Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

 came across this piece just out from Gene Logsdon where he stresses 
something I've been claiming on this list.

     "Corn is selling for over $7.00 a bushel (the recent floods pushed it 
over $8.00), something no one would have predicted even two years ago. Yet 
the costs involved have also doubled and tripled for the commercial farmer 
while the costs for the garden farmer, saving his own corn seed and not using 
chemical fertilizers and little if any of herbicides and insecticides, have 
not gone up much at all, especially since he is not renting or buying more 
land but owns his small acreage or backyard as part of his homestead ... The 
bottom line is that those of us who have been championing a different 
approach to food production than that of factory farming are about to be 
vindicated." -- Gene Logsdon


 Published Jun 17 2008
A farm is a large garden (or a garden is a small farm)
by Gene Logsdon
http://energybulletin.net/node/45533
>From Gene Logsdon (1958):
With Addendum June 2008
Organic Garden and Small Farm Skills

Homeowners who seriously seek to provide some of their own food, and perhaps 
some of their clothing, tools, and shelter too, must first learn to view 
their enterprises within the proper economic framework, or perhaps I should 
say the proper noneconomic framework. They must understand that expanding 
their gardening to include some animal husbandry, forestry-orcharding, and 
home manufacturing is an extension of their gardening, not something new or 
different.

What they propose to do might rightfully be called garden farming as opposed 
to factory farming, which is different from gardening. If they make the error 
of proceeding into small farming or a cottage industry of any kind using the 
expertise of factory economics, then what they will have is mostly an 
expensive hobby.

The differences between garden farming and factory farming are at least these 
eight, although characteristics tend to overlap:

1. Garden farming is craft work; factory farming is assembly-line production.
2. Garden farming is extremely diversified in production; factory farming 
tends toward specialization.
3. Garden farming is essentially noncommercial, that is, free to operate 
outside the structures and strictures that bind factory farming to definite 
criteria of profitability.
4. Garden farming is primarily an avocation; factory farming is primarily a 
job.
5. Garden farming is low-volume, low-cost production; factory farming is 
high-volume, high-cost production.
6. Garden farming arises out of the activity of willing individuals in social 
groups, usually the family; the work environment is therefore usually happy 
and positive. Factory farming sets up a dichotomy of boss-worker 
relationships, and work therefore proceeds in an environment of latent 
hostility.
7. Garden farming is the search for quality; factory farming seeks quantity.
8. In garden farming, time spent is part of the profit; in factory farming, 
time is money.

Garden Farming versus Factory Farming
To show in practice what those differences really mean, I will use as an 
example a comparison of two fields of corn. The first field is my ½-acre one, 
probably the smallest field of corn in the corn belt. The second will be an 
acre from a 1000-acre factory farm in this area.

My ½ acre makes no sense at all on its own. I can only talk about it by 
mentioning in the same breath that it is but a part of a small farm system 
that includes mostly hay and pasture, but also a small field of oats and 
wheat, an orchard, a planting of berries, a vegetable field and several 
“fields” of trees for nuts and wood.

There is an interior diversity in the small cornfield, too. Small as it is, 
it includes several species and varieties of corn: enough sweet corn for 
fresh and frozen table use, a bit of popcorn, and two rows of cane sorghum, 
which is a corn-related plant. Within the tiny section that is in field corn, 
there is still some diversity during some years—rows of hybrid corn 
alternating with twin rows of open-pollinated varieties. Also, there are 
melons growing in the early sweet corn, pumpkins at one end of the field and 
sunflowers at the other, and along one side, pole beans snaking up the 
cornstalks. Planting, weeding, and harvesting this field is mostly hand work, 
an hour here or an hour there in late afternoon, early morning, or 
evening—never becoming hard oppressive work, but, at least for me, generally 
pleasant unless the deer-flies or mosquitoes are worse than usual.

I plow the clover sod for the corn planting in November. In the following 
spring I disk and harrow it. Even with a small ancient tractor, a small old 
disc, a plow, and harrow, the cultivation takes only 2 hours. For a planter I 
use my $30 Precision garden seeder. If I did all the planting at once, it 
would take the better part of the afternoon. I spread manure on the plot, 
too. I used to do that by hand, a 3 to 4-hour job done over a weekend, but 
now, bowing to age I guess, I use the manure spreader. The corn is hoed two 
or three times, with various members of the family helping me out. This goes 
on continuously through May and June, a row or two or three in the evening, 
relaxing work for me away from the typewriter. By the first week in July, 
cultivation is over.

Harvest begins in August with the sweet corn. As quickly as we use it up or 
it becomes too old for us, I cut it, green stalks and all, for the cows and 
sheep whose pasture is beginning to fail in the dry spells we experience most 
Augusts. (Cutting this corn allows more sunshine in to the rapidly growing 
melons, too.) As quickly as the field corn dents in September, I begin to 
husk out the ears a few at a time and feed the still-green stalks to the 
cows. I will also cut stalks from a few rows, bind them into bundles, and 
make shocks to be husked out later (in November), feeding the fodder to the 
animals. My goal is to have half of the little field harvested by September 
25, when the wheat planting season begins. This half then gets planted to 
wheat. This field also contains the popcorn and the cane sorghum, so these 
crops must also be harvested in September. The sorghum leaves are stripped 
from the stalks—my sister and her husband help in exchange for a portion of 
the molasses we later make, so the job scarcely takes an hour. We feed the 
leaves to the cows. I cut off the heads of the sorghum and dry them for 
chicken feed. We haul the stalks to the Amish sorghum press for processing.

