The Contrary Farmer

by Gene Logsdon

  "Mud in the oats and dust in the wheat," as the traditional saying puts it, is more often the truth. Oats is planted as early in spring as the ground will allow, where corn grew the previous year. Disking once or twice is all the pre-planting cultivation necessary. Don't get impatient and try to disk before the ground is sufficiently dry. This is where good drainage becomes particularly advantageous, because it is essential to get oats for grain in the ground as early as possible. M.G. Kains in his classic Five Acres and Independence (Greenberg, 1940) claims that oats will sprout on ice, but I rather believe he meant that the grain can be sown on an icy field and sprout after the ice melts and the soil warms up. I must be sure the disk is set to do a very level job because with all the cornstalks on the field, I can't pull a harrow behind the disk to level the soil. The harrow would plug up with stalk residue. I plant oats just like I do wheat and at the same rate, two bushels to the acre. After I plant both oats and accompanying red clover, I may run the disk over the field again, lightly, to level the seedbed and cover the seed. I might finish off the planting by firming the seedbed with the cultipacker.

  Because I grow about twice as much oats as wheat, only half of the oat field will rotate to wheat in September. So on that half, I do not plant clover since it would not have time to grow much before I disked the field for wheat.

  On the other half, the oats and clover make a sort of wary truce when growing together. In a way they help each other. The legume puts nitrogen in the soil and the natural herbicide emitted by the oats does not faze the clover (it mostly inhibits growth of some grasses). But like seedling trees in the forest, the oats and legume also compete with each other for sunlight. In fact a heavy oat crop can almost choke out clover and especially alfalfa. So, the part of the field that I interplant to clover is the part that I cut early for oat hay as described below. Relieved of the shade cast by the oats earlier than would normally be the case if I waited until the oats matured for grain, the clover rebounds with extra vitality. If weeds have come into the field, mowing the oats for hay also cuts the weeds, preventing most of them from going to seed. The weeds at this stage make fairly good hay too. Making oat hay proceeds just like making legume and grass hay (see the next section).

  Meanwhile the other half of the oat field grows on to maturity. If you are like me and can't stand the sight of a big old sourdock growing above the oats and putting on a head with a zillion seeds in it, you have only half the original field to patrol and behead the intruders.

  Oats ripens a week after wheat harvest. After combining the grain, I rake the straw into windrows, as I do the wheat straw, scoop up the windrows with the front end loader on the tractor, and store the straw in the barn or a stack next to the barn, for bedding.

  Oats of course makes good human food, too. The grain must be hulled, and kitchen-sized hullers for oats do not exist as far as I know. However, you can replace the stationary grinding plates in some handoperated grain mills with a 1/8-inch thick piece of gum rubber to turn the mill into a huller for rice, spelt, oats, and barley. When moving, the abrasive disk rubs the grain against the rubber and the hulls come loose. Screening the grain is then necessary to remove hull parts. You can get more information from the Corona Company, which makes kitchensized mills, and I presume from all small mill manufacturers by this time.

  Another way to dehull these grains in small amounts is by parboiling, as is done in the Orient with rice. I haven't tried it, but if it works for rice, it should work for the others. Soak the grain overnight or until it is soft, then cook the wet grain in a pot with about an inch of water in it until steam is rolling off the grain. Dry and then grind in a handmill and sift. The hulls separate much quicker and easier. Then cook the groats.

  Specialized commercial millers have oat hullers, practical for commercial growers selling to specialty food markets. Ken West, the enterprising Montana organic farmer mentioned earlier, raises organic oats for oatmeal and ships his grain to a mill in another state for dehulling. The groats are then rolled or flattened for oatmeal.

  Some oat lovers try to find a way out of the hulling dilemma by growing hullers or naked oats, but the variety I tried ripened very slowly and unevenly and was a poor yielder. The birds flocked to it in droves and ate or knocked over half the crop.

  Making Hay

  Haymaking is the most important job on a sustainable farm that raises animals. The first reason is that the crop rotation won't be fully economical without growing hay crops and returning to the land the fed hay as manure. Secondly, good hay is so expensive to buy that it will be difficult to show a profit on sheep or cattle if you do not make your own.

