The Contrary Farmer

by Gene Logsdon

  Purdue scientists were spreading leaves and grass clippings with a manure spreader ahead of conventional cultivation and planting, certainly better than burying yard waste in landfills and a lot cheaper than composting the stuff in large, centralized composting facilities. But applying yard waste to soil this way did not gain all the efficiencies of mulch gardening and ran the risk of temporary nitrogen deficiency in the crop if the leaves were incorporated into the soil too heavily-a risk not incurred when leaves are mulched on top of the soil and allowed to break down slowly. "I have long wondered," I said, hesitantly, for I thought I was suggesting a radical idea, "if a self-unloading silage wagon might be modified to apply leaf mulch directly to row crops after the plants were about six inches tall. You could straddle the rows with tractor and wagon and dribble the leaves out through the side unloading chute as you drove along, putting a mulch of desired depth down between the rows. That way you would gain the weed, erosion, and moisture control benefits of mulch gardening as well as the nutritional value of the rotting leaves." He nodded. "Yeah, we've thought of that too especially for sweet corn. Ought to be able to mulch four to five acres a day that way easily with present equipment, quite practical for small farms near cities. Another advantage, for sweet corn producers, is that the mulch would do away with mud at harvest time."

  The moral of the story is that the proving ground for real change in farming has almost always been the garden. Commercial farmers are good at improving their existing technologies, but rarely do they initiate pivotal new practices because they are financially strapped to the mass market and can't afford to risk the possible profit loss of changing horses in mid-field. New agricultural ideas come from gardens where financial profit is not a necessary goal; generally these gardens are city gardens. Fresh new ideas in any institutionalized activity (and nothing is more institutionalized than agriculture except religion and education) almost always come from the outside. Writes Jane Jacobs in her provocative 1969 book, The Economy of Cities: "Modern productive agriculture has been reinvented by grace of hundreds of innovations that were exported from the cities to the countryside, transplanted to the countryside, or imitated in the countryside."

  For example, alfalfa was a medicinal plant in Paris a century before it became a farm crop throughout Europe. Edward Faulkner wrote his revolutionary best-seller, Plowman's Folly, based on experimentation he did in a garden near Elyria, Ohio, not on a farm. It was city gardeners, not farmers, who, with ample supplies of manure from livery stables and street sweepings, brought real sophistication and efficiency to the use of animal manures for food production, as is amply clear from books like Benjamin Albaugh's The Gardenette or City Back Yard Gardening, published in 1915. It was urban influences, following the work of chemist Justus von Leibig in nineteenth-century Germany, that introduced to resisting farmers an agronomy based on chemicals. Today it is city gardeners, following scientists like Sir Albert Howard and Dr. Selman Waks►nan, who have introduced, again to resisting farmers, the notion of an agriculture based intentionally on biology. Leibig disproved the prevalent nineteenth-century notion that plants got all their food from humus. But in proving that plants "eat" minerals, not humus, Leibig went to the opposite extreme and demeaned the practical necessity of humus, and humus-derived nutrients, for a sustainable and efficient agriculture.

  The whole organic farming movement, which now extends even to cotton, a crop once thought impossible to grow without toxic chemicals, was of course inspired by city gardeners. But organic gardens, which in my rural area are still sometimes viewed as the invention of "commie liberals," are not the only generator of change in this regard. Urban recycling is another. Waste paper has become an animal bedding of choice on many farms, not because farmers demand it, but because cities provide it at a cost that is cheaper for some farmers than straw. Composting, once strictly a garden practice, is now becoming a farm business too. Bob Birkenfeld and two of his brothers, who farm 3500 acres and raise 2500 stocker cattle a year near Tulia, Texas, have started a new business they call KBG Composters, making and selling compost with the manure from their own and neighboring feedlots. Birkenfeld is one of my favorite contrary farmers. He says there's not much profit in large scale farming and that he believes if he concentrated all his efforts on husbandry on his home 180 acres, he could do as well financially without the stress of the big operation.

