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| I tried to get organic in central Iowa. I failed. At least half the years it rained too much and too often to do the necessary cultivation and I had weeds enough to choke the 715 combine my custom combiner had then. I didn't hear him complain, but I watched him shut down and spend much time cleaning the corn head after hearing a slip clutch rattle (or maybe that was chain jumping teeth on a sprocket, anyway a sure sign of overload).I concluded that in this black dirt, weeds grow too well to keep them down to a reasonable amount. I was trying to grow all of my corn's nitrogen with a three year period of alfalfa, while selling the hay. That nitrogen cost a whole lot more than buying some 32% I eventually concluded. I could have gotten hog slurry, but I didn't like to think of the compaction of a spreader hauling that across the fields in the spring. I could have gotten turkey litter, but the seller expected to spread it with a conventional dump truck and I wasn't willing to cause that kind of compaction either. And the haul would have been 10 or 12 miles, not generally figured to be economic compared to 32% or NH3.
I learned early that working my land with it wet, made it into concrete as good as pouring concrete on it. Not conducive to wet cultivation and if it was really wet, the tractor belly sat on the ground and it hard to drive that way and very hard on the crop.
So my crops were weedy and limited. But may have been profitable in years when the chemical costs were high and elevator prices moderate, though I didn't get to be organic or sell to the organic markets.
I've been reading an encyclopedia of two cylinder JDs lately and last night I saw a picture of corn being picked with a one row corn picker on maybe a 50 so it was the early 1950s. There was no comment on the weed conditions, but they looked like my corn, a solid ground cover of foxtail.
Raising organic corn with the neighbors all growing GMO corn, I'd be very reluctant to claim my corn is GMO because of the likelihood of pollen drift across the fences and road. I know one long time family organic corn breeder in Eastern Iowa had problems a couple years ago even with somewhat isolated fields from GMO contamination. I've not heard anything about that operation lately, it may have closed.
No way to go organic and notill. Organic takes LOTS of tillage. At least 5 passes with rotary hoe and cultivator after planting in ground cleaned by plowing, disking two or three times, and with one pass of the field cultivator. I found I saved a pass with the disk after I added a couple rows of spring tooth on the back. Same for the field cultivator. But all that preparation work brought up weed seed to its optimum growing depth and it really did grow. While glyphosate does not stay active in the soil, its not accepted as organic.
You must remember organic rules have never been based on agricultural science but were promulgated by Rodale on the premise that anything manufactured was bad and anything naturally found in the ground somewhere was good. But in neutral pH soil he neglected to learn that rock phosphate has no effect on plants. It only has an effect in acid soils or by being treated with acid.
Gerald J. | |
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Organic crops, notill or work ground?
