Dust rules from EPA

Manure doest fit in no till at all. What you do is to plaint the next crop without tilling the soil at all. You plaint it and spray it to kill any weeds and hope for the best. No till will work but the yield will suffer and may not be as good as half of what you expect and goes down each time you no till. You seed fertilize the seed at one pass and then spray it with herbicides to keep the weeds down and then combine the crop. It is a sure fire way to get crop insurance payments. Minimum till is the next best thing to try you only disk the ground and then plaint it. Then you can either spray or cultivate it and hope for the best. Regular till means that you rip the ground then disk it run a Do-all or other leveling device over it then you plaint it . You can cultivate and spray the seed bed at the same time. This will give you the largest yield. Every time you cut corners your yield will be less. This works on Farms in Arkansas and much of the south. Farming practices vary you can't use the same practices in California or on the great plains that you use in Arkansas and expect the same results.

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God must have loved stupid people because he made so many of them.

Sebastes is exactly the sort of person President Eisenhower had in mind in his oft quoted remark about farming being easy when your plow is a pencil and you are a thousand miles from a cornfield. Might as well give it up folks, this newby is here only to irritate and agitate with his repetitious "they used to burn rice straw" nonsense. Let's all just ignore him and not respond. Then maybe if we are fortunate he will grow weary of talking to himself and go away. Yeah, we should be so lucky, this is my one and only response to this thread.

I garden without tilling and while using copious amounts of manure, all the time. It doesn't run anywhere, and it isn't liquid, either. The soil acquires a very nice texture this way, not compacted or cracked dry and caked hard on the top like other gardens in the same locale.

ah, the personal attack! The weakest of the weak debate tactics. If you could prove me wrong you would have presented something of substance. Evidently, you can't..

You have a 1000 acre garden?

You use 120 cows worth of manure each year?

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Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.

CHECKMATE!

No, but that cool Japanese guy who wrote One Straw Revolution doesn't till either, and he does own extensive acreage, which produces better than other farms there.

If I farmed the way I garden, it would use a lot more manure than 120 cattle could generate. But the whole point here is this: mega farming (like 1000 acres at a time) invariably leads to loss of sustainability in terms of topsoil, animal care, and food quality....not to mention (gasp!) ecology.

Why don't the lawmakers just hand our total food production industry over to foreigners? Then we won't have to worry about dust just uinhealthy food made with USA exported fertilizers and pseticides because they are illegal to use here because of the toxicity!

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Do not Lead for I will Not Follow
Do not Follow for I shall Not Lead
I am but a Simple Drummer

So the best thing we can do is to only grow enough for ourself and let the rest starve?
Do you even know about farming or just gardening?

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God must have loved stupid people because he made so many of them.

I believe that the man mentioned does an acre and a quarter.
Or at least that's all he mentions in his interview.
Hardly someone I'd look to when trying to figure out how to grow thousands of acres.

Yes it would be nice if we could go back to the stone-age and use sticks to farm with or maybe just be hunter/gatherers but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
None of which has anything to do with the fact that idiots at the EPA want to do something that will have a far reaching impact on farming and the general population.

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Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.

If all farmers would unite for one growing season and not do anything, maybe people like sebastes would be so weak from hunger their fingers wouldn't be able to farm from the keyboard. Maybe even the next years crop would sell for enough to make a living.

It is unfortunate if you were, or feel you were, personally attacked.

The problem is that you have a very, very narrow view of 'farming' that does not represent but on thenth of 1 percent of farming in the USA. What you & your relatives experience is an extremely specialized type of garden farming.

So, it really has no bearing at all on the issue at hand.

You do point out the _problem_ of regulating farming - people like you, or even worse people without anyone at all near a farm, will be setting the rules.

You have no concept of what you are talking about. I know what rolling the land, and lazer leveling is, and so on. It just isn't done on 98% of the land in farming.

So, it's hard to really prove or discuss this with you. You just don't have enough knowledge to really try. I wouldn't know where to begin.

Thank you for providing the example of what is wrong with these types of regulations.

--->Paul

Conventional till.


Minimum till
Reduced till
Strip till
No till
Multch till

The first one is where you try to make the ground pretty black at some point, before you plant. There are 100 different tillage machines, depending on your micro-climate.

