Careful handling means using bedding and manure packs in the barn, not flushing the manure out with water as if the confinement building were one giant toilet bowl, which is what it really is. The other one fifth of the nutrients needed— and more— can come from green manuring with clovers, say the old books, and as both Ralph and I are convinced is true from actual experience.

So what’s the big deal about chemical fertilizers and juiced up hybrid corns? I wonder how many people know that commercial corn growers are spending on average of over $150 an acre for fertilizer. (Over $200 an acre sometimes, depending on the price of nitrogen.)  And they are spending $100 an acre for hybrid GMO seed corn. That is just ridiculous when even the agribusiness suppliers admit that so far GMO varieties have not meant any general increases in yield. The corn farmer who puts out 4000 acres of corn, and quite a few of them do now, could have a fertilizer and seed bill of one million, two hundred thousand dollars before he gets his planter to the field. I am sorry but I think that is insane. And at least two big farmers I know agree but of course don’t want to be quoted. One of them told me he is thinking about starting a beef feedlot. He doesn’t care if the cattle make any money, he says. It’s the manure he’s after. I know this man well. Never in a million years did I think he would ever say that.

To be continued after my corn and Ralph’s throw ears and develop, to see if I have to eat crow or can brag some more.
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From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

The photo of stunted corn (above) tells why grain farmers don’t like trees in their fence rows. Don’t like fence rows at all, in fact. The trees suck the moisture away from crops, as you can see.

But what’s going on here? The corn in the other photo, just across the fence, growing the same distance from the same trees, is tall and healthy. Why aren’t the trees robbing moisture from this corn?

I can’t recall any time when two pictures tell a better story of what’s happening in farming. I took both photos on July 15, as I write this. I wish I could have gotten into a helicopter above the tree line and shot the picture to get both corn fields in the same photo so readers would know for sure this is a true story.

The field with stunted corn next to the trees has been farmed with chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and modern tillage equipment for many years. It has been cash-cropped to corn and soybeans following each other most of that time, with an occasional crop of wheat in the rotation.

The field with vigorous, healthy corn next to the trees is mine. The rotation here has been five years of pasture and one year of corn for the past eighteen years I have owned the land. I put no fertilizer on the corn at all, except for the green manure from plowing under the sod, and the manure droppings put on it by the sheep. I weeded it mechanically three times.

Both fields were planted about the same time. The row of trees runs north and south, so both fields get the same amount of sunlight. My corn is an open-pollinated variety; the cash crop corn is a modern hybrid. The soil type is the same. My plant population is about 20,000 per acre; the hybrid corn somewhat thicker— I’d judge about 28,000 plants per acre.  My corn rows are 38 inches wide; the hybrid corn rows 30.  Several rows away from the trees, the chemical corn matches mine in height and vigor, so it seems a logical deduction to say that the trees are robbing the corn of moisture,  especially since rainfall has been only moderate so far this year.

But that is not the whole story. At one point in the chemical corn field, beyond where I took the photo, a sod waterway formerly ran from the tree line down a slight slope out into the field to prevent a gully from forming there. The waterway had been in place for years but this time around, the farmer cultivated and planted right through it. The corn in what had been the grass waterway is tall and healthy right up to the trees.

Obviously, moisture, or lack thereof, is only a contributing factor. The real reason for the stunted corn is reduced levels of organic matter in the soil following years of annual cultivation with subsequent compaction and erosion. In the other field, in pasture four years out of five at least, nature could keep organic matter stable or actually increase it over time. An adequate amount of organic matter evidently acts as a reservoir of moisture sufficient for both the fence row trees and the corn next to them. Anybody got any other explanations?

It is logical, it seems to me, to conclude that adequate organic matter in the soil can produce a good crop even if rainfall is below the requirements of modern cash grain farming. Or to put that another way,  how much of the blame for lower yields because of  “less than optimum conditions” as the experts say, should really be placed on low organic matter content, not adverse weather?

Then there is the other question. If my organic corn grows as well as the chemical corn right beside it when both get sufficient moisture, is not that free organic matter worth at least as much as the $150 or more of fertilizer per acre that is applied to the chemical corn every year?
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See also Corn Is For Eating… or Drinking
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Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land), The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life, and just released: Small-Scale Grain Raising, Second Edition: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers.
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From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

If you look closely at the rather nondescript photo above, you will discern two strips of grass much greener than the pasture between them. This photo was taken on July 6 of this year (yesterday as I write). Sheep grazed this pasture for a week in late June and I just shifted them to another paddock five days ago. They had grazed the greener strips right down to the ground. The other grasses between the strips had matured past the most palatable stage before I could turned the sheep in and were not grazed as well. The green strips are already growing back rapidly; the other grasses and clover more slowly.

Can you name the greener grass? I’ll give you four guesses.

There are a few little ragweeds coming up there, and some red clover struggling to establish itself. But the bulk of that growth is volunteer crabgrass. Where did it come from?  Crabgrass is everywhere around here, especially in our lawn, but why it grew  particularly well in these strips I’m not sure. Last year the strips were in corn like you see in the background of the photo. Last year was a miserable year for us. It rained so much I could not get the corn weeded (I won’t use herbicides) and then it dried up so the corn never made much of a crop. The crabgrass just took over in a solid mat late last summer. I couldn’t turn the sheep in then because of the corn and didn’t know that it was good grazing anyway. To put it mildly, I was not at all pleased. I disked the strips this spring and planted red clover. Ha ha.  The crabgrass loved to be disked and roared back, making life miserable for the little clover seedlings. I shrugged and wrote off the strips of crabgrass as a failure… until I turned the sheep in.

I’m not quite sure how to work this discovery into a permanent part of a pasture rotation. But if crabgrass takes over the soil under my corn strips this year, I will not shed even one tiny little tear. Crabgrass is obviously delectable for sheep and it likes dry late summers, the very time pasture is short in this region.

I don’t know yet how to work this fortuitous happening deliberately into my pasture rotation. I think I should encourage crabgrass to grow in the corn by skipping late weed cultivation. The dratted weed doesn’t seem to hurt corn growth at all after the corn is knee high.  Another point worth pondering: had I used herbicides in my corn, I would never have learned about crabgrass. This is not the first time I have noticed that getting locked into factory farming sometimes locks out new discoveries.

I know only one other person who in his lifetime was aware of the benefits of crabgrass— Bob Evans of fast food fame, now passed away, who was also a pioneer pasture farmer and a close acquaintance friend. Unfortunately I didn’t pay much attention to his enthusiasm over crabgrass because of the plant’s notorious reputation as a lawn weed. I remember thinking that sheep like poison ivy too.

By the way, the corn you see in the background of the photo, is shoulder high (on July 6) and has a deep green, healthy color. I’m not bragging. All the corn in the neighborhood is like this—a good year so far.

But here’s the interesting part.  I did not apply one speck of fertilizer of any kind to my corn, while most corn in the neighborhood  has the “benefit” of at least $150 worth of nitrogen, phosphorus and potash per acre. My “fertilizer” was five years of grazed grass and clover sod preceding the corn. If farmers reverted to an agricultural system where most of the land was in pasture and only a little in grain, look at the millions of dollars that could be saved just in fertilizer. Yet when agribusiness compares the profitability of grain farming vs. grass farming, such observations are conveniently ignored.
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See also Garden Farming: The Best Investment
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Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land), The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life, and just released: Small-Scale Grain Raising, Second Edition: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers.
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