Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Mark, if you think I just have some personal dislike for black eyes peas, 
then you're missing my point. Now your information is different from what I 
relied on to reply. For one thing you're not spending the time to shell most 
of your beans, and it appears you are leaving out some of the other time 
spent, and you still haven't added everything up. More important, where do 
you allocate part of the cost of machinery and land to the black eyed peas? 
You don't mention use of herbicide tho you do little weeding, but there's 
also no mention of fertilizer or pesticide cost. No fertilizer? No pesticide? 
One other factor we haven't looked at is how long you can keep up fertility 
without replenishing the soil with organic matter and/or legume rotations, 
and keep up bare soil farming without losing most of the topsoil. I only 
mention that because fields lie dead all over the country in many places. I 
see those fields every time we head to town. The properties are unsaleable 
and useless. A standing testament to the throwaway society, and what we're 
about on this list.

I'm not being critical but using this as an example to suggest we all need to 
assess the time and costs we put into various things for sale, and decide 
what's profitable and what we can't afford to spend time and money on. I'm 
ruthless with myself on this angle. I do grow some great winter squash even 
tho they take too much space. The only good reason is to have more produce to 
sell late in market season. And to eat.

According to charts I've seen, melons are a low value crop for the space they 
take up. If space is no concern that's different. But the more space a crop 
takes, the more bare soil to blow or wash away, the more weeding to do, and 
the more water needed. Which brings us back to mulched intensive no-till as 
the way to build soil and conserve water. And the smaller the area we take to 
grow a certain amount of produce, the less area to mulch, water, and weed. 
Let that sink in.

I stress these things because freshwater scarcity and loss of good land is 
rapidly becoming an expensive bottleneck for food security in this country.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 7/5/2008 at 5:54 PM mcoldiron wrote:

>I pick 5 bushels a day.  That's $6300 a month times 3 months.  There's
>not
>really any weeding with black eyes.  Preparing the soil is done along with
>everything else.  Maybe 10 minutes to break up the land, which isn't done
>every year, another 10 to row it up, and another 10 min. to plant. I might
>run a set of sweeps down the rows once or twice  a year for weeds, but
>that's done at the same time every thing else is done.  Takes maybe 10
>minutes each time to weed the peas.  I don't pick the hole thing at one
>time, just enough to get the 5 bushels each day.  Labor is about 20
>minutes
>per bushel to pick.    Guess you could add another 20 min. as the pea's
>share for attaching the equipment and the like.  Fuel, I'd guess $15
>yearly
>total for pea's share.    About 15 min. a bushel to shell and bag, but I
>only shell 3 or 4 bushels a week the rest is sold as is.  Distance to the
>field is zero.  Taking to market and selling is difficult to figure.  For
>the pea's share I'd guess $1 a week for gas and 15 min. a week for selling
>time.  Did I miss anything?  Looks like a good profit to me.  I didn't add
>everything up, but I don't think it comes anywhere near the $6300 a month
>I
>bring in, even if I miss a few things.  Sounds like you don't like to grow
>black eyed peas.  To me blue lake beans, Kentucky wonders, and pintos are
>the worst for amount of  labor.  At least my back has told me so!! :)  I'd
>choose squash, okra, cantaloupe, and watermelon as the money makers.
>
>TxBeeFarmer (Mark)
>West Texas Zone 7b
>
>