It is almost time to wrap up this year, which means that it
is also time to deliver the last in the series of book reports that correspond
to my new year’s resolution for 2016. Small-Scale
Grain Raising (Second Edition): An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and
Using Nutritious Whole Grains for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers, by Gene
Logsdon, is probably the most iconic book of its kind. So I read it.
Why a book on grain raising?
Grain is pretty cheap to buy, so growing our own doesn’t make much
financial sense. For that matter,
neither does growing your own much of anything (except maybe tomatoes, peppers,
squash, salad greens, sweet potatoes, and a few other high-value items). If money is to be the exclusive deciding
factor, then the most reasonable thing to do (I am fond of saying), is to
squirrel oneself away in the cheapest apartment one can find, work as many
hours as one can tolerate at the highest-paying job one can land, get lucky in
the stock market, cloth oneself (if at all) from discount and second-hand
stores exclusively, swear off all hobbies and procreation, and eat the cheapest
food that will support one’s survival until one reaches an age and point of
health where one can no longer earn money, at which point one ought to proceed
swiftly to the cheapest available method of suicide.
Obviously a pointless existence. Nobody lives that way, and nobody believes it
is a good idea. It doesn’t take much
reflection time to realize that for everyone (with partial exception for those
with a money-making addiction), money is there to support the life they want to
live, and everyone does many things that are not “efficient” by the money
standard. Each person, each family, each
social circle, each community has its own economy of value apart from money,
and I personally find it fascinating to try to tease out how these economies
function.
In our family’s value economy, a small amount of grain
raising is starting to make sense. Grain
species (besides corn, generally) tend to make use of marginal agricultural
soils (our kind) and can in fact be part of a strategy for improving those
soils, which is why we started with small grains. And lacking power tillage equipment, we find
that working with the soil after small grains and their partners have improved
it is easier once the plants have matured their seed…all that stands between us
and homegrown grain is harvesting and threshing the ripe seed heads. So grain is basically a by-product of soil
improvement in this system. This year
for the first time we threshed out enough rye to be eating bread that uses it
as a major ingredient, and we have token amounts of buckwheat, millet, wheat, and
barley to dabble with. And then there is
the corn! Even in our modest soils, we
gathered enough corn to fill probably over two bushels, shelled. Only a small amount of that is popcorn. Most is flint, flour, or dent corn, and two
bushels is starting to be a real contribution to our diet! Time to start paying attention and see if we
can make better use of this part of our garden program to support our lives. Hence the reading choice.
Funny book. In the
promo blurbs on the back cover, Carol Deppe (a hero of mine) refers to the
late, great Gene Logsdon as “…one of the founding curmudgeons of modern garden
farming and sustainable agriculture.”
Agreed. And interspersed with his
dry, sometimes sarcastic wit, a person can here find some very practically
based and experience-tested helpful advice for producing small amounts of grain
for home production of human food and/or animal feeds. Logsdon never couches his tips and
information in prose designed to make him look the expert. One gets the feeling when reading that he is
just trying to help us would-be growers of grain bound for our own pantries to
achieve our aims; it is about us, in other words, not him. Despite that non-expert ethos, Logsdon has
managed a pretty thorough treatment of a wide variety of grain raising issues,
filling in a number of gaps in my own knowledge.
Absent from the book is much by way of human nutrition
savvy, especially with regard to how to overcome some of the drawbacks of
grains for human diets. We’ll have to
leave that to Sally Fallon and the Weston A. Price Foundation.
Anyway, given the quotability of Gene Logsdon, and the
minimal amount of nuance available to comment upon in the book and its
approach, I think I will take the ‘nugget’ approach to this report. I will indicate when transitions to new
chapters occur. Sorry for the very long
report! Here goes:
In the introduction, Mr. Logsdon makes a politico-economic
case for the topic of the book:
“Whenever in history a new, more economical way to do
anything is discovered, it will take over the market, no matter how hard
entrenched big business and government try to stop it. Not all the forces of power, with their
sickening subsidy mentality for the rich, can prevail forever against economic
reality.”
“…the methods I describe and argue in favor of do not
promise what the agricultural experts call ‘top profits,’ but only good food
and the satisfaction of producing it on a scale that society can afford.
We have become a nation dangerously dependent on politically
motivated and money-motivated processes for our food, clothing, and
shelter. In the world we must live in
from now on, to produce our own food is the beginning of independence. To accept that responsibility is the first
step toward real freedom.”
Chapter 1: Homegrown
Grains
Page 6:
“…the special advantage of grains for the organic gardener
and farmer is that you can grow them more easily with organic methods than you
can fruits and vegetables.”
Page 7:
“A bushel of wheat makes about fifty 1-pound loaves of
bread. Two ears of corn make enough
cornmeal for a meal’s worth of corn muffins.
The grain…expands as it cooks with water, and so gives more food to eat
than you would think the uncooked grain represented.”
Page 9:
“You don’t need much space to raise at least some
grains. A normal yield of wheat grown
organically would be at least 40 bushels to the acre. So you’d need only 1/40th of an
acre to produce a bushel. That would be
a plot of ground 10 feet wide by about 100 feet long.”
“A hen needs about a bushel a year, but if she has ample
free range, she needs hardly half that and in a pinch perhaps none at
all.” Always a tantalizing prospect for
the cost-conscious chicken raiser.
Chapter 2: Corn:
America’s Amazing Maize
Page 11:
“Corn is my grain of first choice for all purposes because,
first of all, it is tough stuff. It will
survive adversity better than other grains.
Also it can be planted and harvested on a few acres with mostly hand
labor.”
