by Gene Logsdon
If you eat fish once a week, fifty two-pounders or a hundred onepounders should keep you supplied for a year, and that many fish you can raise in the backyard with a suitable tank and an aerator. A good source of information is the Alternative Aquaculture Association (P.O. Box 109, Breinigsville, Pennsylvania 18031). If you find fish farming intriguing, you can go from there as time and good sense dictate to selling fish to gourmets and fine restaurants. Since fish from "wild" waters are more and more contaminated, and since commercial fish farms seem bent on crowding fish to the point where more and more chemicals are needed to keep them healthy, the cottage farm could become the main source of fish clean enough to eat in the future. Dave Smith of Freshwater Farms of Ohio has been a pioneer in developing fish production tank systems in modified barns and cage systems in natural open waters and is an excellent source of information and supplies (Freshwater Farms of Ohio, Inc., 2624 North Route 68, Urbana, Ohio 43078).
The lazy beekeeper's way of caring for his bees probably makes the professional cringe, but it works for my purposes. I spend two days a year working with the bees, about a day repairing honey frames, and one evening getting the honey out of the combs and into jars. I leave plenty of honey for the bees to live on over winter and take only a small portion for our use. In other words, I let my bees do exactly what they do in the wild, only in man-made hives. Almost every year I read in magazines of some new viral, bacterial, or insect threat to bees, but so far (twenty years), so good for me. I once lost a hive to waxworms. I cleaned the hive thoroughly, captured a wild swarm, and started over. I keep two hives, because if one gets in trouble, or has a down year after the queen leaves with a swarm, the other hive is there to keep on producing.
Honey and honeybees fascinate me, not only because of the wonderful intelligence of these insects and the wonderful flavor of honey, but because I can procure their services almost totally free (not counting the cost of hives and equipment). Bees swarm every spring, and humans panic at the sight and call for deliverance. If the swarm lands on a low branch, it is fairly easy to capture. I set an open hive box under the branch, gently cut it loose from the tree, and shake the bees gently into the box. They don't much like being shaken that way, and buzz their disapproval, but they are full of honey and in too good a mood to attack, usually. Last year a few bees in a swarm did come after me, so now I wear my bee outfit as a precaution. As soon as the queen, buried down in the mass of bees, goes in the box, the rest will follow. After dark, I put a lid on the box, tape all openings and transport it to what passes for my bee yard. Sometimes I have shaken bees into a big cardboard box and then transported the box to the hive.
Earthworms are the livestock that all husbandmen keep as a result of and a sign of good farming. They can also be marketed at a profit, although I hesitate to stress the point because so many hustlers have taken advantage of this fact to cheat people.
Even so, earthworms may be just now coming into their own. Because of the ban on yard waste in landfills, more people are going to find it necessary or at least economical to compost their own leaves and grass clippings. Earthworms can help the composting process enormously, and in the process increase and multiply so that you can sell the surplus to other composters or to fishermen, or feed them to your backyard fish in place of that expensive fish food.
I offer all these ideas (there are so many more) as examples of the imaginative ways you can add a little income and a little fascination to your cottage farm. Ignore university economists who tell young people that it takes a million dollars to get started in farming today. Seek out the people with horse sense and earthworm imagination and pay attention to what they say.
CHAPTER 5
Water Power
Rain makes grain.
Common saying among hrohers on the Chicago Board of Trade
CLsk an agronomist what plant nutrient is the most important, and you will be treated to a short course on nitrogen, phosphorous, potash, and a host of trace minerals necessary for plant growth. Ask a farmer that question and he will unhesitatingly answer: water.
Without adequate water, the most advanced agronomic blend of fertilizers or organic composts is so much powder in the wind. With ample water, there will be at least a fair crop even without any fertilizer. Add ample rain to fertility and your crop runneth over.
