The Contrary Farmer

by Gene Logsdon

  Wild rice. Researchers have told me that there is no real reason why it wouldn't grow, at least for a modest family supply, in an Ohio wetland.

  Watercress. Although it prefers to grow in running spring water, a very contrary farmer I know has made good sideline income growing watercress in a marshy pond fed by springs. This same farmer has capitalized on water power in what is perhaps the most basic way. He sells his good-tasting, unpolluted well water by the bottle out of a little roadside stand. "Many people no longer have any water to drink except that awful-tasting, chlorinated city water," he explained.

  Crayfish. I doubt whether a crayfish farm can be really profitable in northern Ohio, but there are plenty of them in Louisiana. And our Ohio creeks, polluted as they are, still support crawdads. I remember as a boy seining enough of them to fill a three gallon bucket in two sweeps. Yes, you fix them just like lobster and they taste very similarly. Let's see. At today's lobster prices, a three gallon bucket of crawdads would be worth ...

  Waterlilies. Many water gardeners have built small sideline businesses selling waterlilies that they raise in ponds or garden pools. The yellow waterlily has grown wild in our creek for at least sixty years and I presume they were there when the Mississippian Indians built the mound that rises nearby. Maybe it was the moundbuilders who planted the lilies in the first place.

  Bullfrogs and snapping turtles. These two amphibians will proliferate in a wetlands pond if they are harvested in moderation. Both are excellent eating.

  Muskrats and their predators, minks. The fur of muskrats was once prized in the fur trade and mink still is. Once wildlife lovers are educated to understand the dynamics of population growth, fur coats will not be so wrathfully condemned and then these furs may again become a sideline source of income for small farmers. In addition, muskrat meat is very tasty.

  Ducks. Ducks of course can be marketed for the meat. Not fifty years ago, small farmers with access to ponds and rivers made ducks a major source of income. That was not all good, however, because often so many ducks were crammed into a small area that waterway pollution become a problem. "All things in moderation" ... oh, if humans could only learn that.

  Duckweed. This pond weed appears to most of us as an ugly green scum on pond water. To Viet Ngo, a Vietnamese turned Minnesotan, it was the basis of a business. Duckweed turns out to be an efficient purifier of wastewater and a protein feed for cattle exceeding even quality alfalfa in food value. Viet tells me it could be a good human food too, as it is in other parts of the world.

  Peat bog products. Needless to say, true peat bogs or any marsh with a high acid content in its water and soil can contain plant life markedly different from land around it. Pitcher plants and the bug-eating sundews, for example, are easy to sell as houseplants, but many bog plants are endangered species so don't sell those if you don't know how to grow more. Also sphagnum moss, the old, partially decayed deposits of which become peat, is most useful in pot mixtures for container-grown nursery plants. Dry sphagnum moss has twice the absorbent capacity as cotton and would probably make an excellent diaper lining especially since it also has medicinal value. Herbalists say it makes a good temporary bandage. Just think, a throwaway diaper that really is environmentally-benign.

  Milkweed. Swamp milkweed, the one with the dusty pink flowers, prefers wetter soils and often grows in wetlands areas. The pods of milkweed floss (the little parachutes attached to the seeds that allow the seeds to float so well on the wind) have definite commercial possibilities. The floss was used in World War Two as the packing in life preservers and is now used, with goose down, in comforters made by the Ogallala Down company of Ogallala, Nebraska. The company's standard ad says: "WE'RE GREAT IN BED." Herb Knudsen, Ogallala's president, told me in 1990 about research at the universities of Kansas and Nebraska indicating that revenue from growing milkweed is approximately the same as from corn. I imagine that is even truer today because in some years cash grain farmers net next to nothing from corn without the government subsidy (see chapter 8).

  I but ripple the surface of the watery potential. What your pond will draw above all else in the eastern half of the nation will be Canada Geese. This is currently not good news, because these big birds are rapidly overpopulating and becoming a nuisance. Well-intentioned laws protect them too much, for one thing. Hopefully, society will eventually get past its overly protective attitude about wild animals and support "sustained yields" rather than the current deep denial of nature's awful but necessary means of survival: All creatures, great and small, must have predators. When they do not, humans must sometimes step in with a little management and control the population. Nature even dictates that humans have predators. When they do not, and refuse obstinately to use their rationality to control their own population, history shows that, century after miserable century, humans will prey on each other.

