The Contrary Farmer

by Gene Logsdon

  But heterosis also means that corn has great potential for diversity, for producing the unexpected, and that intrigues me. How long an ear of corn is possible? Can I breed-in stalk strength by natural selection? When I asked Dr. Pratt if we could now have an improved open-pollinated variety just as good as our hybrid corn if that were a priority in research, he paused a little, knowing the political ramifications involved, and then answered: "Maybe."

  It might take a long time and a lot of back-crossing to do it, which means lots of money. If done by the public land grant college scientists, who are the ones who normally maintain the banks of germ plasm (seed stock) from which new varieties are developed, it would also require quite a bit of courage: they would run into considerable opposition from the hybrid seed corn companies who of course are big donors to the land grant college coffers.

  So, being contrary, I decided that if no one else would do it, I'd try.

  Since then, instead of a tedious job, harvesting my corn by hand has become a most interesting pastime. Almost every ear is different, some high on the stalk, some low, some fat, some thin, some reddish, some almost white, some with red cobs, some with white, some with softer kernels, some tasting sweeter than others, some maturing late, some early, some easy to husk, some difficult. I save out about twenty of the biggest, fattest ears with the deepest kernels from the strongest stalks, shell the middle kernels out in the spring, mix them together, and plant them. Now, as I husk my way down each row, I keep thinking about the possibility that at any moment I might find the longest ear of corn in the world.

  That might have happened in 1993, if I can believe a recent television show. My corn produced about a dozen ears that even when dried down to 15 percent moisture, measured over fourteen inches long. (As moisture decreases further, the ears will shrink a little more.) Quite a few ears measured over thirteen inches long, and twelve-inchers were common. This is corn that eighteen years ago, when I began my selective breeding, rarely produced an ear a foot long. I was encouraged, of course, but not too elated until one of those morning talk shows on Iv featured a farmer who had with him what he said was the longest ear of corn in the world. It measured fourteen inches-not quite as long as several of mine.

  Lots of people want to buy some of my strain but I am not yet satisfied with stalk strength. There has been much improvement in that regard, but I hope for more. A friend commented: "Gene, you are fighting a losing battle. Every time you get a stronger stalk, the ear gets bigger."

  Caring for Corn

  I have noted in chapter 3 that I plant corn with two little plastic push seeders bolted together to plant two rows at a time. Each seeder cost about $40. Many, many other kinds of new and used tractor and horse planters are available. Used ones at very reasonable prices sell regularly at farm sales. But in the planter department, the small farmer does not have to resort to old equipment if he can afford new. New planters can be purchased by the unit-one-row, two-row, three-row, whatever, and attached to a tool bar behind any three-point hitch tractor or horse forecart.

  The art of controlling weeds is at the heart of successful farming. A low level of weeds can be tolerated, and is in fact helpful from the standpoint of biodiversity, but weeds are sort of like chickenpox: hard to have just a little.

  Effective control of weeds in row crops like corn is a matter of good drainage and good timing, which sounds like a strange, unrelated observation. At least it sounded strange to Pat and Joe even though they had both grown up on farms. Hungering to return to a small farm, they decided one year to turn a two-acre lot on the edge of the village in which they lived into an organic sweet corn farm to make some spare-time money. Tater-King Smith, so nicknamed because of the prodigious potatoes he raised, tried to warn them.

  "That field lays too wet," he told the young couple.

  "Lays too wet?" Pat frowned, giving Joe a puzzled look.

  "Yup. After hard rain it won't dry out until the Fourth of Joo-ly," the old man said. "Needs tile."

  Pat and Joe considered that Tater was just putting on airs as old farmers love to do. They had everything figured out, they thought. They paid Tater King to plow the two acres, which he did while shaking his head and mumbling grouchily to himself, and figured that they could rely on a two-row garden seeder like mine, their garden tiller, and their hand-pushed wheelhoe to care for the crop. With successive plantings, they would have to handle no more than a quarter-acre a day and seldom that much.

