Gene Logsdon: Using Food As Medicine…

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 David Fast Food

From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I will probably get beaten over the head with one of the best-selling diet books, but I really doubt that we can eat our way to good health. I don’t want to sound opposed to the idea of food as medicine. I just don’t believe it anymore.  I made it to 80 in fine shape and what ails me now is something no food faith healer has a diet to counteract.

I have put my faith in fresh food from my own farm and garden, untouched by the factory food industry. But of course, I sin regularly by eating at fast food restaurants all over. Bob Evans was a friend of mine and when we ate at one of his establishments, it was so amusing to see how he would go through the menu and tell me what he considered to be good and what was not so good.  He lived into his 90s on all that fat pork sausage he became famous for.

Organic farming is surely the more economical and environmentally sane way to raise food. But I do not think that certified organic food is necessarily any more healthful than other food which gets me in real trouble with the members of my own choir. If Carol sprinkles insecticidal powder on the potato plants or else we won’t have any potatoes, our garden food can’t be sold as certified organic. I understand the necessity of the rules to keep everyone honest, if only they did,  but I surely doubt that our 90 percent organic vegetables are any less healthful, all things considered, than food shipped in, courtesy of fossil fuel, from a “certified organic” farm 2000 miles away. I guess I’m a food atheist.

Look at all the diet fads that have sprung up and sprung down in the last 80 years.

Gene Logsdon: Lawns Of Purple and Gold

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From GENE LOGSDON

Rain and good old-fashioned laziness kept us from mowing the lawn until the first week of May this spring. By then the yard was so beautiful with wild flowers, I didn’t want to mow, but if I waited any longer I’d have to make hay out if it. As the photo above shows, major parts of the lawn had exploded in yellow dandelions, purple violets, whitish spring beauties and pinkish Quaker ladies. Other areas were blooming with wild phlox, grape hyacinths, daffodils, white violets, trillium, toadshade, mertensia, bluebells and even some vagrant tulips. I daresay no horticultural display, requiring hours of skilled work, could have produced a flower garden any prettier. In fact, I doubt very much that human handiwork could achieve such a garden, no matter how much effort and skill were put to the task. All these flowers come up every year without any help other than not mowing them until they are mature. Only nature could produce such a striking carpet of gold, blue, purple, white, pink, maroon and green grass. Who could want to mow such a lovely landscape?

Almost everyone would, that’s who. The Lawn Culture of modern civilization forever amazes me. Green swards of clipped grass are beautiful, no doubt about it, and quite necessary in many instances. Wherever we quit mowing close to the woods we live in, sapling trees spring up five feet tall in two years.

Gene Logsdon: Once A Farm Boy, Always…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I was sort of shocked by an ad in a recent New York Times Sunday magazine which I read regularly. It showed photos of a magnificent new high rise apartment and the surrounding skyline of the city, also magnificent. The building’s form was awesomely grotesque with the floors seemingly piled on top of each other rather haphazardly, not stacked straight and square, jutting into the sky as if in a careless, random flirtation with the natural environment. Most of the walls were glass which added to a feeling that this was not a building at all but just a dream of a building. I am sure the whole affair was a triumph of architectural design but instead of being awed by it, I felt fear and discomfort. The building looked like it was going to topple over in the first strong wind. In fact the whole scene suggested impermanence and instability to me. My main thought was wondering where all the power came from to energize those zillions of electric lights sparkling unnecessarily across the cityscape.

As I studied the photos, my agrarian upbringing struck me with renewed conviction.

Can Wee Little Businesses Save the Nation?

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From GENE LOGSDON

Both political parties and both capitalism and socialism spout lots of support for “small business.” Maybe this is where we can bring the country back together again. But I put quotes around “small business” because the Census Bureau and the Small Business Administration have exceedingly murky notions about what “small” means.

By the Census Bureau’s way of counting, there are some 27 million small businesses in the U.S. Among these, there are various yardsticks by which to tell if a business is small enough to fit the category. To be considered “small,” a business in the service sector or in retailing can’t take in over $21 million. A farm business is small if it takes in less than $9 million. If you want to use number of employees as a measure, a business is small if it hires no more than 500 people. In manufacturing, you are still small with 1500 employees.

You can see my problem(s). There is certainly a big difference between having four employees and having 1500 or between taking in a half million dollars in receipts and $21 million. A fresh market farmer who has sales of several hundred thousand dollars surely is going to have a different notion of smallness than the grain farmer who is taking in $9 million. This all becomes more than something just sad or laughable when the government, deftly run behind the scenes by corporate business, starts handing out tax breaks and subsidies.

Gene Logsdon: Sacred Springs

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From GENE LOGSDON

A clear spring bubbling up to the surface of the earth was once one of nature’s greatest gifts to humans, holy wells by whatever meaning you give those words. Having your own clean, unpolluted water “on tap” without much effort or expense was a priceless treasure. Significantly ancient sacred springs honored in “pagan” rituals remained holy even after they and the people who used them were Christianized.

I honor all springs as holy. It is one of the few things I have craved to own all my life, even more than a rather unholy Thunderbird in 1955. I had a better chance of owning a spring too, and came close. In college days, our seminary buildings were surrounded by a huge marsh along the Minnesota River that was entirely fed by clear, clean, cold spring water full of trout and watercress. All our water came from there. We also used it occasionally to cool the forbidden beer we “borrowed” from the faculty’s supply.

Springs to this day ooze up rather invisibly in the bed of the creek that runs through our farm and that is why it does not dry up in August like other creeks in the neighborhood. In earlier days, the land roundabout the creek was a veritable paradise of springs and the creek was full of all kinds of aquatic life, even mussels that only disappeared a few years ago.

Gene Logsdon: Unexpected Good Results Make Me Look Smart…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Over the years, gardening and farming have taught me to be pessimistic. I’m the guy who invariably says, when a really nice day arrives, “we’ll pay for it.” We are not in control. How often I have seen two farmers do the same thing but on different days. One makes a profit and the other doesn’t. The one is considered smart and the other not so smart when much of the time it’s pure luck.

So when nature allows me to look smart, I play the part with gusto while I can. Tomorrow it might all blow up in my face. At the moment I am basking in the sunshine of having put one over on my archenemy, chickweed. No significant event here, but satisfying nonetheless.

Optimists should love chickweed. It has many quasi advantages. If I had a washout I’d seed it to chickweed and stop the erosion in two years even if it were big enough to swallow a school bus. To the optimist there is no better winter cover crop than chickweed and if you are very clever, you can sometime use it for pasture here in our godforsaken cold northern winters. Also, it makes a decent salad and an effective salve for skin rashes.

So why do I hate the stuff? It’s taking over our garden, that’s why. Unlike good, honest weeds, it will grow whenever the temperature gets much above freezing and so luxuriates when the ground is too wet to cultivate with anything except maybe dynamite. I know gardeners who are otherwise mild, patient and forgiving enough to endure even jayhawker politicians, but who have finally resorted to flamethrowers to annihilate the weed. Doesn’t work very well however.

Gene Logsdon: Another Shoe Drops In The Global Warming Debate

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Despite the scolding some of you have given me, I still don’t think science has explained worldly global warming any better than religion has explained otherworldly hell. But the debate has taught me something. While scientists like to point out, correctly I think, that theologians are influenced more by ideology not facts, when I accuse them of falling into the same trap, they don’t like it one bit.

Allan Savory is a world-recognized expert and advocate of scientific pasture farming. Lots of you have heard him speak or read his writings, I’m sure. He has recently given a profoundly awesome speech (posted here on Ukiah Blog). He admits in his talk that he once made a really terrible scientific mistake. (How often will you ever hear a theologian say that?) He lives and works mostly in Africa in the vast arid regions there that to an Ohioan look like desert. Quite a few years ago now, he and fellow scientific experts on desertification became convinced that overpopulations of wild animals were overgrazing these dry regions (rain falls four months and then eight months of no rain) causing the grasslands to deteriorate into barren desert. They made a decision to kill 40,000 elephants and did it. But instead of improving the grassland, desertification got worse. Once more the scientific faith in the infallibility of numbers was proven wrong.

For years, Savory has tried to find the right answer.  He now thinks he has found it, and believe me, it will pickle your brain. I can’t believe that he is totally correct but his evidence is rather convincing. The way to turn deserts back into green grass and flowing rivers, he maintains, is to fill this land with cows, like it once was with wild animals. His research gives quite astounding evidence

Gene Logsdon: Big Farms Going Belly Up Again?