Page 15-16:
“I could go on and give detailed and expert formulas for how
much and in what portions you should feed corn and other grains to
animals. I won’t, though, because most
of that kind of advice is mere marketing palaver put out to sell commercial
feeds or to sell more grain than an animal on free range needs, or to help the
commercial producer of meat and milk gain the absolute nth degree of so-called
efficiency…The small-scale grain grower, with good pasture, can ignore most of
that kind of information and rely on common sense and experience…The ‘right’
way in large-scale commercial agriculture is not necessarily the right way for
the homestead gardener and farmer.”
Page 16:
“Planting [corn] in strips is not necessary but a personal
preference of mine. In a corn field, the
outside rows always yield better, and so with strips rather than a solid plot
there are more outside rows. Also, the
soil in the strips is not as shaded as is the soil in a plot planted solidly to
corn, so when I sow clover into the standing corn after weed cultivation for
future pasture or hay, or sow rye for pasture or grain in the following year,
these crops grow better. I have also
inter-seeded oats into standing corn in July for winter grazing, and the oats
need all the sunlight they can get.
Also, if you are planting in a sloping field, the strips can often
reduce erosion significantly compared to a plot entirely of cultivated corn.”
Page 19:
“Corn is rarely completely dry even when you harvest it late
in the fall. Commercial corn growers
almost always dry it artificially, with natural gas as a fuel. This is a very big expense and in my opinion
a poor use of fossil fuel. Before corn
was harvested as shelled corn, the whole ears were stored in slatted cribs no
more than 4 feet wide, and air-dried naturally.
That is how I do it. Once corn is
cribbed, it can be used as needed, although before you mill it, if you do mill
it, give it a month or more in the crib to dry completely.”
Page 27:
“…the economic tunes the commercial farmer must dance to
have a far different beat than the songs the homesteader sings…I can raise the
grain I need so much cheaper per acre than the commercial farmer that it seems
clear to me that commercial farming as practiced today is a dinosaur on its way
to oblivion unless it is subsidized heavily.”
Page 33:
“Some seaweed and sea-product fertilizers contain potash and
trace elements, as do some special mineral and organic blends…Much controversy
rages about these soil amendments and fertilizers, and I do not know who is
right or wrong. I’ve never used any of
them, and my crops always seem healthy so longs as it rains (but not too much).
Page 34-35:
“Commercial hybrid corn can be planted as thickly as 30,000
kernels per acre if plenty of fertilizer and moisture are available, but don’t
you do it. Organically, you’d need at
least 25 tons of good manure per acre to support that kind of plant
population. Moreover, you’d have to
plant the corn in rows not more than 30 inches apart, a move that will
facilitate neither hand harvesting nor sowing a cover crop in the corn in late
summer.
If you are going to plant an acre of corn without chemical
fertilizers, you’ll be better off to shoot for a plant population of around
18,000 kernels. That means a spacing of
about 8 to 9 inches between stalks in the row, with rows 40 inches apart. Such widely spaced plants will make good use
of normal, natural fertility of green-manure crops and manure, and will produce
big ears, easy to harvest and process by hand.
If you plan to plant pole limas or pole string beans to
climb the cornstalks (saves having to put up poles) the corn plants in the row
should be even more widely spaced, one stalk every 12 to 15 inches. When the corn plant is 6 inches high, plant a
bean on either side of it about 6 inches away.
If moisture is normal, both corn and bean will grow well, the latter
fixing a little nitrogen in the soil for the corn to feed on.”
Page 46:
“…you can cut the [corn] stalks when the leaves are still a
little greenish and the ears still in place on the stalk, tie the stalks into
bundles (about a dozen stalks to a bundle), and stand the bundles up into
shocks. This is the cheapest and best
way to dry and store your corn right out in the field. Shocks of corn are what you see in pretty
calendar pictures but rarely anyplace else these days except on Amish farms.”
Page 51:
“When the corn was shucked at the old husking bees, the
husks were not always broken off the ears of corn. Often they were braided together in most
artistic ways. As much as a bushel of
corn could be thus tied together and hung up like clothes on a line, where it
could dry properly without rodents getting to it.”
Page 58:
“I am a little prejudiced against grinding corn for
animals. They can handle whole corn
about as well as ground corn. If you put
some hog manure in a bucket with water, stir it up and pour it through a sieve,
you will find that much of the milled yellow outer coating of the corn has gone
right through the animal just like the outer coating of sweet corn goes through
you. So the argument that milling makes
the corn more “digestible” is not really correct [so long as it is chewed, I
must add]. It just means the animal will
eat more and make the miller more money.
It seems to me that we citizens of mighty America, the most powerful
nation in the world, have the attitude that to handle whatever confronts us,
first it is necessary to pulverize it.”
Chapter 3: Wheat: The
Main Source of the Staff of Life
Page 67:
“You should plant whatever kind of wheat that grows
successfully in your area…Bread from the soft wheats is just as good as from
the hard wheats, we think. The latter,
with more gluten in them, make bread more ‘efficiently’—at lower cost per pound
of flour—so these are preferred by commercial bakeries.”
Page 70
“Wheat is not nearly as demanding of fertilizer as corn
is. Keep your pH for wheat as close to
6.4 as you can and plant in well-drained soil, and half your growing problems
are avoided. Wheat doesn’t like acid
soil and hates wet soil. Wheat will get
enough extra fertility from what was applied to corn the year before, or what
is left over when soybeans precede it…I never use rock powders any more. I mulch with tree leaves, grass clippings,
spoiled hay and manure and that is enough for me. I do not yearn to become the Michael Jordan
of garden farming.”
Page 73
“If you would like to use your wheat for the dual purpose of
grain and grazing, the most practical way to do this on a small plot would be
to let chickens peck the green blades away.
A light grazing by sheep or a cow would be okay too, but if the ground
is muddy, as it might be in late fall in the East and Midwest, the animals
will trample and pack the soil too much.”
