Organic farming

The problems I found were weeds. In this black dirt (central Iowa) weeds grow very well, faster than corn and beans or oats and alfalfa. Its nice to think that they can be headed off with timely cultivation. Sure 'nuf but that timely part never worked for me. Field crops tend to need to be rotary hoed two or three times at 3 day intervals starting 3 days after planting. Many years I put the planter in the shed to the sound of rain. Inches of rain in late May. That was super for getting the crop up along with all the weed seeds that plowing, disking twice and running the field cultivator once before planting brought near the surface. But it made getting into the field impossible for a couple weeks. By then it was too late for the rotary hoe, and still a little wet for the row cultivator to cut off the weeds without transplanting them to the crop rows. Then in a few more weeks the crop needs another pass with the cultivator, but I often couldn't make that pass because the late June rains made the field a quagmire.

So I raised weedy crops that yielded poorly and in the early days when my neighbor had an IH 715 or 915 combine caused many a plug of the head.

I think once or twice I may have actually made money on the crop (neglecting to pay myself for the labor) because my chemical inputs were zero, but my fuel costs were high. Now with fuel 5 or 6 times as high, glyphosate looks cheap. Carrying my home made three point sprayer across the field takes a lot less fuel than plowing, disking twice, field cultivating, rotary hoeing thrice, and cultivating twice, and leaves me with a clean field that yields twice the corn.

At least in this black dirt, weeds grow too well for mechanical cultivation to keep up. Flame weeding may be effective, if it can be done timely enough and should not take much fuel carrying the flamer across the field. But if the weeds are a day too mature the flames that don't hurt the crop, won't hurt the weeds either.

Now there is a more serious problem with crops that are not self pollenated. And that is pollen drift from GMO fields. The main selling points for organic crops are "flavor" and freedom from GMO. When corn pollen can wander miles, its folly to say an isolated corn field is GMO free when all the fields around it are GMO. So the promise of GMO free can't be achieved. And so half the reason for being organic is a lie. The seed may be GMO free and the techniques by the organic rules, but the crop likely isn't. And when the customers or brokers figure out how to check for being GMO free the crop gets rejected.

Go to the organic section of the USDA, download and read all of the regulations. Remember that organic rules are not based on science, but on the thoughts of Robert Rodale that anything which comes from the ground is safe, anything that comes through a chemical processing plant is unsafe.

Remember too that the phosphate mines are considered super fund cleanup sites, from disposing the undesired parts of natural phosphate rocks that were removed by the chemical processing.

Around here there is another problem, the only two organic P sources are manure and rock phosphate, but rock phosphate has no effect in neutral soils, only has a crop response in soils that are significantly acid. Which leaves out the dirt around here from using rock phosphate.

Gerald J.

There was an "organic" farmer who was just weeks away from his certification when a misguieded (questionable) crop duster "inadvertently" sprayed his fields by "mistake." Crop duster was never charged and WAS paid for the spraying though it was maintained that he sprayed the wrong field. The farmer's suit for damages was lost.

Seems there is some mighty stiff opposition from the chemical industry.