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I often wonder if the people who read my meanderings through the pastoral world care about news about big farmers going broke. We probably should care, but I wouldn’t blame those who didn’t. Big business, big government, and big farmers have forged an agricultural economy that is not sustainable. Everybody knows it. We have watched economic bust follow every economic boom regularly over the years. Why not just accept it all as the price of human greed and go our separate ways. But I can’t help being fascinated, the way rattlesnakes fascinate me.

What brings me to this subject (again) is the news that a huge farm— the Stamp Farm of 46,000 acres in Michigan— declared bankruptcy recently. I watch DTN/Progressive Farmer on the Internet for my daily information on farming. Its report, “No Farm Too Big To Fail,” by Marcia Karley Taylor, March 25, 2013, gives the names and numbers and details but I’ll just dwell on the part that is of interest to me. The farm grew to this huge size with borrowed money. The last couple of years, economists have assured us that the farm expansion to huge size was nothing to worry about because farmers were buying land with saved money, not borrowed money. That was not the whole truth (I don’t think it was even half true and said so often). Not taken into account was the huge amount of money farmers were borrowing that was going into land rents and new equipment. These big, fast-growing farms are called, in ag circles “alpha” farms to distinguish them from big farms that have grown large more slowly and conservatively with mostly earned money, not borrowed money. So we have the same old story, over and over again, of people borrowing too much money. Thus it shall ever be, I guess.

Gene Logsdon: Horse Filet Mignon. Yum.

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From GENE LOGSDON

Recently, as everyone knows by now, horse meat was found in Swedish meatballs being sold in various parts of Europe, and the Great Horse Scandal of 2013 was off and (pardon me) galloping. From the consternation being voiced in some quarters, you would think that human flesh had been found in the sausages. Of course if the label says the meat is all beef then it ought to be all beef, not flecked with pork to incense the Muslims and Jews, and definitely not contaminated with old Dobbin’s remains to send British and American eaters gasping to the vomitorium.  Also, there’s a possibility that the horsemeat might come from a horse that had been treated with the anti-inflammatory medicine, phenylbutazone  (bute), which is verboten for human consumption. But as I read the fine print from the FDA, you have a better chance of being hit by a pebble from a passing meteor than getting stoned by bute in horsemeat-“contaminated” meatballs.  Did anybody get sick? Did the meatballs taste bad? Did they maybe taste better? Did anybody know they were eating horsemeat until they were told?

Nothing is so fascinating as the way human culture tries to manipulate the food chain to serve whatever religion or tradition is in vogue. In France, horsemeat is served in fine restaurants. In England a chef would have better luck serving up hedgehog than horse.

Humans will eat anything to make a point or to avoid going hungry. Being ultra-omnivorous is probably why we have lasted so long in the food chain. In Frank G, Ashbrook’s “Butchering, Processing and Preservation of Meat,” the book I use as a guide when butchering everything from hogs to raccoons and muskrats

Gene Logsdon: Here’s Mud In Your Sty…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Mud is the most appropriate icon (how I hate that overused word anymore) of the struggle between humans bent on making money in farming and a nature bent on stopping them. Mud in springtime turns barnyards into forbidding quagmires that can swallow pigs. I say this with some authority. As a child I got stuck in the mud behind the barn and had to wait, screaming in panic, for my father to extricate me. Many years later, a farmer told me, aghast, about visiting a neighboring farm where a cow was standing up to her belly in mud. She was dead.

Mud is the main obstacle to success in year-round pasture farming. Heavy cows can turn a thawing pasture sod into a sea of quicksand in March. And now that tractors have four wheel drive, they will haul hay out to cattle without getting stuck. Instead they cut big ruts and ruin the pasture that way.

So acute is the problem of burying monster farm machines in muddy fields that the Purdue Extension Service has put out a 96 page manual called “Extracting Stuck Equipment Safely.” I can give you a two-sentence summation of what it says: When you bury a huge tractor or combine, call in a professional wrecking crew to pull it out even though it will cost you hundreds of dollars. It serves you right for being so stupid.

Gene Logsdon: Burning Brush Piles…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

March brings the job I enjoy the most, fittingly for this drab season. I burn brush piles that have been collecting from cutting firewood over the past year. Authors who write books about nature are sometimes not pleased by brush pile burners like me. They want us to keep the piles around for wildlife protection. I used to think that, too, and put that advice in at least one of my early books. But I’ve learned that the best way to guarantee that your garden will be ravaged by wildlife is to keep piles of brush nearby. Now that much of the wildlife around us is on a population binge, it doesn’t need protection. And brush piles have a way of over-populating too. Besides, hawks and owls might starve if their prey can duck too easily into brush piles to escape them. I am for owls and hawks, especially owls that prey on feral cats let loose in the countryside by irresponsible pet owners.

The ideal brush burning day is windless so no sparks or flaming leaves blow away and start a fire where you don’t want one. A wee bit of the breeze is nice to drive the flames into the pile. Best if the ground has a slight covering of snow or at least the leaves or grass roundabout are frozen or wet. If not, rake away combustibles from around the brush pile a few feet so the fire doesn’t get away from you. I sometimes set a couple of buckets of water around just in case. It is safer to start a small fire and pile the brush on it gradually as it burns so as not to have a really big blaze at any time. If you have green brush to burn, start the fire with dry brush and pile on the green after the fire is well established. Big piles should be burned out in a bare field safely away from woodland.  But you all know that.

There is an art to everything. The experienced brush burner piles the brush with the butt ends altogether.

Gene Logsdon: Shit Makes Good Medicine

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit recently announced a startling breakthrough. Transplanting feces from healthy humans into the digestive tracts of people suffering from a deadly bacteria (Clostridium difficile) cured 90% of the patients. This bacteria causes some 14,000 deaths a year. The feces were transplanted during colonoscopy or through a nasogastro tube. Apparently healthy bacteria in transplanted stools are able to fight off the harmful bacteria and reinstate a healthy environment in the gut.

This news is heavenly music to me because of the shock and disbelief that parts of my book, Holy Shit, invariably cause. In radio interviews, (where I am asked not even to mention the name of the book, horrors) I try to argue that bodily wastes from healthy people is healthy stuff and makes great fertilizer. This often causes earnest consternation in the interviewers because we have been taught that our bodily wastes are vile, nasty, disease-causing material. Even scientists and health professionals who know better, wave cautionary red flags all over the place at the idea of using human waste for fertilizer.

Because of our cultural attitudes toward bodily waste, society is spending billions of dollars trying to make the stuff disappear when in fact it is worth billions of dollars as plant food. If it were white and smelled like roses, there would not be a problem. I am hopeful that this new discovery will finally persuade people to change their minds.

Gene Logsdon: The Fallibility of Numbers

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From GENE LOGSDON

Those of you convinced that global warming is a grave danger should try to forgive skeptical farmer types like me. We deal with potential destructive weather change every day of the growing season. Feeling helpless in the face of an uncaring human society is part of our daily lives.

When Budd Shepherd said that global warming has become “a belief and an ideology… it stimulates the god center of peoples’ brains,” he expressed my opinion dead on. I think what is happening today is that science is assuming the mantle of religion, and climate change is only one example.

I looked up the links some of you kindly suggested, as I have looked at numbers about climate change before. My problem is that my brain is not capable of comprehending those numbers and I don’t think yours is either. When I am told that there are an estimated total of 210 gigatons of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere I have to wonder, especially since science has not yet determined the total size of our “space.” My first question is who is doing the estimating? A gigaton is a BILLION tons. I can’t wrap my brain around one gigaton let alone a flock of them. Even a tiny miscalculation could mean a huge difference. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is reckoned at around 391 ppm at the moment, as I read the numbers. Between 2000 and 2009 that amount increased by 2 ppm. That is an infinitesimally small amount in terms of parts per million over nine years.  Am I to be shunned and criticized if I wonder whether such a slight change is significant or if there could be a very teensy weensy error in the calculations and in fact the ppm might have decreased by 2 or remained the same? The scientific community is demanding of me a blind faith in its numbers when there is reason to be skeptical.

