It reminded me of finding that US Geological Survey guy at our farm on Horseshoe Road a couple of years ago. He said we had some of the rarest Ohio songbirds he had found anywhere. That farm is covered with headed out cereal rye with a tiny bit of Mother Nature's Cressleaf Groundsel or Golden Ragwort as they used to call it around here. It looks like a meadow but it might be a soybean field one of these days if it ever stops raining in southern Ohio.
There are some corn fields up around a few miles away from here but here the fields are basically untouched. We had just enough dry weather to treat the wheat fields and maybe kill down a cover crop earlier but it is pretty green and growthy around here. It has not been a good year for gardening yet and it is getting late fast, Memorial Day is upon us! I wonder if anyone will take Preventive Planting as our June 5 corn planting date may rush right by us again like it did 2 years ago?
We took our friend Marian to lunch yesterday. She lost her husband on the day my dad passed away 12 years ago and now has buried a son, also. I have known her since the 70's when we attended Marathon United Methodist Church. She has done very well at taking care of others. Her husband John was the best notill farmer I knew and their farms have the range of nature I see on ours. Notill farming is definitely more biological than tillage. We talked about farming back then like we practice today. It just makes more sense to me and I wouldn't be farming much if any at all if I had to till everything. I have never been geared up to do it because I couldn't justify it in my mind.
I parted with tillage in 1976 when we rented the new White 5100 no-till planter at the home farm in Sardinia. We've had a lot of bumps in the road but that one action has led me to a lifetime of study of notill and biological farming and has had a direct impact on who I am married to, who my family and friends are and what I do today.
I can't think of any farmer that notill has had more impact on except maybe for my mentor, Paul Reed. I heard them impact of notill and biological farming this morning when the songbirds helped me wake up.
Ed Winkle
I remembered the first time we no tilled wheat into bean stubble......oh how easy that made it.
ReplyDeleteThis year is the first year most of the full season beans are no tilled. We worked one field that had dandy lions that didn't seem to wanna die.
I spent more money on chemical this year but less on fuel. I lowered alot of stress at planting time too. Was hard to wait for the ground to dry while others were running verticAl tillage tools but spread fertilizer on the wheat and worked on sprayer.
If these birds are not predatory enough to pests, there's other forms of biological farming too, like with Bt, which may be a good or a bad thing, depending on how it's used.
ReplyDeleteSame for the ladybugs, awesome idea which works great, but it seems humans never can get these things right: http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/05/hostile-invader-ladybug-species-carries-spores-that-kill-competitors/
Or sometimes we just get these pests in our native species from global trade: http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/05/the-frog-killing-fungus/
Just like we killed North and South Native Americans before colonization with chicken pox or other diseases for which they haven't built millennia of adaptation and resistance.
Cardinals on a Christian farm, juncos outside my atheist windows, it figures... ;)
ReplyDeleteOnce I understood it, notill was the easiest thing I ever done. If I can do it, I figure anyone can. I do run into some tough nuts though, they are steeped in tradition so much they can't get behind the thought of not tearing up every acre they pass.
ReplyDeleteChimel you are way too much for most to handle, that is all I can say.
Ed