The Contrary Farmer

by Gene Logsdon

  My ancient two-bottom plow (I got it used for $10 and a pickup load of firewood eighteen years ago) doesn't turn the sod over completely, but sets the furrow up on its edge at a somewhat vertical slant. At first I was annoyed by that, since plow champions of yesteryear taught us to bury all that green manure from sight. The strip of green that stuck out at the top of every furrow niy plow turned looked messy and God knows how my German forebears hated messiness. Then I learned from David and his horse plowing that the strip of grass peeking out of the ground was okay: it stops erosion as effectively as the vaunted surface "residue" of no-till farming. Furthermore, the plane of sod extending more or less vertically into the soil for six to eight inches along every furrow allows cascading rain to sink directly into the ground, cutting down tremendously on erosion. On my plowed sod, which in the first place is fairly level land, there is hardly any erosion at all. Even after I run over the surface with my old disk right ahead of planting, I am working up only about four inches of the soil into a fine seedbed. Underneath the fine dirt on top, the vertical shafts of rotting green manure are still there to draw down and hold rain. Therefore, in May and June, when the seedbed is exposed to the weather and when typically the really bad erosion occurs in this area (not over winter), heavy rains do not cause nearly as much harm as they do on hilly no-till ground that the USDA wants us to believe is erosion-free. In really disastrous storms, neither my way nor the no-till way will protect from erosion on hilly land. Hilly land should be in grassland most of the time. Grassland is the only true no-till farming.

  Planting Corn

  Field corn, sweet corn, popcorn, and "Indian" corn are all grown about the same way, but that way varies by region. The ancient, native American southwestern corns of the desert are traditionally grown in discrete hills, widely spaced, perhaps surrounded by pumpkins and squash, or beans that grow up the corn stalks. The kernels are planted as much as eighteen inches deep instead of the usual one- to three-inch depth in the humid Cornbelt. In contrast, the Mayans sometimes grew their corn on raised, irrigated beds and barely needed to cover the seed at all.

  Commercial corn farmers with clay soils agonize over planting depth as well as time of planting. On any rainy day in early April, you can hear a conversation like the following if you sit around the coffee pot at the local feed mill.

  Charlie: "It's too damn early to plant corn and everybody knows it. Ground's too cold." (He has already planted thirty acres but in case it doesn't germinate he doesn't want anyone to know.)

  Hube: "Well I got two thousand acres I gotta get over, and if I don't start in April, I'll never get done in time to plant the other two thousand to beans."

  Bob: "Don't bitch to me. If you weren't such a ground hog you could farm sanely and wait till the soil warms up."

  Charlie: "How deep you plantin'?"

  Hube: "Waaall, I started out at three quarters of an inch and then the weatherman said dry weather was ahead, so I went down to one and a quarter inch, and then the weatherman said it was going to rain after all, so I went back up to an inch."

  Charlie: "Hell, I'm just going to turn off the radio and put all the corn in at an inch and a half."

  Bob: "And then it'll rain hail columbia and the ground will crust over and the cornll leaf out underground and die.

  Charlie: "I'm not working up a fine seed bed-that's what makes the crusting bad."

  Hube: "Waaalll, then if it doesn't rain, that ground won't hold moisture and the corn won't sprout a'tall."

  Bob: "A man's gotta be a damn fool to be a farmer."

  Most of the time corn does just fine and will even make up for a judgmental mistake on the part of the farmer. When I was a novice, I tended to err more on the side of planting too deep in early spring, causing the corn kernels to rot in the cold ground; now I tend to plant too shallow, especially in early plantings when the soil has not warmed up fully. I tell myself, mistakenly, that I must plant very shallow, just under the soil surface, because the soil is too cold, even down an inch, for the kernels to sprout. My mistakes have taught me that it is better to plant at least an inch and a half, no matter how cold the ground temperature at planting time, in case dry weather does not provide moisture enough to germinate shallower plantings. Generally speaking, if the soil is dry enough to cultivate, it is warm enough to sprout corn at the inch-and-ahalf to two-inch depth. That is the safest rule to follow.