  The real problem in wildlife management is one of too much government-from-on-high which, as in the case of wetlands, cannot take into account, when making general regulations, individual or local dif ferences. Fundamental to that problem is the governmental attitude that local people aren't capable of making the right decisions for their local situations. We locals are deemed to be inherently loco, or ignorant, or worse, outlaws who must be forced to do the "right" thing, while the enforcers consider themselves infallible. Dreadful. Millions of us are out here on the land because we love it, and we understand that diversity is the key to ecological health. We intend to protect that diversity even to making sure there are enough damn groundhogs around. But we also know best when too much is too much. I have never killed a Canada goose and face the prospect with loathing, just as when I kill a hog. But I know better than a tableful of faraway bureaucrats when Canada geese can and should be killed to improve the environment of my local area. The government, instead of sending its Rambo game wardens to harass us, should be intent on giving us good general information to help us in our decision-making. But bureaucratic regimes can't even do that. The few scientists who have fought hard for the correct understanding of wildlife population dynamics have had to risk their careers to do so, and their documentation is still not heeded by the regulators. As a result, wildlife agents are forced to follow a hypocritical and stupid method of Canada goose control: they spend costly time breaking eggs in the nests. It is okay to break eggs, not okay to kill birds and give the meat to people starving from malnutrition.

  The Water Power of Mulch

  It seems strange to talk about mulching gardens in a discussion of water but mulching is one of the most effective forms of water conservation and irrigation. Mulch slows the evaporation of soil moisture. This can be a critical factor during temporary dry spells-as effective, or even more so, than irrigation. Mulch conserves moisture not only directly but indirectly by increasing organic matter over the years. USDA statistics say that a soil with 4 percent organic matter can hold six inches of rain before run-off occurs. (Most soils after years of hard farming contain I to 2 percent organic matter or less.) Where irrigation is a necessary adjunct to farming, installing drip hose with tiny holes in it for irrigation under mulch can mean tremendous savings in water and money. For raised-bed growers in water-short areas, the combination of mulch and drip irrigation is the only profitable and environmentally friendly method.

  One of the most thoughtful large-scale farmers I know is Ted Winsberg in Florida. Ted grows about two hundred acres of sweet peppers on his farm. That is a lot of peppers. Lately he has been wondering about the conventional manner in which peppers are raised on a large-scale level-on beds covered with plastic mulch and treated with methyl bromide to kill weed seeds and nematodes. In this system a very sophisticated and expensive method of irrigation is used: a network of ditches which maintain water under artificially-shaped beds at just the right level. The beds and some of the channels have to be reshaped with earthmoving machinery every year at considerable expense.

  So he switched a portion of the farm to permanent beds mulched with com
post and watered by drip irrigation. No more expensive bedshaping every year. So far, no more methyl bromide either. "It's kind of ironical," he told me last year. "I've been raising two hundred acres of peppers while my son out in California raises a half acre in a greenhouse. He clears more money than I do."

  Springs

  There are creekbed springs upstream that keep our creek running yearround, and I hold my breath that they do not dry up like all the hillside springs in this vicinity have done. A clear, clean spring can be the biggest asset of all to a cottage farm. When I think of springs I think of the Kuerner Farm at Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where Andrew Wyeth has painted most of his most famous temperas. The farm would be an amazing place even if Wyeth never painted it, which I presume is why he did paint it. Water for the house, springhouse, cisterns, and barn is piped from a hillside spring that is higher than the buildings. The water has been running through the farmstead for at least two hundred years by gravity. Anna Kuerner, still very much alive in her nineties, used the water to cool the milk and butter in the springhouse for many years, and Karl, her husband, now deceased, stored his apples and his famous cider there. Karl, Jr., now operates the farm with help from his son Karl, who is a masterful artist himself. I have the great good fortune to have known all three generations of this remarkable family. "Occasionally we have to clean off the screen on the pipe inlet," says Karl., "but other than that the system pretty well takes care of itself." Imagine a never-failing, never-ailing water supply and refrigerator. Have we really progressed? Washington and Lafayette planned Revolutionary War battles in that house and no doubt drank the same spring water.

