From GENE LOGSDON
Garden Farm Skills

I am not a real farmer, my neighbors say, because I don’t do it for money. That’s almost funny because the economists are saying that nobody’s farming for money this year. Although the corn crop is good in most of the midwest, there’s not much profit in it. Some go as far as projecting that on average, corn farmers will lose $8 per acre over the whole midwest. If that is the case, I’m not a real farmer for sure because I figure on netting $550 an acre on my corn.

The price of corn as I write is $3.90 a bushel. Some farmers I talk to say they have to have $5.00 a bushel to break even this year because of the high cost of fertilizer, fuel, and weedkillers recently. Economists say the break-even price is closer to $4.00 a bushel. The price seems to be inching that way. Whoopee.

So how do I figure on netting $550 an acre from my corn? I grow only half an acre for one thing, but don’t laugh. My figures would hold fairly well up to thirty acres worth.  Comparisons can be odious especially when someone with a feeble little crop like mine seems to be disparaging the professional grower of a couple thousand acres.   Nevertheless, I am going to do some numbers  because commercial farmers really aren’t thinking very well at the moment and some of them admit it.

Those ears of corn in the photo are from my crop this year. They measure up to 14 inches long, as you can see by the foot long ruler beside them. The longest one has 20 rows of kernels. It will shrink a little as it dries, but as far as I can learn from researching,  this is as big as any ear of yellow dent corn has ever gotten and is almost twice the size of any of today’s hybrids. (There are strains of maize in Mexico that produce ears two feet long but are very skinny.) I’ve had in previous years one or two 16-inch ears but they were frowzy on the tips, with only 16 rows of kernels. The fatter, slightly shorter ears in the photo above contain 22 and 24 rows of kernels, and I know from experience that the kernels will weigh as much per cob as those from the 14-inch ears.  There will be about a pound of kernels on each of these ears. If I had an acre where all the stalks produced one such ear and I planted 18,000 stalks per acre, which is about right for open-pollinated corn, (hybrid growers are planting as many as 30,000 stalks per acre) the yield would be 300 bushels per acre, right up  there with the world records for corn. If I could live 200 years maybe I could produce a crop of all fourteen inchers.  After all it took the Mesoamerican Indians thousands of years to get ears of maize up to five inches long.

I hasten to say that most of the ears on my corn are not as big as those in the photo. Most are still bigger than hybrid ears, but some smaller and quite a few nubbins. I will get fifty bushels from my half acre or a hundred bushels per acre this year. Commercial corn growers are averaging 160 bushels per acre, so my corn is deemed to be poor by comparison, giant  ears or no giant ears. But let us look at the numbers. My fertilizer cost was zero. I rotate corn with three or four years of pastured clover so I don’t figure I need any more fertilizer. Surely it is significant when 14 inch ears of corn can be grown without any commercial fertilizer at all.  My herbicide cost is zero. I control weeds with a  hoe and  a rotary garden tiller. If I were growing a couple of acres of corn or more,  I would have to have a tractor or horse cultivator but that would add only a little to my costs.  I paid zero for my seed corn because I save my own.  Farmers are spending upwards of $300 now for a bushel of GMO hybrid corn seed, which is just ridiculous. I have no land rent cost because the land is my own.  Farmers renting land are paying upwards of $150 to $200 a acre for it or more this year, almost guaranteeing a loss at today’s market prices.  I count no labor cost because experimenting with my open-pollinated corn is my golf game and a whole lot cheaper than golf. I have no harvest cost other than husking the ears by hand and throwing them in the pickup. Farmers used to husk 20 acres or more  by hand but if you used an old cornpicker instead, the cost would be minimal on 20 or 30 acres except for fuel. My drying cost is zero; the corn dries naturally on the cob in a crib that is so old it has long ago paid for itself. That could be true for larger acreages. Commercial farmers some years (this year for sure) have a huge cost in natural gas to dry their shelled corn. My hauling cost amounts to driving my pickup 500 feet from field to crib. Commercial farmers are hauling their corn in semi trucks half way across the county, sometimes farther. I do have fuel and machinery cost for plowing and fitting the land which I estimate at about $30 per acre. I put my total cost per acre at $50 to be sure to cover everything.