But there are better examples of how science is changing into theology. I have been trying to wade through the literature about the discovery of what scientists call a “Higgs boson.” Actually, they don’t think they discovered it yet, after all the hullabaloo. The language of the Higginites is ludicrously obfuscating. A Higgs boson, by definition, is a sub-atomic particle. It has no size. Right away red flags go up in my brain

We Need More “Perspeck”

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From GENE LOGSDON

When I was a greenhorn journalist starting to work for Farm Journal magazine in Philadelphia many thousands of years ago, I got all wrought up over news that my hometown state of Ohio was having a crop failure in the cornfields. I wanted to write an alarming piece on how the grain markets were in for a real purge. One of the older editors sat me down in his office and gently said: “Gene, you gotta have more ‘perspeck’ on the news. It’s all about ‘perspeck’.” I had not heard of that word, but understood it was his shorthand for perspective. “The entire corn crop of Ohio could fail and it would be only a drop in the bucket compared to Illinois and Iowa and their surrounding states,” he informed me. And then he showed me the statistics to prove it.

Society today needs more perspeck. We have all become paranoid about everything. One doomsday prediction after another throws a shadow over even the brightest news. When I try to relieve the gloom with a little humor, I get scolded for being naïve or ignorant or irresponsible. I am inclined, for example, to make snide wisecracks about global warming. I am supposed to stand here on the edge of eternity, quailing and moaning about future flooding of the coastal plains, future deserts in the Great Plains, future obsolescence of the airplanes, future end of stock market gains, and future destruction of the food grains, all because the polar ice is melting and the oceans have risen a couple of inches (actually I just read that it is really a half inch) in the last twenty years. Sure global warming is a worrisome fact and no doubt humans are making it worse. I will quit making snotty remarks about it the very second I see a significant number of people, or even an insignificant number, reduce their fuel-burning traveling habit by one mile or when I see one government reduce by one gallon the amount of fuel it burns in pursuit of war or votes. I will quit making snotty remarks when I could find a scientist who can tell me with accuracy how much CO2 is being emitted into the earth’s atmosphere by natural sources on any particular day or year. No one, as far as I can find out, has any accurate perspeck on that amount. People are standing around, living exactly like they have always lived

Gene Logsdon: Pigweed Is Bringing Us To Our Knees…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Awhile back I wrote here about how Palmer amaranth, a pigweed native to the Southwest, was marching northward into the kingdom of corn and soybeans because it has become immune to most herbicides. That was only a small part of the Great Pigweed Uprising. Other versions of the plant (there are lots of them) like our own common Midwestern natives, Amaranthus tuberculatus and Amaranthus rudis (don’t I sound airoodyte?) have also gone resistant. Out in the country, some farmers call it water hemp and others call it red root, but in either case these weeds have developed a fondness for Roundup and other popular weedkillers. You won’t see headlines in the agribusiness press that say “MONSANTO RETREATING BEFORE INVADING PIGWEED HOARDS” but that is sort of what is happening. Weed specialists are seriously talking about gangs of workers patrolling the corn and soybean rows hoeing out the weeds. I like to read Pam Smith’s column (she is one of the few agribusiness writers with lots of heart) online at DTN-Progressive Farming and she refers to the latest in water hemp control as the old Santa Claus treatment:  Walk the rows and hoe, hoe, hoe.

Giant ragweed is also showing resistance (you can get the whole long, sad story online easily enough). This weed can grow up taller than corn on good bottom land and can stop a combine in its tracks. As I have railed here before, both pigweed and giant ragweed have excellent food value as grain and forage, so we are obviously faced with an almost amusing irony. It would be nearly impossible for large scale farming to continue without herbicides but the weeds we must kill could, in a different world, be just as nutritional for food and forage as corn and soybeans.

I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I use Roundup. It works wonderfully well to kill multiflora rose in fence rows. I battled that pernicious plague for years by hand and often withdrew from the fray wounded and bloody. (You do know that it was the Soil Conservation Service that promoted that stuff in the 1950s.) Now I am getting my revenge. In my dotage, so to speak, I drive along with one hand guiding the four-wheeler and the other guiding the sprayer head.

Gene Logsdon: Yes, What Is Art Anyway?

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From GENE LOGSDON

The comments on the last post were so interesting that I can’t let the subject go. As Troy said, and many others echoed, who’s to say what is art and what is not. Maybe we should distinguish between human-made art and natural art. The everyday farm is full of examples of the latter, of wholly accidental art. Last fall, I found a golden maple leaf impaled on the branch of an ash tree. It surely took the wind a trillion tries to make that happen. I doubt whether any ash tree was ever so adorned before. When I break through ice freezing on the creek, I sometimes uncover on the bottom side the most marvelous crystal convolutions where the cold temperature is still freezing the running water into totally “unearthly” and “unnatural” formations against the under-surface ice. Spider webs, dripping morning dew and glinting in the rising sun, surely are art. On some evenings in winter, the setting sun paints the white oak tree trunks on the west-facing slope in our neighbor’s woods a most striking and “unnatural” orange color.

Everyone in our neighborhood was talking about

Gene Logsdon: The Artists In My Barn

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From GENE LOGSDON

Years ago, a popular folk story told of a farmer who went to a museum and discovered abstract art, especially free-form sculptures. Some of the latter looked vaguely familiar to him. Back home, doing chores, he realized why. The salt block his sheep and cows had been licking on looked remarkably like some of the sculptures in the museum. Hmmm. By and by he arranged to get one of his half-eaten salt blocks into an art display. The block, worked on for weeks by dedicated sheepish tongues, had been turned into a glistening white flow of curve and undulation, its evocative indentations and protrusions suggesting the erotic and exotic, a creative energy yearning to break loose from the chains of gross matter, a deft hint of the eternal verities… and all that horse manure that art critics know how to spread so well.

Yes, you guessed it. The sheep-sculpted salt block won first place in the art contest and someone paid a couple thousand dollars to take it home and display it proudly as an example of the grand height to which abstract art had climbed in these oh so modern times.

Never make too much fun of human folly. The craziest stories have a way of coming true. I just learned (a segment on NPR) that out in Oregon

Gene Logsdon: January Thaw

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

One of my favorite winter pastimes is scouting for the very earliest sign of new plant life as the days begin to lengthen. From other years, I had decided that winter aconites and snowdrops were the champions of the game called First Growth. Especially this year, these flowers bloomed on January 13th, unusual for northern Ohio. But the conditions were right: a rather mild early December and then six inches of snow on top of unfrozen ground. Then came a January thaw and the temperature got up into the 50s, even into the 60s.  The snow melted and voila! The protected yard next to the house suddenly came alive with yellow and white splashes of these two flowers. They were very cagey, however. They did not open the whole way, and so they might be able to withstand considerable cold weather sure to come again.

But, as gratifying as it was to see these early bloomers earlier than ever, they did not win this year’s championship game of New Growth. On the north side of the machinery shed, I was clearing away brush and small trees in December when I noticed lumps of moss in the building’s shade under the brushy growth, dark green from fall growth. But then suddenly in the first days of January, the dark green was suddenly overlain by light green new growth. (You can see it in the photo above. That rounded mound of moss

Gene Logsdon: My Woodpile Is Bigger Than Your Woodpile…

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From GENE LOGSDON

I tried to pull a sneaky little brag on all of you a few weeks ago when I used a photo of my woodpile on a post. The post wasn’t even about woodpiles exactly and I was, like, you know, uh, well, oh-by-the-way, pretending that I just happened to have this photo lying around and so I might as well use it.

But I did not fool friends, Jan and Andy, who operate a garden farm market in central Ohio. Sure enough, they soon sent me a photo of Andy’s latest woodpile, which is bigger than mine, daggone it anyway. (That’s it, pictured above.) I may have started something among the brotherhood of woodchoppers that I will regret.

Andy splits a whole lot more wood than I do because he and Jan use it not only to keep their house warm, but for boiling down maple syrup to sell at the farmer’s market in Bellefontaine, Ohio. I think of Jan and Andy as Ohio’s successors to New England’s famed Scott and Helen Nearing. Their lifestyles are quite similar. According to what I’ve read, Scott continued to split wood until he was a hundred years old. Then he set the maul down, sat himself down, and announced that he had enough wood split to last him out. What amuses me most about him was how he considered himself something of a socialist, in a philosophical sense anyway, which got him in trouble with some people. But when he and Helen got into the sugar maple business, he turned out to be as consummate a capitalist as anyone you care to name.