  The best lesson I have learned is not to be in a hurry. Farmers are just like gardeners. If someone in the neighborhood starts planting, everybody else thinks they have to rush out and take a crack at it, mud and all.

  In the Cornbelt, we now plant corn in continuous rows although the old spacing in hills, three to four kernels to the hill with the hills 40 inches apart, still works quite well. (One for the borer, one for the crow / one for the cutworm and one to grow.) When sown continuously in the row rather than in hills, the kernels of hybrid corn are generally spaced about 6 to 8 inches apart. My open-pollinated (non-hybrid) corn does best at 12-inch spacings but can be planted a little closer than that.

  Row width is arguable forever. The traditional width of 40 to 42 inches was dictated by the work horse, which needed that much room to fit between the rows during weed cultivation and harvest. The fact that corn is grown in rows at all was to accommodate beasts of burden, weeding tools, and harvest machines. Hybrid corns today are bred to be grown in rows 30 inches apart and occasionally in 20-inch rows, but 34to 36-inch rows are more the norm in Ohio fields among farmers who intend to rely on mechanical cultivation of weeds and not herbicides alone. In gardens and beds, you can plant as densely as you have water, nutrients, and sunlight for.

  A good example of small-scale but big league commercial corn production is the four acres one of the Ohio State Extension agronomists, Jay Johnson, has been growing continuously since 1989. He wanted to see how much corn would yield in Ohio if he used every available bit of modern agronomic know-how and focused it all on a very small field where he could exercise great hands-on care. He is averaging on the four acres about 230 bushels per acre, in a state where the average yield is about 120 bushels per acre and where 200-bushel yields, even with irrigation, are rare.

  To get such high yields, Johnson uses a seeding rate of 35,000 kernels per acre or more (normal is 22,000 to 26,000 and I prefer 18,000 per acre with my open-pollinated corn). A plant population this dense requires very high fertility and hybrid varieties genotyped for dense plantings. He applied in the first six years nitrogen at the rate of between 400 and 500 pounds per acre, and in later years about 300 pounds per acre. Rates of phosphorus and potash he used at first ranged from 100 to 200 pounds per acre and 200 to 400 pounds per acre, respectively. In the last four years however, soil tests indicated that he did not need any added phosphorus and potash so he did not apply any.

  What he learned was that despite continuously heavy applications of fertilizer and optimum moisture conditions, the corn yield leveled off after reaching the 230-bushel-per-acre level. He says that his rates of fertilizer were probably too high, and since continuing them did not continue to boost yield, he is now concentrating on seeing what rates are necessary to maintain yields of 200-plus bushels per acre. He also irrigates if necessary to maintain 18 to 22 inches of water over the growing season.

  He says he did not keep track of his expenses, but obviously, if a farmer were to apply that much fertilizer, his costs would be higher than the norm (see the sample corn production budget below). I asked a seed corn salesman I know, who also farms, if he had ever grown 200-bushel corn. "Yep. Once. Never again," he replied, enjoying my mystified expression. "I made the 200 bushel club. 207 to be exact. But it cost me $3 a bushel to do it and corn was only worth $2.50 that year."

  Steve Rioch, director of biointensive gardening programs at Ohio University, tells me that a local farmer, using only organic and biointensive methods, grew corn with a yield of 325 bushels per acre on a small plot. "Biointensive methods work more practically with high-value c
rops like vegetables," says Rioch. "On raised beds of 100 square feet in size, we've increased production of vegetables from 2,000 to 14,000 pounds."

  For a more typical real farm example, Dave, near my place, averages 120 bushels per acre on his upland soil of fair fertility, and often gets 150 bushels per acre on his richer, creek-bottom fields. His farming philosophy has always been low-input production-moderate amounts of commercial fertilizer and herbicides, supplemented by clover incorporated for green manure and low-cost mechanical cultivation of weeds. He plants about fifty acres of corn now in semi-retirement but never planted more than a hundred. He spaces his rows 38 inches apart and uses seed plates in his four row, tractor-pulled planter that drop a kernel every 8'/z inches. He plants hybrids, half early varieties and half late varieties. In 1992, with more than ample moisture, some of the corn yielded over 150 bushels per acre even on high ground, an excellent yield for his kind of soil.

