Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Impossible Farming, by Gene Logsdon
http://www.energybulletin.net/51554
Published Feb 13 2010 by The Contrary Farmer

There is Successful Farming, Progressive Farming, Organic Farming, Natural 
Farming and an awful lot of Wishful Farming. I would like to add to the list 
one more kind: Impossible Farming.

I just ran across another example of it. Pat Hill, in her always interesting 
weekly blog on Progressive Farmer online, mentioned recently an interesting 
statistic or two when she was discussing the challenges that grain elevators 
face these days. A twelve row corn combine can harvest 20,000 to 24,000 
bushels of corn a day. A modern, state of the art grain dryer can dry 6000 
bushels of shelled corn from 20% moisture down to 15% in an hour. (Corn has 
to be that dry to store safely.) But with corn at 25% moisture, that drier 
can reduce moisture to 15% of only 3000 bushels in an hour. At 30% moisture, 
which was the case for a lot of corn coming to the elevator this harvest, it 
can dry only 1500 bushels in an hour. That means that the cost of drying, 
which amounts to plenty at 20% moisture, nearly quadruples at 30%. Going at 
full blast, the dryer can dry 36,000 bushels of 30% moisture corn in twenty 
four hours. The farmer whom Pat Hill was interviewing was running two 
twelve-row combines or hauling in 40,000 to 48,000 bushels a day. In other 
words, just one farmer could haul in more wet corn to an elevator in a day 
than the dryer could dry in a day. If there were, say, forty farmers hauling 
in corn, I would not want to be the manager of that grain elevator. Some of 
them were so pressed this year that they actually ran short of electricity 
and natural gas for their dryers. Can you imagine the horrible nightmare of 
keeping all that grain from heating and ruining before it could be dried 
properly? To top that off, the farmer told Ms. Hill that he planned to add a 
third 12-row combine to his string next year. No doubt other farmers will do 
that too. They do not want to be caught with corn still standing in the field 
in a foot or two of snow as happened quite often this year.

I try to envision a continuation of this kind of farm gigantism. The farmers 
buy bigger or more combines. The elevators buy bigger or more dryers. The 
farmers then can buy bigger or yet more combines. So the elevators have to 
install bigger dryers yet. This also means investing in more semi trucks to 
haul the corn because traffic regulations do not allow for bigger semis. To 
pay for it all, the farmer must expand acreage. The enormity of numbers that 
result as technology becomes capable of handling more enormity is just 
mind-boggling.

Of course, in a “normal” year corn will dry to 20% moisture all by itself in 
the field and so lower some of this awful cost of artificial drying. But how 
many “normal” years can you remember? And keep in mind, this is just a small 
part of the cost of corn production.

And the story doesn’t end there. In corn country, a strange word is on the 
lips of all farmers these days. Vomitoxin. The wet weather caused an outbreak 
of moldy corn, especially a disease called Gibberella corn ear rot. The rot 
produces vomitoxin, which is toxic to both humans and animals. So even though 
we enjoyed high corn yields in 2009, some of the crop, after finally getting 
harvested at enormous cost, is not fit to feed. If vomitoxin is discovered in 
the stored corn, there is no fungicide that can contain it say the experts. 
Hog and livestock feeders are scrambling to find clean corn to feed. Even for 
ethanol, corn with more than 7 parts per million vomitoxin is not being 
accepted.

One corn grower who is also a knowledgeable seed dealer, tells me a strange 
theory. Corn does not usually get infected with this kind of Gibberella rot. 
He is convinced that the new genetically-engineered corn varieties won’t 
mature and dry down the way more natural corn varieties do and that is one 
reason we have such a wet corn problem this year. If this story gains 
traction, I can hear Monsanto howling in protest. But what if it is true?

Whether or not it is true, to be a farmer in these days is to practice 
Impossible Farming. Agribusiness has become so unnatural that it is pricing 
itself out of the food market. We can always multiply numbers, but not the 
real things that numbers are supposed to stand for. Nature always bats last, 
we like to say. More profoundly, nature always bats first too.