Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer
Farming and Industrial Agriculture are similar in the way a day old baby and a elderly corpse are the same thing. The difference is that one has potential and represents health and life and the other is dangerous to life if you don’t do something about it soon.
Whenever you see the word “farmer” or “American farms” in a MSM story you know immediately that they aren’t talking about farmers or farms, but Industrial combines that produce monoculture crops to “feed the world” or to add to gasoline to slowly and deliberately wreck engines.
Industrial Agriculture does the exact opposite of farming by leaching nutrients out of the soil, breaking it down through misuse, and the application of toxins in the form of pesticides and herbicides, ruins the water tables by leaking huge lagoons of manure slurry into waterways every time it rains and demoralizing the people who staff this outdoor factory that treats every living thing like a commodity or a widget instead of the important part of Nature it represents. Now they just want to get rid of the last nagging and troublesome detail of “Farming”, human beings.
As I’ve said before, robots can do everything a human being can do at ten times the cost, with four times as much labor involved and with a much shorter lifespan than that of a human…
Will Robot Tractors Save America’s Farming Industry After It Crashes?
Agriculture automation has the potential to reshape the farming industry in the 2020s and beyond.
A new analysis from Bloomberg shows robot farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means tractors will have no cabs – able to spray, plant, plow, and weed cropland with artificial intelligence.
Autonomous farming is a popular theme among all farming equipment manufacturers. Several years ago, the Australian government studied robot tractors from John Deere, Case New Holland, CNH Industrial, AGCO, CLAAS, Same Deutz-Fahr, and Kubota. The key takeaway from the matrix below is that Deere and CNH are leading when it comes to making tractors fully autonomous, with both companies having released working prototypes.
Bloomberg notes that several startups in Canada and Australia have already made their autonomous farm equipment commercially available.
In Saskatchewan, a Canadian province that borders the US, Dot Technology Corp. sold fully autonomous power platforms for the spring planting season.
In Australia, SwarmFarm Robotic is selling weed-killing robots that can also mow and spread. These companies say their new machines are much smaller and efficient than traditional field equipment.
Sam Bradford, a farm manager at Arcturus Downs in Australia’s Queensland state, was one of the first adopters of SwarmFarm’s robots last year. He has four truck-sized weed-killing robots to manage thousands of acres.
Before, Bradford had used a Case Patriot 4430 Sprayer with a 120-foot boom that “looks like a massive praying mantis.” It would cover the field in chemicals, he said.
However, robots are more precise than traditional sprayers. Bradford said his robots work 20,000 acres, will save him 80% of his chemical costs.
“The savings on chemicals is huge, but there’s also savings for the environment from using less chemicals and you’re also getting a better result in the end,” said Bradford, who’s run the farm for about 10 years. Surrounding rivers run out to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s eastern cost, making the farm particularly sensitive over its use of chemicals, he said.
Costs savings have become important as a deepening trade war has sparked a potential agriculture recession in the US. On top of that, spot prices for agriculture products have been in decline for five years.
The S&P GSCI Grains Index Spot has collapsed more than 50% in 81 months from the August 2012 peak. Meanwhile, inflationary cost pressures have been seen in farming equipment, labor, seeds, fertilizers, fuel, and other farming inputs has led to low margins.
Personal incomes plummeted the most in three years last quarter, as the entire industry is on the verge of collapse from the ongoing trade war.
Trade wars, depressed commodity prices, natural disasters, and a synchronized global slowdown have brought many farmers onto the edge of bankruptcies.
Several months ago, we reported that federal data showed the number of farmers filing for bankruptcy has climbed to its highest level in a decade.
A farm crisis has developed across the American Heartland. Farmers will need to adopt robots to achieve higher profitability and efficiency in operations. SwarmFarm’s Chief Executive Officer Andrew Bate said robots would allow farmers to grow crops more efficiently, adding to their bottom line.
Before the start of Saskatchewan’s growing season, Dot sold autonomous tractors to farmers throughout the region.
Alex Purdy, head of John Deere Labs and director of precision agriculture technology, said, Deere hasn’t released fully autonomous tractors because the technology hasn’t yet matured to replace people.
Purdy said artificial intelligence, deep learning, and advances in computer vision would transform agricultural machinery even further.
Brett McClelland, product manager of autonomous vehicles at CNH Industrial, said the modern tractor does thousands of tasks, and to fully automate those tasks, a deep understanding of each is needed to automate them.
One of the most challenging areas is “sensing and perception,” said McClelland.
CNH Industrial revealed an autonomous tractor at the 2016 Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa. The tractor is still undergoing test pilots and not yet commercially available.
The proliferation of commercially available farm robots could be what save’s the American farming industry after it crashes in the early 2020s.
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I recently spent time on a 12,000 acre farm. I left with the impression that the owner and workers were concerned for and were taking care of the land. They were practicing advanced techniques re seeding, low impact tilling, crop rotation, letting the land lay fallow, crop timing, chemical minimisation, etc.
It was an eye-opening experience.
I have noticed the same thing. A new generation of small farmers are in a different mind-set than those running a farm for conglomerates or some of the old-timers. The robotic stuff seems to just be a new way of doing the same big-Ag monoculture and impersonalization. Perhaps extremely advanced robotics and recognition will change that. The centralization and control by so few and so giant, corps bothers me. Amazon-type corps will treat food with Amazon-type service – namely, near tyrannical and with the logic HSF mentioned in his dealings wtih Wells Fargo a few articles back.
I mentioned I have about 150 fruit/nut trees. I grow 5000+ head of unique variety garlic annually – some heads/varieites get 4″ diameter. I do all of it chemical-free (except using oregano oil on my trees) and started using that term over 15 years ago when “organic” was the rage. I didn’t want to pay to be certified organic (I don’t have the volume), but still wanted to be known locally for no chemicals (better than organic). Now I see a lot of “chemical-free” stuff.
A lot of the organic farms spray A LOT of chemicals and the fact that they are derived from roots, flowers and other “natural” sources doesn’t mean squat. Many of the organic chemicals weren’t subjected to the same testing as lab-made-chems in the 90’s when it became the hot trend because of what they were derived from. Now, recent studies are finding many to be carcinogenic. They might break down more quickly, but a lot of “organic” acceptable chems/sprays are poison and can be sprayed the day before/of going to market.
