From Gene Logsdon
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

It was the first day of March, the first day the sun had shone warmly this year here in northern Ohio. The temperature was inching up to 40 degrees F. and it almost seemed summery. I wasn’t the only creature that thought so either. To my amusement, a slate colored junco hopped into a little pool of snow melt and splashed and fluttered around joyously. Looked like joy anyway. I had to laugh right out loud. It was hardly warm enough to go out without a coat on, yet here was this tiny bird obviously enjoying an outdoor bath. Why couldn’t I go for a dip too? Life just ain’t fair.

I decided to go for a walk to see if there were other signs promising an end to the cold. The first thing I noticed was that where my feet sank into the four inches of snow cover, the print of my boot filled with water. The snow was melting and the moisture was sinking to the ground, which was no longer frozen. I wasn’t too surprised at that. Every year about this time I see this happen. The constant soil temperature down about a foot or two is about 55 degree F. When the soil surface is insulated from cold air by snow that is about 32 degrees, it is not usual for the lower warmth of the soil to drive the frost up out of the ground, especially when the covering snow is melting in the sun. That’s why in snowy winters, the soil often thaws sooner in spring than in cold, bare-ground winters. Okay. We all know that. Hold that thought.

What I discovered next I could not believe. On the south side of the house where the snow was melting fastest, the winter aconites and the snowdrops were blooming wherever the snow was gone. Impossible, I thought. I had just checked the day before and there was nothing there except snow and my cold feet. Those flowers just could not jump up and bloom that quickly.

I tried not to get too excited. I needed to be the cold, logical scientist. Flowers just can’t spring out of the ground and bloom an hour or so after the snow melts. Just doesn’t work that way. I needed to hone my powers of observation on the situation more intensely— something I am not very good at doing. As I honed in on the edge of the retreating snow, I saw more snowdrops emerging into view. They had come up and begun to blossom UNDER THE SNOW.

Maybe this is just ho-hum for botanists who know how cold hardy snowdrops and winter aconites are, but I have never read any reference to it “in the literature.” It led me into totally wild notions. We’ve got all these monsantaclauses boasting about how they can save the world by genetically engineering fast-growing corn to produce fast-fattening food. Why don’t they put their minds to a really worthwhile goal. How about developing corn that will come up under the snow?

I can think of something even better than that. Why not genetically engineer a new biological thermostat for humans? If juncos can bathe in snow melt, why shouldn’t all of us be so blessed? Think how awesome it would be if science could jigger a gene or two that would allow us to enjoy winter without artificial heat. We are burning up our planet because we insist on living in climates that we aren’t supposed to be living in. We are tropical animals. If we were serious about saving the earth, we would have to admit that we haven’t evolved to live this far north. What if by some teensy weensy little genetic manipulation, we could endure the cold like polar bears do. I’m ready.
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Image: Dark-Eyed Junco on Wikipedia
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From GENE LOGSDON
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

I define “new agrarian age” as a society in which rural and urban lifestyles become indistinguishable. Roof top vegetable gardens in downtown Manhattan for instance. A more typical example is a landscape where urban agriculture and rural manufacturing exist side by side in harmony.  I saw a photo recently of horses plowing a large garden plot with the Cleveland, Ohio, city skyline in the background. Some years ago I visited Paws Inc., where Jim Davis, the creator of the comic strip “Garfield” has his business headquartered. The location in rural Indiana (where Davis grew up), is so far out in the country that there was no suitable sewage system to handle the waste from his three big office buildings and fairly large number of workers. He had engineers design and build a greenhouse where plants, fish, and other aquatic animals flourished by feeding on the nutrients in the wastewater while purifying it before its return to natural waterways. Aquaculture and urban culture surely joined hands in that greenhouse. Silviculture too because Davis was also raising tree seedlings in the greenhouse to reforest wornout farm land in the area.

