The Contrary Farmer

by Gene Logsdon

In general, learn as much as you can about hand tools because if you get exactly the right one for the right job, the work is so much easier. We are losing the lore and knowledge of proper hand tools-an axe handle is shaped the way it is for precise reasons that few can appreciate unless you try to swing an axe not shaped the traditional way. The spade I bought for digging tile trenches is a new thing, poorly designed for the job. I tried to use it until my back about gave out and my foot got sore trying to push the blade into the soil. Only when I tried cousin David's hefty old spade, made specifically for digging tile ditches, did I understand why this menial work need not be repugnant. Even if you don't really know the fine points of hand tools, if you buy used ones at farm sales, you are much more likely to come away with something good, and at a fraction of the price of nice, new, poorly designed junk.

  Keeping tools properly sharp is another skill whose importance can hardly be over-emphasized. My friend Roy Harbour's memory of farming fifty years ago is sharper than his hoe. He says his father always honed a hoe blade on both sides of the edge, unlike the way hoes come from the store. "You never had to swing my father's hoes," says Roy. "Just nudge the weeds with the blade and they turned up their toes." Once Roy gets started, he can't be stopped easily. "Dad would heat an axe blade a little, and then pound the blade out pretty flat to back about an inch from the edge. Then he'd spend a whole evening sharpening that thing till it would cut hair. I am not kidding. With his axe and a little practice you could cut a four-inch sapling off with one whack."

  No wonder it took "civilization" less than a century to turn millions of acres of primeval forest into a great big ball diamond.

  CHAPTER 10

  Winter Wheat, Spring Oats,

  Summer Clover, Fall Pasture

  The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and the grain are next; the sovereign is the lightest.

  Mencius, circa 300 BC

  Grain farmers and fishermen have no trouble understanding each other. One plows the land; one plows the water. Both must bow to the fickle antics of nature in their search for food. 'heir inability to control the weather breeds in them a patient pessimism that endures century after century, outlasting all of the power hungry zealots and bumbling bureaucrats. Compared to nature, zealots and bureaucrats are a piece of cake.

  The similarity between grain farmer and fisherman extends even to a visual likeness between grain field and body of water. Growing grain takes the moods of the wind as water does. The Polynesians distinguish dozens of different plays of wind on water and these seafaring people have names for each of them. I yearn for special words as well for the winds that move the amber waves of grain. But I must make do. Catspaws ruffle the surface of the growing wheat and oats as on the surface of the pond. Whitecaps of grainheads nod in the breeze like the undulating swells of a seascape. My eye can follow a whirlygust across the field as the grain stalks bend before the wind in swirls made visible by a contrast between the lighter-colored stems and undersides of the plants and the darker tops: whirls of color from ivory to jade when the wheat is still green; of burnt siena to gold when the grain is ripe. The understory clover thickens to a luxurious green as the grain matures, and then a fit ful, fretting wind parting the taller wheat gives the impression of emerald raindrops dimpling a golden lake. I think of a painting by Manet.

  At dusk comes the most bewitching sight of all. The sun, already below the horizon, still casts enough red into the skies that the color reflects horizontally on the ripening grain and the wheat heads look like tiny embers in a dying fire. As the embers fade, fireflies come up out of the grain to mimic that effect, the females on the wheat stems, the males in the black air above the field: hundreds of thousands of them blinking love messages in an utter serenity of silence.

  I have seen grain and water unified after a June downpour sent the creek cascading out of its banks. The flood waters rose in the wheat field until only the ripening wheat heads stuck above the surface: a yellow foam on the water lapping at the very brim of a red-winged blackbird's nest built deftly into the tops of a bunch of stalks, and looking like a tiny, moored boat. Mother blackbird perched on the edge of the nest, singing as if she had not a care in the world. That night a chorus of frogs made merry as the water receded. Two weeks later, I harvested the grain in a billow of dust and wondered, from the tractor seat, if I had only dreamed of the frogs.