That said, take a look at the LD50’s (Lethal Dose 50 percent of test rats/mice/etc.) for some of the indurstial chems and then combine that with the spray schedules put out by every university (many big-Ag “farmers” follow those to a letter) AND stick-em type chemicals to make the sprays adhere and stay on the food longer. Read it once and you will start paying extra for the local farmers stuff done by hand as much as possible!
I use two things that could probably be utilized on all crops and provide results comparable to cost of chems: Fine netting for trees/row covers for beans and such, AND Oregano Oil at 20-40 drops per gallon for fungals/bacterials/virals. The oregano oil WORKS and no one knows about it, so, as I mentioned once before: keep it to yourselves or big Ag will use big Gov to make it “illegal” or price it out! These methods and application cost no more than chems – I have done the math and my only variances are due to my lack of volume/equipment compared to a huge farm. It costs no more to spray a peach tree once with oregano oil and water and then cover it with fine netting after thinning, than applying chems several times annually. Same for row crops and other fruits/nuts.
These are actions people can take. I don’t see big-Ag thinking along these lines right now, regardles of the robotics deployed. Pride before profit is for small-timers, at least, for now.
very interesting. when do you spray? (before buds come out? after pollinating has completed? )
This is going to be a LONG answer for a short question! It will be worth it.
It depends on what you are spraying for. I usually only do 1 or 2 sprays. One late winter to kill anything that overwintered (if you put in 2 teaspoons per gallon of real soap, like Fels Naptha or Dr. Bronners in, you will also kill insect eggs and help spread/mix the oregano oil around evenly).
Peach leaf curl is said to be unable to be cured once it (fungus) is on your trees (total bullshit but seems to be “known” by everyone) and that you have to use copper spray in dormant stage (late winter) to prevent it, often called Bordeaux mix (it’s organic-approved, insanely enough – too much of copper trashes the soil from year, after year exposure and it causes skin problems on people – not as bad as other anti-fungals like Chlorothalonil, but still unacceptable).
Essential oils (thyme works too from what I have read) can be used any time on leaf curl. It takes a couple sprays a few days apart and all fugus dies, infected leaves fall off and new ones come out (unless very late season, but then it would be minimal unless you had let it go because it comes out as soon as the tree leafs out).
Other problems I have fixed: bacterial spot (apples, pears, peaches, cherries), fire blight (pears and another supposedly “unfixable” attack), and powdery mildew (grapes). Some success with brown rot on cherries, but if you are getting brown rot, your tree is planted in the wrong place (by soil or sun or both) or you have not pruned correctly for air-flow/sun.
Once fruit sets and you thin (1 fruit per 6″ of branch – not cherries though), wrap entire tree with insect netting. Secure with wooden clothes pins (they are like .01-.02 each). Again, unless you have wet/poor soil or bad location for sun or air-flow, you should not see more issues if the tree is netted. Bacterial/Fungal/Viral tend to start in spring, not when the trees are leafed out or later in summer – then it is insects and the netting, if applied correctly and secured correctly, will provide 100% protection. Take it off for harvest and use for several seasons before it is degraded.
Apple maggots, coddling moth, wasps and stinkbugs do most of the damage around here (and birds!). Totally prevented if netting is applied when fruit is marble size or less (right after flower petals are 100% dropped is good or a little later, but marble size at most).
Learn about varieties and root-stocks. All fruit trees are clones, but not all clones are created equal. Try to match the root stock tolerances and benefits to your soil.
Prune and thin more than looks right for better fruit (bigger/sweeter) and prevention of down years.
That is a nutshell of 20+ years of XP – follow the suggestions and you ARE better than any commercial set up!
Good luck, take a little pride in the work and enjoy!
What do you think about neem oil? I’ve been using it on citrus trees (leaf miners) with limited results but every organic blog has something positive to say about it… Chip
I used neem one time in one season about 10 years ago. As you mention, it had limited effect. From reading, it appears that neem is a very low impact organic-approved chemical. It would need constant application (every few days) to really make a difference.
Neem has low runoff impact and is not one of the organic-approved chemicals that has carcinogenic potential – there is research showing it may actually provide chemo-type use against cancer.
There is some effect (bad) on bees, so, spraying needs to be done at the right time of year (not during bloom at all) and day.
Insect netting is a better solution in my opinion (even on a huge orchard) because if you take all real costs into consideration (neem oil, applicator/sprayer, prep-time, spray-time, number of applications, equipment clean up after each use, equipment storage, equipment maintenance) compared to applying low-cost insect netting once and removing it once and then storing…..it is less work and less cost to just use the netting (and you get perfect fruit).
Neem is pretty safe though, but it is still poison at a certain level – here is the LD50 from the MSDS:
Acute Oral:LD50: >5g/kg [Rat] Acute Dermal:LD50: > 2g/kg [Rat]Inhalation:Inhalation:LC50: > 0.72mg/Litre [Rat]
5 grams of Neem per 1Kg of weight in a rat is quite a bit to kill half. For people, that translates to: about 400 grams for a 175 lb. person – about 14 ounces or so. Skin application is far less.
And LC (lethal concentration in air) is even less. When I spray anything, I wear a full disposable tyvek suit and a full-face mask with the 3M 60926 P100 Organic Vapor cartridges. That blocks 99.999 percent of many organic vapors and also solid particulates (down to 1 micron if I remember).
Thanks, this is a very interesting post.
J&G, thanks so much for the information. Extremely useful! I’m having problems with fruit trees, high bush blueberries, raspberries.. seems like everything I’m growing has some type of blight or disease. Highly discouraging. Hopefully, this will turn things around. God Bless.
Great information and advice, JAG – although I do not have fruit trees, I have for a couple of years had issues with fungal blight – have rotated crops, etc., and do not anticipate issues (unless rainfall is unusually heavy) with that, but Oregano oil is on my shopping list anyway. Thanks for that. Do you have any advice re growing garlic? Would love to hear whatever you care to share, because XP is priceless. Thanks!
Niebo and LuvCO2,
Those blights are, as niebo mentions, due to fungus. That fungus is found in the soil and overwinters there.
Just like Peach Leaf Curl (a fungus) it is recommended to use….Copper Spray (and worse chlorothalonil). The same things prescribed for leaf curl.
That can’t be coincidence. I would try it and I would apply it in early spring and apply to soil as well around the plant so that roots can uptake into the plant.