Page 75
“The worst problem in raising wheat organically is weed
control. Because wheat is customarily
planted ‘solid’ rather than in rows, you can’t easily weed it, so without very
good management, you can get too many weeds…In organic farming the crop before
wheat should always be a row crop that has been cultivated intensively for weed
control…If you are organic and growing only a small plot, it’s better to plant
your wheat in rows and cultivate it like the Chinese do. American farmers may laugh at you, but the
Chinese have forgotten more about raising food than we yet know.”
Page 84
“Wheat has more protein in it than corn but less
carbohydrates. It takes about
one-and-one-third times as much wheat as corn to produce the same increase in
weight, which is another way of saying that corn is more fattening. And since wheat is worth more as human food
than as animal feed, it is not widely used to fatten animals. But it can be. Whole wheat and corn mixed half and half
makes a good scratch feed for chickens.
I’ve mentioned that I like to feed chickens wheat in the
bundle so the chickens, instead of me, do the threshing. The drawback to this method is that, in the
bundle, the grain is more vulnerable to rodent and weevil attack than when the
grain is threshed and stored in a rodent-proof bin. My solution is to feed all the wheat bundles
from harvest-time until the corn is ready, before the weevils and rodents have
time to do much harm. Then feed corn
through the winter.”
Page 85-86
Remembering collaborative threshing work:
“There had been at least as many women involved in preparing
the food as men involved in harvesting the grain. Not all the women who came to help with the
food did my mother remember fondly, and among the men there were individuals
who despised each other. But all of them
knew that they depended on each other for survival. Every strawstack was an expression of faith
between farmers.”
Page 87
“But the strawstacks are mostly gone now except on some
farms of the stricter Amish sects. And
on too many farms, the animals are gone too.
In winter, the barn lot is an empty, windswept, forlornly cold place to
be. The old barns stand as silent as
mausoleums, replaced by modern stinking, chemicalized, electrified,
concrete-clad “systems” where animals are crammed together like fistfuls of
maggots.”
"The strawstacks have disappeared, the barns stand empty, and
the farmers hope to go to Florida in the winter. Their children have gone away too. You will find them sitting stolid and
impassive before the television set, watching Disney films that show them how
children used to learn about life: caring for animals and sliding down
strawstacks. No longer do children have
the blissful independence to relax like Little Boy Blue, ‘under the haystack,
fast asleep.’”
Chapter 4: The Sorghum
Family
Page 93
“When it comes to the feed grains, corn gets all the
glory. Point out that grain sorghum is
almost equal in nutrient value and that it will outproduce corn in dry
climates, and in fact, will grow in dry climates where corn won’t, and you are
met with silent disbelief. Point out
furthermore that grain sorghum makes a fine flour for human diets and the
silent disbelief may turn to not-so-silent snickers. A great many people have never even heard of
grain sorghum.”
Page 93-94
“Yields are comparable to corn, about 100 to 180 bushels per
acre on unirrigated land, depending on fertility. But where corn will only yield 80 bushels per
acre in dryland western growing conditions, sorghum can yield 100 bushels.”
Page 96
“Plant grain sorghum about ten days after the proper
corn-planting dates in your area.
Because sorghum can be planted later than corn, southern farmers can
plant it after harvesting wheat in June and so get two crops from the same field
in the same year. Also, the later
planting date of sorghum gives the small farmer or homesteader greater
flexibility. If your corn planting gets
delayed by bad weather, or your old equipment (or primitive hand-tool methods)
is too slow to get the corn you need out on time, you can plant the rest of the
acreage to grain sorghum.”
Page 98-99
“Harvesting sorghum by hand is easier than harvesting
wheat. When the seed heads are ripe and
dry, the grain comes out of them easily enough; in fact, it will shatter out if
left in the field very long after ripening.
Go down the row after the seeds are hard, but not dead, falling-off
ripe, and cut the seed heads off with about a foot of stalk…Tie the stalk heads
together into bundles and hang in the barn, or spread no more than two or three
bundles deep in a clean, out-of-the-way corner.
Hanging or laid out, the clusters can dry until you need them.”
Page 99
“After chewing on the stub of my pencil for a fifteen
minutes, my calculations say that a row of grain sorghum 200 feet long can be
expected to yield at least one bushel of grain.
And that might be the right amount for your first venture into grain
sorghum.”
Page 107
“You can get a thousand brooms from an acre of
broomcorn. Takes a lot of work, but so
do strawberries. It’s something to think
about, anyway. Need I have to say that
today most of the broomcorn for brooms comes from China?”
Chapter 5: Oats: The
High-Protein Cereal Grain
Page 111
“The first commandment of the wise garden farmer is to learn
how to make good food out of what grows well in one’s own climate.”
Page 113
“If you keep horses, sheep, or rabbits, it will pay you to
grow oats. Even a small patch in the
garden will save money on your rabbit-feed bill. You don’t even have to thresh the grain out,
just feed it, stalks and all, to these animals or other kinds of livestock. Recent experiments by Ohio State in the
southern part of the state indicate that oats, sown in late summer, can provide
high-quality winter grazing for cattle and sheep.”
Page 118
“If you have gardened a long time, you have noticed, I’m
sure, that almost every year there is a short period of dry weather in early
spring when the ground does dry out enough to till. The temptation, which most of us give in to,
is to plant some early vegetables. About
half the time this planting amounts to very little because the ground is still
too cold for good germination, and more cold weather is going to come
anyway. So instead of planting
vegetables at that time, plant a patch of oats and you’ll be ahead on both
counts.”
Page 119
“…you can plant, in the garden, in rows wide enough apart to
get the cultivator through. In this case
some weeds will grow in the rows, but you can take out enough of them to keep
the oats growing fine.”