Gene Logsdon: Water Costs As Much As Gas

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

It is difficult for me to believe that people pay good money to buy water to drink and not complain at all. Eventually, I suppose, we will have to buy air to breathe. Yesterday, I watched with awe as a man emerged from a store bearing three big plastic bags jammed with plastic bottles of water. I asked him how much bought water costs these days. He said that with gas down to nearly $3.00 a gallon, the water costs about the same. I guess I should go to town more often so I can learn what progress is all about.

I still drink my well water and prefer it to bought water, but neither my children nor grandchildren agree. They don’t like my water’s whiff of sulfur which gives it character to my taste, the way a bit of Scotch does to a martini. Plus this kind of water is very good for the bowels. I often think of the seminary in Minnesota where I went to school once upon a time. It had previously been a health spa where wealthy people came to “take the water.” There were actually two kinds of water there. The sulfur water tasted and smelled like rotten eggs but was thought to be good for whatever ails you. From other springs issued what we called “iron water,” so hard that when poured, it sounded like you were emptying a log chain out of the bucket.

It has been my lot in life to become a sort of connoisseur of farm waters

Gene Logsdon: Cobbled Up Gates and Fences

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From GENE LOGSDON

The older (and lazier) I get, the more creative I become at putting up temporary fencing that ends up being permanent. Not so long ago I plugged a gap in a deteriorating pasture fence with a section of ancient spike-toothed harrow. The harrow is so old I call it Adam. Heaven knows how many acres Adam had leveled after the plow before he was retired to our tree grove. He thought his useful days were over, I’m sure. But desperate for a way to fix the fence in a hurry, I spied the rusty old soul leaning disconsolately against a hickory tree and knew he was just what the situation required. Now Adam has a whole new second career ahead of him and looks quite jaunty in his new role. In fact so well does his left section hold off the sheep that now his right section has become a fixture in another hole in the fence. Some enterprising soul might want to give this idea serious thought. There must be thousands of Adams rusting away in farm machinery graveyards far and wide. Start marketing what could be called Forever Fence.

Over the years, I have used all sorts of things to plug holes in fences or to serve as gates to the entrances of fields or barn pens.  Wooden shipping pallets make passable “temporary” fences and pens and if you know how to beg pathetically, you can often get pickup loads of them at factories. Out in the weather they last about five years which is forever enough for an old man. Four of them wired together in a square make very handy impromptu lambing pens. Three of them will do the same against a barn wall. If you have a lot of old baling wire (lengths of which I have also used to thread through rusted out sections of woven wire fence), you can wire a bunch of pallets to each other and set them up in a zigzag fashion to make a fence that doesn’t need posts.

Pounding Beef

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From GENE LOGSDON

I walked into the kitchen today and found my wife engaging in the primitive practice of pounding on a slab of round steak with the edge of a saucer. Every so often she would pause and sprinkle flour over the meat, then savagely attack it with the saucer again. I have witnessed this strange behavior for so many years, first by my mother and then by my wife, and I have generally taken it for granted. But suddenly it struck me as so Neanderthal that I should maybe ask some questions. But questioning someone who is pounding meat with a saucer can be dangerous. When my mother used to do it she had that same fierce look on her face that she had when killing a snake with a hoe. One learns to address beef pounders very humbly and gently because they are liable to be in a bad mood from having to do such base work. In fact, one of my millions of theories about the human race is that people who decide to pound beef with a saucer are already in a bad mood and are taking it out on the poor round steak.

“Honey, shouldn’t I be doing that?”

Cold stare. “No, you won’t do it right. Go out and bring in some potatoes if you want to help.”

I don’t want to do that either. “Why don’t you use the regular metal meat tenderizer?”

Even colder stare. “That thing doesn’t do the job. And the flour plugs up the teeth. Go get some potatoes out of the pit.”

Thus it shall always be.

I like to talk about pounded round steak in this holiday season of eating high on the hog—or cow— mostly because I love the stuff, and when Carol turns it into Swiss steak with onions and tomato sauce and all sorts of mysteries out of the herb cabinet, this lowly kind of cheap meat tastes as good to me as the best prime Porterhouse steak in Omaha.

Gene Logsdon: Another Advantage Of Backyard Hens

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I have a hunch that the following scene happens only on one farm in the whole wide world so pay attention. You are driving down a two lane highway in Ohio when you pass a farmstead with a chicken coop in easy view through your windshield. In front of the coop stands a middle-aged woman with a kind of vacant air about her, cracking an egg on a fencepost and gingerly letting the white stuff ooze off onto the ground to separate it from the yolk. She tosses the shell back to the hens to eat. By now you probably have slowed almost to a stop because surely the poor woman has lost her mind from the hectic pressures of modern farming. She seems to be rubbing the yolk between the palms of her hand. A dog laps at the egg white drooling to the ground. By the way, she is also barefoot.

Unless you are an artist, and then maybe only a certain kind of artist, you are not going to believe what is going on here. The woman in the hen yard is Pat Gamby who with her husband Steve, has been farming at this location for 22 years. This is your typical Midwestern dairy farm except that it is organic, but neither Pat nor Steve is typical in any ordinary sense of the word. Besides being a farmer, Pat is a professional artist who started drawing at age four and, without any formal training whatsoever, was actually painting pictures on commission when she was still in high school. Steve, besides being a farmer, played minor league baseball until he got smart and realized that farming (and playing softball on my team) was more fun. I’ve found excuses to put them in several of my books, most recently Holy Shit, so readers might be familiar with them already. I thought I knew them fairly well too until I heard about this crazy, barefooted woman breaking eggs on fence posts to feed her dog and tossing the shells out to feed her hens.

Gene Logsdon: Look Out, The World Is About To End Again…

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From GENE LOGSDON

Last summer I started to fall for the old Doomsday Disaster Doldrums again. It didn’t rain from the middle of May to September. Crops didn’t grow and pasture dried up. I was once more painfully reminded of how close we live to the brink of disaster at all times. The food cliff, if not the fiscal cliff, lurks just one misstep away, or so it seems. Of course the rains did come in September and more in October and now going into December, the pastures are lush and I don’t think I will have to feed hay until January. The latest weather roundup says rainfall in Ohio for the year is about normal. Ho hum.

I never learn. I got a good case of the DDDs in 1988 when it did not rain one drop here from April 11 until July 17. And I can remember my parents and grandparents in the 1930s despairing when it seemed that every other year the weather was taking us to the end of the world. And they didn’t have global warming to blame.

But it was back in the 1880s when the worst (so far) weather came our way. Our Sandusky River, here in northern Ohio, got a crust of ice on it in July, so the old papers say. A huge volcano had erupted in Indonesia in 1883 (Krakotoa) and it sent enough ash and debris into the atmosphere to shade the sun for several years even as far away as Ohio. But not many people here knew that and probably would not have believed it anyway. From every pulpit came the old DDD refrain: the end is nigh.

Gene Logsdon: What Is Space Anyway?

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From GENE LOGSDON

I just finished reading a pre-publication copy of  Paradise Lot, by Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates (out next year) that makes me wonder exceedingly about the meaning of what we refer to as “space.”  On only one tenth of an acre, the authors tell how they squeeze in 150 to 200 different kinds of food plants, including some in a pond and more in a greenhouse, all for year round eating in the north. From this “space” they are harvesting 400 pounds of perennial fruits and vegetables every year (some of which I have never heard of, like Rebecca violets) plus lots of annual vegetables. The book includes a detailed layout map showing how they do it, but I’m still finding it hard to believe. The best way I can think to describe their method is that they’ve eliminated space in their garden except for the pathways, which they are trying to fill with useful low-growing plants too. From now on, when someone asks me how we can prevent food scarcity forever I have a ready answer. Simply eliminate our preconceived notions of space. With work and knowhow, we can always find room to grow more food. Using the forest food methods of Paradise Lot, I have a hunch we could right now be growing all the food we need simply by eliminating all the space taken up by America’s lawns and filling it with food producing plants. If we run out of that space, there’s thousands and thousands of miles along all our roads which could be growing food or fiber.

Recently, we took our grandson back to college.

Gene Logsdon: Planting Rather Than Mining…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

In contemplative moments I like to think about all the manufactured products that could come from the soil surface rather than from deep underground. Today I was listening to a report on NPR about flutes made of bamboo. Bamboo is a marvelous example of how plants can replace metal and plastic. Asians even make bicycles out of bamboo and use it as scaffolding in construction work.