  The beauty of soft red winter wheat (that's what we grow in Ohio) is not just a harvest-time show, but an all year event. After I finish the wheat harvest and gather the straw for winter bedding, the interplanted clover grows again with great vitality, unhindered now by the shade of the wheat, and intent upon blooming and setting seed before winter. By September the field that was green in June and golden in July is pink with clover blossoms over which dance legions of multi-colored butterflies and bees.

  In a nearby field, where I harvested oats in July, I plant the next year's crop of wheat in the last week of September, after danger of Hessian fly infestation has passed. By the end of October, the field resembles a lawn in June. With a border of woodland in fall colors, the green wheatlands become my delight, especially as they grow still greener into somber November.

  The wheat can also double as sheep or even cattle pasture in the autumn without harm for the next year's harvest, if the grazing is not severe and the animals are not allowed on the field when the ground is muddy. Sheep are better for this. Their dainty feet do not trample the wheat as much.

  And what greens up first in the drab days of March? The wheat fields of course. It is also in the wheat that I perform my first and favorite planting rite of the year: broadcasting clover seed while the wheat is still dormant or even after the little blades begin to grow again. In the Ozarks, where spring plantings are more apt to be accompanied by warm weather, folklorist Vance Randolph recorded in the 1930s that menstruating women, working naked by the light of the moon, were thought to give the crops special advantage. Success would be insured if sexual intercourse were performed on the seedbed. I asked a modern Ozark farmer if those superstitions continued today. "That's not superstition," he replied with a chuckle. "That's just a good excuse."

  The Culture of Wheat

  Winter wheat has immensely practical advantages for the cottage farm. It is the only crop planted in the fall in the north (unless you count the intriguing possibility of growing turnips and kale for winter pasture), and so it spreads out the work load for both farmer and machine. If 1 were to plant no wheat, I would have to plant more oats in the spring, which would possibly mean larger equipment and certainly more labor right when I should he getting ready to plant corn. Also fall wheat planting occurs after oat harvest and before corn harvest, avoiding the scheduling conflict that results if soybeans are included in the rotation (soybean harvest invariably occurs right when you should be planting wheat). Moreover, fall planting enables the wheat to get established without weed competition, since weeds grow only weakly, if at all, in fall-cultivated soil. If the wheat follows oats in the traditional manner, the field can be disked several times while it lies fallow between oat harvest and wheat planting, a great advantage when a field has become infested with weeds from poor chemical farming or a lack of proper rotations.

  The interseeding of clover (and often timothy along with it) in wheat makes it unnecessary for the farmer to spend time and money on seedbed preparation exclusively for the clover and timothy, since these crops germinate well enough on the wheat's seedbed. The timothy seed is so fine it does not need to be covered with soil. Just broadcast it right on top of the ground immediately after the wheat is sown. It comes up with the wheat, but its blades are so fine they are barely noticeable until the following year. The clover is added in early spring when the soil is still relatively bare. Rain, or recurring freeze and thaw, will allow the tiny clover seeds to sink far enough into the soil for good germination, which is, after all, how nature plants seeds.

  I have sown wheat and oats for t
wenty years by walking across the field, back and forth, cranking a little broadcast seeder slung over my shoulder. In one pass across the field, the broadcaster sows a strip about thirty feed wide, which is about what a $15,000 drill will cover in one pass. But the broadcaster sells for less than a hundred dollars. Although I now plant only a couple of acres this way, I have sown ten to twenty acres over the course of two days in younger years and not expended any more energy than I would have in jogging a couple of miles each day. My friend and neighbor Dave used to seed seventy acres of clover in a season this way.

  Plant two bushels of wheat per acre when broadcasting, and eight pounds of red clover seed. The rate for timothy is about two pounds per acre. There is a gauge on the broadcaster to set the proper amount, but I do not pay much attention to it since the actual seeding rate will depend on how fast I walk and crank the whirling propeller that scatters the seed evenly over the ground. If I can see two wheat seeds per square inch on the ground, I figure I am sowing enough. I prefer to err on the side of too little rather than too much with grain, because the clover will do better in a thinner stand of wheat than a thicker, and I value the clover more than the grain. I run a check on myself as I plant by noting whether or not I am getting a half bushel spread with the wheat for every quarter acre. I can decrease or increase the rate by either opening the aperture out of which the grain falls onto the propeller or by walking slower while I crank. With the red clover seed, I make sure every quarter acre gets at least two to three pounds.