Since it’s a fungus, I would bet it’s “in” your soil (meaning spread around there). You can’t replace that and ammending is a lot of work. Also, fungus does well where drainage is not enough (even though it might appear to be enough/dry). Rotate your crops (I use 8 or 12 year rotation – way more than anyone would recommed or does….it jsut isn’t conducive to using chemicals so, what retailer/maker would recommend that! And it does require more land/planning).
When growing garlic/alliums the BIGGEST factor is rotation. 6 years is absolute minimum for prevention of nematode build up. Nematodes will destroy everything, build up over time and once there can stay for decades (yes, decades). Choose the right variety – there are hundreds – for your zone. Hardnecks don’t do well in the south, for example. For huge bulbs: Plant 6-8 inches apart in rows and make rows at least 12″ apart (I do 16″). Plant in fall at EXACTLY 4″ depth 2 weeks before first hard frost (difficult to time sometimes but just go by the almanac). Save your biggest bulbs each year for seed. Over time, it will acclimate and you will get bigger and bigger heads until they are maxed out.
My favorite varieties: Hardneck: Purple Glazer, Korean Red, and Duganski Softneck: Transylvania, Polish Soft and Inchelium Red
In almost every state, the main (or one of the main) components that has been pulled out of the soil is Calcium (some manures, like Chicken, will put enough back used seasonally). Almost all planting soil is deficient in calcium at this point…and it is said tilling causes erosion – maybe, in some places and some methods. Garlic must have loose/loamy soil – tilling is a must. I till three times before planting. Once to break up surface grass. Two weeks later, till again. Finally, I put down Chicken Manure (at least one month before planting or you risk ecoli, etc. – seriously don’t mess around, ONE MONTH before planting) and do a final til. Once garlic is planted, cover with 3-5 inches of straw. It helps with weeds and soil erosion.
I was going to respond but you did such a great job and covered all of the bases that there’s nothing left to add. 8 year crop rotation is hardcore. You must have a lot of space and keep meticulous records.
HSF, niebo, Lovco2, Jag, et all,
Every commenter so far might enjoy this…
https://www.history.com/shows/the-american-farm/about
Thanks HSF – those are some really encouraging words and I appreciate it.
I do, indeed, keep meticulous annual records, including data about, rotation, all till dates, plant dates, harvest dates, heads planted vs. heads harvested, harvested weight by variety, average head weight by variety, cure time days, etc.. All in spreadsheets going back to about 2005 when I started.
It takes me about 2 acres+ to do 5000-6000 heads annually and rotate on a 10 year schedule. Off years are either cover (just the first year after harvesting – rye grass) or just let go to grass and wildflowers.
Thanks again for reading (I know brevity is not one of my strong points!) and the encouragement.
Something I want to experiment with as a treatment for fire blight: Raw milk spray. Apparently, lactic acid bacteria deliver a two-pronged attack on Erwinia amylovora: 1) Flooding the new blooms with good bacterial activity, and 2) Killing E. amylovora directly.
Never tried it though because I haven’t personally seen a bad case of fire blight in Malus.
Also, haven’t needed to till with garlic. I planted it directly in 8’x8’x3′ hugelkultur mounds in alternating, concentric circles around fruit trees (among other guild companions), approximately 2′-3′ from center on the edge of the mound plateau. They love the loose, fully composted growing medium. Trees are spaced 15′ apart in row, 20′ between rows. Mostly on M7, OHxF 87, and Myrobalan (depending on species and cultivar) 12″-14″ of mulch in between each planting (in row and working on in between), bush beans cutting perpendicularly and strawberries at the corners. Everything is thus far in harmony. Only thing not currently working in my favor is Bermuda grass. That stuff is Satanic.
Been experimenting with Geneva rootstocks not parented by O.3 (G.222, G.202 mostly). Never thought I’d start out an Electrical Engineer and end up working the land.
I have had success using a powdered milk spray on powdery mildew on grapes before I found the oregano oil solution (oregano works way better).
I am wondering if the varieties you are growing (crab or orchard?) aren’t fireblight resistant and maybe that is why you haven’t seen it. Or, you prune and thin right and planted in the right soil type/class and maybe that helps too. Maybe just lucky so far too – stuff comes out of nowhere too often!
I haven’t had the opportunity to use raised beds or the hugelkutur technique, but I am rotating far more than anyone I know at 8-12 years and cover crops in bewteen (and some years, just wild). That really helps keep soil healthy and loamy if tilling for pre-plant.
Your permaculture op sounds like you have the method/science down and are seeing results.
You clearly know your stuff on varieties and root stocks! I love hearing/talking about that stuff!
Good luck with the bermuda – here it’s crab that seems unstoppable sometimes….I think farming may actually require more problem solving and forsesight/planning than electrical engineering some days! It’s good that someone with your skills is on that path now.
I’ve read about diluted gone “bad” raw milk spray on fields, supposed to work wonders. Just like health begins in the gut for humans, health begins in the soil for microorganisms and bacteria (and for us humans). Peace.
Agri-engineering (is that even a valid compound phrase?) vs. EE is a tough one. I’d wager both are equally complex but the same decision trees are used. Applying Agile SDLC to farming for task and defect tracking has been awesome, and I am relieved to see Conor Crickmore up in NY using a derivation of the same methodology on Neversink Farm. (Surprise surprise, he was a Data Architect in NYC in a previous life!) Building motherboards, software, and crops has a lot of overlap.
I’ll post a list of the scions sometime as well as the rootstocks on each. At least YOU would appreciate it! 🙂 Fire blight is more prone on pears for me, even on the resistant cultivars. But I catch it before it goes further than the blossoms. A lot of the apples are inherently resistant but I do have several (Spitzenburg and Pink Pearl are notorious, apparently) that may pose a problem in the future. The key with them is maintaining the resiliency just like you would your own body. In my experience thus far, the less they go without, the less insect damage and disease pressures I seem to have. Paul Gautschi theorizes that when the plants are so luscious and filled with water, insects aren’t attracted to them, almost like they know which plants to eliminate. Either that or they drown in the leaves’ excess water.
BTW, don’t feel bad about using spreadsheets in such a detailed fashion. The only time I open Excel is to do bills and to track plantings.
Interesting on the oregano oil. Do you think it would work for tomato blight?
I think it might – see above where I responded to you and Niebo. Thanks!
I am going to try oregano oil, dude. That sounds intriguing.
No man, thank YOU!! This site is the best !!!