Last week I attended the annual conference of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA), spending the day signing and selling books and gabbing with people. Those of us who remember the early days of OEFFA were stunned and jubilant at the overflow crowd. So many people wanted to come to the conference in fact, that about 200 had to be turned away because of space limitations, Carol Goland, OEFFA’s executive director told me regretfully.  I looked around the main exhibit hall (a highschool gymnasium) crammed with booths where all sorts of organic and natural farm supplies were being sold. I was remembering the early days, when, said Mike McLaughlin, a farmer and OEFFA official since the early days, “we thought that four exhibitors was a major achievement.”

It is difficult to make generalities about any group of humans, but I’d say that today’s OEFFA member is more sophisticated about the possibilities of the new ecological trends in agriculture.  Back in the early days, I’d say that we were mostly angry and rebellious at being called radical just because we didn’t like what industrial agriculture was doing. Today’s OEFFA members are more assured about the way forward. They would rather figure than fight. If someone called them radical, they would merely be amused. They are convinced that the agribusiness methods of the past are so obviously unworkable that there is no need to fight anymore. Move on.

And they are moving on. There was something electric in the air. I could feel it. At meetings of industrial farmers these days, the talk is fairly bleak, but here, among new farmers and gardeners with a hundred new ways to produce food and sell it locally, the people just seemed to glow with optimism. I’ve been sitting at tables selling books it seems like forever. This time, buyers would approach me with victorious little smiles on their faces. Something about the way they would pick up a book and plop it down in front of me for signing while they got out their billfolds bespoke an exuberance that was full of quiet confidence. Sometimes a buyer would briskly pile three or four books up and say “How much?”  An author’s dream.   OEFFA itself had a long table of books for sale. I was told that on Saturday, the big day (I was there on Sunday), people stood three and four deep in front of that long table, buying books. A couple of attendees who stopped to buy a book from me were carrying— you’d never guess what. Brand new pitchforks they had also just purchased. When a farmer buys a new fork and a new book in the same breath, that’s new age agrarianism.

I could be wishful dreaming again. This could be just another spurt in the ancient back to the land idealism I’ve seen come and go twice in my lifetime. But maybe something more permanent is in the offing. Money farming is pricing itself out of the food market, and maybe government, which continues to prop up this kind of farming with artificial money, is being forced to realize that. As farmer and author Joel Salatin, the keynote speaker, symbolized to the world:  ecological and organic farmers are here to stay and they are ready to take the helm.
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From GENE LOGSDON
Garden Farm Skills

I am not a real farmer, my neighbors say, because I don’t do it for money. That’s almost funny because the economists are saying that nobody’s farming for money this year. Although the corn crop is good in most of the midwest, there’s not much profit in it. Some go as far as projecting that on average, corn farmers will lose $8 per acre over the whole midwest. If that is the case, I’m not a real farmer for sure because I figure on netting $550 an acre on my corn.

The price of corn as I write is $3.90 a bushel. Some farmers I talk to say they have to have $5.00 a bushel to break even this year because of the high cost of fertilizer, fuel, and weedkillers recently. Economists say the break-even price is closer to $4.00 a bushel. The price seems to be inching that way. Whoopee.

So how do I figure on netting $550 an acre from my corn? I grow only half an acre for one thing, but don’t laugh. My figures would hold fairly well up to thirty acres worth.  Comparisons can be odious especially when someone with a feeble little crop like mine seems to be disparaging the professional grower of a couple thousand acres.   Nevertheless, I am going to do some numbers  because commercial farmers really aren’t thinking very well at the moment and some of them admit it.