  With modern pre-treatment methods, urban waste managers have found ways to deliver an entirely safe, composted sewage sludge to farmers at a cost that is cheaper than conventional fertilizers. After initial hesitancy, farmers are lining up to get this material, which is also being used to restore strip-mined lands to forest and meadow. Unfortunately, organic farming organizations, after much debate, have disapproved the use of pre-treated, composted sludge on certified organic farms. To me this was a stupid move which I think springs from our silly fear of our own excrement. For ten years I have followed this debate and as a writer have worked closely with the leading sludge scientists. True, in earlier times, PCB-contaminated sludge was a remote possibility (though even then, ton upon ton of sludge was applied to Ohio farmlands with no problems), but with modern pretreatment and constant monitoring, sludge is, as USDA scientist Dr. Rufus Chaney says, as safe as any soil amendment or fertilizer can be. He once pointed out to me that there is more cadmium applied to farmland by way of commercial fertilizer in one year than in all the sludge ever spread. Farmer Gary Wegner, who has found sludge to be an excellent fertilizer and humus builder and erosion fighter for his dryland wheat farm in Washington, has been hired by the city of Spokane to promote the use of sludge in farming. He says he makes his most effective argument with a bottle of vitamin/mineral tablets. He reads from the label the vitamins and minerals that are contained in the tablets "from A to Zinc." "The heavy metals like zinc that people have been erroneously taught to fear in sludge are the very metals that they consume in health pills and which my soil is deficient in," he tells his audiences. Of course the Chinese would smile at this debate. They have been using human excrement on their garden-farms for forty centuries. The only problem it seems to have caused them is over-population.

  Alan Chadwick, the famous advocate of French intensive and biodynamic horticulture, understood the importance of the urban garden in generating agricultural change, as is clear from a story that organic gardening's guru, Bob Rodale, was fond of telling. It seems that in the early 1980s, Bob and Wendell Berry (the two of them probably exerting more influence on agricultural thinking in modern times than anyone) went to California to interview Chadwick at the latter:s famous garden in Santa Cruz. Chadwick, who, like Rodale, has since died, was a very opinionated and passionate gardener. His way of cultivating, beginning with double-digging and finishing with the hand rake and hoe if with anything at all, never the rotary tiller, was the only way one dared to garden under his tutelage, and he could be acerbic and even insulting in defense of his beliefs. (It is a good thing we never met because I think double-digging is a waste of time.) The university where Chadwick held forth on his gardening methods had by that time begun the logical progression: students of Chadwick had started a farm based on the master's garden methods. The farm annoyed Chadwick, perhaps rightfully, because it unwittingly drew attention away from the true source of its success-his garden. Without Chadwick's knowledge, Rodale and Berry were taken on a tour of the farm first, and had enjoyed a lunch with food provided by the farm. They then went on up the hill to Chadwick's digs, where the master was waiting for them. Before giving them a tour of his own, Chadwick invited the two famous progenitors of new farming ideas to eat a garden lunch outside the little but where he lived surrounded by his plants. "When we told him we had already visited the farm and eaten there," recalled Bob, "lie glared at us indignantly, and without a word turned around and stalked into his cabin. That was the end of the interview." Bob, who had an exquisite sense of humor, grinned at the recollection. "He never did come back out. We walked around a little while, embarra
ssed, and left."

  Mechanical as well as agronomic technologies can move from garden to farm, strange as that may seem in an age of 300-horsepower tractors. The hand-pushed garden seeder is a good example. This simple, plastic two-wheeled seeder costs $50 to $70 depending on where you buy it, and will last a lifetime unless you run over it with your truck. Commercial market gardeners are now joining two or three units together for multi-row planting, doubling or tripling the amount of planting they can do in a day without fossil fuel. Two or three together are in fact easier to push than one. I thought it was my idea until I read Andrew Lee's excellent book Backyard Market Gardening (Good Earth Publications, 1993). Lee shows how to fit three Earthway planters together thereby increasing the amount of land that can be planted by one person in a day to at least two acres, which is about all many commercial vegetable farms need to plant at one time. Two people, each equipped with my two-row version, could plant three acres a day between them without undue fatigue and in a week's time plant twenty acres of corn, all that is necessary for the kind of small commercially viable controlled grazing farm this book advocates. Of course, the large operators who farm around me get a big kick out of watching me push my two-row planter planting corn, while they pull thirty-row planters across their fields. But since without their subsidies, they aren't making any money either, they don't laugh too loud.