One comment on garlic, don’t pull after it’s been very wet or rainy. It will pull out and leave the bulb in the ground never to be found. Wait till its somewhat dry. And I agree with JAG, raised beds and no till are the way to go. Tilling ruins the soil microbiome, nuff said. I’ve been no till for years and it has worked wonders.
Just drove back from Virginia and North Carolina and the amount of dead fields is staggering. It seems so simple to me. But then again, not profitable unless you kill the soil. Reap what you sow I guess.
No till is the only way to go if one cares about one’s land. 100% right IMHO. Even more importantly, we need to rebuild the soil incremently as we go. The more we put in, the more we get back.
I am not in this to become uber-rich. We need to educate for the future. I plan on posting my successes and failures in the fall for others to learn. Not sure if many folks would be interested, but I’ll go line item by line item if necessary.
I just returned from a 2200 mile motorcycle trip thru Texas and New Mexico and back. Truly amazing. Where I’m from in Louisiana it used to be said that you could run cattle at 1 head per acre on improved pasture. On the huge cattle ranches out west, I don’t know what the ratio of cattle/per acre would be but it looks like a cow would have to graze on a dead run to get enough to eat. The farms are something to behold. Thousands of acres of mono-culture. Forty acres and a mule is definitely a thing of the past. The American people have no idea where their food comes from.
I watched Idustrialization come of age in the 80’s growing up in NE. Many lost out and the human landscape changed dramatically, corporate farms consumed their neighbors, producing a patchwork of large farms dotted with abandoned homes, stretching from SD all the way to Mex and from the Rockies to the Mississippi.
Concentrating the power of food into a dramatically smaller coterie of corporate titans in league with nefarious multinationals.
This round of sorrow should produce more of the same.
Should work out great.
I thought, when reading your title, that the job of getting rid of people was already well under way. That the seeds of our destruction were already sewn. Big Ag Machines will simply ensure the destruction is absolute and unnoticed. Even with machined food, seed to market, our problems are insurmountable.
The chemicals used by Big Ag have wreaked havoc that only the aged understand. I recall, as a lad, that after a few days of really good rain, there would be tadpoles in the puddles remaining a few days later – in all the puddles. There were still minnows, fish, frogs snakes and turtles in every running stream. I spent my boyhood chasing them.
They’re all gone.
Industrial Big Ag kills everything. There were those who saw it happening, saw the planes spraying and plumes of poison drifting everywhere, who cried out in alarm. Studies proving eco-collapse, human endocrine disruption, cancer, birth defects, and polluted waterways everywhere meant nothing at all, really. The poisoning is ubiquitous, everywhere, in everything.
Mechanized Big Ag isn’t ‘farming’. It’s yanking humanity’s roots from the soil while nobody is watching.
Reminds me of when we moved here to the hills of southwest Wisconsin nine years ago. About 10 acres of our land was ridge top alfalfa, had been farmed in the modern way, corn, beans, alfalfa for as long as anyone around here could remember.
Anyway, the first thing I did was take a shovel and dig in the alfalfa fields to see what the soil was like.
Zero worms or bugs or any living organism in the soil that I could see. Not one.
The farmers here “kill” the soil every time they change crops.
We take care of the land ourselves now.
For a few years, every spring, I would walk the old fields and “frost seed”, broadcast a mix of grass seeds, and the difference is amazing.
We get a tall, mixed grass every year, and the soil has worms and bugs everywhere you care to dig.
Erosion issues are also gone.
Some people who have studied the dust bowl years and all that major devastation have concluded that, yes, it can happen again.
I agree, and likely worse.
I still have 80 acres of my old home place. I lease it out to some people to pasture their cattle. The agreement was that they would clip the pastures twice a year to help keep the weeds down. I usually wound up doing most of the mowing myself. They told me that they were going to buy a spray rig and spray the pastures. I told them they could take their cattle and go somewhere else. It’s only 80 acres buts it my 80 acres. I don’t want it killed with chemicals. I don’t see nearly as many bees as I did when I was a child growing up there. There used to be an abundance of Western MeadowLarks. Now you don’t see any. For years neighboring farms used all kind of chemicals on their soybeans and other crops and I think that has alot to do with the disappearance of the birds. Quail are another you never see.
If my father hadn’t worked so hard to clear that land I might just let it go back to nature.
Ha! I had forgotten about tadpoles in puddles/ruts after it rained. You are right, they used to be there. I used to catch the following snakes locally as a kid: corn, milk, water, garter, bull, and even caught a blue racer a couple times. The salamanders I found as a kid under rocks are now endangered or very scarce. Garter snakes are all I see now – corn snakes, in particular, used to be very common and found even when not looking.
Some stuff I don’t want to run into when out hunting up mushrooms deep in state forest – especially in spring – HAS come back. Namely, timber rattlers (not fully, but more every year), mountain lions, wolves, coyotes and bears.
Stumble on anything, but timbers, with young ones in spring and it will be a bad day. Timbers are pretty secluded and 50 bucks worth of snake-bite shields or 100 for full chaps/pants will prevent any issues.
Pileated woodpeckers (the giant bastards), peregrines, and a bunch of other birds (like eagles and osprey) have come back. Maybe snakes and tads will too some day.
Cuba is a really good example of how a country can ‘revert’ to farming without petro-chemical ‘enhancements’, and sustain the environment’s microbial health. Monoculture is an imperative with Big Ag.
Maybe bright coders can compute our way back to a balanced ecosystem that doesn’t kill everything not intended for harvest, but I doubt it.
Sweet Jesus are you Bernie in disguise…..the Cubans are starving in a tropical paradise where everything grows on its own! WTF are you talking about Willis! Not good. Big Ag is also “not good” but let’s not delude ourselves about the worker’s paradise…about Venezuela…..they are getting back to the land after eating the zoo animals and local domestic pets. Average weight loss of 20lbs…..I don’t think they are having much fun being connected to the land. I live in MT a big AG state…..with literal oceans of wheat, barley, and black Angus as far as the eye can see. 10 acres/AUM (animal unit)……Personally, I am hoping for depression in farming so I can buy up some great properties cheap. Organic certification costs $1,200 so not that big of a deal. I do see some of the local progs attempting to do the whole food CSA/coop, usually with vegetables but they invariably go bankrupt not for a lack of market but due to sheer ineptitude. Unicorns farting rainbows is great until you have to run a freaking farm……not easy but it can be done. Our local grocery stores are fully supportive of local products and some farmers have been successful on pretty small patches of land (50 acres). American Big AG is immoral but man are they productive.
