by Gene Logsdon
A great horned owl hoots from high in the big trees, hoots for a mate. He does not have to worry about the slavocracy of wages. He gives a hoot about worthwhile activities, like mating. He hoots the first inklings of spring. I note how the black raspberry canes glow purple in the fading sun, a purple that grows in intensity as winter wanes. Another whisper of spring. I must bestir myself a little now because nature, too, is an uncompromising boss. If the weather warms even a little now, though it is still February, the sap will begin to rise, and the time for felling trees will have passed.
When a large tree hits the ground, the earth trembles. I can feel it in my bones and my soul trembles in response, like a tuning fork. And the sound that accompanies the fall causes me to quiver: as the trunk rends from the stump, a groan issues from the protesting wood and crescendos to a high wail as the tree gains momentum in its fall. At the last, the very last, it is screaming a raw, shrieking death cry, followed suddenly by a breath-sucking, thunderous wI-{UNW as the trunk hits the ground. In the second ripple of sound waves shuddering out from the great fallen giant, I sense, almost audibly, a kind of static snapping from branch to branch through the standing trees nearby. I imagine invisible sparks, the soul of a tree disintegrating. The bird chatter, even the murmurs of wind high in the trees, hush in the electric air.
What I have heard is the roar of a dinosaur dying. In a few more generations, no one in this place will know the sounds that a two-hundred-year-old tree makes when it falls. Should a philosopher ask in those days whether a tree falling in the forest makes a noise if there is no one to hear it, the answer will be: "Not anymore."
CHAPTER 8
King Corn
If the corn turns out as good next year as it did this year, we'll all he ruined.
A neighbor speaking to the author about surplus corn problems in 1982
The cultivation of maize has probably sent more soil down the Mississippi River in the last century than natural erosion did in the preceding twenty. Clever compilers of statistics say that for every bushel of corn produced, five bushels of soil wash into lowlands, ditches, and streams or blow into the next county. The townships of the midwest spend millions of dollars annually to clean out the dirt that oozes into roadside ditches, and this is the least of the erosion cost that the earth must bear. Much of the soil is lost from farms owned by wealthy people, who rent their land to farmers who produce surplus corn on it subsidized by taxpayers. Perhaps we are quite demented; I see no other suitable explanation.
I know a farmer rich enough to have retired years ago, who instead filled every building on his several farms with corn while he waited fruitlessly for a year when prices would go up high enough to make a killing on sales. When he ran out of other space, he knocked a hole in the roof of an abandoned country school on his property and filled this, too. That scene, plus one other, of a hog standing in the doorway of what had once been a pretty country church, say more about the decline of rural life than anything I could write.
So why do I place a high priority on corn for the cottage farm?
In the first place, it is a very reliable crop. When contending with the vacillating moods of Old Bitch Nature, reliability is everything. That is why corn is produced in excess. Even a fool can grow it and many do. Whenever I used to worry, in drouth years, that we would go into win ter without enough feed for the livestock, my Uncle Carl, now passed away, would always scold me gently: "Now, Gene, never in my lifetime (he was eighty by then) have we ever lost a corn crop entirely." With Carl gone, I have assumed the job of neighborhood soothsayer. Since our combined memories encompass a century, I think I can conclude with all the fervent rectitude of science that corn is, indeed, a reliable grain. Not in a hundred years have we lost a crop entirely. A Cornbelt farmer is not going to starve. He can always whip up a bowl of mush.
I do not say that entirely in jest. Although this book aims to tell how my friends, neighbors, relatives, and I enjoy farming and rural life, ours is no gentrified bucolic retreat surrounded by white hoard fences. Out here on the ramparts we understand that we are talking about survival. Nature is ready and willing to accommodate us dead or alive and preferably the former. Root, hog, or die is the password to her sanctuaries. We sense a miracle every time a seed sprouts and grows to maturity because, considering all the possibilities of that not happening, fruition is almost a miracle.