  If you buy poor hay in an effort to economize, you are throwing money away because such hay has no value other than as fiber. Sawdust would be better. Poor hay is hay that rain has fallen on after it is cut. The stems are strawy brown instead of green. It has few leaves left on it, and they are brown too. Good red clover hay is not as green as good alfalfa but more of a dull olive color. Good hay has a softness to it; the stems are not rind-hard. When I have badly rained-on hay, I don't bother to bring it to the barn, but shred it with the rotary choppermower and leave it on the field as mulch.

  Another kind of poor hay is one cut too late in the plant's growth cycle and dried too long in the windrow. It is hard-stemmed with few leaves and little protein value. A legume gives you the best balance of quantity and quality if cut right after it starts to bloom. But if you must wait because of threat of rain, the hay will still be nutritionally superior to rained-on hay even if cut a few days before or as much as ten days after it reaches full bloom. If you mow hay too far in advance of blooming, it will be so green that it will take a day longer to dry-a day more with risk of rain. One advantage of making hay after it is a little too mature is that it will dry quicker.

  Clover or alfalfa hay, alone or intermixed with timothy or some other tall grass, is the mainstay of the husbandman in winter. If legume hay is put up correctly it can be the only feed you need for ruminant animals. Even pigs and chickens can derive a third of their food from forages. If you can't raise both your own grain and hay, it is, at current prices, cheaper to raise the hay and buy the grain.

  Haymaking involves the same procedure whether it is grass hay, cereal grain hay, or legume hay. Essentially, the plants are mowed with a sickle bar mower (I have also used a rotary mower on meadow grass hay with good results even though the rotary mower shreds the hay considerably), allowed to dry in the field, raked into windrows, and then baled and barned or hauled "loose" (unbaled) to the barn or stack. The trick is to cut hay when there will be at least three days of sunny weather in a row. I study the weather snap on television with an eagle eye, hoping to spot a three or four day spate of dry weather. I know from experience that the meteorologists are very good at giving today's weather, and fairly good at giving tomorrow's weather. Beyond that, I can do about as well with one eye on the sky and one on the weather map.

  The disadvantage of oat hay is that it takes at least a day longer to dry than clover. The advantage is that we are talking July 1, usually, for oat hay, and the chance of getting a week of dry weather then is better than in June, the major haymaking month.

  Grasses, of which oats is one, should he cut right as they form a seedhead or just before. If you cut them after the seedheads mature, the plants will have stored their protein in the grain and the rest of the hay will have little taste or nutrition. I try to cut at milk stage when the grain is partially developed but the stems are still green, hopefully getting the best compromise between nutritious green matter and nutritious seedheads.

  I leave the hay in the swath until it is about two-thirds dry, or for about two days of sunny weather, then with a side delivery rake and tractor, windrow the hay and let it dry until it is safe to pile in the barn loft without heating up and starting a fire. The raking requires artfulness as well, not so much with grass hay like oats, but with legumes. If the clover and especially alfalfa gets too dry, the rake kn
ocks too many leaves off. If the legume is raked too wet, drying in the windrow will proceed too slowly. In dry weather, I like to rake in the morning when some of the night's moisture is still in the hay to decrease leaf shattering.

  I can't describe with words how you will know when the hay is dry enough to put into the barn. Only experience can guide you. I can tell by the sound of the rustle the hay makes when I fork it on the truck and by the heft of a fork full. I can tell by how easily the fork slips into the hay, and how easily the hay comes off the fork. When the hay is still too wet, handling it is like trying to lift forkfuls of wet rags.

  Putting a large amount of uncured hay in the mow is a good way to burn a barn down, but since we make only small amounts at a time, I can spread slightly moist hay out over the whole loft, about two feet deep, and eventually the hay dries without heating up too badly. Sometimes a little mold develops in it, but it seems to feed all right. I worry sometimes about breathing the moldy dust that puffs into the air when I fork that kind of hay down from the loft to the animals, but we all seem to have survived so far.

