Seventy years ago, when I was a kid, there were two main types of farmers. The conventional farmers didn’t use chemical fertilizers or sprays. They all plowed their fields in the fall. They used conventional “timed” cultivation to kill grass and weeds. Some still worked with horses and every farmer cut their grain with the binder, sometimes horse-drawn. And farmers helped each other in the fall with threshing and corn cutting because it took between six and ten men to make up a threshing gang. Very few liked corn cutting with an old horse-drawn, single-row corn binder that cut the corn in the field, bound it with twine into very green, heavy sheaves about eight feet high. They had to be manually picked up and stooked into upright stooks of eight or 10 sheaves. Then came the hard work of picking up the stooks about a week later and loading the sheaves onto a wagon crossways.
Then more hard work. After the wagon load of sheaves was brought to the silo, they were unloaded, again by hand, onto the conveyor that fed them into the corn cutter, driven by a tractor that another neighbour owned, and blown up into the silo by a large fan on the corn cutter. Four or six knives attached to the fan cut the corn stocks into one-inch pieces. There were three or four men up in the silo to “tramp” the silage. Seventy years ago, it was too expensive for each farmer to own their own corn blower pipes, so they were taken from farm to farm and put up before corn cutting, taken down after and moved to the next farm.
A few years later, when a few neighbours purchased a tractor-pulled corn harvester, corn cutting became much easier. Farmers enjoyed going from farm to farm threshing and corn cutting because it was kind of a competition to see which farm served up the best meals. Within a year or two, everyone knew who the best cook was.
Switching from threshing to combining took a few years. When the threshing mill was at the barn, the farmer not only got all the grain and straw, but he also got all the chaff, which was the most absorbent bedding. The combine was faster and less labour intensive, but most of the chaff was lost in the field. When the first rotary combines arrived, many farmers didn’t like them because they chopped up the straw, and much of it stayed in the field because balers couldn’t pick up the short pieces. If grandpa could see the forty-foot combines or the twelve-row corn harvesters that are in the fields today, he would be totally amazed.
Today, conventional farmers use an array of chemical fertilizers and sprays to make crops grow larger, with fewer weeds and less tillage. (we sold our last moldboard plow about 30 years ago!) This minimum tillage and no-till way of cropping has been made possible with the use of more chemical sprays to kill off the vegetation. This reduces over-drying the land and doesn’t disturb the life in the soil that lives at different depths, though some of those chemical sprays do kill off a percentage of the micro bacteria (healthy soil has about a billion micro bacteria and other micro-organisms in every teaspoon of topsoil).
Yesterday’s conventional farmer has become today’s organic farmer who does not use chemical sprays and is very limited to which lime or organic fertilizer they can use. Many of today’s organic farmers can achieve higher yields than farmers who use chemicals extensively. Organic farmers have continued to become very well informed about the health of the life in the soil and the advantages of mixed agriculture where there is a mix of animal farming and crop farming.
Although chemicals used on farms have been monitored by various environmental agencies in both the U.S.A. and Canada, some of the testing has been given to the same companies that sell the GMO seeds and the chemicals that farmers spray with. During the last 30 years, suspicion has arisen about the health safety of some of the chemicals that farmers have designed their cropping plans around. Some of my scientific friends who have spent their lives working for university and government labs, now that they are retired are beginning to release information that they could not talk about before. We are learning about reports that had to be reviewed and published in other countries because former government departments refused to allow them to be released here. Some information that was gathered in our own provincial hospitals was banned from being released. Some of those most-used chemicals have been released only with government information that was tested a decade ago.
Rumors are circulating that some of our farmers’ most reliable chemicals may not be on the market within two years because of many million-dollar court cases that didn’t go the way the defendant wanted. Years of plant breeding and decisions have been made because of that one chemical.
Fifty years ago, an old farm friend of mine told me that once that chemical arrived, conventional plant breeding that was based on yield, stock strength, dry down, etc. was replaced by the development of varieties that were compliant with that one chemical. A growing number of health issues – cancer, digestive, and even mental – have been linked to that one chemical. Because at least two generations of farmers in North America have built their practices around that one chemical, if it has to be replaced, food prices might go up significantly until farmers get re-educated and learn how to farm without that chemical. But don’t expect the owners of the pharma company that manufactures that chemical to compensate you for the higher food prices.
Farmers in many other countries in the world have never used that chemical and still have surplus food. Foods or oils that are made from corn, soy, canola, sugar beets, wheat, rice, etc. may be the most affected! Keep informed!
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
