Some Knowledge

The garden was too big again this year.  There were too many weeds.  We got a lot of tomatoes, but that was about it for home-grown food this season.  Grass and weeds took over the garden around about the end of July, and choked out the corn.  What corn did grow was eaten by swarms of ants.  Overall it was a bit of a bad year for gardening.

Yesterday I went out to the played out tomato patch and cut all the twine I had tied to stakes holding the plants up.  I unraveled the twine from the dead plants and stuffed it into an old shopping bag.  Then I pulled up the stakes and put them away in the barn loft.  I went to start the tractor to plow under all the weeds, but the battery was dead.  Fifteen minutes later, after I found the battery charger, I connected it to the battery and then went and pulled up all the posts where the sprinklers were.

That was yesterday.  This morning I walked out through rain-wet grass and opened up the barn.  I took the charger off the tractor and poured some gas into the fuel tank.  I turned on the gas valve and the tractor fired up on the first crank.  I warmed up the engine and then went out and hitched up the plow.  I started to plow.  All went well for about half a row.  Then a big wad of grass collected on the front of the plow and bogged down the tractor.  This would not work.  There were just too many fresh weeds.  I dropped the plow and hooked up the disk.

The disk pulled well through the forest of grass, weeds, and dead corn stalks.  Of course, there were still too many weeds to make much of an impact even with a six hundred pound disk.  I spent an hour going back and forth over the weedy garden four full times.  I ended up with half the ground bare, and half covered in a thick layer of mulched hay.  This was good enough.  Fall and Winter would take care of the rest of the work.  All the garden needed now was a couple of seasons of whither and the soil would be ready to turn over in the spring.

I dropped off the disk and drove the tractor back to the barn.  I shut down the engine and closed off the gas valve.  An hour of trying to disk under a field of weeds was all the gardening I needed for one day.  I can understand why farmers use herbicide.  Getting rid of weeds with manual labor is too much work.  I can see people dying if they had to weed out a hundred acres of corn with a hoe.  Even with a tractor and an implement it is a lot of work to try to get rid of weeds, and they only seem to come back worse the next year.  With all the grass growing in the garden this year, I think next year most of the garden will become lawn.  I didn’t really get a lot of vegetables this year, but the tomatoes were very good.  Next year there will be fewer plants and more careful cultivation.

I woke up early this morning.  It’s going to be hot today, so I wanted to do the outside work before it got too miserable.  I had some coffee and a piece of raisin bread toast for breakfast, then got on my John Deere hat and my gardening boots and work gloves and walked out to the barn.  I started up the tractor and opened the barn door, then I drove out to hitch up the disc to disc up the garden.

As I attempted to hook up the new center link, I noticed that it was too wide to fit onto the disc hitch.  I pulled the lynch pin on the link where it attaches to the tractor, then lugged the link down to the basement where I ground off just enough steel from the implement side link flange so that the link would fit onto the disc.  I finished hooking up the disc and dragged it twice over the entire garden, breaking up the mounds the plow had left last weekend.

After unhitching the disc and parking the tractor back in the barn, the fun began.  I went inside and got the bag of corn seeds and some string.  I found the hoe in the back yard and got that too.  I got a couple of stakes from the barn and brought everything out to the back of the garden where I intended to plant the corn.  I paced off the length of the garden, divided by two, subtracted one pace, then tied one end of the string to a stake and paced off the length of half the garden.  This amounts to about fifty feet.  I tied the other end of the string to the second stake and marked off a row.

Following the string, I dug a trench for the corn with the hoe.  I moved the string to the next row location and got out the bag of seeds.  Bent over, I placed a seed every six inches or so in the trench.  When I finished seeding the row, I picked up the hoe and covered the seed in the trench.  When all the seed was covered, I used the back of the hoe to tamp down the dirt on top of the row.  Then I moved on to the next row.

The cycle of digging a trench, planting the corn, covering and tamping went on for about two hours.  I got all the corn planted, which made ten rows or about 500 feet of corn.  This is enough of a patch to take care of.  By the time I finished it was over 80 degrees and the sun was shining and the breeze was blowing and my back was sore and I was done for the day with planting.  I put the seeds away, took off my boots and hat, and took a good long bath to get rid of the sweat and dirt from the garden.