  Another spring, or possibly another upwelling of the same vein of water, provides the water source for the pond in front of the ancient Kuerner home. For many years this pond was the Kuerner kids' swimming pool. It is the centerpiece of many famous Wyeth paintings, especially "Brown Swiss."

  "Sometimes we just jumped in the horse trough in the barn in the old days," says Louise (Kuerner) Edwards, who with her son still operates her own farm about twenty miles away. Wyeth has immortalized that horse trough, too, in his painting, "Spring Fed." The reason for Wyeth's popularity and influence is much argued. by art historians, but seems simple enough to me. Human culture is still rooted in farming and Wyeth has chosen rural life as his medium, so to speak, for expressing the emotional upwellings that charge his creativity with energy. The millions upon millions of people in the world who are contrary farmers or the offspring of contrary farmers, pining for something they associate with the way their parents or grandparents lived, can simply enjoy Wyeth's works as very striking illustrations of that life, or else as the deeper outpourings of the universal human spirit within that life.

  For example my favorite Wyeth painting is "The Virgin," a rendering of teenaged Siri Erickson standing naked in her father's barn. What makes it my favorite is the story that goes with it, told by Wyeth himself in Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons, a collection of his works published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1976. As Wyeth was painting Siri in the barn, he says, she became intent on something she saw out the barn door. Suddenly she rushed out, stark naked, grabbed a club and sprang into the garden where a groundhog was eating vegetables. "She just clubbed it to death," Wyeth is quoted as saying. Then she came back and resumed her pose, groundhog blood splotched on her leg. All in a day's work. Wyeth said he was astonished but considered the incident "a bit of luck" for him as an artist.

  But it wasn't luck. He lives on the land he paints every day, enabling him to see the real rural culture, out of which Sin sprang, and to paint it honestly. "She once told me she liked to ride bareback in the summer at nighttime completely nude with her blond hair streaming behind her," he also relates.

  Andrew Wyeth, though certainly not a fanner in the strict sense of the word, is to me the most contrary farmer of us all. He understands that our life is not dull and boring, but full of drama. He understands why we will be here on the ramparts, clubbing groundhogs to death if we must, riding naked in the wind if we feel like it, long after the tinsel of civilization passes into hydrocarbon history.

  CHAPTER 6

  A Paradise of Meadows

  To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bea, One1 clover, and a bee, And reverjy. 1l1e revery alone "ill do, If bees are feuc.

  Eirtily Dlc}2nnstm

  I encountered an apparition in our pasture field on a recent November morning. A ghostly white cattle egret was strolling along with the sheep as they grazed. Egret? I stared unbelievingly, then ran for binoculars to verify the identity of the chicken-sized bird. American egrets are common in the South where farmers call them cow egrets but are as unusual as alligators in a northern Ohio sheep pasture. The bird book confirmed my calculated guess: egret it was. How it got here I have no idea though 1 understand this species is drifting more frequently northward than it used to. How long this one will stay in our meadow before it falls prey to cold weather or a coyote or a fox I can only guess. For the present it walks haughtily about like Theodore Roosevelt on the White House lawn, occasionally seeming to peer into the ewes' eyes with the intensity of an eye doctor in pursuit of a detached retina. Absorbed in its ministrations, it does not even mind when one of the ewes butts it away. When it runs out of anything else to do, it gobbles up chunks of manure, both sheep and cow, the way a chicken will sometimes do. Egrets are prized by southern husbandmen because flocks of them help control insects that buzz and bite and bother the animals. Stockmen sometimes build roosts for the egrets in their stock ponds because the birds like to perch on dead trees surrounded by water.

  Our lone visitor will have to make do with a tree perch over the creek. And coming in November, it will find precious few bugs though there are always a few brownish-yellow dung flies on the cowpies this late in the year, and earthworms underneath.

  I think of the egret as one of the many bonuses we have received for following what we believe to be the basic tenet of sustainable agriculture: The grazed meadow, or pasture, or grassland-call it what you will-is the ecological and economic foundation of farming.