Ample rain means 35 to 40 inches per year. The real reason the United States has the most successful farming in the world is not because we have a so-called capitalistic economy and so-called innovative farmers, but because we have the greatest expanse of rich soil combined with the most advantageous weather in the world. Even the state-run farms in Russia would have done reasonably well in the Cornbelt. Already in the 1700s in the "Illinois Country," the French settlers around their frontier forts of Kaskaskia, Illinois and Vincennes, Indiana were raising surpluses of grain and competing with each other so sharply for the Spanish market down the Mississippi that they drove the price down too low for a decent profit. And this in spite of the fact that they farmed in a halfhearted, haphazard manner. They much preferred hunting, drinking, and chasing Shawnee women through the underbrush-probably the only traditional farmers in America ever to relax and enjoy life. Even way before that, in the Mississippian era of the moundbuilders, this land was so rich in food that Native Americans were able for quite some time to maintain stable, settled towns of considerable size without a domesticated agriculture. Within walking distances of their villages, they hunted and gathered all the food they needed.
I am forever surprised when I hear prominent individuals within the contrary farmer ranks say that they would prefer to farm in New England or California/Oregon if given their druthers. None ever say the Cornbelt. That just shows how contrary they are. There is a presumption that the Cornbelt is the domain of large scale agribusiness and therefore alien to a community of cottage farmers. There is also the coastal prejudice that nothing exciting or imaginative ever happens in the midwest. But what tremendous potential eludes the serious farmer or forester who decides to shun the richest soil and most beneficial climate in the world for food and fiber production. I am always deeply impressed by the awesome problems that good farmers of the dry West, the cold Northeast, the hot South, and the steep mountains overcome to achieve success. But if you are beginning as a cottage farmer and have no roots elsewhere, remember that compared to these places, farming in the Cornbelt is a little bit of heaven. Don't let the corn and soybean oligarchy take it all.
Regions with less than thirty inches of rain per year have to conserve moisture by leaving the land lay fallow for a year without crops, by mulching, by irrigation, and by growing crops acclimated to drier climates. The accumulation of salts in soil that is caused by irrigation has already ruined vast areas of former paradises in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Farmers in regions of short growing seasons must spend most of their time storing food for winter as squirrels do, and shoveling snow.
Of course, if it rained only thirty inches and all of it came in the growing season, that would he ample for many crops. Rain that falls on frozen ground or on already saturated soil, conditions that often prevail in the midwest in winter, does not do us much good. Most of that kind of rain ends up in the Great Lakes or the Gulf of Mexico. As Virgil said, "Oh farmers, pray that your summers be wet"-but not too wet---"and your winters clear"-hut not too clear.
Too much water is just as bad as too little, and I do not mean only flooding. In fact most flooding, here today and gone tomorrow, is not as disadvantageous to farming as soils that "lay wet" all the time. No mat ter how fertile they are, potentially, or how much fertilizer might be added, such soils will not produce crops until they are drained properly. If they do dry out by late May, they are planted late and so produce less and mature late or not at all.
If most of a field is dry enough at proper seeding time, farmers often give in to the temptation to try to cultivate and plant the whole field, wet part with the dry-especially when trying to farm more land than
they can handle. Soil cultivated when it is too wet will not support a good stand of any of the grains or legumes, or good pasture grasses. It just produces gummy balls and slabs of soil that bake hard as rocks in the sun and grow up in milkweed and artichoke.
And the wet areas will grow in size. The reason? If wet soil is worked too wet, it compacts. The compaction causes the wet hole to dry even more slowly and the next year at planting time, the area of wetness will therefore be larger than the previous year. If you go ahead and try to work up a seedbed anyway, you compact yet a larger area, and so on, until what was just a little wet hole becomes a quarter acre.
Therefore many clay soils, however fertile, have to be drained, formerly with clay or cement tile, but now mostly with PVC pipe. Nonfarmers are often greatly surprised to learn that hundreds of thousands of miles of tile underlie the Cornbelt region. Even somewhat hilly land will have low spots here and there that require drainage.