I go through basically the same routine every year planting sweet corn.  This year I tried a new hybrid, Bodacious, which did really well for my neighbor last year.  I’ll have to wait and see how well it does this year.  I put in the garden a bit late this season, but there was frost only a couple weeks ago so I did not want to have any plants die from the bad weather.  It is supposed to rain tonight, so my corn will be watered in well.  It may even hail a bit tonight, so I am not ready to set out the tomatoes yet.  There’s always a lot of time at the end of the season for late crops to ripen.  If the weather is nice tomorrow I will plant squash and maybe some green beans for the rabbits.

A cover crop is a planting that puts a crop on soil that would otherwise be bare.  This can be a crop such as rye planted in the off season, or can be a crop that fixes nitrogen, like a legume.  There are several benefits to growing a cover crop.

One benefit of cover crops is that they prevent erosion.  The roots of the crop hold the soil, and the upper portions of the plant prevent rain from running in streams over the surface.  Erosion removes a significant proportion of farm soil each year.  A cover crop would be valuable if it were just for this purpose.

Legumes and clovers have the ability to fix nitrogen from the air and incorporate it into their tissues in the form of proteins.  When these plants are plowed into the soil, this nitrogen will be released as the plant tissues decompose.  Various kinds of legumes fix different amounts of nitrogen.  The ratio of carbon in the plant to nitrogen will determine the availability of fixed nitrogen as the plant decomposes.  This is because decomposition will take a certain amount of nitrogen to break down the cellulose and other carbon compounds in the crop.

Deep-rooted plants like alfalfa also transport a proportion of nutrients from the subsoil to the surface, where it can be used by subsequent crops.  The roots also break up compacted soils and hardpan and can improve the drainage of the soil.  Alfalfa is also a valuable forage crop rich in protein for animals.  All cover crops sequester a certain amount of plant nutrients in their tissues and are sometimes called “catch crops” because they keep the fertility of the soil from leaching away with the rain.

Another benefit of cover crops is that they incorporate a good deal of organic matter to the soil when they are plowed under.  As the tissues of the crop break down in the soil they turn into humus and other organic compounds that help the soil hold water, improve it’s texture or tilth, and provide a slowly-releasing source of nutrients for cash crops.  Organic matter in the soil also provides food for microbes, fungi, and worms which are beneficial to the growth of plants.

Cover crops used to be one of the common methods by which farmers improved the health of the soil.  These plantings can choke out and shade weeds, and in general make a better medium for the growth of plants.  As fertilizer and chemicals become more expensive, and as organic farming becomes more prevalent, cover crops will play an important part in the management of soil condition for the modern farmer.

Farming and agriculture are the original ways man harvested solar energy.  Even before humans learned how to plant seeds, they reaped the foods of the earth for their nutritional value.  Today we are seeing a somewhat new phenomenon: energy farming.  With the ever-increasing cost of fuel, people are growing plants for the fuel value of the energy they harvest from the sun.

In ancient times right up to present times, farming has required a lot of hard work.  Modern man has developed a lot of machines to help him with the tasks of cultivating food.  In the old days it required animals to pull plows.  Now, we have tractors and petroleum products.  There is still a lot of work involved in driving a tractor and hitching up implements.  There is the cost and labor necessary to irrigate crops, as well as the cost of applying fertilizers and pesticides.  Any way you look at it, it takes a lot of work to grow plants.

In agriculture, the soil must be made ready to accept seeds.  This usually means breaking it up in some way so that the seeds will have plenty of water and air available in the ground to grow.  Plows, discs, harrows, rototillers, all these devices work the soil to get it ready for planting.  Then, after the soil is prepared, there is the task of planting the seeds.  This task was made more effective and easier with the invention of mechanical planting devices.  In the old days, a person might broadcast seed over a wide area by hand.  They might also dig furrows by hand and cover the seed with a hoe and set the seeds in place by treading on the row.  All this takes a long time and can be back breaking work because much of it is done stooped over.  Machines went a long way to improving the life of the farmer.