  We are convinced because of the advances being made in what is called controlled or managed rotational grazing, by which meadows or pastures are divided into sections or paddocks and grazing animals moved from one to another as necessary for the most efficient growth of both animals and pasturage. When controlled rotational grazing is done properly, the meadow or pasture can provide almost all the food for the animals on the farm, and some "grazing" for humans, too. Have you tried wilted dandelion bud salad with vinegar and chopped boiled eggs? Or broiled Agaricus mushrooms basted in butter and lemon juice? Egrets and who knows how many other manifestations of wild nature provide the dessert.

  The reason controlled rotational grazing, or grassland farming, the older term which I prefer to use, fits the cottage farm so well is that this is becoming the most economical way to keep animals as the cost of annual crop farming rises. In grassland farming, the animals do most of the work of fertilization, weed control, and harvesting. Since the pastures are re-seeded only rarely, planting costs are minimal. Also, grassland farming provides hay as a by-product, and hay, if it must be purchased, is the single biggest expense of the small farm that keeps animals. In fact, on a very small farm such as ours, it is hardly possible to make a profit on animals if you must buy hay rather than make your own. Most important of all, grassland farming with the majority of the acreage in sod is the only "no-till" system to effectively control soil erosion, the ruination of civilizations. The highly touted (by agribusiness) chemical no-till method, where toxic poisons are used to denude the land of weeds so that crops can be planted in undisturbed soil, is seemingly less effective and in any case too new to have proven itself. It appears that as weeds continue to develop immunity to weedkillers and as harmful insects continue to proliferate in the undisturbed soil, requiring the use of lethal insecticides, chemical no-till will prove to be only a temporary solution t
o erosion.

  To understand a meadow, you really need to sit down in one a while. Maybe like for twenty years. But instead of lapsing into reverie right away, pay attention to what's going on around you. You should be able to reach out and touch several different species of plants from your sitting position, and spy, in the space of a quarter acre or so, perhaps twenty or thirty different ones. Generally, the older the pasture (the more years it has not been plowed up and renovated), the more plant species can be seen there. It took fifteen years from the time I started my pasture, on land which the former owner had devoted to annual row crops, for blue-eyed grass to appear, the most delicate and to me beautiful of our native wildflowers. I have no idea how it came to grow in that field. Did a bird eat a seed somewhere else and drop it here in its manure? Perhaps we should leave the explanation to magic. Magic is more fun than science, and maybe in the long run more reliable.

  As I sit in a meadow, savoring the magic, I can tell the season by the plants that are flowering. Dandelions and spring beauties dance across my meadows from late April to late May. Violets hide among them. (Our friends Dave and Pat have naturalized daffodils in their pasture.) White clover blooms profusely from late May through June and less vigorously the rest of the summer and fall. Wild strawberries bloom in early May. Cinquefoil, which looks somewhat like a strawberry plant but has a yellow bloom, comes in June. So do buttercups. Although their blossoms are hardly noticeable, many of the early grasses, including mainly bluegrass, bloom also about the beginning of June. The little blue (and sometimes whitish) blossoms of blue-eyed grass nod shyly in June. Red clover, alsike clover, hop clover, alfalfa, and other legumes all bloom, purple to pink to white to yellow, in. June, if not grazed off by the animals. Grazing is good for clovers (or more correctly, good for the grazier) as grazed clovers regrow quickly. If allowed to go to seed, clover plants will not make a strong second growth. The weedier and more undesirable meadow plants start blooming in July and continue until fall; here in Ohio that means sourdock, Queen Anne's lace, thistles, mullein, horse nettle, burdock, sheep sorrel, milkweed, yarrow, plaintain, and many others. In the fall ironweed, goldenrod, Joe pye weed, and wild asters bloom-not desirable for grazing either, although pleasant to the eye. Most if not all these plants, while a weedy nuisance if over-populated, are revered for one or another curative power in traditional herb medicine and so may benefit livestock in ways not precisely known yet. I am not sure that boiled root of ironweed is good for motherfits, whatever that is, or that yarrow will purge the kidneys, but neither am I about to scoff. Many of our medicines were discovered by way of herbal folklore. The animals know. When allowed to live in their habitat unbothered by humans, how many mountain goats, elk, deer, rabbits, buffalo, or groundhogs suffer from motherfits or need their kidneys purged?