One of the major tasks I face in bringing back my farm to good fertility is renewing the old tile lines that over the years of previous tenant farming were allowed to fall into disrepair. In fact tiling is more critical for me than for the larger farms around me. To lose an acre or two out of five hundred to poor drainage is not so bad, but even a sixteenth of an acre, out of a field that is only two acres in size, is considerable.
Tiling is almost miraculous in its benefits. In promptly removing excess water from the soil, the tile, placed two to three feet underground on a grade so that the water drains through the system by gravity, makes the soil more porous. Oxygen seeps through it more readily, and nutrients, especially nitrogen, become more easily available to the plants. Roots grow deeper and earthworms, which do not like sodden soil either, become plentiful. Soil acidity is more easily controlled by liming because the lime does its work of raising soil pH better on well-drained soil than on wettish soils. There is less temptation to cultivate when the soil is too wet, so compaction is avoided.
Some soils are so jackwaxy, as we say, that they can't even be drained with tile. Soils with such heavy clay usually occur on rather flat land of former marshes or lake beds where layer upon layer of vegetative matter solidified with the layers of clay particles settling out of the water. These soils require sophisticated surface drainage systems if they are to be cultivated. The Soil Conservation Service (the SCS, with offices in every county) can tell you all about such techniques (all about tiling too) but you would be better advised to plant this kind of land in grass and graze livestock on it or to build ponds and raise fish and ducks. South of my farm a few miles is a very large expanse of such clay, so right that water won't go down through it to the tile. Or when it does, the fine wet clay seals the tile perforations. Humans very wisely have relegated most of this land to a State Wildlife Area.
All of which is a purposefully long-winded way of saying that the cottage farmer is a waterboy in every sense of the word. Water is as necessary to farmland as it is to a football team. A farmer helps nature bring the water in and when nature goes overboard (no pun denied) he must try to move the excess away as quickly as possible.
In choosing a farm, water should be the first concern. If nature doesn't provide enough, where are you going to get more? Build ponds, dig wells, practice desert farming. If nature provides too much, how are you going to get rid of the excess? Use tile drainage, which means making sure you have access to an "outlet"-an existing tile, creek, ditch, or pond low enough in your landscape to drain your tile system into. Or convert wet holes into ponds or wetland swamps and farm around them.
In choosing a garden spot, the same priority holds. If you garden with raised beds, you can, to some extent, avoid the problem of wet soil. Raised beds will work fairly well for vegetables even if you put them on concrete-Benjamin Albaugh was the first to describe how to do that in his 1915 book, Home Gardening. However, you commit yourself to a great deal of watering because raised beds usually won't stay moist enough through capillary action alone.
The spring-fed creek on our place was a major reason that we bought this piece of land. (The other reason was the woodlot.) Not only did the creek mean water for the livestock, but it guaranteed an outlet for tile drains. Two waterways (channels where water runs like a temporary creek after heavy rains) crossed our property and both had tile mains already in them to provide other outlets if needed. My first major chore was to return these waterways to grass so that they would not continue to erode into gullies.
As soon as money became available, I started putting in new tile lines in the bottom fields, with outlets into the creek. I hired a custom drainage engineer to do the work. I am now putting short tile lines through the garden areas, doing the digging by hand. Spading out a trench about two feet deep and a foot wide goes surprisingly fast-a good job for March when there is not much else to do. The slope of the land where I'm digging is pronounced enough so that it is easy to maintain a grade. My grandfather would keep a bucket of water beside him as he dug along, and every so often, would splash a little water into the trench and watch which way it flowed, just to make sure he was maintaining a grade. Two to three inches of fall per hundred feet is desirable though you can get by with less. The more grade of course, the faster the water will drain away.
With the ditch dug, I uncoil a roll of 4-inch plastic drain pipe and lay it carefully in the bottom of the trench, shoveling a little soil over it to hold it in place. After I make sure water is moving okay through the pipe, I cover it completely. If the tile goes through a particularly wet place, like at the corner of our garden, I will fill in with a layer of gravel over the tile and up to just below plow depth so that the water drains as fast as possible out of that area-what we call a French drain.