  They went ahead and made their first planting on May 2. That turned out to be the last day they were able to do anything on time. Rain fell on May 4 just as Joe was about to try out his new wheelhoe cultivator which he had discovered was just about as easy to push along as the garden tiller was to guide, especially up close to the row. Five days later when the tiny corn plants were peeking through the soil along with several hundred billion trillion weeds, the soil was finally dry enough to cultivate. But then rain came again. By the time the field dried out enough the second time, five more days later, the weeds were in full command, and it was slow going even with the tiller. Weeds in the rows could not now be buried by rolling dirt in on them. Only hand hoeing was effective, and with the soil now hard, and the weeds four inches tall or more, weeding became slow and exhausting work.

  Had the field been properly drained, Pat and Joe would have had no problem controlling the weeds despite the rainy spring. The field would have been soft but dry enough to cultivate two days after the first rain, and with wheelhoe or tiller the soil would have worked up like applesauce, flowing into the rows to bury the still tiny weeds there while the weeds between the rows were being cut out of the ground. If a little hand hoeing were necessary, it would have been easy work in this soft mellow soil.

  In the poorly drained field, the weeds overtook the first planting. The dirt was as hard as concrete when it did finally dry and the shovel cultivators Joe tried to use behind Tater's farm tractor turned up slabs as big as bricks which rolled over and dropped on the corn plants. Didn't much matter anyway because the weeds in the rows were as tall as the corn and could not be buried without burying the corn too. The same sad chain of events followed the second planting, which was delayed by wet soil until it was almost time to make the third planting. Therefore what corn Pat and Joe got to sell came all at once late in the season after most potential customers had eaten their fill from other farm stands.

  "I believe we lost only about $50 an acre on the two acres," Joe said sarcastically to Pat at the end of the year.

  "Lucky you didn't put out more than two acres," Tater King observed.

  Ever after, Pat and Joe swore that growing organic corn was impossible because only with chemicals could they control weeds in wet weather.

  In well-drained soil it is also possible before planting, and especially practical on larger acreages, to disk the plowed seedbed at least twice at intervals of about four days, in order to destroy the first two waves of sprouting weeds. This also prepares a clod-free seedbed that is easy to plant with the hand-pushed planter described earlier and in which the corn seed will sprout quickly.

  On corn fields larger than about five acres, farmers who do not wish to use herbicides will often begin their weeding regimen with what is called a rotary hoe, a tool consisting of a series of wheeled, curved spike blades. When pulled by a tractor at about 8 miles per hour, the rotary hoes literally throw tiny germinating weeds out of the ground. The rotary hoe is run right over the top of the emerging corn rows, killing weeds in the row as well as between the rows. Occasionally a corn plant is hurled out of the ground, too, but not enough of them to be of any consequence. As Dave says, "If the rotary hoe isn't yanking a corn plant out once and a while, it probably isnt getting enough weeds either." A rotary hoe can't be used in horse farming, because the horses can't pull it fast enough. A spring-toothed harrow, with the teeth set in the most slanted position, makes a fairly good substitute for horse farmers.

  As soon as you can see the corn coming up, you can begi
n weeding with wheelhoe and rotary tiller. On acreages too large for tiller management, cultivation with tractor or horsedrawn shovel cultivators begins when the corn is about three inches tall. There is a wide assortment of shovel cultivators available, old, new, horse, or tractor: one row, two row, and so forth. When the corn is small, you will need shields for shovel cultivators so that the shovel blades do not bury the little corn plants with dirt. If you adjust the shields correctly, the shovels will roll (scrape) just enough dirt in under them to bury tiny weeds in the row without burying the corn. After the corn is taller, you remove the shields and let the dirt roll unimpeded up next to the corn plants, burying the next generation of weeds that tries to grow there.