Page 120
“I know a farmer who used to cut and bale his oats as he did
hay, and then feed it by the bale to his animals. His livestock ate the oats and some of the
straw. The rest of the straw became
bedding.”
“You can cut the oats when the grain is just beginning to
harden, and the stalks have still a little green in them. Tie the stalks into bundles…and place the
bundles into shocks, where the oats can finish ripening and drying somewhat
protected from the rain. Then rank the
bundles in a barn or even outside like a double stack of wood with the butts of
the bundles to the outside and the heads inside to protect them from rain. Feed the oats by the bundle as needed.”
Page 122
“The Internet bristles with requests for information on
where small, kitchen-sized hullers can be obtained, which means that interest
is high. I’m sure that when
entrepreneurs realize this, they will rise to the occasion.”
Page 123
“Your blender will cut up the groats to any size you want,
but it cuts up the hulls too. All that
fiber may be healthful, but not tasteful.
You can run the blender briefly and sift out or winnow out some of the
hulls to get something approximating good oat flour.”
“Fortunately, there is another way out of the dilemma…a
rarely grown oats, Avens nuda, or naked
oats. This species does not have the
tight hull around the groat. Although it
is available from many northern farm-seed companies, it has not become
mainstream because it doesn’t yield as highly as other oats and because birds
love it.”
Page 124
“A common practice among strawberry growers used to be to
grow oats in the strawberry patch for mulch.
Instead of having to buy straw and transport it to the garden, gardeners
broadcast-sowed the oats over the entire strawberry patch in the early fall or late summer.
The grain would grow tall but would not have enough time to produce seed
before frost killed it. Dead, the oat
plants fell over and maintained a protective mulch over the berry plants.”
Chapter 6: Dry Beans: The Poor Man’s Meat
Page 128
“…the basis of natural, sustainable farming is the working
partnership between grasses (grains) and legumes (beans and clovers). Grasses grow well in rotation with legumes
because the legumes draw nitrogen from the air to invigorate the grasses. When the grasses (grains) use up that free
nitrogen and weaken a little, the legumes or clovers come back strong and
charge the soil with more nitrogen.
Farmers who take advantage of this partnership to its fullest can avoid
spending lots of dollars on expensive nitrogen fertilizers and save inestimable
amounts of natural gas, which is used extensively to make that fertilizer…At
least as long ago as Virgil, who sang the praises of partnering grains and legumes
in his Georgics, this truth of good
farming has been recognized. I believe
that the garden farmer would do better to heed the words of poets like Virgil
(or Wendell Berry today) than the money-inspired science of modern farming.”
Page 130
“The soybean is the number one 'cash grain' crop in America,
so it gets the most attention in farming circles. I think soybeans can make wonderful food for
humans, as Asian civilizations have shown for centuries, but I wonder, all
things considered, if we should feed them to our farm animals when oats might
be cheaper and generate a more sustainable kind of farming. Before the soybean came to America—'before
farmers went crazy,' as my father liked to say—American farmers grew corn, oats,
wheat, and hay or pasture crops, in that order of rotation. Now much of the Corn Belt is an endless
rotation of corn and soybeans, which amounts to almost a monoculture. Fields in soybeans erode worse than fields in
oats, and thus, with so many millions of acres in vast fields of soybeans,
erosion problems are more severe.
Soybeans do have more protein than oats, so they are a good food,
properly prepared. On the other hand,
because of the large quantities needed for farm animals, oats might be a better
choice because they produce more grain per acre than soybeans and can be fed to
animals without cooking. But, of course,
oats do not put nitrogen in the soil the way soybeans do.
So I guess it’s a draw.”
Page 131
“I think legume hay and legume pastures, with perhaps a
little oats as a supplement to corn, is a better livestock feed than soybeans,
and the manure won’t stink as badly as manure from soybean meal.”
Page 134
“Some scientists think inoculation can be overdone. They say a field that has been regularly
planted with inoculated legume seed may not need further inoculation at every
planting. Other agronomists disagree,
demonstrating that Rhizobia
populations tend to decline, especially under intensive cultivation and dry
weather.”
Page 135
“On some intensively farmed soils, trace-element deficiency
is showing up in soybeans and possibly other dry beans. In this situation, manganese and boron are
the two micronutrients the beans are usually lacking. Both deficiencies cause yellowing of the
beans or a pale greening. My neighbors
add manganese to their fertilizer as a matter of course, applying it to the
crop that precedes soybeans in their rotations.
In a garden-farm situation, where the soil has not been stressed into
trying to produce the very highest yields and where regular green manure,
compost, and animal manures are applied, trace-element deficiency should not be
a problem. I suppose there are exceptions
to that statement, but I haven’t run into them in seventy years, so I say
stewing over trace elements should be dropped down to about eightieth place on
your list of worries.”
Page 141
“[his uncle] Carl in his later years was seized with a
strange idea. He quit growing corn. To quit corn in the Corn Belt is tantamount
to losing one’s mind in our community.
Carl did not mind being scorned because he had his own peculiar outlook
on everything. Once when we were
discussing the sudden upswing in the number of swimming pools in town, he
opined: 'Yep, and most of those people
don’t have their bathtubs paid for yet.' ”
Chapter 7: Rye and Barley
Page 150
“…rye’s popularity continues because of its amazing
tolerance for cold weather, which makes it an ideal winter cover crop and a
desirable pasture plant for livestock in fall and spring, when other pastures
have quit or just started to grow…Rye’s second advantage is that it will
produce a crop on land too poor for wheat.
In the cold climate of northern Europe, where soil is poor, rye is an
important and dependable source of bread flour.”
Page 154
“All rye used for seed should be clean and ergot-free. If you use seed that is over a year old, you
may automatically control ergot because the sclerotia lose viability after a
year’s time and hopefully won’t carry the disease over to a new crop.”