Those ears of corn in the photo are from my crop this year. They measure up to 14 inches long, as you can see by the foot long ruler beside them. The longest one has 20 rows of kernels. It will shrink a little as it dries, but as far as I can learn from researching,  this is as big as any ear of yellow dent corn has ever gotten and is almost twice the size of any of today’s hybrids. (There are strains of maize in Mexico that produce ears two feet long but are very skinny.) I’ve had in previous years one or two 16-inch ears but they were frowzy on the tips, with only 16 rows of kernels. The fatter, slightly shorter ears in the photo above contain 22 and 24 rows of kernels, and I know from experience that the kernels will weigh as much per cob as those from the 14-inch ears.  There will be about a pound of kernels on each of these ears. If I had an acre where all the stalks produced one such ear and I planted 18,000 stalks per acre, which is about right for open-pollinated corn, (hybrid growers are planting as many as 30,000 stalks per acre) the yield would be 300 bushels per acre, right up  there with the world records for corn. If I could live 200 years maybe I could produce a crop of all fourteen inchers.  After all it took the Mesoamerican Indians thousands of years to get ears of maize up to five inches long.

I hasten to say that most of the ears on my corn are not as big as those in the photo. Most are still bigger than hybrid ears, but some smaller and quite a few nubbins. I will get fifty bushels from my half acre or a hundred bushels per acre this year. Commercial corn growers are averaging 160 bushels per acre, so my corn is deemed to be poor by comparison, giant  ears or no giant ears. But let us look at the numbers. My fertilizer cost was zero. I rotate corn with three or four years of pastured clover so I don’t figure I need any more fertilizer. Surely it is significant when 14 inch ears of corn can be grown without any commercial fertilizer at all.  My herbicide cost is zero. I control weeds with a  hoe and  a rotary garden tiller. If I were growing a couple of acres of corn or more,  I would have to have a tractor or horse cultivator but that would add only a little to my costs.  I paid zero for my seed corn because I save my own.  Farmers are spending upwards of $300 now for a bushel of GMO hybrid corn seed, which is just ridiculous. I have no land rent cost because the land is my own.  Farmers renting land are paying upwards of $150 to $200 a acre for it or more this year, almost guaranteeing a loss at today’s market prices.  I count no labor cost because experimenting with my open-pollinated corn is my golf game and a whole lot cheaper than golf. I have no harvest cost other than husking the ears by hand and throwing them in the pickup. Farmers used to husk 20 acres or more  by hand but if you used an old cornpicker instead, the cost would be minimal on 20 or 30 acres except for fuel. My drying cost is zero; the corn dries naturally on the cob in a crib that is so old it has long ago paid for itself. That could be true for larger acreages. Commercial farmers some years (this year for sure) have a huge cost in natural gas to dry their shelled corn. My hauling cost amounts to driving my pickup 500 feet from field to crib. Commercial farmers are hauling their corn in semi trucks half way across the county, sometimes farther. I do have fuel and machinery cost for plowing and fitting the land which I estimate at about $30 per acre. I put my total cost per acre at $50 to be sure to cover everything.

Growers of open-pollinated corn tell me, as I have also experienced, that livestock eat it more eagerly than today’s hybrids. And why not. Hybrid corn is bred today to resist injury from  machinery, weeds, bugs, and adverse weather. Why wouldn’t it resist animals and humans trying to eat it?  Commercial corn is dried by heating, sometimes overheating, with natural gas, which can reduce nutritional value. I don’t know how to put a dollar number on  that kind of profit.

If my 50 bushels are priced at $4.00 a bushel, that’s $200 worth of corn or $400 an acre. With a cost of only $50 on a per-acre basis, my net profit per acre is $350. If I had to buy those fifty bushels from the elevator, the cost would be around $6.00 a bushel (the elevators charge for handling, especially for handling and bagging small amounts), so I can say that my puny crop has a net return of $550 per acre. Compare that with losing $8 an acre on 2000 acres.

Whose the real farmer? One I know well farms 200 acres. He has most of his acres in rotated pasture and maybe 30 acres of corn— a commercial model of what I do. He will have more machinery and fuel costs per acre than I do,  but he will have no fertilizer, chemical spray, drying, or transportation cost to the elevator. He does not use high-priced GMO seed corn.  His machinery cost are much less than that of typical grain farmers because he is using older, smaller tractor equipment. His total costs will be only a fraction per acre of the large commercial grain farmer’s costs. Then he feeds his corn to his cows to make organic milk and sells it at a premium price.

So I ask again: who’s the real farmer?
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