Rejuvenating A Worn-Out Farm

 

After we had been operating our small eight-acre farm organically for 11 years, a friend with the Agricultural Extension Service finally admitted we were being successful. "But," he said, "I don't see how it can be practical on large acreage. We have to feed the world." Here was a sobering thought. Then it turned to a challenge; why couldn't these same principles be practiced on a hundred acres or even a thousand acres? I jokingly mentioned to my wife that we should sell this farm and buy a bigger one. Even though we spent many laborious hours building up this place, including a new house, which we spent two years building ourselves, she didn't immediately throw a negative opinion at me. She too loved a new challenge. Besides we were still young and our growing family needed more room.

Surprisingly within only a few months of searching, we found a place that fulfilled our wishes, but it was really run down. The house was livable, but all the outbuildings and barn were about to fall down. The fields were so poor that in a rainy year Johnson grass only grew knee-high-talk about a real challenge! With testing, I learned the soil was highly alkaline and void of organic matter. A much different soil than I was accustomed to farming. On the good side, the fields were level and not eroded. It was encouragement from Robert Rodale that really helped. He said that because the soil was alkaline and with our average rainfall, the minerals were all there but locked up. With a lot of organic matter and time, the soil could again become fertile. So how do I get organic matter? Growing it was the only possible way, and it seemed like the only thing that was adapted to those worn-out fields were weeds. I let them grow to near maturity, then just before they bloomed, mowed them off with a cycle-bar mowing machine, leaving them on top to protect the soil. I did this for two years; the third year I broadcast common sudan grass and disked enough to cover the seed but not bury the weed mulch. I mowed the sudan twice before fall; the soil was now beginning to get a fair mulch cover.

Still, the soil was so sterile that the weeds from the two previous years were still not decayed. Since fall was coming, I decided on a winter legume. I chose hubarn clover. I bought scarified seed, inoculated it, then broadcast it with a cyclone seeder and tried to disk it in, but the mulch was so thick and tough, the light harrow couldn't cut through. It did shake the seed through so they lay on the soil under the mulch. Luckily a rainy spell came, and every seed must have sprouted. The clover grew and grew. It didn't stop until it was beyond my reach-eight feet tall. It turned into such a beautiful crop I decided not to work it in green, but let it mature and combine the seed.

The harvest was excellent, and we made good money. So good I decided to grow clover again the next year, even though a Botany professor friend told me you cannot make two good clover crops in a row. I really didn't believe him; after all, he wasn't a farmer. Guess what. I didn't make a good second crop even though rainfall was ample. All the weeds, Johnson grass, and native plants gave it too much competition. I learned clover can tolerate, even prefers, a tight, alkaline, low-organic-matter, and low-nitrogen soil. With its strong growth, deep taproot, and nitrogen nodules, it creates a soil condition, which is excellent for the other species of plants. They are then able to compete for moisture, sunlight, and root oxygen.

During the fourth year on the new farm, we started growing vegetables. They did okay, but we had our share of insect problems. The soil was still out of balance-too much undecomposed organic matter tying up nitrogen and no humus to fall back on. Even though I had a good railroad job, we couldn't afford any more barren years on the farm. We kept going with vegetables, about 15 acres at a time, and we saw an improvement each year.

We rotated the vegetables with a fall planting of half-and-half elbon rye and vetch seed. Then six to eight weeks before spring vegetable planting we worked in a strip of cover crop to prepare a seed bed. We didn't farm a continuous field, but did it in twenty-two or forty-four row strips (our sprinkler system covered twenty-two rows). We left an equal size strip of cover crop, which would be planted in vegetables in the fall or following spring. The strip farming method gave us a good beneficial-to-troublesome insect ecology and the cover crops served as windbreaks.

Inside the twenty-two row strip, we didn't always plant solid either, but did some companion planting, such as legume and non-legume vegetables in two row strips each. Our cover crops were not worked in deep; we shredded them down with a brush hog, then chisel, and then harrowed several times to prepare a seed bed. We learned we couldn't plant a summer legume cover crop because of cotton root rot, so we stayed with the vetch/rye-vegetable rotation through the winter. It worked well. The insect problems got fewer, and the quality of the vegetables continued to increase.

We sold a lot of our produce to natural food stores that made carrot juice. At first they complained our carrots didn't quite make the quality taste the California organic carrots did. But by the fifth year of our production, they said our carrots were just as good. By the seventh year, they preferred our carrots over the California carrots.