Corn is the most "miraculous" of the foods we grow. In 1988, rain did not fall here from April 12 until July 17. The corn stalks looked like pineapple plants. But after July 17, when some good showers came, the shriveling ears and stunted stalks on the best ground leaped toward the sky and made a fair yield after all. My special strain of corn made its usual giant ears, but I could find on many of the bigger ears an indented ring around the middle, where they had begun to stop growing in the drouth and then, after the rain, expanded and put three more inches of cob and kernel on the end. Even poorer ground produced half a crop.
Then came 1991, the year of the record-breaking drouth. But this time we went into the growing season with the ground saturated from the floods of 1990, and so the corn, native to the land of the Aztec heat, just went right on and made an average yield without any appreciable rain at all. I observed during the driest of dry spells in August that after a night of heavy dew every corn plant held a thimble-full of dew water in each cupped vortex where leaf met stalk. I calculate that every plant bore about half a cup of dew water, and with 20,000 stalks per acre, that's over 600 gallons per acre in one night. Some of this water was absorbed into the plant and some ran down the stalk to make a little ring of wet soil at the base. Birds, bees, and other bugs sipped this free irrigation water on the plants, and I imagine the mycorrhizal fungi and other biotic soil life threw some wild drouth-time parties in the moist soil around each stalk.
The next year, 1992, was the wettest year on record here. Yet our corn crop was better than ever.
Corn has its insect enemies, like slugs, wireworm, corn root worm, and corn borer, but if grown in rotation with other crops and if proper mechanical seed bed preparation is done before planting and proper weed cultivation practiced after planting, these pests rarely become a problem. Diseases also lurk in the cornfields, ready to lash out if opportunity presents itself. But for the most part, corn, because of the resistance bred into it by nature and by scientists, is not much affected. This might change, however, as factory farmers fog the corn land with poisons whose effect on the health of soil microorganisms is hardly halfknown.
A second reason I place a high priority on corn is that it can be conveniently and even pleasantly harvested by hand in fairly large amounts-say, up to ten acres by two people. This is not true of other grains because their ears are too tiny for efficient hand harvesting.
When I say that corn is capable of efficient hand harvesting, most of my neighbors, reckoning profit in terms of hundreds of acres of corn, think I'm nuts. But on the cottage farm, as I shall try to show, small acreages of corn are sufficient and hand harvesting them saves significant amounts of money. All you need for harvesting are two hands, a husking peg, and a pickup or wagon or cart in which to toss the ears.
Look at what we have done with our "labor saving" technology. Consider for example a 160-acre field of corn. Forty years ago, this field was a whole farm, with house and barns and animals and many kinds of crops and people working in the fields. The buildings, woodlot, and fences have now been bulldozed away, the animals transferred to confinement factories where they must be heavily medicated to prevent disease. The people have gone away too, most to the boredom of the assembly line or the hopelessness of no steady job at all. In the spring, a lone man, often hired at minimum wages, jockeys monster equipment over the 160 acres and in a couple of days plants the whole parcel. Before or after, a custom sprayer applies poisons. All summer the field is empty of activity except for an occasional Indian artifact hunter (me) and the deer. Again in the fall monster harvesters and semi-trucks or grain wagons appear on the f
ield, causing terrible compaction if the soil is wet, and whisk, whisk, whisk, the corn is gone. One such "farmer" I know, groggy with lack of sleep after forcing himself to keep his $100,000 harvester going into the night, accidentally ran over and killed his hired man, who had crawled under the machine to check a bearing.
Meanwhile the people who might have harvested that corn with communal, physical labor, get their exercise jogging along the road, risking being run over, radios plugged into their ears in an effort to alleviate their painful, panting boredom.
Compare that picture to a scene I recently observed. I had gone into an Amish cornfield to find out from its owner when he would have time to press and boil down my sorghum molasses. Half of the field had already been cut with binder and horses, and a group of men and boys were moving across the field, setting up the bundles strewn on the ground into shocks. I approached them through the standing corn and they could not see me. I was in the situation all writers yearn for: I was invisible. Were these farmers bent over in pain and boredom at their "backbreaking, tedious work?" No way. They were jabbering away in German to the tune of almost continuous laughter while the boys wrestled and played tag between the shocks. They were having a party, working hard.