A drainage contractor with his ditcher digs and lays the PVC pipe all in one operation, guided by a laser beam to stay on grade. Then he pushes the tile ditch closed with a bulldozer. I'm doing the garden area by hand because the machines are too large to maneuver in the area.
In the middle section of the farm, drainage is also needed when I have the money. But in this case rather than outlet into the tile that exists under the waterway, which needs to be replaced, I have built a small pond and will outlet the new tile lines into it. At least that's my excuse for building the pond. I crave a pond like some people crave a seaside resort.
Enjoying Ponds and Creeks
Without a pond, a farm is sort of like a village without a church. A pond becomes the biological epicenter of a farm, drawing to it wild and domestic life looking for rest, relief, surcease, thirst slaked, a swim, a skating party, or maybe just a place to sit idly by and watch how nature pays homage to water.
Most of my sitting idly by has been done at the pond my father built fifty years ago just two miles away. A creek or river may be more fun to observe than the pond because the water moves, but either way, the water attracts not only the wildlife I encounter in the surrounding fields and the woods, but a different array of both plants and animals.
In the tree kingdom, the sycamore likes to grow close to water. Its wood makes the best butcher blocks-just saw off a section of log and put it on legs.
Black and peach-leaf willow, rarely seen in upland woodlots, shade the water's edge. You can often start willows, especially weeping willows, by sticking a green stem the diameter of a pencil into wet soil. Most of the time it will root. Willow makes terrible firewood, but artificial limbs are manufactured from it. Someone has to supply that market. Why not a cottage farmer? .
Weeping willows love to grow with their feet in the water. Along the creek, I have a huge one that is the first tree to leaf out in spring and the last to lose its leaves in the fall. There is always a day in late April when I can straddle a low branch, my back against the giant trunk, and in the space of an hour see a different species of wildlife every other minute: bird or bug or turtle or fish or muskrat or land animal. The willow's blooms in April are rather nondescript, but what a hive of insects they draw, the tree becoming one huge, throbbing buz
z. The buzz attracts swarms of birds. A yellow warbler, fresh back from Mexico, hops among the branches, hardly pausing in its singing to snap up bugs. There is no yellow as yellow at that of the yellow warbler. I watch this one carefully, longing to find its nest. Normally this species goes farther north to nest, but you can never tell. I want to find a yellow warbler nesting because this bird has a reputation for knowing how to handle cowbirds. Cowbirds like to lay eggs in yellow warbler nests, among others, but the warbler is just as likely to build a new nest on top of the one desecrated by cowbirds, and then lay another clutch of eggs. Ornithologists have recorded instances of yellow warblers building as many as six nests, one on top of the other, to bury cowbird eggs. That I would like to see.
I always spot the red-winged blackbird in my big willow. A northern oriole always builds its hammock nest in a branch over the water. I look down now toward the water and am startled to see a redstart, black and flaming orange-red, back from Ecuador or maybe Cuba where it is called Candelita-"Little Flame." It is hopping about in a red ozier dogwood bush next to the water but soon moves on. Redstarts never sit still.
Then I see two snapping turtles glide through the water under the willow branches looking for crayfish which have all zipped, tail first, under rocks and logs to hide. The turtles slide under the pads of yellow water lilies that survive here against all odds. Schools of minnows drift by, and a kingfisher, clacking its raucous cry as it wings over the water, sends them scattering for underwater cover too. The kingfisher will not sit in my willow because there is no solitary dead branch to perch on and then plummet from, unimpeded by branches, into the water to catch a fish. Kingfisher goes on downstream to a dead elm stub over the water.
With my binoculars focused on the creek bottom, I see a freshwater mussel inching along on its one fleshy white foot, leaving a curvy line in the mud behind. If I stare at the mussel, it seems not to be moving. But when I look away and then back again a few minutes later, it has traveled a couple of inches beyond a little rock I was measuring its progress by. Its trail seems to be writing out a very casual letter S. For spring?