Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Good Farming Was More Advanced A Hundred Years Ago
by Gene Logsdon
 Published Jul 31 2009 by Dave Smith, Organic To Be, Archived Jul 31 2009
http://organictobe.org/index.php/2009/07/30/good-farming-was-more-advanced-a-hundred-years-ago/
Garden Farm Skills

Working from the premise that we will eventually run out of plentiful 
supplies of manufactured fertilizers, I have been reading old farming books 
written before artificial fertilizers became easily available. I am amazed at 
the sophistication with which science approached the subject of soil 
fertility once it become evident in the mid-1800s that farmers were rapidly 
depleting the native richness of their soils and had to find ways to restore 
it using livestock manure and green manure crops. In some ways, what science 
advocated then was more advanced than farming practices are today.

If we have to produce food for growing populations without large supplies of 
manufactured fertilizers, the science of a hundred years ago is going to be 
back in vogue. Even if we don’t run out of fertilizers, advanced manure 
science will be very useful for anyone wanting to avoid the high costs of 
commercial fertilizer. (Don’t laugh at the term, “manure science”— 
agricultural colleges are now conducting what they called Manure Science 
Review days.)

“Backward” farmers like myself may not look so backward after all in the 
future. Ralph Rice, who farms in northeastern Ohio, just emailed me a photo 
of his unbelievably lush corn, unbelievable because it is an open-pollinated 
variety and has no chemical fertilizers on it at all. The reason I believe 
Ralph’s photo is because I have similar corn and it is just beautiful. I hate 
to tempt fate by bragging— we could get a wind storm tomorrow and blow it all 
over. But the case just must be made. Granted that this is, so far, a very 
good year for corn, no one with an open mind can look at Ralph’s or mine and 
not wonder if maybe we backward guys are really going forward.

All the literature from about 1870 to 1910 states that four-fifths of the 
plant nutrients in animal feed is still in the manure when it hits the 
ground. With careful handling and application of the manure, most of those 
nutrients can go back to the soil. Careful handling means using bedding and 
manure packs in the barn, not flushing the manure out with water as if the 
confinement building were one giant toilet bowl, which is what it really is. 
The other one fifth of the nutrients needed— and more— can come from green 
manuring with clovers, say the old books, and as both Ralph and I are 
convinced is true from actual experience.

So what’s the big deal about chemical fertilizers and juiced up hybrid corns? 
I wonder how many people know that commercial corn growers are spending on 
average of over $150 an acre for fertilizer. (Over $200 an acre sometimes, 
depending on the price of nitrogen.) And they are spending $100 an acre for 
hybrid GMO seed corn. That is just ridiculous when even the agribusiness 
suppliers admit that so far GMO varieties have not meant any general 
increases in yield. The corn farmer who puts out 4000 acres of corn, and 
quite a few of them do now, could have a fertilizer and seed bill of one 
million, two hundred thousand dollars before he gets his planter to the 
field. I am sorry but I think that is insane. And at least two big farmers I 
know agree but of course don’t want to be quoted. One of them told me he is 
thinking about starting a beef feedlot. He doesn’t care if the cattle make 
any money, he says. It’s the manure he’s after. I know this man well. Never 
in a million years did I think he would ever say that.

To be continued after my corn and Ralph’s throw ears and develop, to see if I 
have to eat crow or can brag some more.

~~

Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot 
County, Ohio.

Gene is author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative 
Impulse (Culture of the Land), The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming 
Life, and just released: Small-Scale Grain Raising, Second Edition: An 
Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for 
Home Gardeners and Local Farmers.