  Without shovel cultivators I use the rotary tiller, then straddle the row and scuffle dirt with my feet into the rows to bury weeds. This is not as slow or exhausting as it sounds, since the dirt is loose and mellow. I move up and down the rows at a fairly good clip in complete control, or at least my feet are. I can scuffle in just precisely the amount of dirt I need to cover the weeds and not the corn. I get a chance to examine every plant and every bug along the way, which I would not do if I were seated on a tractor or horse-drawn cultivator. I can see where wireworms and cutworms have struck, note with satisfaction the little black beetles eating smartweeds, and potato bugs eating horsenettle, and find, underneath a chunk of manure that did not get buried by the plow, two ground beetles of a kind that I know eat cutworms. Sometimes bluebirds, red-winged blackbirds, and grackles alight ahead of me, also intent on cutworms and other delicacies. Carol helps sometimes or our married children and their spouses, and our talk makes the work go pleasantly by. By July or even late June, the corn has grown tall enough to shade out germinating weeds, and cultivation is no longer necessary.

  A new tool for tractors from 15 to 150 horsepower makes multi-row cultivation with rotary-tiller action (up to eight rows at a time) possible now. It's called the Multivator, from Mitchell Equipment in Marysville, Ohio.

  Corn Harvest

  Farm animals could actually harvest the corn themselves and often did in traditional farming. Lambs can be turned in the standing corn as early as August to graze the lower leaves of the tall corn stalks. They generally do not reach up and grab the ears. Next hogs can be turned in to eat the ears, and then the cows, horses, and sheep can overwinter on the stalks and the ears missed by the hogs.

  But on most cottage farms, human harvest of the ears is necessary for feeding to chickens and livestock year-round, especially in winter, with a little corn saved for making cornbread and other delicious cornmeal pastries.

  I start harvesting corn in late August, cutting green stalks that do not have nice ears and tossing them over the fence for the cows and sheep. This green corn is a good supplement to pastures that are often drying up in late summer. I have experimented with another trick I found in an old farm book, cutting the green stalk above the ear after the ear is well along toward maturity and feeding that to the livestock too. The ear matures, apparently no worse for having had its stalk decapitated. The practice may indeed benefit the ear because all the nutrients after decapitation are directed into the grain instead of the top stalk. My very tall open-pollinated corn is very good for this early harvest because the decapitation means the stalks will not be so prone to blowing over in a wind storm.

  About September, after the kernels are dented and the milk line has receded halfway down the kernel to the cob, corn can be chopped by machine and put into silos. This requires a fairly large tractor, a chopper, a silage wagon, a blower, and a silo, so I do not believe that the process is right for the cottage farm of the future (too much expense). But some clever cottage farmer may figure out a cheaper way to do it, like running green stalks and ears through a brush chipper and using airtight plastic bags for storage. My feeding of green ears and stalks in August and September is my way of making silage. I let the animals' teeth do the chopping and their meat and milk do the storing.

  Starting about September 25, maybe earlier, depending on the year, when the ears have bowed down on the stalk to point to the earth they know they must return to, they are dry enough to harvest and store. By then the husks are turning brown and the kernels are well-dented and beginning to "dry down." I do not bother to get the corn tested for moisture, because I know that in my slat-walled crib, the cleanly husked ears will continue to dry to a safe 14 percent moisture content without molding, and save me the natural gas drying bill that costs big cash grain farmers so much-13 to 18 cents a bushel and in wet autumn years more than that. In fact, drying corn artificially is one of the worst weaknesses of industrial corn production. The cost in money is horrendous in wet years and is a wasteful way to use one of our cleanest fuels, natural gas, because corn could be dried naturally in cribs in ear form like I do. The ears could then be shelled, if desired, for later marketing. But because corn farms are so huge now, and picker-sheller harvesters so labor-saving, it is fruitless to argue with large acreage farmers about how much money they could save by harvesting ear corn instead of shelled corn.

  Ironically, ear corn brings a premium price over shelled corn at some elevators today because the cobs are in demand. Ground up cobs are used to polish metal. The exceedingly soft fluff on the outer surface of the cob is used in baby powders. Also the whole ear, both grain and cob, can be ground and fed advantageously to cows.

  Some farmers of several hundred acres still do harvest ear corn and store it in cribs to be fed to livestock or sold later. One-row and two-row ear corn "pickers"-even new ones, but many old ones-are used for the harvesting. Old one-row pickers are affordable for the smallest farmers who do not want to hand harvest.