Growers of open-pollinated corn tell me, as I have also experienced, that livestock eat it more eagerly than today’s hybrids. And why not. Hybrid corn is bred today to resist injury from  machinery, weeds, bugs, and adverse weather. Why wouldn’t it resist animals and humans trying to eat it?  Commercial corn is dried by heating, sometimes overheating, with natural gas, which can reduce nutritional value. I don’t know how to put a dollar number on  that kind of profit.

If my 50 bushels are priced at $4.00 a bushel, that’s $200 worth of corn or $400 an acre. With a cost of only $50 on a per-acre basis, my net profit per acre is $350. If I had to buy those fifty bushels from the elevator, the cost would be around $6.00 a bushel (the elevators charge for handling, especially for handling and bagging small amounts), so I can say that my puny crop has a net return of $550 per acre. Compare that with losing $8 an acre on 2000 acres.

Whose the real farmer? One I know well farms 200 acres. He has most of his acres in rotated pasture and maybe 30 acres of corn— a commercial model of what I do. He will have more machinery and fuel costs per acre than I do,  but he will have no fertilizer, chemical spray, drying, or transportation cost to the elevator. He does not use high-priced GMO seed corn.  His machinery cost are much less than that of typical grain farmers because he is using older, smaller tractor equipment. His total costs will be only a fraction per acre of the large commercial grain farmer’s costs. Then he feeds his corn to his cows to make organic milk and sells it at a premium price.

So I ask again: who’s the real farmer?
~
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.
Gene’s Posts
~~

From GENE LOGSDON
Garden Farm Skills

The sentence nearly leaped off the page and knocked me down: “No one with land should be without a job.” Jennifer McMullen, writing in Farming magazine in the current Fall, 2009 issue (“Good Food Depends On Local Roots”) was quoting Jessica Barkheimer, who, like Jennifer, is deeply involved in developing farmer’s markets in Ohio. I was at the time wrestling with a closely related concept but had not thought to put it in those words. I might have said it a bit differently— “no one with land is without a job” but the meaning would be the same. If you have some land, even an acre, you have the means for making at least part of your income and in the process gain a more secure life. Surely that is what it means to “have a job.” Our society hasn’t endorsed that notion yet, but I think that we are evolving toward that kind of economy.

We are only beginning to recognize how many income possibilities that a little piece of land can provide. We know about market gardening but most of us do not yet appreciate its reach. It’s not just sweet corn and tomatoes. It’s about all the fruits and vegetables on earth. Tasted any pancakes made with cattail pollen lately? Neither have I but it is treasured in some gourmet circles, I understand.

Market gardening goes beyond the plants themselves. A whole new world of marketing can open up from inspired ways to package the products. At a market in Bellefontaine, Ohio, a couple of weeks ago, shelled lima beans were going fast at five bucks for a half pint!

There are far more products you can grow than just fruit and vegetables. Meat is beginning to show up at farmers’ markets, as well as dairy products and grains. Flowers, fresh and dried, too. Uncommon seeds are a possibility, especially of heirloom varieties or uncommon wildflowers and trees. Medicinal herbs. Mushrooms. Nuts. Baked goods. Plants for holiday decorations. We are all familiar with the success of pumpkins, but have you ever seen corn husks that in the autumn develop streaks of red and green and purple in them, fashioned into wreathes and bouquets? Magnificent. If you get into cattail pollen pancakes, you can use the dried cattail leaves to weave handsome, durable baskets. There’s a market for uncommon native tree species coveted by people who want to use only native plants in their ornamental landscapes. Local nurseries sometimes sell wahoo trees with their bright reddish pink berries. This small tree grows wild all over the eastern U.S.

Forest products are not just the purview of the commercial timber industry. Some small woodlot owners saw out blanks and boards from logs not profitable for the larger timber market. They sell the wood to woodworkers or turn it into products they sell themselves. Have you ever seen a bowl fashioned from a blank of boxelder which has the highly-desirable reddish grain in the heartwood? Awesome. Some farmers make good sideline money selling cedar, black locust, and other long-lasting woods for fence posts. There’s always a market for firewood and as energy prices soar, its value will continue to increase.