  Joining the seeders is extremely simple. I put my two together with three scrap one-by-two inch boards, each about three feet long. One board bolts to holes I drilled in the front wheel kick stands (with two seeders joined, they stand upright without need of the kick stands, so immobilizing the latter doesn't matter). I sawed slots in a second board which fits over the frames of the two seeders right behind the planting boxes. The third board bolts to the holes already drilled at the top of the handles, holes intended by the manufacturer for a fertilizer box. You could attach a board at this juncture even with the fertilizer box installed. I had thought that I would have to cross-brace the frame to keep it from racking, but the three hoards hold the two seeders very rigid. I can vary the distance between the two units (or three, or even four) by sets of holes and slots in the boards. I can quickly dismantle the frame if I want to use one seeder alone in the garden.

  The rotary tiller is another machine that (except among Chadwick's followers) has gone from the garden to the farm. The first well-known example was the Howard Rotovator, first made in the I 950s, a large, heavy rotary tiller for farm tractors. It was touted as sustainable farming's replacement for the plow but only a few farmers have accepted it. The Lilly Roterra is a more modern adaptation of the rotary tiller idea, but it too has not won over many farmers and for the same reason: primary and secondary tillage with a Rotovator (or any other rotary tiller) was considered too slow compared to other methods. Also, and here I agree with Chadwick, most rear-end tillers spin so fast that they can harm soil structure if overused. They can also create a hard layer of soil at normal tilling depth just like a plow or disk can, if deep rooted crops to perforate the hardpan are not kept in the crop rotation.

  A more promising adaptation of the rotary tiller to farming is as a weed cultivator, at which this machine has no equal in the garden or field. Shovel cultivators can slide around weed roots, but no weed can escape the tiller's chopping action. Coming on the market now are multi-rowed, hydraulically and PTO-operated tiller cultivators mounted on farm tractors. They look like big steel spiders whose legs each end in a little tiller. This is one answer to the commercial farmer's new interest in mechanical weed control now that weeds increasingly exhibit resistance to herbicides.

  Gardens act as incubators for the farms of the future by exploring new marketing methods as well as field production strategies. The new generation of commercial market gardeners nearly all began as backyard gardeners enormously affected by the consumer desire for low cholesterol, pesticide-free, fresh food. Ward Sinclair, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer turned market gardener, began selling his organic produce to fellow workers in the offices of the Washington Post where he worked. The number of customers grew. He tells me that he found selling food more satisfying than selling words, so he quit his job and started what is today one of the most successful commercial market farms in the East.

  These new and often very contrary farmers were all drawn into direct retail sales in an effort to supply the city demand for organically clean food and to make a profit doing it, thus reconnecting the farmer with the consumer directly. This "reconnecting," so well exemplified by farmers' markets in the cities, makes for a healthy economic system. Human beings are mostly rather wonderful creatures in their personal relationships with their spouses, their children, their parents, their friends, their comrades at work. So when food shopping becomes a direct experience between the farmer and the consumer, mutual solicitude is invariably generated. The farmer wants the customer to be pleased, and the customer, so served, wants the farmer to continue in business. Farmers' markets thus represent one of the few remaining examples of genuine capitalism left in this country.

  Compare that to the lowly-paid hired hand feeding ten thousand steers knee deep in shit at a big feedlot owned by millionaires for taxdodging purposes. Do you think this worker gives a damn whether the meat he is helping to produce pleases some faraway urban consumer? Likely as not, he despises urbanites in general because he knows they make a lot more money than he does and can afford to buy the steaks his labor produces while he eats hamburger. This kind of farming is not free-enterprise capitalism but captive-enterprise socialism.