  I harvest my acre or two by hand. With the pickup truck alongside, I go down the row, husking each ear and tossing it into the pickup, a few rows each evening and a few more on weekends. Maybe on a fine October weekday, I will just take the whole day off from this writing room prison and time warp myself hack to 1940, when as a kid I followed my father around the field, helping him husk corn. Those were peaceful, gossamer days among the corn shocks, before the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor-always the inevitable bombs-and ended for now or forever (who knows which?) the centuries-old stability of agrarian society. The war hastened the technological changes, cutting the past from the future as cleanly as a sharp axe cuts tree sprouts. The autumn of 1941 was the last time we hauled corn fodder to the sheep with horses and sled, with harness hells jingling.

  As I walk down the corn row, I husk the ears in turn in one of two ways. Often the ear hangs down with the husk already loose enough that I can grab the end of the ear inside the husk with my right hand while my left hand grasps the stem end. A slight squeeze with my left hand while simultaneously a slight twist with my right, and the ear pops free from the husk and I toss it, all in one motion, into the pickup truck. If the husk is still tight on the ear, I slash it open with the husking peg tied to the fingers of my right hand, while at the same time, I strip the husk down the ear with my left hand. Then grabbing the ear with my right hand and snapping it off from the stern while holding the loosened husk in my left, the ear comes free. Although this is work, I view it as practice for the husking contests still held in our county. I can never beat the oldtimers who husked acres of corn like this when they were young, but I keep trying.

  I try to keep all the corn silks out of the husked corn, and not leave any husk on the ears, since both the silks and husks would, in the crib, inhibit the circulation of air. But a stray husk or silk won't hurt. Nubbins are often still somewhat milky, which would also slow down drying in the crib, so I toss them to one corner of the truck and feed them right away to livestock.

  I shovel the corn off the pickup into my little crib, built using a centuries-old design for drying the ears naturally. The walls are slatted, the slats (one-by-two-inch pine boards) are spaced about an inch apart for good air circulation. The width of the crib is about four feet, and should be no wider because that is about the limit
that natural air circulation can penetrate into the ears in the crib (that is, two feet from either side). The length of the crib can be from here to kingdom come. The side walls slant out as they go up, so that rain, striking against the slats, will drip down and out of the crib instead of into it: very simple, but expressive of the collected genius of tradition. Small hatch doors along the top of one wall open, so I can toss shovels full of corn from the pickup into the crib. At the bottom of the back wall is another small door from which to shovel out the corn. I feed the corn to the chickens on the cob. They can peck the kernels off, saving me the job of shelling. Hogs can eat the corn off the cobs themselves too, and F.B. Morrison's Feeds and Feeding (Morrison Publishing Company, 1946) says they fatten just about as well on whole corn as on milled corn until they weigh 150 pounds, so that saves another shelling and grinding operation. When I do mill corn for the milk cow, or to finish out a hog or steer, or for little chicks that can't handle whole corn, I take it to the feed mill in town. I would like to have my own sheller and grinder, but at my level of production, it is cheaper to pay the mill to do this job.

  Harvesting corn by hand is soothing work to me. I don't need to hurry. I have at least until Thanksgiving to finish, and could do ten acres, or even fifteen as our parents did, by husking a little every day all winter long. In fact I have mused about putting the whole place in corn, and husking just 25 bushels a day, hauling it to town, getting $50 a load, and being content with that much money and with the warm glow of Carol's eyes and the woodburning stove at day's end.

  If I want to save the fodder (leaves and stalks) for livestock feed, I cut the stalks and make shocks of the corn like the Amish do. I used to shock some every year, mostly so the kids could pretend that the shocks were "teepees" just as I did as a boy. Dad didn't mind us playing inside our teepees because by making room for ourselves, we opened an ample space for good air circulation. I considered myself the Last of the Mohicans. Out in the field now, building a shock, I realize that as a farmer, I truly may be among the Last of the Mohicans.