The Race Goes Not Always To The Fastest
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?
~~
Posted
on
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 7:41 am
And I bet you could make a few bucks selling seed corn from your crop to people who have similar goals…
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:30 amI was recently re-reading Charles Walters “Unforgiven” and checking some records online. He had corn parity in 2000 pegged at $11.76, based on 1950. The actual price paid at the Chicago BOT was $1.97 – 16% of what farmers need to make a living. So the rest is debt, welfare and bit of a lift from ethanol.
I assume the big reason farmers don’t switch to a low-input, open-pollinated, rotating model is that they’re in so much debt that they’re required by Monsanto, Cargill or whoever to keep planting that insane GMO seed, use every square inch of land, and so forth.
Gene, do you think a parity price – because it would help farmers pay off their debt and build earned income – would help move things toward the kind of cultural practices you describe? Or do you see this as a problem that will or should only be solved by going “contrary,” as you and your neighbor have done?
It would be just great to see a nation of 80 acre family farms – I just don’t see how that’s going to happen one farmer at a time. Maybe the “real farmers” would make a switch if they knew they had a price they could live with.
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:09 pmGene,
Or you could say that the prize for being the fastest is the booby prize. The expression that captures it for me is, yes, the early bird may get the worm, but its the 2nd mouse that gets the cheese.
My take on this whole thing is that the primary issue isn’t the money, though that’s obviously relevant, but the fact that while these overly big farms are nominally selling ‘corn’, what they’re really selling is their topsoil. Everything goes out and nothing comes in, except the ubiquitous chemicals they call ‘fertilizer’. Nothing closes the circle, so of course they have to artificially prop up the dirt with their chemistry sets.
Farms that close the circle, that have a balanced and more complete production cycle through rotation of crops and a balance of plants to animals have everything going for them. Animals (other than humans for the most part, it seems) instinctively sense the foods of higher nutritional value. So its no surprise that they go for the corn you or I produce over the ‘corn’ that’s monocropped with chemicals. ‘Corn’ in quotation marks because it looks like real corn but its missing so much, as any cow or pig or chicken could readily explain to the agricultural engineers. They might as well make fuel out of that stuff. And don’t even get me going about the red things that look like tomatoes.
For sure, there’s some nutrient loss on any farm when its products go out the driveway, but nature knows how to make good dirt, too. That level of nutrient loss from the soil can largely be replaced with the kind of sound farming practices you’ve been patiently explaining for so long. That said, there is surely an important chapter or two to be written about the one way street of nutrients from farm to city or factory and what can be done to begin to bring about a flow in the other direction.
I personally go a bit off the deep end in that regard, collecting one neighbor’s horse manure, another’s newspapers and cardboard boxes from the local hardware store. The problem is that there’s no system to do it. Its mostly individual effort, though I’m sure there are some exceptions to that. Its a huge cost of so many people moving off the land in the first place, only to stuff their lawn clippings and leaves into plastic bags and send them away to a landfill. …and then run off to the nearest box store in the spring to buy more plastic bags of compost. I guess we need to waste a lot of things. It creates so many jobs.
October 23rd, 2009 at 5:20 amGene, as a longtime reader and collector of your excellent books, I deserve first chance at buying 5 lbs of your corn. Please advise where to send the money.
October 24th, 2009 at 9:41 amedson4, I haven’t sold any of my corn seed. It doesn’t have enough stalk standibility or uniformity to suit me yet.
October 24th, 2009 at 1:21 pmKyle, I have made an immense effort to understand the meaning of parity. I don’t think it’s because I am too stupid, but I have never quite been able to grasp how to make the concept work in the real world. I used to go round and round with Chuck on the subject. I’m not against it. Seems that someone would have to decide precisely what parity would be every year with numbers. And I’m afraid that someone would be the someone with the most power and money. I like the simplicity of supply and demand.
DavidZ: The magazine, BioCycle, devotes itself to your excellent thinking about how we have to return from the city and from industry the “wastes” that keep the soil fertile.
I love this way of thinking. I have wondered many times when in a farmer’s mind did it sound like a good idea to stop supplying his region and start trying to supply the nation?
-Nathan
October 24th, 2009 at 7:55 pmGene,
October 25th, 2009 at 6:39 amI agree that the actual pricing, implementation and enforcement hasn’t been very clearly documented or explained. I’m working on an article about parity at the moment that I hope will introduce the concept to laypersons interested in food issues. I’ll put a link here when it’s done. If your many personal conversations with the peerless expert on the subject weren’t enough to convince you, maybe a few pages from some anonymous schmuck will be!
