Market Farming

[Richard Stewart <rstewart AT zoomtown.com>]

For some reason what I sent did not post...so here it is again.

This is going to be a long post.  I have also included a page of photos detailing in general both the tools we use for the grains (commodity and small local):  http://gallery.me.com/thesw0rdofroland#100316

Understand that what we are doing is designing a small system that will work for human consumption.  Animal consumption needs less attention to insect issues, especially if those insects are a protein source for birds.  :)

First of all, we started farming a decade ago and five year ago, we took over commodity farming the ground we leased out because we either did not have the knowledge on how to farm it or did not have the equipment.

Our goal is to convert away from conventional a step at a time without going into debt or relying on a grant from tax payers to do so.  The goal is to do so at a price that is not exorbitant but MUCH more profitable to cover the smaller yields and decrease in volume relative to a commodity crop.  For example, GMO corn as of today was trading locally for 6.14/bu, which is VERY high.  That is a dollar value of o .112/pound.  This means that I am grossing at say 200/bu per acre (11000LB/acre) 1232 per acre.  Now that's an easy acre.  Very little time or effort is spent on that acre to maintain it.  So it may seem a bit misleading.  Those growing non-GMO (which often means they are using different herbicides as was the case 30 years ago) get at most maybe a .75 to a 1.00 premium.

Open pollinated corn, with zero spray, I can sell, milled wholesale, at a 1.00 per pound.  My yields are about 75 to 50% less than out commodity crops so at worst case scenario I am grossing seven times the amount.

My goal is to produce corn meal from open pollinated corn.  So far things are going and in addition to the cornmeal I also mill my neighbors soft red winter wheat and I have purchased several thousand pounds of both organic rye and buckwheat to experiment with, both in handling and in milling for market.  In addition to the grains we are also experimenting with multiple acres of small dried soup beans (black turtle beans) and increasing our potatoes production from 1 acre to 5 acres and then hoping to double that again two years from now.

I've tried doing grains by hand and you will not make money from that, period, either to sell to market or as feed.  It needs to be mechanized...till or no till both methods work, but yields are less in no-till (I am still out on this and follow what Rodale is researching but its all still experimental) unless you are doing a chemical no-till, which I think sort of defeats the purpose (except to control erosion).  It all needs to be mechanized, especially if you  are fitting it into an existing operation that does not have a lot of time flexibility.

So, all that said, grains involve three things, that you can either invest in, or rent out.  You can cut corners here and there in terms of cost and experimenting but in the end if you are going to make money doing it (either by sell the grain to customers or cutting costs by using it as feed) you will need to eventually invest in the infrastructure to do it.

What grains you grow are determined by the region you are in, so I won't go into much detail there.  I, for example, cannot predictably grow a hard red wheat, our normal winter/spring cycle is not usually cold enough.  This year we probably could have considering how cold its been, but if we had a fast warm up like we did last year with a high moisture spring it would mold up in the field before harvest and be worthless.  So we focus on soft red wheats, winter ryes, buckwheat, dry/soup beans, and open pollinated corn.  We might be able to get a spelt to grow...maybe and we have a friend that is trying a derivative of the an old heirloom Turkey Wheat that they have gotten to grow don in North Carolina.  For every type of grain you grow you need extra equipment either to plant, to harvest, to clean or to handle.  Not a lot but storage along is a huge increase in costs, even if you only harvest 80 bushels of each.