Bamboo is very invasive and I won’t try growing it after I saw what a weed it has become around Chadds Ford, Pa. where I used to visit often. But invasiveness is an interesting subject for contemplation too. If we decided to make bicycles and structural lumber out of bamboo, it would suddenly become a major resource rather than an invasive plant, would it not?

We could easily go back to baseball bats made of ash like the major leagues still use. The metal ones that have replaced wood in softball and amateur baseball drive the ball farther and break less, but the good ones are more expensive too. One reason the major leagues stick with wood is because metal bats can rocket the ball at lethal speeds back at the pitcher. Also they can render most of the major league ball parks obsolete because with a metal bat even I could knock the ball over the fence. In some ways the case for wood vs. metal in ball bats limns the whole debate about planting vs. mining. It all comes down to money.

Henry Ford made car bodies out of plasticized soybeans. Wood-paneled station wagons were once almost common. Good artificial limbs can be made out of willow. Osage orange has more tensile strength than steel. I have catalpa fence posts that were used for forty years (20 years each by my grandfather and uncle) and are still going strong for me. A friend of mine makes flutes out of various American native woods. We can all think of many such examples.

Gene Logsdon: Falling Leaves…

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From GENE LOGSDON

This time of year our inside window sills clutter up with tree leaves that Carol and I have found in our grove while walking to and from the barn and which are so pretty we just have to save them. At first we try to outdo each other in finding the brightest yellow-red-orange-gold maple leaf with still a little green in it. As the season advances, our choices become more eclectic, perhaps more abstract, favoring leaves with more somber purples and olive greens, or even with brooding browns and blacks along the veins or margin edges. Some of these are downright ugly in a way. My interest in human art paintings has followed a similar course over the years, going from bright and garish in the days of youth to earth tones in old age. In fact, walking to the barn in the fall becomes sort of like visiting an art gallery. Only the paintings in the woods are almost infinite in number, cater to every taste, and are free for the picking.

Now in mid-November, with all the bright and beautiful leaves faded away, I find myself admiring foliage rarely given much attention in fall coloring exhibitions. Sycamore leaves, for instance. This year, our sycamore mostly dried up and shed its leaves early. But way in the top of the tree, a few leaves hung on and are just now fluttering down in time for Thanksgiving table decorations. Their color is a mingling of muted mauve, olive and brown with rather metallic green veins that filigree out from the central stem to the lobe tips. Very arresting— my photo above doesn’t quite do them justice. They seem unreal, in fact, something that if an artist were to put it on canvas, would seem like fakery to sycamore-deficit viewers.

The late autumn leaf show takes a sort of radical turn for us. I see out the window at this very moment on Nov. 19 a little tree clad in bright green leaves amidst the somber brown grove around it.

Human Bodies For Fertilizer?

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From GENE LOGSDON

I thought I had an original idea recently only to find that thousands of others were way ahead of me. I got to thinking about cemeteries and their potential for garden farming while making death a little less abhorrent. That’s when I had this “new” idea that actually is very old but is now a new movement.

Have you heard about “green burials”?  A growing number of people want to be buried without toxic embalming fluids like formaldehyde, in a shroud or cardboard box or cheap, wooden, readily-biodegradable coffin. Since our bodies are going to decompose no matter what (even in mummification), why not let them return to life-giving humus naturally, thereby enriching the soil?

So I’ve been entertaining myself with a bizarre vision of cemeteries as gardens and orchards of lush food plants fertilized by all that nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, trace elements and organic matter that dead bodies would provide. Could human culture advance toward the true definition of immortality, the enfolding of our remains back into the food chain to contribute to the health of the environment even in death?

I see on Google that every year we are burying 90,000 tons of steel caskets, 14,000 tons of steel vaults, 2700 tons of copper and bronze caskets, 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete, and some 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid, mostly formaldehyde which destroys microbial life in the soil. Even if these numbers are not quite accurate, they make the point very well.

Gene Logsdon: Lima Beans Into November

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Bad weather almost always brings a few good results, something to hang on to in the time of adversity. After the extremely dry summer, rain came here again in September and October and nature reacted with a tremendous spurt of new growth. Sometimes I wonder if during drought the soil doesn’t store up energy that is then unleashed when moisture returns. Anyway, among various good effects of this spurting green revival, our pole lima beans decided to come alive with new growth and blossoms.  Aiding that spurt of growth, we suffered no killing frost going into November.  (The photo shows the pole beans after the last harvest, after frost did come on Nov. 5.)

So on October 27, with the “storm of the century” bearing down on us (seems like every year now we have the storm of the century), Carol and I were out in the cold wind harvesting the last of these late beans. We picked even the ones that we normally might leave to mature another day or two. The advantage of pole limas is that you can hold a pod up to the sky light without picking it and ascertain the size of the beans inside. The secret of a really tasty lima bean is to harvest it when it is just a little bigger than a man’s thumbnail which is difficult to determine any other way. By the time the bean is plump enough to feel with your fingers, it has past its tenderest, tastiest stage.

Shivering in the wind and with fingers turning blue

Better School Lunches Should Taste Better Too

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From GENE LOGSDON

Seems to me that if we want school kids to eat lettuce, broccoli, carrots, peas, green beans, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, whole wheat bread, fruit cocktail etc. etc., we have an obligation to make these foods taste as good as fast food hamburgers and French fries. MacDonald ‘s spent millions of dollars developing its French fry and now we want the kids to eat instead untried sliced, browned potatoes that I’m sorry to say, are not nearly as tasty. Ask any school kid.

Have you eaten a school lunch lately? I don’t want to criticize the cooks at all because they work hard and do the best they can, given the circumstances. About all they have to work with are mass-produced, canned products or “fresh” products from distant places. Commercially canned peas, green beans, or sweet corn taste awful to me and the fresh lettuce out of supermarkets is not very desirable either. Mechanical vegetable harvesters can’t handle peas and corn at their tenderest, most tasty stage and factory-processed food of whatever kind just isn’t as good as home-cooked. Just because bread is brown doesn’t mean it tastes good. Mass production equals mediocre taste and most school lunches are by definition mass-produced. When I ate school lunches with my grandsons on Grandparents’ Days, I noticed that most of the vegetables went right off the plates into the garbage buckets.

It’s good to see some new programs developing like the “National Farm To School” project and other efforts to link up local fresh fruits and vegetables with school lunch programs. An article in the Farm and Dairy magazine of October 11vreports that local food is being served in various counties in West Virginia (and I presume other states) and some cafeterias are actually cooking from scratch instead of heating up from cans. In one project, students planted and picked the beans that were fed to them in the cafeteria for two days. I have doubts that such dedication and pilot programs will continue, because school time occurs mostly when fresh garden produce isn’t available. But West Virginia’s Ag Department has thought of that too, and in some instances high tunnel greenhouses have become part of the effort to deliver local fresh food to schools through the winter.

Accompanying these programs there should be more experienced efforts employed in selecting good tasting vegetables and fruits. Everyone has his or her own taste, but I’m sure that those of us with long gardening experience will agree that most commercial sweet corn is harvested too late or served too stale. Peas are often picked too late, even from gardens where machines aren’t involved. Commercial peaches and tomatoes are picked too green. People complain to me that store-bought potatoes increasingly have an off taste now. I don’t know why, perhaps from being stored too long. Select varieties (Red Norland is my favorite but there are others) direct from the garden or even after four month storage, are so good. Likewise the taste of apples varies widely. I’ll bet a MacDonald hamburger that if children had access to the new Honey Crisp apple, they’d prefer it to candy.

Gene Logsdon: Hens Are Changing The Meaning of “Profit”

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

The most amazing cultural event of the 21st century, at least so far, may be the rise of the hen. And Henny Penny is not squawking that the sky is falling, like humans are, but how locally produced eggs and fried chicken are a main part of the pot of gold at in the end of the food revolution rainbow.

Forgotten are our old cultural icons of milk maid and cowboy, replaced by the backyard gardener surrounded by a lovely little flock of hens. The egg has even weathered the condemnation of cholesterol paranoia and is once more as honored at the breakfast table as a glass of wine is at dinner.

You see chickens just about everywhere these days: on magazine covers, in television ads, and all over Facebook where humans show them off to their friends like they do new babies. Hens saunter demurely across the manicured lawns of suburbs as well as the manure-peppered barnyards of rural homesteads. You hear them clucking and cackling in the background when news reporters interview Afghan or Iraqi villagers on the radio. I imagine they are saying something like “Cackle, cackle, why don’t you clucking Americans go home.”