  The way I grow my corn is somewhat unique because I plant and harvest only one acre. My method could be expanded to at least fifty acres with small traditional equipment, in which case it would closely follow Dave's regimen but without the herbicides. My per-acre costs are lower than those of a commercial grower, but so is my yield. I grow open-pollinated corn which ordinarily has a yield potential of only 110 bushels per acre. I like to apply a ten- to fifteen-ton-per-acre application of manure right before plowing the legume under and often that is all the fertilizer I use. However, I have learned from experience that if the legume in the previous year(s) was cut for hay several times, the soil may be depleted of available potash. So the corn crop, planted in the spring, especially on thinner soil, will take good advantage of a moderate amount of additional potash, either as wood ashes, or a natural rock source of potassium, or some chemically refined fertilizer like potassium sulfate or muriate of potash. Potassium sulfate is considered preferable to muriate of potash by soil ecologists because the latter contains chlorine which may build up harmfully in the soil with heavier applications. What I actually do if manure is short is add nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash at about 200 pounds per acre in a 6-24-24 formulation. Those gobbledegook figures mean that for every 100 pounds of the formulation, I am applying 6 pounds of actual nitrogen, 24 pounds of actual phosphorus, and 24 of actual potash. (Compare that to Johnson's rates of 400 pounds, 200 pounds, 400 pounds.) I use this acidulated fertilizer rather than the raw rock sources of phosphorus and potash because it is cheaper and requires handling much less tonnage.

  Oh, so you're not a certified organic grower, visitors sometimes snort, knowing that I have been an outspoken supporter of organic farming methods for thirty years. Nope, I'm not. For thirty years I've also said that a moderate amount of chemical fertilizer is not harmful to anything and is sometimes the most economical way to maintain fertility. I thought that the organic fraternity would eventually realize this. My garden is 100 percent organic, whatever that means anymore, and so is my orchard, though in the latter case I experimented many years to work out a way to make this practical. If a small amount of chemical fertilizer every fourth year on my crop fields makes me a cheater among the Chosen, that will prove in the long run to be the organic fraternity's problem, not mine.

  The contortions that the National Organic Standards Board has been forced to go through in arriving at a list of materials that big time organic marketers agree should or should not be used in organic farming is evidence enough of the impossibility of defining "pure" organics to everyone's satisfaction. To effect a compromise, the NOSB has drawn up an interminably long and tedious list of materials, decreeing some to be okay, some to be used with certain restrictions, and some to be altogether prohibited.

  How can a substance be restricted sometimes and sometimes not, and still be "organic"? So the Board conspired the status of "transitional" organic farmers-farmers on their way to becoming organic but not there yet. In some cases, these farmers can put "transitional organic" on their food or fiber labels, which is meaningless in terms of the product itself.

  I think the NOSB has given itself an impossible goal: to try to administer an ideal from on high for thousands of farms in thousands of different situations. A totally sustainable agriculture might not even be possible no matter what known methods are used, given an ever-rising population. Marty Bender, who has made the study of sustainable agriculture his career at the Land Institute in Kansas, points out in a recent study that farmed soil will sustain itself in fertility without some form of added phosphorous and potassium only if it is not farmed but devoted to green manures half the time-for instance, seven years out of fourteen in tests conducted with dryland wheat. Since the sources of phosphorus and potash are finite, maybe the best we can do with rising populations is to slow down the environmental deterioration-delay the inevitable collapse until humans come to their senses and control their numbers voluntarily.

  And to say that natural raw phosphate or potash derivatives are okay for sustainable agriculture and the fertilizers refined from them are anathema is an argument for which little proof exists outside the minds of organic purists. Besides, think of the increased air pollution, ozone build-up, transportation costs, and highway accidents that would occur if all of agriculture decided to rely only on far greater tonnages of the unrefined material.