It is very difficult to get accurate, much less current statistics for Cuba, but it’s agricultural base can hardly be compared to Venezuela’s
This 2106 article describes a country much different than you picture, with an ecologically sound agricultural system with the some of the highest yields in the world, largely in small plots, without petrochemicals. I think it is important for families to grow some of their own food and most Cubans do. Most Americans would have to pay fines for doing what Cubans are encouraged to do.
http://theconversation.com/cubas-sustainable-agriculture-at-risk-in-u-s-thaw-56773
Cuba’s agriculture was weaned off of petrochemicals when the Soviet Union imploded. Its rates of increase in food output have exceeded any Caribbean and most South American countries. They compost more soil per capital than any country in the world.
People who aren’t getting enough to eat, or nutritious food, perform poorly in academic areas. A natural biome provides food much more beneficial to brain health than soil denuded of most microorganisms and soil dwelling creatures. I could dig earthworms anywhere on my grandfather’s farm. There are none in the soil of industrial farms.
Cuba has a 99.8% literacy rate, 3rd in the world…
America has a 85% literacy rate. (15% of adults can’t read)
Got brain food?
Corporate Farming, NYC and WDC are seemingly brilliant but ignorant; especially regarding science, farming and US Deplorables. The Sun has started a Grand Solar Minimum (GSM). The Earth is entering the Eddy Minimum (probably a 30 year cold weather period punctuated with earthquakes and volcanoes; ref the Wolf, Sporer, Maunder and Dalton Minimums of the Little Ice Age). Wiki is totally corrupted with NWO Global Warming lies. Let the Elite blow their corrupt printed fortunes on IT Corporate farming; we should be encouraging people to leave cities and become small farmers and ranchers below the US Armageddon Line and the food they produce will become very valuable within a couple years. The Oligarchs IT Agricultural Corporations will fail like the big Russian Collective farms failed (that had destroyed the Kulak Farms and caused famines like the Holodomor).
Greenhouses using aquaponics and people growing their own food is better. The solar minimum will make food costs go up and change many things.
FYI Europe has 10 acre under roof greenhouses that can be sited close to a city and are very productive….Europe has much less arable land than we do. Going to be very cold here in MT but we can do the whole “high tunnel” approach and keep scaling up. Snow flurries today here!
And what is the “Armageddon Line”? The 45th parallel?
Where the mile high glaciers stopped.
Roughly, Interstate 70.
33 degrees north and south is something I read.
No, no, a thousand time no! Do not leave the city! Remain where you are! Everything is better in the city! The country is boring, dirty, squalid and smelly! The country idea of culture is a dance at the grange with fist fights out back on Saturday a few times a year and church every Sunday! Count your blessings and remain where you are!
Don’t worry, a special welcoming committee will be there to greet (educate) them.
Very very true..For example,.Industrial agriculture, using slave labor, caused massive erosion and wrecked Italian food production so badly that Rome had to rely on imports from North Africa…Industrial agriculture in ancient Mesopotamia, using irrigation, salted up the fields so badly that they can’t be farmed thousands of years later…
I’ve gardened for a long time and even alot of gardening practices end up being bad for the soil. Giant machines, that make tractors look tiny clearly aren’t helping the soil. They have been growing food on dead soil propped up by sprays and all the rest for a long time now.
I’ve been doing no-dig gardens for 5yrs now with good success. I minimally loosen the soil with a pitchfork when needed and ammend the soil each year. Half my garden is now perennial. I let a portion of many of my plants go to seed and reseed the raised beds, and eat the rest. This works great with spinach, potatoes, tomatoes, kale, and swiss Chard. I do have to buy more pepper seeds, lettuce, and peas. I have wild grown chives and garlic onions and asparagus, I think it as needed and we eat that. Onions grow wild really well. There are some veggies I’ve just had no success going to seed and actually growing back the following year. But for any gardeners out there that want to try and minimize labor and also witness how plants attempt to continue to produce naturally, give it a try. Spinach is one of the easiest, same with tomatoes. They pretty much grow like weeds at this point. I use mostly raised beds. All the work was frontloaded, although every few years I have to buy some mushroom compost to bulk up some of the beds that get shrinked up too much. Ground Cherries grow too well, and although I love them, they have spread and seem to grow all over the place. But there is no need to buy new seeds every single year for a large number of plants. The soil stays much healthier with the no-dig method, the great majority of plants do not need tilled soil and you lose alot by doing deep tilling.
Nearly everyone on my road is a part-time farmer of some sort. My neighbor is the only one that does it full time, raising beef cattle. The rest have to work part-time jobs to pay the bills. Small scale farming seems like a big challenge and none of the people around her doing it are getting wealthy form it, that’s for sure. Small scale organic beef cattle guys around here seem like the do the best financially, they only do tractor work for haying etc to take care of their livestock. If we ever need eggs we can just go nextdoor 2$ a dozen. Other from the occasional bull getting out, or cow in the driveway it has been a fun experience being surrounded by farms. Plus who doesn’t love the smell of manure in the morning, wakes you up better than coffee!
A big part of the problem with industrial farming is they have no fucking clue how to rebuild what they tear down. The more fertilizer these assholes use, the more depleted the soil becomes. They don’t add anything to it. Maybe Agent Smith was right about humans being no better than viruses.
Whether one is religious or not, they should take the time to watch Paul Gautschi in this documentary. The guy is a crippled Vietnam Vet who is “making a difference”.
https://www.backtoedenfilm.com/organicgardening.html
Is this a joke? It’s like “everything is swarming BUT the bees”.
I asked a man from Iowa about fishing there. He laughed and said the runoff of pesticide has about killed all the fish. Now many states have been flooded and are cesspools of chemicals and are damaged. It used to be many farms and farmers, now it’s one owner owning a mega-farm that goes for miles. I personally have talked to many people who tell me of swine and poultry farms polluting waterways about everywhere. I worked on a hog farm fixing equipment and they had gotten into trouble for pig shit ending up in the snake river. Modern practiced of depleting the soil of nutrients and never letting the soil rest are bad also. This kind of shit has been going on for years. Sorry to ramble I think I need my morning coffee.