Think also of insect and animal products that the small acreage homeowner might explore for sideline cash. Think out of the box. Earthworms. Honey bees. Pigeons for squab. Aquaculture products in ponds or backyard tanks.

In more traditional livestock ventures, the Nigerian Dwarf goat is being touted as the best dairy animal for small acreages. (There’s an article on these goats in the same issue of Farming as the article cited above.) A mother Nigerian weighs only about 50 lbs. but can supply enough milk for a family at least part of the year. The cream, like that of cows, makes great ice cream. Ice cream always sells.

I could go on for pages, but you get the picture. We all accept the fact that most of us must invest in a car to keep our jobs. I think the day will come when most of us will also invest in a few acres of land to keep our jobs.
~

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.
Gene’s Posts
~~

From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

My wife, Carol, doesn’t normally call herself an artist, but the images accompanying this post could be called some kind of still life art, even though rendered with her own hands using real objects, not with brush and paint. The multicolored shapes in the basket are an assortment of peppers she just harvested before the first frost, and the red shapes on white background are tomato slices in the electric drier. Our son-in-law loves peppers, the hotter the better, and so he and our daughter have supplied us with pepper plants of varieties I never knew existed and most of which I can’t eat. But who would want to eat such a beautiful table decoration anyway?

It is no surprise that gardening and farming inspire art. The partnership between nature and humans in the act of producing food can’t help but produce beauty too. A shelf full of home-canned vegetables means food security, but the real reason we delight in them is that the food just looks so pretty sitting there in rows in the cellar. The act of laying by food is its own reward even before we eat the stuff.

I made a shock out of the spent sweetcorn stalks in the garden last week and put a few pumpkins around it. Visitors ask me why I went to the trouble. I had to shrug. Not sure. Just think it looks pretty. Reminds me of whole fields of shocked corn, the subject of who knows how many paintings and photographs from the past. Many Amish farmers now have hitch carts which they are allowed to use to pull corn pickers and grain harvesters with their horses. So they don’t really have to shock all their corn and oats anymore. But many of them go on doing so anyway. If you ask them why, they will say that the straw they thereby harvest as a sort of byproduct of threshing is worth as much as the grain. But down in the deeper recesses of their souls I will bet anything, they do it because fields of corn and oat shocks look pretty.

Pumpkins make another good example. We grow pumpkins, even weird kinds like Cinderella which we don’t even eat. We grow the Cheese pumpkins for that. One of our Cinderellas this year was so heavy we had to get our muscle-bound grandson to carry it out of the garden. So why do we grow the big, stupid things? Because, well, they’re pretty.

In fact, the market for pumpkins is soaring, even in these recessionary times. Why? Pumpkins make nice homey decorations. The same with gourds. The same with bittersweet, a bouquet of which adorns our entrance way at this very moment. There is so much artificial and plastic crap around, the human spirit yearns for the homespun and the real.

One tends to grow philosophical about it, even, heaven forbid, metaphysical. Last night, here at the beginning of October, I was still able to pick a pint of luscious yellow raspberries that we grow, courtesy of another person’s kindness. They just look so beautiful in the basket. Years ago, I wrote that yellow raspberries are hardly worth the work because they are too susceptible to diseases. A man in Minnesota, whom I do not know to this day, sent some plants with a note: “Try these and change your mind.” I don’t know the variety, but he was right. The philosophical question is: Do they look beautiful to me because I love their taste? Maybe they look beautiful because they remind me of the beautiful person who sent them to me.

The notion that good taste might come before beauty doesn’t hold true, actually. To me, an eggplant is profoundly beautiful. That deep purple color is just so stunning. But I don’t much like the taste. I just like to look at them.

Perhaps I should view this question psychologically rather than philosophically. Maybe the colors of the harvest glowing in the slanting harvest time sun quickens the human spirit in a very special way, as Monet would say. A psychology book I once read claimed that purple was the favorite color of geniuses. I don’t know how anyone could arrived at such a non-sequitur but hey, sounds good to me.
~

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.
Gene’s Posts
~~