  There is so much more technology to haymaking that has not been discovered or rediscovered, especially for small cottage operations. The present practice of compacting hay into some kind of bale, especially the large round bales which are too cumbersome for cottage farmers and too wasteful of hay, may not be the best way for the smallest farms. Newman Turner in his book Fertility Pastures and Cover Crops (Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1955; reprinted by Bargyla and Gylver Rateaver, 1975) describes more sophisticated stacking methods that allow a farmer in very humid regions to put hay soon after it is mown in small stacks (or doodles, as my grandfather called them). These doodles are supported by little tripods of poles instead of a single pole of common tradition. Once in the stack, the hay is not much harmed by rain as it would be lying in a windrow and eventually the stack dries out without molding because the tripod affords good air circulation.

  With Turner's method, mown hay is picked up out of the swath or windrow and delivered to these little stacks in the same way we moved it to the large stacks of my grandfather's fields: with what is called a buckrake, a large wooden forklift, in Turner's case attached to a tractor, which scoops up a fairly large amount of hay at one time. After the hay dries, the buckrake can move the little stacks to the livestock as needed.

  Reading Turner's book a year ago, I realized that whether or not I ever used his stacking method, I could surely copy the way he moved hay from the windrow with my tractor's front-end loader. My son, the wood wizard, built his version of the buckrake in one day out of our own white oak. Instead of laboriously hand-forking hay into the pickup truck and then hand-forking it even more laboriously from the truck into the second story of the barn, where Carol would hand-fork it on back farther into the loft, I now use the tractor and "buckrake." Lowering the big wooden fork into the windrow of hay, I simply drive along until the fork is full, raise it a little, drive to the barn, raise the forkload to the loft door, and then standing inside, hand-fork the hay off and stow it away. Three hand operations reduced to one. I can make hay faster than previously, and do it alone.

  Now I realize that I can stack hay outdoors with this rig without any hand-forking. This practice, if perfected for use on cottage farms universally, would mean saving money in a big way by limiting the need for indoor hay storage. I think loose hay outdoors cures better than baled hay anyway, and today plastic film is available to cover the stack top so it sheds water well. With wood bunkers around the stacks, animals could self-feed from them except in spring-thaw time. Also, being outside most of the time, the animals would spread most of their winter manure themselves. To alleviate the mud problem of congregating around the stacks, I would locate the stacks on the highest, best drained spots in the field, where the soil needs the heaviest deposits of manure anyway. I can hardly wait to try this scheme out.

  Many nineteenth-century farms operated this way, sometimes even building frames over which the hay was stacked, so that the animals had some shelter during the cruellest weather. For very small farms that can't justify the high cost of machinery or labor these days (can any farm justify it?) these old methods are again economical and practical. Perhaps they always have been, and we have only been fooling ourselves with the "advanced" technology of the twentieth century.

  To hurry along hay drying, most farmers use what is called a hay crusher or conditioner. The conditioner, pulled by the tractor, sometimes directly behind the mower, pulls the hay from the swath through a set of rollers which crush or break the hay stems with an action like that of an old wringer washing machine. The breaking of the stems allows them to dry out faster. The conditioner is another piece of equipment I have been able to get along without on my small farm, but I found it advantageous for our hundred cow dairy farm in earlier years.

  In the kind of rotation I follow, where there are five fields, one each of corn, oats, wheat, first full-year hay, and second full-year hay or pasture, I will possibly have hay to make in all plots except the corn. The wheat plot's seedling clover can be made in September after wheat harvest, as can the seedling growth in the oats field. Two cuttings each can be made in both the first year and the second clover plots (three cuttings with alfalfa). Also there may be an early cutting of grass hay from the pastures during the flush of June growth. The second-year clover plot's second cutting can be left for pasture into the late fall. The first year's second cutting can be harvested for clover seed instead of hay.