What’s the alternative? Humans will over-use their resources and suffer the consequences, it’s happened before and will again. This runaway train wasn’t built to runaway, but we human don’t look to the future. I keep my head down, easier to do when pulling weeds. Predicting a flawed future gives me no satisfaction. Participation in destruction does not require membership.
WTF???
I can think of One Task — plowing. If I try real hard I can come up with 10 tasks. Maybe.
I sure as shit can’t come up with “THOUSANDS”. Someone help me out ….
Plows. Plants. Chemicals/fertilizers/harvests. Just from what I saw. The tractors were gps guided. Highly automated. There is a system on the weed killing boom that only sprays the individual weeds, not the entire surface of the land. The seeders can plant eacch seed with a bit of fertilizer next to it. The seeder cuts a groove, places the seed, placed the fertopilizer, then closes and tamps down the groove – on a boom around 20 yards wide with untold seeds going in at once.
Those tractors are very special. And damn big.
WTF do you need a goddamn tractor for if you rebuild the soil? Why plow anything? Jeebus, humans work hard to fail.
I’m not interested in “feeding the world”. Only my community. Fuck the cities. If everyone learned to give to the soil instead of destroying it, we wouldn’t have these issues. It takes 100 years to naturally build 1″ of soil. And the industrial farmers have lost 8-12 FEET of it in the Midwest. Fucking retards.
Ask any orchardist with a screw in his brain what type of activity fruit trees generally like in soil. They’ll rightfully tell you fungal activity. Fungi through their miles of hyphae provide the trees with sustenance in a symbiotic relationship. Yet these same dilweeds are spraying Round Up in the rows and all sorts of nasty shit on the trees. Americans are eating poison.
And then we double down by tilling anything and everything not nailed down. It’s suicidal and Genesis taught us a lesson about how hard humans would stupidly toil once we got the boot out of Eden.
We have around 100 sq yards of raised garden beds. It easily feeds us with all our general vegetable needs – onions, pumpkin, squash, zucchini, lettuces, peppers (unbelievable crops), citrus, berries, tomatoes (enormous quantities for making sauces and dried), broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, chard, radish, potato, eggplant, horseradish, etc etc.
I mean, we get ENORMOUS yields and give heaps away. Almost any suburban block has enough space to put in that amount of raised beds. It is somewhat costly at first, but then the yields just keep on coming.
I am busy making my superhot pepper sauce as I type this. Ghost peppers, reapers, brain strains, seven pots, etc., with a lashing of super ripe red jalapeños,onions (home grown walking and potato onions), slow cooked, charred, smoked, and then blended to a beautiful sauce. Of course, only Choctaw and beaners can stand the heat of it. Random whitey will do a rain dance when they sample it, and call for momma.
Raised bed gardening is the way to go. And of course, it is easy to eat organic if you grow food yourself.
I read a story several years ago about a community in Detroit transforming derelict and abandoned lots into beautiful urban gardens which could feed swaths of city dwellers. And then the City Council caught wind of it and didn’t like it too much. There was another story — same city — where a guy wanted to convert lots into a Christmas tree nursery. Same City Council put the kibosh on it.
Very sad.
Put the word “Big” in front of anything … and you wind up with a clusterfuk worthy of death.
Big Ag.
Big Pharma.
Big Banks.
Big Stucky.
You get the idea …..
Can small farmers like HF feed nearly EIGHT BILLION people??
I seriously doubt it.
Go Big Ag!! Fill mah belly, baby!!!
What ya gonna do when the 7 bad years come (they’re knocking on the door) and Big Ag is a Big Putz? What about the 300 million hungry urban American cannibals?
There’s a lot of racoon meat in my neck of the woods.
I live in dry land wheat country and love it, miles between neighbors. The flip side, the other day I waved at a farmer while he was running his tractor…no hands needed. The tractor runs for a mile(literately) with no human input. I wonder if he sees what the next version of his tractor looks like. I wonder if he has a new job picked out yet.
No farmer wants to drink a cooler full of beer with his wife. Much more fun to “work” in the tractor and get your buzz on. I often had double rows of beans planted by the end of the day.
Now my 5 row planter is 5 guys with sticks, and I drink beer with the wife. My new wife. The old wife- forget it, much preferred being in the tractor, burning fuel and planting 20 rows at a time.
Nicaragua is low tech and Latinas are better wives!
HSF
Where is the $$ at for small farmers?
Specialty foods? I met a guy who was moving his family to Florida (I think) to start an avocado farm. He and his wife were white collar in DC area with 4 young kids. I thought that was very interesting.
Specialty cash crops is where a lot of the really small guys around here make a decent profit. Of course, there is always the saying, “behind every good farmer is a wife…with a job in town!”.
The specialty garlic and local-market fruit varieties (verse traveling varieties bred for supermarkets and far away shoppers) I grow, although not in any volume, fetch multiples higher than store prices and if you have any contacts in your area, the stuff isn’t hard to sell because if you are doing it right, quality and flavor is just off the charts compared to Kroger, Wally, Meijer, Aldi, etc.. Whole-Amazon-Foods might have comparables, I don’t know and I have never once shopped at one.
There are over 1000 varieties of Avocado – I can’t see the taste variances found in fruits like apples, pears, peaches and plums though. But I am not an Avocado farmer…maybe there are superior varieties that just never make it past the local markets due to characteristics that prevent travel. It is interesting stuff, as you mentioned.
It’s happening everywhere. I cannot count how many Gen X IT execs and senior engineers are going into agriculture. Not to profit mightily, mind you. They want out of the Boomer-Millennial shit stained corporatocracy to live a simpler yet more meaningful life. It’s actually pretty rewarding to learn from the land by using your previous life skills. Build a drone, fly over the farm, see what’s working from the sky, etc.
It almost feels like a mass awakening, but maybe it’s just midlife crisis and my balls are in a bunch.
There’s a new tv show comedy about a couple that inherits the “old home place”, know zero about farming but decide to chuck the city and move. You other fossils would compare it to “Green Acres” and the “Haney place”.
I’ve been thinking about your question since you posted it.
Here’s the thing, today for example my son and I sold ten feeder hogs to another farmer. They were born here, we feed them 100% discarded produce, breads, and dairy from a local grocery stores, what would cost a shopper thousands of dollars retail every week, but that we get the day it comes off the shelves, still fresh but not saleable to people. Other than our labor in caring for them and the fuel spent picking up the feed seven days a week, it was simply a product of the farm. That’s only one thing we sell. And I got to enjoy the company of my son.