  Before seeding I disk the old oat stubble several times in late August and early September to clean up weeds and incorporate the straw and stubble remaining after oat harvest. After planting I go over the field again with the spike tooth harrow set as lightly as possible, to further level the soil surface and cover the seed a little.

  A surer way to get a good stand is to plant the wheat with a grain drill, about an inch deep, maybe two inches in dry falls. Old drills are common at farm sales and inexpensive, but my grain growing has not suffered for lack of one, so I continue to do without. In dry weather, going over the field after seeding with a cultipacker to firm the soil is a good practice.

  Between planting and harvesting wheat and its companions, timothy and clover or alfalfa, there is nothing else to do except admire the grain if it promises a good crop, or grumble about it if not. Weeds can become a problem where the traditional rotations are not followed or where the farmer relies totally on herbicides for weed control. One of the ironies of modern farming is that now with all the streamlined herbicides, Canada thistle and giant ragweed (to name but two) are a far worse problem than they were befbre herbicides.

  Once I have my little fields into proper rotations, weeds are generally not a problem. I watch for stray thistles and sourdock, and cut them back before they bloom. A. sourdock here and there that is not allowed to produce seed can actually help the soil by punching its long carrotlike root down into subsoil, increasing soil porosity and pulling up minerals to the soil surface just as legumes do. After harvest, a mowing to clip the wheat stubble sets weeds back again, and then the clover comes back strongly enough to choke them out the rest of the year. Mowing the clover for hay twice or thrice the next year or two, along with some pasturing the second year, keeps the weeds at bay. Then the land is plowed for corn and the corn cultivated intensely to further discourage the weeds. Oats, following corn in the rotation, has its own allelopathic (herbicidal) effect on grassy weeds and provides a measure of control until after harvest. Summer fallow cultivations after oat harvest, or after mowing of clover if clover was interseeded with oats, bring the rotational weed control practices back full circle.

  Eventually the good farmer-following a rotation of corn, oats, wheat, hay, and pasture and then back to corn-will keep his fields relatively weed-free without herbicides. If a special weed problem does occur, then a small spot-spraying of herbicide to the problem area can be very effective, but only under the mantle of proper rotations and cultiva tion. I am sorry to have to disagree with the organic purists who liken herbicide applications to human drug use and say that it only takes a teaspoonful to start an addiction. A grain field is not a mentally sick human being. On the other hand, depending on chemicals alone, with heavy, routine sprayings, only insures that you will have to spend lots of money on a large amount of chemicals again the next year. Every year the cost of chemical farming creeps up. The standard single application of herbicide to soybeans is now up to $30 per acre, more than twice the cost of cultivation. Often more than one application of herbicides becomes necessary, and in no-till farming, applications of insecticides, which are more toxic than herbicides, become necessary as well. That money allows the herbicide companies enough profit so that they can afford to spend huge sums of money on those sickeningly hypocritical advertisements that convey the idea that using herbicides is the way to preserve the family farm. Herbicides are the single most useful technology by which mega-farms can keep on expanding acreage and thus force family farmers off the land.

  The first reward of the grain is in eating it yourself. The smell of nirvana is homemade bread baking. The latest food guides advise a diet about half of grains, and about a fourth each of fruits/vegetables and meat, but sometimes I think I could almost live on home-baked bread (spread thickly with butter) and homemade pasta.