  I figure 1 am just as competent and justified in this situation to declare that a little chemical fertilizer is okay in good farming as the NOSB evidently feels justified and competent in saying that antibiotics, which I have not had to use, are sometimes okay in organic farming.

  I also part company with the organic certification effort in its complete prohibition, no exceptions, against applying clean, pre-treated biosolids (sludge) on farm land. This prohibition is simply witch-hunting. I have covered the waste management field journalistically for nearly a decade, and have worked closely with the leading scientists in the field, including Harry Hoitink and Terry Logan at Ohio State, Rufus Chaney at USDA, and John Walker at EPA to get the information on advances in handling biosolids to the public. These men, who have no axes to grind either way, insist that pre-treated biosolids today are among the safest of farm fertilizers if applied properly.

  If anyone should be in favor of using biosolids in farming, it ought to be organic farmers, since this waste material is rich in organic matter. Marty Bender, commenting on the finiteness of sources of phosphorus and potassium for fertilizer, says that agriculture MUST turn to recycled city biosolids as one source for maintaining soil fertility. Gary Wegner, a wheat farmer in Washington state who is very sensitive to the ecological problems of agriculture, likes to point out that far from being harmful to farming, the minute quantities of so-called heavy metals (he thinks "lite" metals would be a more appropriate term) are precisely the trace minerals his soil needs.

  Oren Long, a Kansas rancher, ecologist, and organic baby beef producer before he semi-retired, said to me this very morning on the phone: "If the National Organic Standards Board insists on barring all synthetic fertilizers, most farmers trying hard to achieve a sustainable agriculture that works will simply drop out of the organic movement. I don't care to be certified organic anyway; I just want to run an ecologically sane farm on the least amount of outside inputs as possible."

  I throw down the gauntlet. I will match my corn (or any other food I produce) with any corn of any big food company who has muscled into the organic market and gotten certified. Measure both, sample both, diagnose both by the most advanced analysis available. If my food is not at least as pure of harmful chemicals or as full of nutritional content as the certified stuff, I will eat a football helmet and shut up forever.

  The problem with straining gnats in organic farming is that it leads, sure enough, to swallowing camels or at least giant-sized oxymorons. I have listened to women condemn apple growers for using the chemical Alar, which has never been proven to hurt even one tiny baby, while in almost the same breath, the very same women support abortion as a means of routine birth control.

&
nbsp; But I have more interesting things to do in the corn field than argue about gnat-straining organic farming certification. I am trying to grow a non-hybrid, Reid's yellow dent, open-pollinated corn that would be es pecially suited for hand harvest on small farms. Open-pollinated corn has the ability to produce much larger ears than current hybrid strains. Large-eared corn is more efficient for the small grower: I can husk one big ear much faster than two small ones. Furthermore, with open-pollinated corn, farmers can save their own seed instead of having to buy new seed every year as in the case of hybrid corn. Hybrid corn will return to its nubbly parent lines if replanted too often. Hybrid seed costs roughly $24 an acre (much more in 1993-1994, because of the great floods of the Midwest). In addition, there is some evidence (not yet conclusive) that open-pollinated corn is more palatable to animals than hybrid.

  So the challenge presented itself. Could 1, by selecting the largest and fattest ears from the sturdiest stalks every year for replanting (weak stalks are the bane of open-pollinated corn), develop a strain of strongstalked corn with ears that contained twice the kernel weight of hybrid, thereby doubling the efficiency of hand harvesting?

  Why aren't scientists doing this kind of work with open-pollinated corn? They do it with cereal grains which are almost all open-pollinated varieties. The answer is that corn is not homozygous the way that wheat and oats are. The seed does not repeat itself uniformly. When you plant all the kernels from a single ear of corn, many of the resulting plants are apt to be a little different from each other. Possessing that much heterosis, as a geneticist might say, corn is difficult to improve by selection but relatively easy to improve by crossbreeding. So hybridizing was born. Stalk strength and ear uniformity and increased yields soon followed.