Page 160
“Each shock, when finished, [has] to be 'capped' to keep out
rain. The cap was just another bundle
fitted over the shock to make an inverted V 'roof.' To bend the bundle, or break it as we said,
the shocker had to clasp the butt end against his stomach with the left arm and
bend the straws over that arm with the right hand, almost as if he were
folding a blanket. The bundle could then
be set over the shock.
Page 161
“Barley rather than corn is a good crop to follow potatoes
since scab disease in potatoes can carry over on corn but not on barley, I
understand.”
Page 161-162
“Researchers…have found that barley grown in rows 14 inches
apart produced as good a crop a solid-planted barley, even though less seed was
used…What’s more, research reported much greater efficiency in fertilizer use,
and weeds could be controlled by cultivation in the early stages of the crop.
For garden farmers, planting small grains in rows, however
untraditional in America, makes sense.
They, too, can use less seed, can use precious compost and organic
fertilizers more efficiently, and can cultivate for weed control instead of
using herbicides. Also, for hand
harvesting, grains in rows will make bunching the cut stalks into bundles
easier.”
Page 162
“An easy way to sprout small amounts of barley for a few
farm animals is to soak the grain heads when they are still attached to the
stalks in tied bundles. Do one bundle at
a time. It should sprout in about five
days at a temperature of 60 F.
Eventually, you’ll know how much barley to keep in the soaking process
so as to keep a steady ration coming every day.
The barley will sprout right in the head, and you can toss the whole
bundle or part of it to the chickens.
They get excellent feed, the stalks make excellent bedding, and you don’t
have to thresh the barley.”
Page 165
“Some farmers tell me that if you blow the grain through a
silage chopper against a silo wall, the considerable force of grain striking
concrete will loosen about 60 percent of the hulls, be it barley or
oats.”
Page 166
“One reason I think the garden farmer should grow a variety
of grains is because that makes controlling weevils and other storage insects
easier. If you use up your barley from harvesttime
in June until late summer, you aren’t going to have bugs in it. They don’t have a chance to become
entrenched, so to speak. Then you can
feed up your wheat and oats in the fall, then go to your corn and soybeans
until the following summer, since weevils don’t bother them much. If you have only a little harvested grain in
bins for no longer than six months, and the grains are of more than one variety
(so that one kind of weevil may not like one grain as well as another), and if
you clean the bins or barrels out well when empty, you just aren’t going to
have a lot of insect damage.
In fact, on a well-planned, small-scale schedule, you could
get by without having to store grain at all.
Feed rye and barley right out of the field in early summer, wheat and
oats in late summer, buckwheat and sorghum in fall, and corn out of the shock
or off the stalk all winter. You’d have
some loss from weather, but not much.
Garden farmers have only begun to innovate commercial agriculture to
their own purposes, and more new thinking like this will surely come
along. We’ve all got a lot to
learn. As an old English folk song that
dates to the Middle Ages put it: 'Neither you nor I nor anyone knows, How oats,
peas, beans, and barley grows.' ”
Chapter 8: Buckwheat
and Millet
Page 171
“The Agricultural Research Service has developed tetraploid
buckwheats that have more uniform seed size and thicker stems to resist
lodging. These new varieties have not
necessarily increased yield potential, however.
Breeders have also discovered a buckwheat flower type that is
self-compatible, and inbred lines are being developed, which in turn will lead
to better varieties.”
Page 172
“To get around the problem of the buckwheat grains not
ripening all at the same time, he cut and swathed the crop, which allowed most
of the buckwheat “grains” (buckwheat is not technically a grain) to dry and
mature more evenly.
Page 173
“As green manure, buckwheat will make three crops in one growing season.”
“Buckwheat has few disease or bug problems, which is another
plus for organic growers. You can plant
it by broadcasting the seed over a worked seedbed. No need to grow in rows for weed cultivation;
in fact, you don’t want to. Solid stands
of buckwheat…will more than compete with most weeds.”
Page 173-174
“If you don’t want to dry it in a windrow as described
above, wait until after frost has killed the plants and the more mature seed
has had time to dry. This usually means
harvesting at about 17 percent moisture, then drying the seeds down to the
necessary 12 to 13 percent with artificial heat or spreading out the seeds very
thinly in a dry environment.
Small amounts in the garden can be harvested by hand. Cut the stalks with a scythe (or sickle-bar
mower), tie them into bundles, allow to dry well under cover, then proceed as
with threshing wheat by hand. Buckwheat
threshes easily. You can shake much of the
seed out of the bundles when it is dry.
Or rap each bundle over the edge of a bucket or the edge of a pickup
truck bed. Or put the bundle in a sack
and trample or flail as described earlier for wheat…Winnowing must then be done
to separate out the chaff and stem bits.
With a garden patch of buckwheat, you can gather a cup or
two at a time for breakfast from the standing plants, using your fingers to
strip the dark brown, pyramid-shaped grains off the stems below the
still-blooming tops of the plants.
Chickens like buckwheat.
Rabbits do too. I just feed them
the plants, with the grain still intact on them. A crop will not go to waste in any event,
because, if you let the unharvested plants stand through winter, the wild birds
will have a feast.”
Page 174
“The ground up hulls are good fiber, but like oat hulls, too
many means less tastefulness. I like
whole-buckwheat pancakes, but I prefer to have most of the hulls removed. With a commercial huller this is no problem,
but at home, using a blender or kitchen mill, hulling is more difficult. We have used our blender to grind all grains
(it will wear out sooner, however) and have found that if the buckwheat is
toasted a wee bit or at least heat-dried well before grinding, the hulls will
shatter off better, and many of them can be sifted out in a flour sifter. Well worth the trouble.”