We grew some popcorn this year, some of the ears/kernels got moldy. We dried them and tried to take off most of the good kernels. We’re still not sure if we should keep it for eating. How do you prevent mold on corn without fungicides? Thanks, Greg
October 25th, 2009 at 6:29 pmI enjoy reading about this subject, I learn a lot. I live in the Palouse Region of Eastern Washington where mono-cropped wheat and chemical fertilizer are king, so it’s refreshing to read a post like this.
October 25th, 2009 at 6:58 pmMichael Pollan has written that beef cattle should not be fed corn because their digestive systems are fundamentally suited to grass.
Gene Logston’s story is convincing on its own terms, but he doesn’t address the dominant use of corn products (including sugar) in the vast quantities of processed foods that make up way too much of the standard American diet.
October 26th, 2009 at 6:59 ambet with a little trial and error, I could figure out how to make FRITOS!
October 29th, 2009 at 8:57 amgene, i have a burning question:
if you can net the same profit on a very small acreage that a huge industrial farm is getting, why not take those huge farms and divide them up into small farms?
we’d create more jobs, start taking better care of the soil, produce a more interesting diversity of vegetables rather than corn for corn syrup or ethanol.
October 30th, 2009 at 10:11 amDave hi there!
I am totally Organic, and I admire your writings on your blog, I know how much time and effort this must require…
I have added your ‘Organic Blog’ site to our directory here at ‘The Organic Home’ – Please check your details and link are good for you, look in the ‘Blogs’ – ‘Food & Drink’ category, and if you wish us to change or edit your entry do let me know.
If you would return a link to us here, I would be delighted, (as Google loves shared organic links ) and do let me know if you have any news, events or blog posts, and we can add these to our news pages.
Our group of sites had over 8.5 million hits last month, so I hope that our link and future contact can bring you some extra traffic.
Warmest Regards & Organically Yours…
Mark Golding
December 11th, 2009 at 1:57 pmHi Gene,
January 8th, 2010 at 9:04 amI just love all your posts! I have been reading you for years and enjoy your articles in “Farmers” magazine. Please blog some more. I’m and organic gardener in SW Ohio and reading your blogs are so informative and entertaining.
Gene – This is one of your best organic farming/ gardening pieces ever – the more one can do to fight the elimination of the seed bank biodiversity by the big corporate ag entities the better !
January 25th, 2010 at 7:07 pmplaces like the Seed Savers Exchange are excellent sources for this endeavor – Mark
Gene, I ran across Willamette Exporting (in Oregon)who import walk along grain harvesters (or crop binders as they call them) (starting at $9600) and even more interesting, a foot powered grain thresher ($1700) and a hand (or electric) operated winnower ($1150). A very nice gentleman by the name of Max Ray Webster is the president at (503)246-2671. Also had very high quality hand sickles from Japan and unique rototillers. No website, but he will be happy to send you out a package.
February 2nd, 2010 at 4:57 pmHi Gene,
Great article! You are a great inspiration: especially regarding soil and seed conservation. I love your books.
You live in a pretty part of the country. We have our family reunion every August in Harpster, at the park next to the RR tracks and the old school site.
August has more going for it than February though; that’s one reason I live in Georgia.
:o)
February 16th, 2010 at 10:57 amHey Gene just want to thank you. When we read your book, At Nature’s Pace we realized that we really could do this! We have just started our adventures in “garden farming”. We would LOVE if you could stop by our blog! Thank you so much for all your inspiration.
-John and Leslie Glenn
February 19th, 2010 at 7:13 pmit’s really nice to have your own farm..im gonna have one when i win in the uk lottery..hehe
February 26th, 2010 at 8:13 amI am trying to contact Gene about the possibility of engaging him to headline AERO’s annual meeting the weekend of October 22-24th. AERO has been promoting and organizing communities around Alt. Ag and Energy since the mid 70′s. A strong, experienced and very friendly group.
thanks, Jim
February 26th, 2010 at 10:38 amJim Baerg I am not scheduling any more speaking engagesments for the time being. But I surely thank you for thinking of me.
March 2nd, 2010 at 3:57 pmRick Moser: I have many many fond memories of that little park. We had a family get together there last summer. My novel, The Last of the Husbandmen is inspired by Harpster. You might almost recognize some of the fictional characters.
Patty: I try to do a blog every week. Also a newspaper column for theprogressortimes.com
John and Leslie Glenn, will take a look when I get time. Gene Logsdon
Hi Gene,
I am going to get that one. I have read, and treasured several of your books. I have been looking for “All Flesh is Grass” for a week; it’s around here somewhere.
March 4th, 2010 at 4:09 pm