For our soil type and location, the Ceral (Elbon) rye-vetch is probably the perfect cover crop combination. Both grow well in the winter and in our alkaline, calcerous soil. The rye has a very fibrous root, is a strong grower, never freezes, and is an excellent nematode deterrent. The vetch, a legume, has a taproot; it feeds much deeper than the rye. With the rye taking the nitrogen from the soil, the nodal bacteria on the vetch root must take most of its nitrogen from the air. We also learned to mow the cover crop with the shredder set about eight inches high right after the rye shoots up the seed stem and before it opens. This stimulates it into more growth as it tries to complete its life cycle. That process seems to extend the life of the rye. Also, each mowing gives the vetch sunlight and allows it to grow thicker. In the first years when the soil nitrogen content was low, the vetch could compete, but as the soil got richer each year, the rye outgrew it. The mowing made both plants grow thicker and when you worked them in, you had much greater tonnage of organic matter and much more nitrogen than if you had grown either plant alone.

In areas where we didn't intend to grow vegetables, we let the vetch and rye go to seed, and let it stand through the spring and summer. It helped smother the Johnson grass and other weeds. In addition, we got the many benefits of a mulch on the soil. Come October, we disked shallow, and we had next year's cover crop planted.

When we worked the soil, we never turned it over. We used a shredder to chop up large cover crops, then chiseled as deep as we could, then used the disk harrow. We always kept the organic matter as close to the surface as possible. That is the natural soil profile. When you bury organic matter too deep, the decomposing microbes can't get enough oxygen, and the fermentation makes methane gas. We did haul manure when available and when time permitted, and we usually went straight to the fields with it unless weather or crops didn't permit. In that case, it was piled in giant piles to keep nutrients from leaching away when the pile got wet.

With the cover crop rotation and a limited amount of manure, we could keep the organic content and nitrogen in a good condition, but soil tests still showed the soil was low in phosphate. We tried rock phosphate even though the extension service said it wouldn't work. We had to learn the hard way. Two tons per acre broadcast didn't show much production increase, but we accidentally learned that if we put the phosphate in strips or bands in the bottom of the rows and put the seed or transplant right on it, we could double, even sometimes more than double, production.

By banding the phosphate, the alkaline soil couldn't get to all of it and lock it up. And the roots can grow right in the phosphate and take what they need of it and the other minerals it contains. We also applied a natural humate that was mined in the Alpine, Texas, area. We applied one thousand pounds per acre. We didn't have a control to accurately gauge production increase, but it seemed to really enhance quality. Even with a good organic content, the high pH of the soil dropped very little, but the plants could tolerate the alkalinity better.

Besides vegetables, we grew pecan and fruit trees. The pecans were well adapted; they needed water and not much more. The fruit trees were something else we really had to experiment with. Some varieties couldn't tolerate the high pH of 7.7 to 8.5 at all; they just turned yellow unless a heavy mulch over the whole root system was always maintained. From that we learned that any fruit tree we mulched with compost produced much better and didn't have wormy fruit. We used as much as one- to two-cubic yards of compost per tree. This wasn't economical, but we could have high-quality organic fruit from an area where most fruit trees don't readily adapt.

Keeping our farm all organic not only made it more fun, safer, and more challenging but exciting too. Fertility increased, production increased, and insect problems decreased each year. Potato beetles were a problem on both farms when we first started, and we hand-picked a few to give their natural enemies the upper hand, but each year we saw a decline, and by the seventh or eighth year, they completely vanished. The squash bugs were another problem. In the beginning, we used some sabadilla dust for control. Their numbers also declined each year, but more slowly than the potato beetles.

We had an assortment of other troublesome bugs and they too steadily declined. You could watch the soil fertility definitely play a role in their numbers. The other problems we had were viruses that were brought in with transplants, to which there is no known cure, organic or chemical. The only control is prevention, but even when we got a virus, we could make a crop. Production was directly related to soil fertility.

We no longer farm as large as we did. With the compost business we found an easier way to make money. But one thing we did learn: it was easier to farm organically on a hundred acre operation than it was on the eight-acre farm. The larger environment you have control of, the better you can work with Nature. You don't have a close neighbor spraying and possibly fouling up the environment. Our farm was a success, even considered so by my agricultural extension friends, and everything we did to boost production was a natural practice that is feasible on any size farm.

One of the best proofs that our soil was fertile was that the neighbors' farm animals were always looking for a weak spot in the fence to crawl through and graze on our side. Our farm animals never cared to go over to their side. Through the years, the lesson I have learned is that each farm has its own unique environment that must be studied to find the best adapted plants and trees, missing nutrients, methods of tillage, planting dates, and all the other things that spell success.

Mother Nature is your best teacher; she has much to reveal and has never-ending patience. There is no limit to the heights of education in her University.

 

The Garden-Ville Method - Lessons in Nature