  Soft red winter wheat is used mainly for pastry flour. White wheat (durum) is generally used for pastas. Hard red winter and spring red generally are milled for bread flour. We use our wheat for all purposes except pasta. We mix a little white bread flour with our own homeground whole wheat to make the bread lighter. Although pasta is generally made from durum wheat flour, we use regular unbleached flour in a recipe of one pound flour, five eggs, and one half-teaspoon of salt. John Rossi, of Rossi Pasta, now a very successful gourmet pasta business, told me years ago not to use the usual pasta flour called semolina because it was a bit too coarse for the little home-style, hand-cranked pasta machines like ours. He recommended the Sapphire brand of durum. We could probably grow our own durum but that is just one more of the ten trillion projects I have not found time to explore yet, and regular flour works fine for us.

  At any rate, homemade pasta is even more of a treat than home made bread. It is lighter and tastier than what you normally buy at the grocery. Most commercial pasta (not Rossi Pasta) is manufactured by extrusion-that is, the moist dough is squeezed by pressure through a screen, which heats and half-cooks the pasta and makes it heavier and pastier.

  We feed our own wheat whole to our chickens. I also grind some in with the corn and oats for all the animals. In feeding wheat whole to hogs, it should first be soaked for a few days. If a pig eats a lot of dry wheat, the grain can swell in its stomach and kill the poor thing. Soaking on the other hand begins the fermenting process, which could lead to slightly inebriated but happy hogs. My father soaked even milled grain for his hogs, and the joyous sounds of the pigs at feeding time brought to mind, well, the noise emanating from a downtown Chicago singles bar during happy hour.

  My father-in-law used to tell a story I can repeat now because all the people involved are dead. He tried his hand once at making bootleg whiskey on his Kentucky farm. He washed the leftover runny mash down a sinkhole, thereby destroying the evidence. Or so he thought. One evening at milking time, the cows came in from the pasture wobbling and swaying in a most ludicrous manner. First father-in-law feared that they had some strange disease or maybe had gotten into some locoweed (white snakeroot), but they seemed in good enough spirits. In fact, they acted exactly as if they were drunk. Hmmmmmm. Investigation proved that the whiskey slop had finally worked its way down through the hilltop sinkhole and was oozing out of a cleft in the rocks at the bottom of the hill. The cows had bellied up to the bar and sucked the mother lode dry.

  Spring Oats

  To the cottage husbandman, oats is (if oats seems to require a plural verb to your ear, it is not so spoken among us peasants in rural Ohio) a far more important crop
than wheat. It makes good hay and temporary pasture, for one thing. As grain, oats is higher in protein than wheat, and much higher in calcium, iron, thiamin, and fat. It is much lower in carbohydrates. This latter fact makes it an ideal feed to mix with corn, which is high in carbohydrates but relatively low in protein. In fact as I take every occasion to point out, experiments in the 1930s, reported in the previously cited Morrison's Feeds and Feeding, indicated that while oats is cheaper than corn to buy, it is worth just as much as corn in a feeding ration where it comprises a third of the ration with corn. Morrison did not seem to know why, and today no one even knows enough to ask why. We're all supposed to grow corn and soybeans and keep our minds shut. Oats is horse feed, and by God, we are up-to-the-minute, forward-looking entrepreneurialagribusinesspeople who don't intend to stare into a horse's rear end all day, again. Ever.

  So if you are buying feed, a ration of corn and oats is cheaper than corn alone (or corn and wheat-wheat costs more than twice what oats costs) but is possibly just as effective although don't expect the corn and soybean industrialists to ever admit that. If you are raising oats to feed with corn, you can figure your oat crop is worth just as much as your corn although it sells for about a dollar a bushel less at market prices.

  That reminds me of something else the cottager should know about. The price you get for selling your grain at the elevator is lower than the price you will pay for buying grain at the elevator. They call it handling charges. The elevator will pay you, at the moment, about $1.40 a bushel for oats. If you come back the next day and want to buy oats, it will cost about $1.80 a bushel if you're lucky. That is one sumbitch of a handling charge. No, life is not fair. So when someone tells you that it is more economical for a cottager with only a small number of animals to buy his grain rather than raise it, remember to figure in this additional cost over market prices when you do your own calculations. Or buy your grain direct from another farmer who won't sock you with a handling charge.