Page 177
“Millet is grown in the United States mostly for pasture and
hay. Only proso millet is grown
seriously for grain. It is used for
animal feed, flour for humans, and birdseed mixtures. It is nutritionally superior to many of our
common grains, containing more essential amino acids than wheat, oats, rice,
barley, and rye. It lacks only lysine,
the amino acid buckwheat is high in, making buckwheat and millet a good
combination in your diet. Also, while
most grains form acids in your stomach, millet, with its high alkaline mineral
content, counteracts acids and is more easily digested. Millet, not rice, is the basic carbohydrate
food in China, especially norther China.
The Hunzas, whose reputation for health and longevity is well known eat
millet regularly.”
Page 177-179
“The word millet
is used to refer to plants in four different families, and therefore leads to a
tremendous amount of confusion, including mine.”
Page 179
“Proso millet, Panicum
miliaceum, is the only millet grown for food in the United States. It is sometimes called broomcorn millet
because the open heads of the plant resemble small broomcorn heads…This family
of millets is the one used from earliest times for grain and flour, especially
in India, China, Japan, Manchuria, and Russia.
Proso is usually milled for livestock as well as humans because the seed
coating is so hard. Chickens can handle
it whole.”
Chapter 9: Rice: The Oldest Garden Grain
Page 185
“One could say without exaggeration that the culture of most
of Japan, China, India, and Southeast Asia is built on—and survives because of—a
cottage rice industry. We Americans may
not possess the keen Asian taste for rice, or may live where rice cannot be
grown, but we can learn from rice the economies of grain gardens and how to
develop a technology that serves such economies rather than a technology that
forces grain production into the hands of a few human land hogs, some of whom
already tell me they would rather not be called farmers anymore. (I have honored their request.)…Certainly more
people eat rice than eat wheat, but more wheat is consumed. Rice is not nearly as 'commercial' as
wheat. The bulk of the former is
produced at home for home use. In fact,
the United States, which produces only about one percent of the world’s rice,
is the leading exporter of the grain! A
comparison between rice growing in America and Japan can be almost
soul-shattering. A father-son team in
Texas may handle 500 acres of rice or more, but barely make a good living by
our standards. That many acres of rice
in Japan supported one hundred families comfortably up until a couple of
decades ago, and still does to some degree.
And yet we insist that we are the efficient ones.”
Page 187
“The Japanese have learned to grow [rice] successfully as
far north as Hokkaido, which has a climate similar to our southern New
England. Upland rice—varieties that grow
without flood irrigation—will produce a crop in Thailand at 4,500 feet above
sea level, and at twice that elevation in the Himalayas…Upland rice is grown
about like spring-planted wheat.”
Page 187-188
“The typical Asian farmer has been loath to switch to direct
seeding despite the labor-saving advantages.
He seems to prefer longer working hours to the higher cost of chemicals
and machinery that would be necessary in place of labor. Agricultural experts seem to think his
attitude is stupid. But the Asian farmer
knows he is not going to gain a whole lot in net profits anyway by adapting
new technology, and he runs the risk of becoming much more vulnerable to
financial disaster when he substitutes cash and chemicals for labor. His American counterpart hasn’t learned that
yet, but, oh my, the lesson is well underway.
When technology offered the American farmer the bait, he swallowed. Technology said: 'All you farmers are farming
500 acres and barely making it. I can
make it possible for you to farm 1,000 acres and get rich.' The farmers accepted this as faith, not
understanding that for every 500-acre farmer who went to 1,000 acres, some
other farmer had to give up his 500 acres and go to work at something else. Now, when the 1,000 acre farmers find that
they aren’t doing a whole lot better than when they farmed 500 acres, the
technological answer is to farm 2,000 acres.
And again, the farmers believe it.”
Page 189
“[Gene’s Uncle Carl] hoed the weeds because he wanted his
field to look beautiful. And to farmer
eyes, his weedless field was
art. In all this county full of
herbicides and monstrous cultivators, only his field was without weeds. And farmers stopped along the road to admire
it, and admire the work that made it so.
He admired it too. He shared with
the ‘old-fashioned’ farmers a wisdom the new technologists can’t
comprehend. He had raised his daily work
to the level of art, while the technologist slaved away all his days hoping to
reserve a little time in the end for art purchased from an antiques store. Whose 'economies of scale' were the wiser?
Page 190
“Output per man, by our standards, is extremely low, but
efficiency in terms of number of people fed per unit of fossil energy used is
extremely high. As F. H. King pointed
out in his classic work, Farmers of Forty
Centuries, in 1907 Chinese, Korean, and Japanese garden farms were feeding
five hundred million people, almost twice the population of the United States
today, on an area smaller than all the improved farmlands in the United States
at that time. And doing it without any
of today’s big machinery, commercial fertilizers, or herbicides.”
Page 191
“If you want to try a small plot of rice as described at the
end of this chapter, use a variety that’s recommended for your area. If none are, proceed at your own risk.”
Chapter 10: Some
Uncommon Grains, Old and New
Page 218
“The Goshenhoppen historians at East Greenville,
Pennsylvania, keep alive the craft of linen-making, and I was lucky enough, in
the 1970s, to observe the whole process performed at their Goshenhoppen Folk
Festival. You almost need to watch such
a demonstration to learn the craft of linen making.”
Chapter 11: Legumes:
The Overlooked Partner in Small-Scale Grain Raising.
Page 220
“A farm or garden, even the best ecological farm or garden,
is essentially an assault on nature. You
carve out a plot of ground and grow upon it what you want to grow, not what
nature would have naturally provided there.
Lessening the impact of that assault, by allowing the greatest number of 'all creatures great and small' to live and die in mutual beneficence on that plot
of ground, should be a major goal of the garden farmer.”