Chickens are winning over the world again, as they have always done throughout so-called civilization because they are such a cheap and easy source of good food. So handily can they produce eggs

Gene Logsdon: A Small Thing But Maybe Not…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

All summer I raved and ranted at the squirrels that were eating the corn in my crib. I was particularly concerned because the drought seemed to be making sure this year’s crop was going to be a bust. I did not look forward to buying corn at drought-inflated prices just to keep squirrels fat eating my reserve supply. Eventually, we practically encased the whole crib in chicken wire. To no avail. Once a squirrel makes up its mind to get into something it will find a way even into a lead vault.

What is most infuriating about squirrels eating corn is how wasteful they are. They do not eat the whole kernel. They do not even eat half of it. They drill into the middle of the white heart of the kernel and with their incisor-like teeth extract a snippet hardly bigger than a flake of dandruff. Sitting on top of the ears of corn, they toss that kernel away like a drunk does an empty beer can, and snatch another off the cob. The wounded kernel then slips and slides down through the piled up ears of stored corn. Sometimes the wanton, fluffy-tailed rats jerk kernels from the cob and then drop them, eating nothing out of them at all. By summer’s end, the top layer of corn in the crib was only half-shelled cobs and the bottom layer mostly half eaten or whole kernels.

I realized on close examination that the half eaten kernels were really not even a third eaten and that there was still plenty of nutritive value left. I fed them to the chickens— at least I didn’t have to shell them off the cobs as I or the hens, usually do. The chickens ate the wounded kernels as well as they ate the whole ones and kept on laying eggs. Talk about a win-win situation. The squirrels got their fill and so did the hens.

Gene Logsdon: Using The Old Farm To Sell The New

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Historians like to say that we can’t “go back” to the past and that certainly is true in a general sort of way. But as a matter of fact, in farming circles, we are always “going back” one way or another. In every generation there are people who decide that “going back” is a way to escape what they dislike in the present and there are a whole lot of people, now and historically, who dislike what is going on in agriculture.

Today, we so-called “back to the landers” would rather say that we are going forward to the land and a new attitude toward farming. But the way we make our forward-looking local farm products appeal to consumers often harks back to the old agrarianism. For example, an appealing way to sell locally-grown whole grain products is to call your store or web site a “granary.” It has a sort of romantic ring to it that was hardly a part of the real thing back when every farm had one. Ours lasted until 1958 and the word was common in our everyday conversation. The “grain-ree,” as we pronounced it, was about 30 by 30 feet in size, built up off the ground so that it would be easier to keep rat-proof. Inside it was divided into bins in which we stored whole oats, wheat, and milled grains for the chickens and livestock. I would never have dreamed then that the word as well as the building would almost pass out of existence. Now, with the return of small scale grain raising, lots of homesteads would find one of those granaries very handy.

Gene Logsdon: Veiled Prejudice Against Farmers

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

American society seems to have lost its old prejudices against farmers since the hick and hayseed days and in fact the small, local variety is probably being canonized more than we deserve. But the class conflict between city and country is still around. The whole simplistic political division between so-called red and blue states has its roots in that ancient mistrust and misunderstanding between farm culture and city culture, or what I prefer to call it now, old culture and new culture. The fact that both town and country people live about the same today doesn’t deter the prejudices. Educated people, especially with advanced degrees, still view those who don’t go to college with veiled disdain while the uneducated still strike back and ridicule college graduates for their presumed lack of practical knowledge.

Sometimes however the intellectual snobbery towards farmers gets even more absurd than the blue collar contempt for “egghead” PhDs.  I got a letter recently from a newly-graduated art student who is also a farm girl. She sent along a passage from a book that I am not going to quote directly because what the author says is ridiculous and he may not have meant what it sounds like he meant, or would like to qualify it. The book is about landscape art, and the author says in passing that “agricultural workers” tend not to like art depicting natural settings because they associate the fields with hard work and the seacoasts with the danger of storms. More disturbing, one of the art graduate’s professors said he agreed with the author.

I try to think of an instance where he might be correct. The best I can come up with are migrant workers harvesting tomatoes in the sweltering sun while being referred to as “greasers” by the natives. But no, not even that works very well because I have picked tomatoes in the hot sun, once right along side migrant laborers, and I still love landscape paintings more than any other kind. I am sure that the migrants, being like most other humans, enjoy landscape paintings too if they have any interest in art at all. (One of them I worked with was putting his children through college on money earned picking tomatoes.) In my experience, the people who don’t like landscape paintings are very urban in their backgrounds and prefer abstract art in all its many forms.

Weeds That Like A Sip of Roundup Now and Then

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

First the glorious days of advanced farming brought us corn stalks that eat tractor tires. Now there’s a weed that likes to drink weed killers, especially Roundup. Recently Palmer amaranth “completely overran” most of the soybean test plots at Bayer CropScience’s test plots in Illinois, in the words of DTN/Progressive Farmer editor, Pam Smith, despite having an arsenal of herbicides thrown at it. She describes some of the plots as “forests of pigweed.” I shouldn’t joke about this because it really is a serious problem, but I just can’t help it. At least 20 years ago, in New Farm magazine, a Rodale publication I was working for at the time, we reported weeds becoming immune to herbicides and the herbicide industry hee-hawed us for being organic nitwits. So pardon me while I hee-haw right back.

Palmer amaranth is one of about 60 recognized kinds of pigweed or amaranth (we call it redroot in my neck of the woods). The Palmer type is native to the arid southwest but finds other climates just fine, especially in drought years. First it marched across the southern states and now is invading the Midwest. I have a great hunch that other pigweeds like the kind that plagues my garden will also become glyphosate-resistant if they haven’t already. Ironically, the weedkiller industry is now advocating crop rotation along with their herbicides as the way to control weeds, which of course is what wise farming understood long before Roundup came around.

What makes this situation almost amusing is that Palmer amaranth is at least 8000 years old and makes nutritious food for humans. Amaranth was a staple in the Aztec diet as well as Mississippian Indian cultures of the mound-building era. To this day, the seeds or grains of this “weed” are popped and mixed with honey to make a popular snack in Mexico called alegria. Grain amaranth is still found in seed catalogs (Seeds of Change, for one). Back in the 1970s and 80s, the Rodale Institute, under the aegis of Bob Rodale, began seriously to experiment with pigweed

Gene Logsdon: The Weather May Not Be the Problem

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

There are so many stark contrasts in the world today. These are times out of which great epics of literature ought to be written but aren’t. Society is too engrossed in drivel like whether badminton players in the Olympics were cheating or not. This summer, the driest in 50 years in parts of the Midwest, the Army Corps of Engineers is dredging deeper channels for the barges on the Mississippi River, which is at an all time low level. Just last year, rainfall in the eastern corn belt was at an all-time high and the Corps was desperately trying to control flooding on the Mississippi.

Weather-related contrasts are occurring here in my own Ohio backyard where it barely rained at all from May to August. Close to our farm stand two cornfields just across a narrow road from each other. One has nearly normal corn and the other (in one of the photos) has drought-stricken corn. I know personally both farmers who planted these two fields and both are very competent. The soil in both fields is the same. Fertilizer applied was about the same. Rainfall was the same. This contrast appears all over the county, all over the state, all over the Corn Belt. What is going on here?

Farmers and farm reporters and this blog have talked the question half to death. Our own local chapter of contrary farmers lists these possibilities for the difference in the two fields: time of planting, depth of planting, corn variety, seed bed preparation, plant population, and prayer. Since the two farmers involved both attend church regularly, I think we can rule out that last factor.

Gene Logsdon: Feeding The Buzzards

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Walking over the brow of a hill in my pasture, I came upon the most ghastly, heart-stopping sight I’ve ever seen on the farm, or anywhere else for that matter. Perched on six fence posts in a row were six turkey vultures, alias Cathartis aura, or what we call buzzards. What made the scene so awesome was that when the big birds saw me, they raised their wings above their heads, as if preparing to launch into the air, but then just remained motionless. Each set of those wings spans some six feet from tip to tip, making the birds look bigger than eagles, bigger than condors, bigger to my startled eyes than Boeing 707s. Think of the mythical Thunderbird of American Indian folklore. Now think of six of them in a row at eye level, transfixing you with beady stares from stony eyes set in flaming red heads, surrounded by black feathers of doom. Adding to the ghoulish scene were more buzzards on the ground

The Return of the Enclosed Garden

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From GENE LOGSDON

The interesting and entertaining reactions to my recent post about destructive wildlife in the garden encouraged me to ponder the situation more closely. Pondering things closely always leads me to weird ideas. I am thinking about the possible return of the walled gardens of Victorian times. How do you know they didn’t become popular in the first place to keep out wild animals including humans? And tame animals too for that matter because, in those days, livestock were allowed to wander about as freely as we allow deer to do today.