One year I grew four acres of corn instead of my usual one and invited in other cottage farmers to harvest it by hand. That turned into a parry, too, and everyone took home a pickup load of corn for their animals and for making cornbread. Imagine what kind of future could emerge if this mingling of work and play were repeated over the whole countryside.
Even if growing corn were the most grueling work imaginable, and uneconomical to boot, I would still put it at the top of the list of necessities, for two other reasons: sweet corn and popcorn. Farming without raising and eating sweet corn ten minutes from the patch is like living out a lifetime as a virgin.
Maize thrives in regions averaging 35 inches of rainfall with 18 to 22 inches of that coming during the growing season of 90 to 120 days, and where summers are warm and long. But there are ancient varieties that grow in hot deserts of Mexico and high cool mountain ranges of the Andes. The Navajo cottage farmers and others have popularized some of these corns and built successful small businesses with their blue cornmeal. Dr. Richard Pratt, an agronomist at Ohio State, is trying to transfer the drouth resistance in these desert corns to regular Cornbelt strains.
Geneticists have developed short season hybrids to push the boundaries of the Cornbelt further north. Irrigation extends these boundaries farther into the West but the era of large-scale irrigated corn farms may be ending as ground water supplies decrease or become too expensive to pump out. In these drier areas, sustainability should dictate that other grains be grown commercially, including grain sorghum, a relative of corn, on the southern Plains, or barley in Idaho and Montana (more on these grains in chapter 10). Or perhaps scientists like Dr. Pratt will develop corn varieties for the Plains that won't require irrigation but will yield enough so that farmers can continue to stay in debt buying hundred-thousand-dollar combines that end up in demolition derbies.
But if I am so enthusiastic about raising animals on pasture alone, why do I consider cultivated grains at all, let alone corn? My answer: You cannot trust the weather to cooperate. Never put all your eggs in one basket. Pasture can be the sole source of animal feed, as the buffalo proved, but the buffalo migrated in winter and did not have to worry about superhighways. Cornell University has demonstrated that livestock in the north can be overwintered on pasture, even with lots of snow on the ground, but when you read the fine print you learn that, yes, the animals were provided with a little supplemental grain and hay when the weather got really tough. Animals will need a little grain in drouthy summers, too. A LITTLE is what the cottage farm provides.
Moreover the success of the cottage farm depends on biodiversity. The more species of life on hand, the greater the chance of survivability for them all. As Diane Ackerman says in her recent wonderful New Yorker essay on entomologist Thomas Eisner (August 17, 1992): "Variety is not just the spice of life but the indispensable ingredient." The contrary farmer lives by that dictum. If nature, in her contrariness, dries up the pasture grass, 1 will feed corn. If she hurls hail on the corn, I will feed oats. If she blows down the oats, I will feed wheat. If she floods out the wheat, the grass will be lush. A conductor can't depend on violins alone, but rather on a whole orchestra. And so must the husbandman.
Preparing Land for Corn
I have to laugh at the earnest garden and farm hooks (some of them my own from the 1970s, in my more innocent years) that propose to tell the poor reader exactly how to grow everything. The inevitable conclusion the beginner reaches is that there is one and only one right path to horticultural or agricultural correctness and that there are experts who really do know what path this is.
In practicing sustainable farming, corn, which is a grass, should be planted on land where some legume was growing the preceding year. That's about as far as I want to go in laying down inviolable rules, and even that one does not have to be slavishly adhered to. The ancient Romans understood this rule (see Virgil's Georgics; he got it from the ancient Greeks) and nothing science has done since has tempted me to seriously question the tradition. Which legume to use depends on your preferences if not your climate. I think the best one on my farm is red clover which makes me a contrary farmer once again: the experts all insist alfalfa is better but I stick with red clover because it stands humid weather a little better and is not bothered by the alfalfa weevil.