A diversified farm can easily have fifty or more products for sale from eggs and composted manure to hard wood slabs and fresh cut flowers. Every season has it’s products and even with the most basic marketing- we only use signs in front of the farm and word of mouth, both zero cost- you can keep things moving all year long. It brings in more than enough to pay the taxes, fuel and insurance and whatever other things they only take money for. And no matter who I deal with when money comes up, I always offer to trade and in most cases they accept.
But that’s not the part where the real economics kicks in. It’s what you aren’t spending that makes it so profitable. Almost everything we eat, all of our energy needs, our water, exercise, good sleep, family relationships, repairs to our home, our vehicles, our appliances, our general maintenance, etc. are all things we provide for ourselves instead of having to pay someone else to do. Most people make the exchange of being away from home for fifty or more hours a week for money to pay other people to watch their children, fix their washer, repair their roof, mow their lawn, cook their meals, etc. etc.
It all comes down to this- where is the real value in life? Is it in accumulating more money so you can pay people to manage your own life, or is it in having more time to do what you want, when you want with the people you love the most? I went from being a 1%’er and I wasn’t happy and I damn sure wasn’t satisfied. I know I’ve probably said this somewhere else, but the day I looked out the window of my office and saw a squirrel on a branch and actually envied him? That’s when I knew my values were all screwed up.
Farming is a way of life, not a way to earn a living. Big difference.
Great post. Just a quick salute to your comment about what you aren’t spending, which is Truth. The hundreds of dump trucks full of chipped trees from arborists and horse manure from local stables cost me damn near nothing. I gave them a place to dump their “waste”. It composted and became hundreds of yards (literally) of new topsoil. I can’t even fathom how much money I have saved. Only once did I rent a skid steer to move it, when I had gotten backlogged with a lot of arborist jobs in my area. Otherwise, it’s been a wheelbarrow, a couple of kids, a wife, and the healthiest I have ever been.
It can be done.
HSF,
I came back to see your answer. Thanks.
Also, if you had not been a 1%er, would you have, or would you have been able to, become a farmer?
Fair question, but I wasn’t one for very long. I worked from the time I became an adult until we moved here and in those 30 years I was solidly middle or lower middle class for almost all of it. It was only in the five years or so when I finally ‘made it’ financially in my mid-40’s that I discovered the truth behind the maxim that ‘money can’t buy happiness’. And the only reason I ever did that well then was because I took an enormous risk using all the saved capital (and family help) from those first 25 years of work to launch the business. I just as easily could have bought the farm at that point, but I didn’t have the maturity or insight that it would have taken. And I was still woefully blue-pilled about most things in America. It wasn’t until after 9/11 that I really started to wise up and start to figure things out for myself.
Short answer, there’d still be a mortgage and there’d be a lot we’d have to do without, but yes, it would have been possible and something tells me that we were destined for this no matter how we got here.
Where there is a will, there’s a way.
HSF – I find I enjoy both – country way of life with the creature comforts of affluence. If one can have both, I recommend it.
I completely admire what you’ve done- especially the pride that shows through when you talk about the raised bed gardens and preparing your hot sauce, I found that eloquent and sincere in a way that exceeds anything you ever said about your former life. And I agree with you, it is far better to have some of the creature comforts and there are things I miss from that time, but not many and fewer every time I look back. And there are things that have replaced those creature comforts that are far superior that I never could have understood or achieved if we hadn’t given it up. Yesterday my son and I worked on a project together that was the culmination of months of hard work on his part and when we delivered it to the buyer both he and his family were so gracious, so full of appreciation and goodwill (and he paid cash) that it made that exchange worth 10 times as much as any of the ones in my past. To have that time to work with my son, to see the pride he takes in doing things, to enjoy each other’s company not just on weekends and evenings, but all the time isn’t something I could ever have experienced before and it made all the other things I occasionally miss seem so trivial. Today a pound of really good coffee beans is worth more to me than a dinner at a fine restaurant and it only costs a fraction.
We have more than enough, and at this stage of our life we need less all the time. Everyone has their sweet spot in life and some people never find it. We’ve been both blessed and lucky enough to have hit the right combination for our needs and our desires and that’s all anyone can ever ask for.
We also froze a huge amount of lime juice today. We have limes the size of small oranges. We juice them and put he un ice cube trays, take them out of the tray and bag them for for later use. Just a couple blocks with ice and water makes a great summer drink. Or add gin and tonic of an evening watching the sun set is nice too.
Our little garden is the wonder of our friends and neighbors who have not seen raised beds used that way before. They plant direct in the ground – much harder and less fruitful – and hence they tend not to grow their own produce much. We give the too large to eat stuff to their chickens and livestock.
Plus the raised beds – almost three feet high – help keep the snakes out. And these are not friendly timber rattler type snakes – these are serious killers, the eastern brown, which are seen quite regularly. I hates them.
Wonderful. And the cool thing about feeding chickens wholesome food is they make even better future soil! They’re little soil manufacturers and give eggs to boot!
“Or add gin and tonic of an evening watching the sun set is nithe toot flubbra buf dug soom.”
That’s me. anyway, with gin and tonic.
Wasn’t soylent greens society like this?
Shut up and eat your people-cracker.
Maybe the world needs fewer average IQ 69 blacks, and so on, rather than sadistic coin-shaving ‘efficiency?’
White people have no problems with managing their populace. Why should we suffer just so some futureless-faggot run NGO, with a board made up of childless sociopaths from the Fortune 100, can boast about feeding 4 billion useless niggers?
Maybe letting people that hate us, rule over us, is suicidal insanity?
Maybe it’s not a new problem?
I wish there were something wise I could add to what several folks like Jabbers already posted. All I can state — without evidence, mind you, but with a strong, gut feeling and an engineer’s mindset of deductive reasoning — is that my wife and sister’s cancers are no flukes. The increase in young mothers’ breast cancers is alarming, both anecdotally for me but also based on the medical literature. Hell, my sister eats even more healthily than me. There’s no explaining it away.
Forget the fact that my heart was ripped out with those back-to-back nightmares, which just so happened to top my baby girl’s out-of-nowhere (non-hereditary, food allergy-related) autoimmune disorder. There’s something wrong with the very basics in this country…the food supply, the water supply, waste everywhere.