  Pick-your-own selling is the granddaddy of modern urban-driven marketing systems. Where hand harvesting was once considered mean, back-breaking work, urban consumers, picking their own produce, view it as recreation.

  Subscription gardening is one of the newer, urban-driven marketing systems. Customers, usually referred to as clients, pay a pre-determined amount of money to a farmer who in turn provides the client a season's supply of food. Clients might or might not help with the work. The farmer knows ahead of time what he needs to grow, and gets at least part of the subscription fee up front to finance the crop till harvest time instead of having to borrow it from the bank. I like this kind of arrangement because it engenders little farms right in towns and cities-hence, the birth of the "urban farm" as it is being called. If you could buy stock in something called "the urban farm movement" it would be a good investment. Fortunately, no such stock exists.

  Whereas Sinclair and similar farmers sell mostly out of trucks or booths at farm markets or at their own stands in urban locations, other farmers sell very specialized high-quality produce directly to restaurants. Restaurant specialties might be baby vegetables, or gourmet mixes of salads, or exotic varieties of melons, and so on. I recently obtained from another gardener a golden raspberry, variety unknown, which is absolutely luscious, more resistant to mosaic diseases than the other yellow varieties I've tried, but only a fair producer. I wonder whether it would be of interest to local fine restaurants if I could supply only small amounts in season. Five years ago, a restaurant manager some distance away was not encouraging. "We can't handle local stuff, I don't care how good it is," he had said, "unless you can promise me year-round, weekly supply." He's not in business anymore either.

  But now, when I asked Rosie Wood at our local Woody's restaurant, she responded most enthusiastically. Not only would she be interested in golden raspberries, but just about any other high-quality fruit or vegetable I could bring her. She has since sent me information about other farms from which she obtains vegetables, as a way of encouraging me. This is what I mean by an urban-driven agriculture. If it can happen here, in a county where the total population is less than 26,000, it can happen anywhere in America. The real problem is that we do not open possibilities like this to young people, either at home or in school. We persuade them to seek "secure" jobs with the likes of Dupont and IBM which are presently laying off workers by the thousands.

  Another developing market for p
esticide-free food comes from people who are learning that they suffer from chemical allergies hitherto not recognized as such. Allergists are discovering that some cleaning fluids, dyes, pesticides, and other chemicals thought to be "safe" cause, in some people, persistent allergies that have been diagnosed for years as flu or other common ailments.

  A man came to me several years ago wanting to know if I would sell him unpasteurized milk from our cow. Doctor's orders. I had to tell him that the law forbids me. I can drink my own. I can give it away. But I can't sell it. Bootleg milk. Another example of idiocy done in the name of "serving the people." The real reason for laws against certified clean raw milk is to protect the established dairy industry's monopoly over milk production.

  Keeping the Proving Ground Small

  Whether cottage farms merely want to grow their own food, or decide to branch out into a commercial venture, the kitchen garden-the learning garden, so to speak-should be small. Almost everyone imbued with cottagitis, including me, initially makes a garden that is way too big for the time they have available to care for it. That is why some people get discouraged and quit gardening. On a small kitchen garden you can lavish compost and mulch. You can concentrate the time you do have available to keep weeds from ever gaining a foothold and so make gardening an easy job. You need only hand tools, thus cutting down significantly on the expense. You can handily irrigate, if necessary, and use only a little water. You can control bug damage, if any, by hand methods. The out-of-pocket cost per pound of food produced this way is extremely low compared to buying food.

  My daughter and son-in-law have a raised bed garden only twelvefeet-square in size behind their suburban home, but the quantity and quality of food it produces is amazing. They fertilize with top grade, composted sewage sludge approved for gardening. Never anywhere have I seen such luxuriant tomato and squash plants. By using clever trellising and every square inch of ground space, and by putting in new plants as quickly as the old are harvested, they can raise all their spring, summer, and fall salad makings and most of their main-course fresh vegetables.