In the fall, in preparation for corn the next year, I plow the field that has been in red clover for two years. Yes, plow. And yes, in the fall. I could use a heavy disk and field cultivator or chisel plow to incorporate the clover for green manure but these implements are much more expensive than my old plow. I could plow in the spring, and sometimes do, but our Ohio clay soils are easier to work into a spring seedbed after fall plowing than after spring plowing.
Or I could spray poison weedkillers and plant into the dead clover with a "no-till" or "zone-till" planter that does not require working the soil into a fine seedbed beforehand. But I don't intend to pay $15 or more an acre for weed poisons if I can help it, nor do I need to spend $15,000 for a no-till planter and $60,000 for a tractor big enough to handle it when a $40 hand-pushed garden planter works just fine for me.
Nor do I want to be forced to spend $10 per acre or more on poisons to kill slugs and insect pests which sometimes proliferate in undisturbed, no-tilled soils. As the slugs are killed, so also can be millions of earthworms and thousands of birds who eat the poisoned bait, as happened in eastern Ohio a few years ago.
No-till farming-that is, killing with poisons all plant life that might compete with the crop plants and then planting with special drills into the undisturbed soil-is being touted by the chemical companies and the government as the only practical (read, short-term, profitable) way to avoid erosion. No-till or chemical tillage does control erosion fairly well on fairly level to gently rolling land, but there are other less costly ways for the small farm to do that. The most vicious smear that the chemical companies brush on the face of good traditional conservation farming is the notion that no-till is the only way to stop erosion and that only no-till leaves a residue of plant material on the surface, which is ridiculous. You have the same amount of residue to work with no matter what method you use to grow the crop. What no-till farming really amounts to is a convenient way for large farms to keep on expanding in size while avoiding the severest kind of erosion that used to be common on careless farms. But erosion can still be had on steep notilled slopes. And since no-till has only been practiced a short time, there is no way to tell whether it will remain a sustainable technique. In fact there is much evidence that weeds are developing immunity to herbicides.
I am a champion of the small plow and small tandem disk for small farms. I have the company of good contrary farmers: David and Dave, the first a horse farmer and the second a tractor farmer. Th
ey are both respected for their agricultural skills in their communities and are imbued with a high degree of ecological sensitivity. Like me, they are considered contrary by the Soil Conservation Service which has gone all out in favor of chemical-soak, no-till farming, and all but outlawed the plow on hilly land: If you want to get your government subsidies you can't plow what the SCS deems to be "highly erodible land." You can, however, rotate those very same acres from corn to soybeans year after year, spray the soil with weedkillers so that it is always bare except for the crop "residue" (the dead stalks after harvest), and watch this soil erode just about as badly, on sloping land, as it did with poor plowing meth ods. Just because you have residue on your soil surface does not mean you will not have erosion. On a steep, "no-tilled" field in Knox County, Ohio, a few years ago, I watched a gullywasher sweep away all that corn stalk residue which in modern chemical conservation parlance is supposed to stop erosion. Running water piled that "residue" up against a fence at the bottom of the hill with such force that the fence was knocked flat on the ground.
In my farming, I plow only sod land-that is, fields that were previously growing hay or pasture. That means any particular field is rarely plowed more than once every four years. Because of the legume roots, the infrequent use of the plow, and the applications of animal manure and green legumes incorporated by the plow (green manure), this soil stays loose and friable and I can plow it with a small tractor (35-horsepower) and a two-bottom (two plowshares) plow. David can plow the same way with a team of horses. As he points out, this is the only way a small farmer can cultivate soil efficiently. Alternative equipment to the plow and the small, tandem disk-standard chisel plows, offset disks, field cultivators, subsoilers, no-till planters-require much more horsepower. Some of us contrary farmers suspect the de facto prohibition against plows is just another ploy to help the big-iron ground hogs run us out of business.