As long as most people are not involved in food production or avid gardening, I think it will be a long time before we are going to get the kind of social solidarity needed to enact measures to control runaway wildlife populations. It is easy enough to convince the gentle folk among us to get rid of mice and rats in the house but oh my, not those precious deer and raccoons in the garden. If there were deer that developed a taste for car tires, you can bet that society would rise up in wrath and settle that problem in a hurry.

Gene Logsdon: Gambling With Our Food

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

The drought that is affecting much of the Midwest is scary enough but what makes me even more nervous is the way speculators in the grain futures market are sending grain prices gyrating all over the place as they bet on what will happen next. Betting on the future supply of food is risky business. There’s too much chance for mischievous manipulation. It is risky enough to gamble with banknotes of one kind or another but they aren’t edible no matter how much good steak gravy you sop on them. Food, however, is everyone’s essential necessity and I wonder greatly about the wisdom of gambling with it especially when many of the gamblers can barely tell a stalk of corn from a hoe handle.

Like most everyone else, I’ve had orthodox economics drummed into my head. I know how economists argue that the speculators, by pooling the information upon which they place their bets, arrive at what is called “price discovery” that helps establish some kind of market  equilibrium overall, and helps farmers and processors and society in general adjust to the situation. The gamblers also benefit all of us, I’ve been taught, by “risk shifting” or hedging which provides producers and others with a way to shift the risk involved in ownership of a commodity to others

Gene Logsdon: The Wild Empire Strikes Back…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I can’t figure out why society is so enamored of movies about invaders from outer space when we have a real life invasion going on from earth’s inner space. Squadrons of deer, raccoons, opossums, skunks, chipmunks, rabbits, squirrels, moles, wild turkeys, crows, robins, wolves, black bears, feral hogs, to mention a few, have unleashed an attack upon homes, gardens and farms unprecedented since the 1800s. It is worse than a century ago because we don’t have nearly as many hunters now as we did then. In the 1940s when I was growing up, there was not a deer in our county. Now they roam at will across the farm fields, towns and highways, laying waste to everything that grows and causing far more deaths on the roads than bombs do in Afghanistan.

If you garden at all, you will get a laugh or at least a sly smile from the cover of the New Yorker for July 2 of this year. It shows a cartoon by Edward Koren, of a man mowing a little plot of lawn surrounded by woodlands and an army of wild animals staring out at him

Gene Logsdon: A Farmer Who Actually Farms…

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Life is so much a matter of contrasts. Last week I wrote about a large scale farmer of several thousand acres who drives his computer 9 hours a day while his brother and hired help to the actual farming. In stark contrast, shortly after I talked to him, an old friend stopped by to tell me that, after nearly forty years, he was retiring from small scale dairying. He tried to be upbeat about it but I could tell that he was sad too. He will keep on farming his 200 acres and maybe raise a few steers. Old dairymen never die, they just quit milking cows.

I’ve bragged in my writing over the years about Steve and Pat Gamby way more than they wish I would. Against all economic expertise, they have made a success of small-scale commercial farming and of life. They are very devoted to each other. They’ve raised three children anyone would be proud of. One of them, Rebecca, just finishing up college, happens to be an outstanding athlete also. She was playing last week with the USA national women’s softball team that would be our USA Olympic team if women’s softball was still in the Olympics. She played with and against the best softball players in the U.S. (actually in the world) and did all right for herself.

Her father did all right for himself in sports too, having played professional baseball in the minor leagues before he decided he’d rather stay home and milk cows. That’s how I got to know him. When I found out there was a former minor league ballplayer in our neighborhood, I courted him shamelessly for our softball team. He decided to play, against his better judgment, I think

Today’s Farmer: Nine Hours Daily On A Computer

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I promised not to use his name because I wanted him to speak freely which is not easy to do these days when society is in such conflict. He is a fortyish farmer, articulate, engaging, a delight to talk to. He and his brother grow upwards of 5000 acres of corn and soybeans, much of it rented. The first time I met him, several years go, I remembered him saying that a farmer needed to spend two hours a day on the computer, hedging and marketing his grain. Talking to him a few days ago, I recalled his remark and he smiled. “Make that 8 to 9 hours today,” he said. That included time he spent marketing for other farmers who evidently recognized his skill in this regard.

I was aghast. Just think of that: a man who considers himself a farmer spends his working day almost entirely in electronic grain marketing. His brother “tends to the farm machinery.” They employ five people and “we pay them very well because it is really difficult to find people who have a real work ethic.” (None of the hired help has gone to college and it occurred to me that here was an opportunity to make a good living without spending a hundred thousand dollars to get a degree. Are there any guidance counselors pointing this out?)

Meeting this farmer again, I decided to take advantage of his experience to ask my favorite question these days.  “I keep sticking my neck out and saying there’s going to be crash in farm land prices. Is that the case in your opinion?”

“Not yet,” he said. “Unlike the crash in the 80s, much of the land expansion now is being done with cash, not borrowed money. If prices drop, most farmers are in a better position to ride it out.”

“But accountants who handle farm business tell me that while farmers are paying half or more down with cash

Gene Logsdon: Can Garden Farming Be Too Successful?

From GENE LOGSDON

This is just mischievous philosophical musing. Don’t take me too seriously.  On the other hand…

One of my favorite  books is the classic “Farmers of Forty Centuries” by F.H. King, written in 1911. It details the way food was produced in much of Asia for something like four thousand years and still is in many places there. It was, according to King who traveled the area at that time, an amazing kind of small scale agriculture that, without chemical fertilizer or power machinery of any kind was producing more food per acre at the beginning of the 20th century than farming in America then or now. The way the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese returned all organic wastes, including human manure, to the soil was an absolutely triumphant model of sustainable farming. Some of the production figures from that time, over a century ago, seem almost unbelievable even today, and it all happened without Monsanto Claus if you can imagine that. Author King writes of farms in Japan which were producing food enough for 240 people, 24 donkeys, and 24 pigs per 40 acres, a size of farm that in the United States at that time would be regarded, he says, as too small to support a single family. Some 500,000,000 people (the present population of the U.S. of course is around 300,000,000) were being fed in the Far East upon the products of an area smaller than all the improved farm land of the United States in 1911. These garden farms hardly averaged one to two acres each. With a climate similar to our mid-south to lower corn belt area, these tiny farms sometimes grew three and even four crops per year on the same land. So precious were organic fertilizers that a private contractor paid the city of Shanghai $31,000, gold, for 78,000 tons of human waste which the contractor removed from residences and public places at his own cost— and felt privileged to be able to do so, says King because he was going to resell it to farmers.

To maintain ultra- high production, hundreds of miles of canals

Gene Logsdon: What Is The Secret Of Parsnips?

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Whenever I go to a big supermarket that carries fresh food, I always find these long, wrinkled, ugly, rooty-looking things called parsnips on display. Someone must like them or they wouldn’t be there, but I can’t find anyone who admits to eating them, or anyone who knows what the attraction might be. It certainly isn’t phallic, as carrots sometimes get portrayed.  What is the allure of parsnips?

We grew parsnips once. They were slow to germinate so weeds got a head start on them. As for taste, I am not saying they weren’t edible if cooked with enough butter, but that is kind of true of cardboard too. Parsnips are “best” in early spring after having spent the entire winter in cold or even frozen soil. The cold enhances their taste which tells me that in the fall they must taste terrible. Nowadays, marketers sometimes refrigerate fall-harvested parsnips before selling them.

Parsnips have been cultivated and cherished at least back as far as ancient Roman times. The most obvious reason for their popularity is that they are available to eat before any new growth arrives in spring, a real advantage before modern storage methods came along. But there are other roots in the ground that also survive winter. Why parsnips?  Help me out here.

