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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Impossible Farming, by Gene Logsdon
  • Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:55:57 -0700


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.





  • [Livingontheland] Impossible Farming, by Gene Logsdon, Tradingpost, 02/14/2010

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