In October I harvest the field corn from the other half of the field, jerking 
the ears from the stalks and tossing them on the truck, pleasant work when I 
do it a few rows at a time. I put the corn in the crib to finish drying. Then 
I shred the stalks that are still standing with the rotary mower, and the 
harvest is finished.

For the sake of simplicity of comparison, let us assume that the whole ½ acre 
is planted to field corn only, my yield being what it generally is, about 95 
bushels per acre (small potatoes in this area) and corn selling at $3 a 
bushel. My gross income from the corn would be $285 per acre. I’ve used about 
$7 worth of gas, oil, and fuel, including spreading the manure on my ½ acre, 
which works out to $14 per acre. Three or four sacks of wood ashes go on each 
load of manure for lime and potash, but these are free. The manure itself is 
free, as is the nitrogen from the plowed down clover sod. My hoe, the only 
herbicide I use, is for all practical purposes free, too—I paid 50¢ for it at 
a farm sale twenty-three years ago. I save the open-pollinated seed from the 
preceding year’s crop. So my variable out-of-pocket costs per acre are 
$14—let’s say $15 if I include the bit of hybrid seed I sometimes use.

Now let us look at the variable costs a factory farmer must pay, using 
figures for 1984 as budgeted by the agricultural economists at Ohio State 
University for a 150-bushel yield. With corn at $3 a bushel, the factory 
farmer will gross $450 per acre, but after deducting variable costs, will 
have only $239. My 95-bushel-per-acre crop will have grossed $285, minus $15 
in variable costs, to equal $270. And what if the factory farmer did not hit 
his 150-bushel goal, which is entirely more possible than my not hitting my 
95? In last year’s bad drought, I still got 95 bushels, while the 150-bushel 
factory farmers were also getting 95, and some, just 2 miles away, were 
getting only 40 bushels.

But of course that’s not all the factory farmer’s costs. Fixed costs are also 
figured by the university.

If the price of corn averages $2.50 a bushel during 1984 (the university, in 
fact, projects only a $2.40 price), the factory farmer will have lost $32.00 
per acre.

I don’t have any fixed costs to speak of. On a farm of my size it is 
ludicrous to figure a land charge—no farmer is going to want to rent my ½ 
acre by itself. What’s more, that land is paid for out of my regular job and 
would be there for me to enjoy whether I farmed it or not. Nor can I 
rightfully figure in a labor or management charge, as these are my pleasures, 
not costs. As for a machinery charge, my ancient equipment was either given 
to me for next to nothing, or, in the case of the tractor, is so old it is 
probably gaining value as an antique now, rather than costing me anything.

Nor does that tell the whole story. My corn is not marketed as such but is 
fed through animals at a “cost” of only my labor and thus the “profit” is 
increased several times. Then the food produced is consumed at home, not sold 
at wholesale, and so we can figure its value at the retail prices we’d have 
to pay if we bought rather than produced it ourselves.

Now you know why small and medium-size farms trying to operate the 
agribusiness way are going out of business, and why small farms like those of 
the Amish, where farmers are trying to do what I do but on a larger scale, 
are making very good money indeed.

The practice of garden farming, moreover, is not limited to rural areas of 
relatively large homesteads, either. It can be practiced in the suburbs and 
in the city. In fact, the inner city is especially ripe for it because there 
is plenty of human labor there to substitute for the expensive machinery and 
chemicals of factory farms. There are also tons (literally) of deteriorating 
buildings that could be recycled into barns and all sorts of wooden tools, 
furniture, and shelters. Those acres of crumbling buildings and rubbled 
ghetto lots could all blossom with tiny garden farms.

~
Addedum June 2008:

Corn is selling for over $7.00 a bushel (the recent floods pushed it over 
$8.00), something no one would have predicted even two years ago. Yet the 
costs involved have also doubled and tripled for the commercial farmer while 
the costs for the garden farmer, saving his own corn seed and not using 
chemical fertilizers and little if any of herbicides and insecticides, have 
not gone up much at all, especially since he is not renting or buying more 
land but owns his small acreage or backyard as part of his homestead—as part 
of his HOME—not as an investment to make money in cash grain.

Therefore his out of pocket costs have not gone up hardly at all except for 
the small amount of gasoline or diesel he uses as fuel. For the factory 
farmer, $7.00 a bushel corn is not a great boon but only means that all his 
costs have gone sky high too. For the garden farmer, however, seven dollar 
corn represents a real increase in the worth of his labor since he does not 
have the costs involved in growing seven dollar corn commercially.

This is the secret of the success of Amish farmers. They benefit from the 
rises in farm prices without a concomitant rise in their cost of production. 
They can sell on the inflated 21st century market while continuing to farm 
with horses and other low cost methods from the 19th and 20th centuries. That 
is why commercial farmers secretly despise the Amish, and no doubt now, the 
garden farmer. And the higher prices climb with shortages of chemical 
fertilizers, fuel, and land, the more advantageous it will be for the garden 
farmer.

The bottom line is that those of us who have been championing a different 
approach to food production than that of factory farming are about to be 
vindicated.