What little solid history I can find about the parsnip only increases the mystery. In Gardening For Profit, an interesting old book by Peter Henderson, first published in 1867, the author goes to great length pointing out that parsnips

Gene Logsdon: Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees and Trees Don’t Grow On Money

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I was so gratified to see Wendell Berry’s remarks in a recent interview (“Wendell Berry: Landsman” with Jim Leach in Humanities magazine, May/June 2012) where he makes a point about economics that is overlooked in these days when divisiveness rules the political roost. The general view is that the economic battle is between capitalism and socialism, but as Wendell observes, “both are industrial systems and they have made the same mistakes in some ways.”  Both have ignored “the propriety of scale and the standard of ecological health.”

Yes, yes, yes. But I would like to go farther (probably too far) than Wendell did. Both capitalism and socialism are similar industrial systems basically because both accept and practice the industrial idea that the fundamental tool to “growing an economy” is the ability to borrow money at compound interest rates. I certainly would be foolish to deny the effectiveness, maybe the necessity, of being able to borrow money. We borrowed to buy our first house and car. But seeing how borrowed money nearly ruined people I knew when I was growing up, I was determined never to borrow again if I could avoid it and I never did. Repaying a loan over a long period of time often means buying the house or car twice and if one carries credit card debt all the time, to paying for stuff more than three times.

Somehow this kind of insanity has become sanctified in our society as if it were holy scripture. The phrase “free enterprise” is uttered by its high priests with all the fervor of a biblical evangelist uttering “the Lord Jesus Christ.”  I remember

Why Such A Lack of Common Sense About Dogs?

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

I can’t believe what I am seeing in dog food advertisements. Good old Rover is shown licking people on the face, once even licking a child on the lips. This is so disgustingly unhygienic to me that I have to wonder if there is something going on here I don’t know about. Doesn’t the present generation of pet owners understand where else that dog might have been licking moments earlier? Do I have to spell it out?

We all used to know that dogs carry parasites that can be transmitted to humans. By parasites I mean worms. Yes I know that the well-cared for pet dog is routinely wormed and medicated just like children are, but you don’t want any dog licking your child on the lips. The risk is too great. If you don’t believe me, read any straightforward discussion of animal hygiene and note how widespread is the problem of humans getting worms from pets, especially dogs.

I am constantly amazed at people who get so distraught over the idea of using composted dog manure for garden fertilizer but who think it is just so cute when cuddly little Bow-Wow drools all over them. I think the problem traces directly to the lack of experience in husbandry that our present culture suffers from. You can deify or humanize pets if you wish and provide them with luxuries even lots of humans can’t afford, (and then complain about paying taxes to help people on welfare) but in the end, an animal is an animal and it does not think like a human. Dogs have been known to pick up a baby and shake it to death in innocent play.

Gene Logsdon: Writing “A Sanctuary of Trees”

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Writing books is a precarious business. I’ve been foolish enough to do it now about 28 times and I never know what is going to happen. I expected to get scolded for my novels (too irreverent about religion) and for titling a non-fiction book “Holy Shit.” But oddly enough, most readers seemed amused, as I had hoped, rather than irritated in these cases.  Much to my surprise church ministers who responded were especially positive in reaction to my criticisms of institutional religion. Obviously there is a great upheaval bubbling up right below the surface of traditional religious sects of all kinds. A professor of theology and stalwart defender of Christianity at one of our leading universities, after reading my irreverent novel, “Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food,” which he says he enjoyed, now calls me, not altogether jokingly, “one of the good atheists.”  In return I call him “one of the good Christians.”  We get along wonderfully. This is precisely the kind of relationship that I think is becoming more the norm.  You must remember how bad things used to be. When I was a Catholic kid seventy years ago, we were told it was a sin to go to a Protestant church service. Although there is still much conflict between various religious groups, and between religion and non-religion, more and more I see a joining of hands to get to the real work of keeping our civilization plodding along.

So I wrote “A Sanctuary of Trees” and even in such an uncontroversial book (I thought), I am getting scolded more than from previous books. My underlying intention in everything I write is to try to show, in what I hope to be a humorously wry way, the direct connections between agriculture and urban culture as human activity plays itself out in history. In the first part of “A Sanctuary of Trees,” I conjoined silviculture with my early years in a Catholic seminary studying for the priesthood. What I learned from the forests surrounding the several seminary locations I attended influenced me more than what I was hearing in the classroom. What I learned in both places led me eventually to choose the forest and leave the seminary.

Now I am being taken to task for rejecting my “call from God.” I am surprised since I thought this was a minor part of the book. But that’s okay because it is another indication to me of how closely culture and agriculture can be linked

Gene Logsdon: It Pays To Stay Home

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

One of the unsung advantages of being in love with a garden or a farm is that the lover doesn’t mind staying home and by doing so, saving gobs of money. In fact most of us land lovers much prefer to stay home. A back forty even as small as an acre can be an exciting, fascinating adventure into the farthest reaches of the earth. The great entomologist, Jean Henri Fabre, spent much of his life making amazing discoveries about bugs on the few brushy acres behind his house and writing about them. With 30 acres, I never want for a changing world to travel through, a journey not far in miles but almost infinite in terms of material wonders and splendors deep down into the earth and high up into the ever-changing beauty of the sky.

Staying home has to be one of the most unpopular ideas in America where the whole culture embraces faraway travel as essential to happiness. Many of us don’t really have homes that can provide as much enjoyment as travel promises. Rather than spending our money to acquire such a property, we are taught to buy such enjoyment with far away travel. Perhaps what we need is proper publicity. To advertise traveling at home, a documentary could open with unbelievable close-ups of ants herding and milking aphids on an apple tree, a raccoon destroying a bluebird house, a hawk dive-bombing a mouse, a flint arrowhead sticking out of a creek-side cliff. Then a roll of drums and a voice sonorously introduces the docudrama:  “Today we are going where no explorer has gone before— YOUR BACK FORTY.”

Also, in earlier times, a home could not electronically provide all the connections with the outer world that now make travel almost obsolete. You can visit just about everything now in your living room.

Gene Logsdon: Gardening In The Nude (or New Use For Rhubarb)

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer
[Repost]

One of the greatest mysteries of life for me is society’s ambivalence about the naked human body. People line up by the hundreds every day to get a look at Michelangelo’s anatomically-correct statue of David. But if a real live David were to stand naked beside that statue, the sex police would haul him away, even in Italy where nude statues are as common as pizza.

I once did a lot of “research” into the subject of outdoor nudity. Research for a writer means I “asked around.” What gives here, anyway?

You’d be amazed. Actually most of you would not be amazed because what I found out was that most people, given their druthers, would not wear clothes in their back yards or even front yards, if they could get away with it, at least not when the weather is nice. People I asked drew the line only at going beyond the home environment unclothed or where the environment inclined excessively to poison ivy and mosquitoes. One person put it this way: “If everyone took their clothes off while they mowed the lawn, in twenty minutes no one would take a second look. If the nude person was as ugly as I am, no one would take a first look.”

I have a hunch that there are plenty of backyard swimming pools whose waters reflect bare backsides more than they do swimsuits. For sure what passes for a swimsuit in many of them would make a typical thong look kind of klutzy. But people also expressed a yen, if they trusted that I was not going to name names, for gardening in the nude. In fact the practice has been sanctified into folk tradition, at least in the Ozarks. According to folklorist Vance Randolph, writing in the 1930s and 40s, the spring planting ritual in the hills involved a sort of celebratory session of love making

Gene Logsdon: Nature’s Promises Kept Again

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From GENE LOGSDON

Every year in the brown, sere days before the great greening in spring, I begin to have doubts. Will the flowers come again?  Will the birds return? Will the trees leaf out? With all the despair and calamity rife in the world, the ancient fear that the end is near is as believable as ever.

Perhaps global warming will burn us up.

Oh no, it’s global cooling on the way. Watch out for glaciers.

No, no. The real fear is bombs and chemicals.

Not to worry. Disease outbreaks will get us before that.

Going into March I am gripped by a madness that has nothing to do with basketball. I am torn between despair over a political process descending into lunacy and an economic process that guarantees only an ever-growing poverty class.  I am glad I do not know how to tie a rope into a noose.

Then I look out the window one morning and see the great miracle. Snowdrops are blooming by the house wall. I blink my eyes and shake my head. They are still there. In a few more days they are joined by winter aconites, merry yellow jewels against the melting snow. Slowly but surely all the spring wildflowers return— actually this unusually warm spring, they came fast and furiously— and I feel that great uprising of joy and hope once again.