  Southern graziers have developed to a very high degree the art of using oats for hay or rotational grazing, especially for winter pasture. Northern graziers are only just learning because it has always been believed, until the techniques of intensive grazing came along, that winter pasture in the north was not practical. We now know that red clover and some of the grasses, like fescue, can be grazed under controlled condi tions whenever there's no heavy snow on the ground and mud is not a problem. Even after the hay and grass have died and turned somewhat brown (like hay, in other words) the plants have as much or more nutritional value as hay.

  Oats can be sown for fall and winter pasture or hay after an early sweet corn plot has been harvested and the stalks grazed down by livestock, or cut and hauled to the livestock. Rye grass can also be used this way, but the husbandman who is raising oats anyway is dollars ahead just using his own homegrown product for temporary pastures.

  Beans and Minor Cereal Grains

  You can play all kinds of tunes with the marvelous synergy of crop rotations. Let us suppose that drouth kills the seedling-clover stand in the wheat. After wheat harvest, I can resow the clover. Or I can plant oats for late summer pasture. Or I could plant buckwheat for grain, or soybeans and other beans for hay or for human food.

  Soybeans are a staple for vegetarian farmers. Most years they can be sown as late as July in the north and still produce a crop of beans before frost. This is the great advantage of beans in crop rotations. Two years ago, when it became apparent in June that drouth had ruined my new seedling clover, I made what hay there was, plowed the field, and sowed soybeans. Not wishing to use herbicides I planted the beans in rows like corn so I could cultivate them. I used my double garden seeder for planting, just as for corn, and used the string bean plate, which planted the soybeans perhaps a little too thick. But they grew beautifully, well above my waist height.

  Soybeans being a legume can draw nitrogen from the air for fertility and so, like all legumes, are an excellent crop for organic farmers. For the beekeeper like me, soybeans are also a source of superb honey.

  Navy beans and similar dried beans can be planted the same way. All beans can be harvested with a combine, just as you would cereal grains.

  You should have seen me haul in my 26 bushels of soybeans to the elevator last fall. At the height of the harvest, ton upon ton of beans were being brought to market, and I found myself in my pickup wedged between two semi-truck loads in the long line of trucks and dump wagons waiting to unlo
ad at the elevator. I was treated something like the village idiot-everyone was glad there was still a smaller farmer around to feel superior to. When the test station operator lowered the big suction pipe into my pickup to get a sample of my beans, the other farmers teased me good-naturedly, pretending to worry that the pipe would suck the whole 26 bushels and the pickup as well-whoosh!-into the test bucket before the operator could turn the suction motor off. Yuk yuk yuk. But I got $5.85 a bushel for my half-acre of beans, the same price everyone else was getting, and that $152.10 represented about five hours of work and a little gasoline, or about $28 an hour return on my labor-a whole lot more than the mega-farmers' per-acre profit. I also took off some hay from that half acre before I planted the beans, which normally (if not played out because of the preceding year's drouth) would have been a ton and a half of clover hay worth $150. And after I combined the beans, I planted wheat and grazed the wheat in November.

  I keep thinking of intriguing new tunes to play on the rotation melodeon. What would happen if I planted an heirloom table bean like Jacob's Cattle (which would sell for a great deal more than soybeans) after a cutting of hay, and followed by wheat for grazing and grain? I now have ten trillion and one projects on the agenda.

  Rice is the staple cereal grain in the Orient, where, it should be remembered, the cottage farm is the premier kind of farm. As Richard Critchfield points out in his Trees, Why Do You Wait? (Island Press, 1991), in my opinion the most accurate account of the decline of rural society in America: "Despite huge crop increases, farms in India and China are not getting bigger and fewer the way they are in America. Indeed, the number of draft animals in both countries has grown." Most of the world's populations in the Third World countries are in fact fed by cottage farming. Historically, small Chinese farms have fed more people per acre than the mightiest, modern American mega-farm does. Even in very industrial, first-world Japan, the average-sized farm is barely more than four acres, and is it not true that Japan's economic health and growth is better than ours? An American anthropologist, who happened also to be a gardener, told me once how amazed he was to find cottage farms in New Guinea that both in variety and amounts of food out-yielded industrial agriculture three to one.