One positive thing I will say about the aforementioned: When one has visited Hell, absolutely nothing in this world other than death is able to break you. Nothing. And make no mistake, our family delved the depths for three miserable years straight…back to back to back.
My micro farm is unlike anything in my area, all terraformed cedar glade (which I was told was impossible to do), all permaculture philosophy. Its primary purpose was to feed my family holistically. Its secondary purpose is to transform the way my community views food.
Fuck Big Ag. They don’t stand a chance in the future. In fact, if they weren’t so sociopathic, I’d feel bad for how painfully they are going to suffer over time. The Lord has a way of allowing pride to destroy the most vile creatures.
Atheists and liberals (a bit redundant, but nevertheless) are terrified of a man with a mission greater than self; who is willing to sacrifice everything for righteousness. As well they should be.
Hey man – appreciate that you read what I put down. We (the U.S.) are, indeed, eating a bunch of poisoned food.
We have a little more in common…
My wife had BC – caught at stage 2. Double Mastechtomy. Came back after 2 years. More surgery. This was back in ’08 or so. She’s been ok for 10+ now.
Her sister, not so lucky. Caught at stage 4 (BC, as well). She made it for about 1 year – metastisized to brain, leg, other. Wifes parents could not tell my wife upon diagnosis – I had to…hardest thing ever seeing your wife break down after that news. Her sister had 4 kids…not even 40 and healthy lifestyle, never smoked, etc..
Anyway, just wanted to say I am familiar with the heart ripping and nightmares. It sucks and is among the most difficult trials for one to go through in life.
Your micro-farm sounds awesome! Congratulations on doing what was claimed impossible!
Sincere thanks for sharing your story and thoughts.
This ship will be righted in time.
It’s rough as you know. Both wife and sister were 1A. What worries me about my baby sister is that hers was more aggressive and had LVI markers. Not much I can do though.
I think the most difficult part of it all was me thinking: “Why the women in my life, who are better people than me? Why not me?”
Just curious as to what you deem micro-farming? Are you doing biointensive planting with a sq/ft approach, in addition to greenhouses? Do you sell to local farmers markets or others? The market Gardener by Fortier, is an interesting read on attempting to make a living by micro-farming. So many terms get thrown around in the gardening community, sometimes specificity is the only way to make sense of what someone is actually doing. Alot of what people are doing could be lumped in as homesteading as an umbrella term.
We grow about 90% of our veggies for about four months a year, we live in climate zone 6 so growing season isn’t overly long. We do have a cold frame greenhouse, and I grow a fair amount of our garden in the fenced in yard. So if someone didn’t know what the plants looked like they might not realize we have various onions, turnips and potatoes growing wild. For us our interest was to attempt to be healthier, we have tried at times to see how much we can reduce the grocery bills. Overall the amount of money we put in most years at best breaks even. Although we don’t sell anything, and donate tons of Zucchini and other veggies to our family and church. I used to go to every master gardener seminar and gardening related event I could go to. It was kinda of humorous to interact with so many neo-hippy types, many whom wouldn’t care for my non-commie political views.
The relocalization and urban gardening movements were big for awhile and continue to a degree but seem to have petered out a bit. But most farmers I’ve spoke to really have most of their knowledge in tractors, equipment, and seed and sprays. There were only a couple farmers that ever had information that helped me as a gardener. But I used to meet at our local store for crappy coffee at 430am and chat with the farmers, who were all quite a bit older than me. It was interesting, and humorous that they viewed our town as having “grown up” meanwhile it only has a blinking light.
I really should refer to it as a 3 acre orchard and edible landscape (blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries) with future micro-farm potential, per my wife’s plans. We could talk for hours about it and one day maybe we will. But in a nutshell: Study nature to find out what God does. Go walk in the woods and notice that plenty of life springs up from tree logs and the forest floor is not uniform. Bring it to your garden with the understanding that, while you can accelerate the process, you must have patience.
Research hugelkultur in depth and experiment. It works exceedingly well. Think of Llpoh’s raised beds on steroids, providing water to your vegetation for years with minimal watering requirements. Also, two of the five most influential people in my life have been Paul Gautschi and Albert Einstein. Both very different people, both humble enough to experiment and learn from error.
If you want to plant heirloom fruit trees, understand that they don’t necessarily store as well as the dead Franken Food in supermarkets, and they may be more prone to diseases. So embrace it and fight it with your veggies and legumes which help to repel insects. Plant a guild.
Art – That kind of hurt aches in ones bones forever, and cannot be forgotten.
Nor can the fact that you and loved ones suffered inconceivable despair, your health and happiness stolen by the indifference of Big Agri-thieves. The evidence is irrefutable, and easy to ignore until it’s invisible hands strangle those we love.
I hope others find your courage and determination to give back to the land what it once offered everyone, and you find peace in your heart.
Appreciate the kind words from all. I wasn’t fishing for anything, but at some point we all have to come to grips with tragedy. How we respond is what defines who we will be.
I’ve been reading Jim’s site I believe since the beginning, if the beginning was around the time of TARP. Years later, I vividly recall being in the hospital waiting for my wife to recover from the double mastectomy surgery. I decided to cheer myself up by throwing shit at some dude on here for fun, just as a release. It was spiraling as beautifully as a former poster Smokey’s shit. I remember whoever it was physically threatening me and I was in total stitches…the nurses must have thought I was crazy with how hard I was laughing during all of this.
But let me tell you: The mental, emotional, and physical recovery from that surgery is nothing I would ever wish on anyone, even Moochelle. If you don’t laugh at some point during the ordeal with your loved ones, you’ll never survive.
I’ll never be as successful as Llpoh is, or as eloquent a writer as Jim, and my land will never produce as much as HSF’s. BUT — I can throw shit better than most, and the Lord gave me the ability to solve problems. I can live with that.
Genesis 3:19. I want to learn how the Creator does things. He has no landfill. He has no plow. He fertilizes in the fall, and composts it in the winter. Insects are His police force that tell us when something is wrong.
We work hard to fail.
Big Ag Gets Rid of People
I propose we have a nice, old fashioned, preferably very bloody revolution, and flip that headline to read People Get Rid of Big Ag.
Embrace the madness.
Stay small.
Pray daily.
how many of you thought about how it was roughly 100 years ago that the ag business & society itself were radically changed by the mechanization of agriculture?