Farming is not just about planting stuff and waiting for it to grow.  Weeds and insects often pester crops and have to be dealt with.   One of the hardest jobs on the farm is removing weeds.  Weeds root themselves in the soil and are hard to pull out.  They are fibrous and difficult to cut out even with a sharp hoe.  Modern farmers often rely on chemical herbicides to kill weeds.  Weed control can be as simple as mixing and spraying the right compound.  Still, this costs a lot of money and takes a good deal of knowledge.  Insects can do even more damage to crops.  Aside from removing them by hand or just living with the losses, chemical sprays are about the only way to remove insects from a crop.  There is much research being done on biological controls for insects, but it is not always possible to find a predator species for a pest and introduce it in the required numbers to solve the problem.

After everything has grown and has been tended, there is the work of harvesting.  Modern crops are often harvested by machines, if this is possible.  Harvesting is hard work and requires some care when dealing with delicate crops like tomatoes or fruits.  In America, much of the harvest work is done by migrant workers who often come from Mexico for this seasonal employment.  There is a very narrow window on harvesting, which means when things are ripe and ready you have to get them in from the fields.  If you miss a harvest and lose a crop, sometimes because of weather conditions, all the work and expense of planting and tending your farm will be for nothing.

Almost all of the food we eat is grown on farms.  Fishing is the one industry where animals are still harvested from the wilds for food, and even fish farming is becoming more prevalent.  In recent years there has been a surplus of production of staple foods, which are often fed to animals to produce premium proteins.  Animal farming is a big industry and employs a lot of people.  Dairy, meat, cheese, wool, leather, gelatin, and many more products are produced by animal agriculture.

In recent years there has developed a trend, supported by governments, of fermenting foods into ethanol to burn in motor vehicles.  This uses up most of the surplus production of foods and drives the price of food up.  Corn is fermented into ethanol to mix with gasoline for motor vehicle fuel.  In Brazil they get most of their fuel from ethanol manufactured from sugar cane.  This is a growing technique of making fuel that is controversial.  It may in fact take more energy to grow and process ethanol than you get from burning it in your car.  It is a fact that this added use of food for fuel drives up prices.  It remains to be seen what effect this has on the world’s supply of food.

Human beings have been farming for thousands of years.  There is no other way to supply the foods necessary to support large populations of people who live in cities.  As long as there are many people on planet earth, they will have to farm food to supply themselves with the necessities of life.

The cost of nitrogen fertilizers has gone way up this year.  This is because anhydrous ammonia and other nitrogen fertilizers are made with natural gas.  Methane, CH4 is reacted with atmospheric N2 at high temperatures and pressures on an iron catalyst to make ammonia.  Anhydrous ammonia is now going for over $400 a ton.  This is more than double the price a year ago.

Farmers apply high concentrations of nitrogen to increase yields of corn.  Soybeans can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere with bacteria in their root nodules.  It may make sense in these times of higher energy costs to go back to the system of crop rotation that was practiced before artificial fertilizers changed farming.  The alternative to the use of artificially-produced nitrogen is to use manure or sewage sludge to fertilize crops.  High crop yields require a high input of fertilizer.

It may be a good idea to do accurate soil tests to determine just how much fertilizer that is needed.  It makes no business sense to apply more fertilizer than is necessary for a crop.  Much of the fertilizer that has been over applied in the past has ended up in river systems and lakes, causing problems.  Even ground water in some areas is contaminated with high levels of nitrates.  Higher prices will force farmers to be more accurate with their application of fertilizers.

It is not just the price of nitrogen that is increasing.  There may also be shortages of anhydrous ammonia this year because production is being cut back.  The high price of natural gas is causing some fertilizer manufacturers to sell off their stock of gas for a profit on the market.  The limited supply will no doubt drive the price of nitrogen even higher.  Even with record high prices for crops, it may be hard for farmers to realize a profit this year with the rising price of fuel and fertilizer.