“…quail will proliferate naturally on your farm if provided
brushy cover for nesting and protection.
Quail can, in turn, control the chinch bugs who might otherwise ruin the
outer rows of your cornfields or armyworms that might otherwise move into wheat
fields from the fence lines. An
unthinking farmer will cut down his brushy fencerows, which would have provided
cover for quail, in order to gain four more rows of corn, and then he must
spend money to spray the bugs that would ruin those four rows. Worse, the farmer must then travel to some
wilder place far away to hunt quail.”
“Nature abhors an excess as much as she abhors a
vacuum. She obeys, unerringly if
blindly, the basic dictum of self-preservation: In equilibrium lies survival.
This is the essential principle of organic farming. It should be the essential principle of foreign
policy, too, instead of the suicidal notion now in vogue that bombs are the way
to self-preservation.”
Page 221
“…when you think of grains, don’t isolate them as modern
agribusiness does with its gigantic fields of grain. Think of grains as just another link in the
food chain leading from the smallest microbe in your soil to the biggest animal
in your barn and the healthiest mind and body in your family. And understand that you are not just
increasing the variety and balance of your gardens or fields by growing grains,
but exponentially increasing all the species of plants and animals that give sustenance
to your grains as well as feed upon them.”
Page 225
“Clovers for hay or pasture will give you weed control if
managed for that. Beans and peas won’t. With alfalfa, the control of weeds comes
mostly from repeated mowing for hay along with the heavy growth after mowing
shading out weeds. When the alfalfa crop
is cut three or four times a year for hay, and that practice is followed for
several years, excellent control of most weeds is obtained. Then a follow-up crop of corn, for instance,
is almost free of weeds for the first month or so after planting, when weed
control by cultivation is difficult for organic growers because the corn plants
are so small at that time that the cultivator or hoe might cover them with
dirt. The more fertile the soil, and the
lusher the alfalfa, the more complete the weed control. If, however, alfalfa grows four or more years
on the same field continuously, it will thin out, and weeds and grasses will
gain a footing.”
Page 228
“Organic fertilizers with a guaranteed analysis of nitrogen,
phosphorous, and potassium are available and ideal for my situation, but too
expensive for me to use in large amounts.
My ‘bias’ is that an organic farm must be producing its own animal
manure for fertilizer if is to be profitable.”
Page 230
“August is harvest month in the garden…I will also want to
go fishing and sit in the shade a lot.”
“In October, I [harvest corn]…moving down the row of stalks
methodically unless I spy a flint arrowhead on the soil surface, which happens
regularly in this area. Then I stand
there awhile contemplating the artifact and wonder if its owner planted corn here
too.”
Chapter 12: Feeding
Grain to Animals
Page 234-235
“Another way to look at feeding livestock on your garden
farm is to compare the process with feeding babies, crude as that might
sound. Some folks believe it is more
convenient to buy a variety of canned baby foods at the supermarket, and
believe, at the same time, that they are reasonably assured that baby is
getting nutritious fruits and vegetables.
But does that mean, as commercial baby-food manufacturers would like us
to believe, that mother can’t prepare her own baby food as nutritionally good
or better than what she can buy.
If grain mills for animal feeds were as inexpensive and easy
to operate as baby-food grinders, there would be little reason at all for
garden farmers to buy commercial feeds. Except to save time and labor.”
Page 235
“…the first time you go to a feed store to try to buy feed
or to get some advice on feeding your animal, most often the person in charge
will seem to believe (I’m convinced some really do believe it) that an almost
mystical health value attaches itself to a commercial sack of feed simply
because it comes from a commercial feed company, or because it has passed through
a commercial grinder. The contrary
garden farmer feeding homegrown whole grains and homegrown processed feeds is
considered a witless apostate and his animals will all wither away. It is as if the animal nutritionists who work
for the commercial feed mills hold secrets of healthful food that the rest of
us are not privy to.
Within the framework of modern confinement feeding of farm
animals, that mystic faith has some justification. If hogs live their entire lives on concrete
and are fed through augers one diet of milled hog feed their entire lives, then
that feed better contain every known mineral, vitamin, protein, and
carbohydrate that their hog needs. And
the fact that confinement-fed animals still do
suffer disorder and disease proves that the scientists haven’t yet solved all
the mysteries involved.”
Page 236
“If the animal consumes more in a given period of time than
he would roaming free-range, he will likely gain weight faster, and that’s the
name of the commercial game. It is also
why we have such a dreadful number of obese people in our society.”
“The garden farmer can feed mostly whole grains with
satisfactory results. In fact, in many
cases the homestead animal is overfed.
Our twelve laying hens receive no milled feed at all anymore. They lay just about as many eggs on whole
grain—or no grain at all when they have ample room to roam through field and
woodlot. I’m more inclined to use milled commercial feeds for baby
animals.”
Page 237
“When I was a boy, we put a trough full of loam from the
woods (soil that had not been farmed and therefore not depleted of natural
fertility and trace elements) in the pen with baby pigs. They rooted in that dirt and got their iron from
it. If they had been on pasture, they
could have gotten their own iron.”
“Animals will generally be healthier grazing a slightly
weedy pasture than in one where only one type of grass or two are allowed to
grow. Variety is the key to feeding animals in the natural environment of
the garden farm. If your livestock have
access to many kinds of food, they will balance their diet on their own. The only exception is if you live where soils are naturally
deficient in certain essential trace element, like zinc or selenium. Where organic matter is high in the soil,
trace element deficiency is extremely rare, but under intensive farming, zinc,
boron, selenium, and other trace elements may be lacking.”
