An old farming friend once said, “You’ve never really farmed until you’ve walked down a gravel road kicking stones, wondering where the next dollar will come from.”
In May 2022, a lot of consumers and farmers (farmers are consumers too) will be second guessing — what can we do without?
Some foods are more dense with nutrients than others. When we walk down the aisles in the grocery store, we should . . .
think of that. Charts that list nutrient density are easy to find on the Internet. Vegetables grown in your garden are usually higher in nutrients than foods grown on a super, large commercial farm.
Farmers have read my previous columns, when I mentioned “the seven bank accounts of a farmer.” The most important one is the soil on the farm. Soil is like a bank account. When it is well balanced with all the essential nutrients and soil life it can sustain the farmer for a year without adding much fertilizer. A soil that is lacking in a couple essential nutrients is like a bank account that is low in funds. A soil that is low in copper will lower the availability of nitrogen to the crop. A soil low in calcium will not let the crops get the best use of phosphorus. Use of some herbicides will reduce the availability (tie up) certain micro-nutrients, even if the soil test indicates that they are in the soil.
A regular crop rotation will increase micro-biology life in the soil and return higher yields than straight grain farming. Manure should be buried before you can smell it. What you smell is nitrogen escaping into the atmosphere.
Farmers should use GPS soil testing where each hector is tested separately. Sometimes one end of a field treats much different than the other. One year I saved enough money in fertilizer by GPS soil sampling to pay for GPS testing on the farm. Even if the farm is GPS tested every five years, it allows the farmer to see how much more even the tests get. Now with seed corn at $400/bag and fertilizer at $1000/tonne, the farmer could have $15,000 in the planter when he goes to the field.
Some farms now use variable rate seed planting and fertilizer application that changes according to the GPS map loaded into the computer in the tractor. Some of those big tractors, combines or choppers can hold 1,000 litres of fuel so farmers don’t just drive up the road for a joy ride.
When I was a kid and we always killed our own beef, grandma always made big pots of beef-barley-vegetable soup before the dog got the soup bone. Mom made homemade porridge from three or four kinds of grains, a sliced apple, four or five kinds of dried fruit and cinnamon and nutmeg, which was to die for. Nowadays, the cereal box is worth more than the grain inside it. When grandma made leftovers for supper, it was a treat.
That $400 seed corn, the $1,000/tonne fertilizer and that two dollar fuel that farmers planted the crop with will reflect on all food prices next fall. Many farmers today use reduced tillage or no-till but then an extra trip over the field will be required with that $40/gallon herbicide.
You will probably see more farmers planting a cover crop into grain or corn fields before fall. This will reduce erosion and water runoff and give some added organic matter to incorporate into the soil in the spring. A healthy soil contains between 100 million and one billion bacteria per teaspoon of topsoil. They are the little guys who produce nutrients that crops can use for free. Let’s be good to them.