Page 239
“Commercial feed salespersons usually advise soybean meal
for protein supplement because it speeds up the fattening process. But you don’t have to feed out a hog in four-and-a-half months on a garden
farm. If your hogs don’t reach the
butchering weight you want until they are six months old, what’s the difference
to you? A longer period of feeding out
the animal won’t mean losing money, as it might for a commercial hog
producer. The meat might be an
itsy-bitsy degree more tender if fattened faster, but will have itsy-bitsy less
taste to it, too. A longer feeding
period could mean saving money for the garden farmer, in fact, by not using as
much expensive protein supplement.
Connoisseurs of pork, especially of smoked hams, maintain that hogs
fattened more slowly (especially on a diet supplemented with acorns) produce
better-tasting meat anyway.”
“Some corn contains more protein than other corn, even within the same variety. In some tests, normal hybrid corns sometimes
contain more protein than special high-protein varieties, the difference being
the soil, culture, and weather conditions.
In processing, almost everyone today will admit that corn dried with
artificial heat sometimes gets too hot and is therefore less nutritious than
slowly air-dried corn. And some feeders
believe that old, open-pollinated corn varieties are, pound for pound, more
nutritious than the highly specialized hybrids of today. All of which means that the identical feed
formula on two different farms might have a different nutritional value.”
Page 240
“With [a variety of protein sources] you get a broader range
of proteins, which not only means a healthier animal, but also more
protein-rich eggs and meat, and a manure capable of producing plants with a broader
range of proteins in them.”
“…remember that a few hens with the run of the woods and
pasture can supply everything they need except in winter from foraging.”
“Usually in fattening poultry of any kind an all-mash diet
will do a quicker job, as already noted.
Not necessarily better, but faster.
I used to feed my layers and broilers the same feed: whole corn, whole sweet sorghum grain, whole
grain sorghum grains, some broomcorn seeds (hens don’t much like them), millet,
and buckwheat; alfalfa hay; some grass seeds that they pecked off the stalks
when on free range; weeds gone to seed; sour grass (high in vitamin C) when the
hens were penned up; plus some eggshells, oyster shells, a little bone meal
sometimes, table scraps, garden wastes of all kinds, and a little commercial
mash in winter. We feed new chicks a little bread and milk if they are
acting unsatisfied, let them run on the lawn where they chase bugs and nibble
at clover after they are about a week old, and keep commercial feed beside them
at all times.”
Page 246
“As long as they have access to green plants and some water,
geese and ducks will get through a summer without any grain at all, but a
little extra shelled corn won’t hurt them, either. When fattening the birds for market or
fortifying them up for a season of egg-laying, feed a little grain if you want
to be sure of more eggs.”
Page 247
“If [geese and ducks] have a pond to dive in, they can get
by on much less…even to some extent in winter.
Look at those wild Canada geese if you don’t believe me.”
Page 247
“The way cats and dogs were fed on the traditional farm was
efficient and nutritionally complete. At
milking time, the pets got a pan of milk fresh from the cows, daily. When hogs, beef, chickens, and rabbits or
whatever were butchered, they got parts of the carcass the farmer didn’t
want. They caught and ate rodents, to
the farmer’s great benefit. And there
were always table scraps to paw through.
When I was a kid, buying commercial pet food was unheard of on the farm,
and we always seemed to have about a dozen cats and at least one dog around all
the time. If you live the traditional farm way, you won’t have to
worry about your pet cats and dogs unless you allow them to overpopulate. But if you don’t raise your own milk and
meat, you will have to spend considerable money on pet foods to supplement
table scraps and the occasional rodent the pets might catch. In almost all cases, pets are fed too much
and get fat, just like their masters and mistresses.”
That’s a good place to end.
Book recommended. Enjoy!
One of the markers of fall for us is that it is "leaf collecting time." We are known with some of our neighbors as being folks who are very happy to come rake and haul away leaves that are unwanted. This year was no different - in our desire for leaves (lots and lots and lots of leaves - is there such a thing as too many leaves?). What was different this year was that our good intentions did not always match the time available to follow through on them. I was starting feel rather embarrassed when communicating with our neighbor about raking at their place. It felt like about every week or two I would check in if it was a good week to come over and collect and then at the end of the week I'd send my regrets for not ever getting over. We had more or less used up much of the large pile Jason and the older girls had collected at a few others' places in the fall and were in need of restocking. So yesterday and today were the days and we finally made good on our word. They were lovely days, if not a little unsettling being this warm in January. My parents are in their home upstairs right now, which meant that they were happy to have Terah hang with them to free me up some on both days some to work with Jason. Every time we get a chance to work side by side, we are reminded once again how very much we like doing just that! It was fun to wake up this morning both feeling that good tired sore feeling from hard work, and then to both note that our legs felt a tad like play dough on our morning run together.
The leaves are not just good organic matter, they are a lot of fun for the young and old alike. I watched as Jason took a break today to run and do a flip into the big pile. And yesterday when the girls' friends were over, there were all sorts of games taking place in the leaf pile. Terah got to enjoy a few wheelbarrow rides, and some stomping around in the leaves. She also had her first experience of the tire swing in the woods (which is on the path to our neighbors) and it was a big big hit! She would clasp her little fingers tightly around the rope, which was very handy for her swinging safely and not so easy to get her off when Alida's turn came around!
There's been a lot of fun and special times in our household this week. That is pretty typical every week, but there is an added specialness that is unmatched when Grandma and Grandpa Myers are upstairs. Kali is not up there as often as she's got her ducks to meticulously tend and often gets side tracked reading (amazing how the minutes can fly by), but the two younger gals are pretty much always ready to head up the stairs! It's pretty sweet for me to watch the love and enjoyment flow both directions! We've also enjoyed having my folks come our way for some meals, particularly those weekly amazing meals that Kali makes for us (a baked potato meal is on the menu for tonight, which is why I'm blogging and not cooking).