The rest are various ways of doing less tillage. Even 'no till' requires you to at least disturb the soil enough to put the seed in the ground, so there is no 100% 'notill'. There are many ways to apply liquid manure and commercial fertilizer in all of these systems.

Solid manure is more of a problem in reduced tillage, and especially notill. It can be spread on the surface, but a lot of places that is no longer allowed, it must be incorporated. Kind of a difficult thing; govt encourages notill, enccoutrages solid manure to be incorporated, doesn't want soild manure stored in piles, and on and on - they don't really know what they want one to do with it, and are putting forth all sorts of regulations that argue with each other... Sorry,t hat's a different topic.

No-till:

On ligher, warmer, drier soils it works great I hear.

Farther south where you have a longer spring, it can work real well.

About 3/4 of the crop land in the USA has gone to some sort of reduced tillage. It works well!

Except in a few spots, where the soil is very heavy clay, very cold, very wet springs, and very short growing season.

That of course is where I am, and notill does _not_ work here - the ground stays too wet & too cold.

Even at that, I myself have reduced the tillage I do - where I grew beans last year, I only apply NH3 in spring and field cultivate, then plant. That is pretty low tillage.

Every area is different, and unfortunately notill does not work for me. But reduced tillage is a good thing, and it is practiced on more farmland in this country than not.

Some are giving blanket statements of this is how farming is done, period.

My point with this thread is that, in fact, farming is done differently - and successfully - from county to county, and farm to farm, and there is no one way to do it that will work for everyone.

And that is what is wrong with the idea of EPA trying to regulate dust coming from a farm.

They can regulate a factory, or a power plant, and so on - these have clear borders & defined hours and mostly work indoors.

Farming is outdoors, fighting mother nature every step of the way. anyone who gardens knows that. You can't apply one set of rules to such a thing.It's not like a factory job that you can regulate in this way.

I appreciate the discussion this thread has brought, lots of different views.

--->Paul

When youre gardening over 1000 acres at once, that might mean something.
Otherwise it's totally irrelevent to this discussion

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ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

You dont have to be "proven wrong" since youve failed to prove yourself "right"

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ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

1000 acre "megafarms" generally exist in climates and environment suitable primarily for grain production. Except for rice, you cannot and will not make a living (i,.e. anything more than a glorified hobby) as a grain farmer with anything less than 300-400 acres and this would be in some of the better producing areas (i.e. N. Missouri, Iowa, etc). 1000 acres of dry land farming (i.e Nebraska, South Dakota, flats of Colorado, etc) is nowhere near "Megasized."

People that critized "Corporate" farms have no idea what they are talking about. "Corporate" farms are generally family farms that incorporated as tax strategy (S corps). The have to expand to survive--grow or die--economies of scale. As profit margins are screezed they need more land to make a living. Often these farms buy out those farmers that no longer wish to farm or have kids that have no interest in farming.

BTW "extensive acreage" in Japan is probably 5-10 acres or so. I know the farming models of Korea, Japan, and China and, while very interesting and worthwhile, don't necessarily fit with America's breadbasket do to climate/environmental/cultural differences.

IIRC, I have also seen articles in Acres,USA that tell of "real farmers" who have organic operation with substantial acreage who farm sustainably and don't plow or plow minimally.

All that machinery costs a lot to operate. And I can't believe that on a homesteading forum, 'bigger" is being advocated over "smaller and better". I never said that big farms should be taken away. I do think that there should be restrictions on number of animals per acre and number of animals per farm regardless of the size of the farm. I also think that monocultures are a recipe for disaster in a number of ways.

Farmers are supposed to be innovative and resourceful. They found ways to plow with little more than a horse drawn branch back in the old days. But now I'm being told that they can't farm without sending that precious topsoil (which most of them don't replenish, so in that context, is irreplaceable) into the wind and downstream. I don't believe it. Farmers are masters at adpatation, which is why they can cope with changes in weather,etc. I feel pretty confident that a way can be found to farm with reduced plowing.

I also think we should be paying more for our food, and to the farmers, _not_ the middlemen. If they got more money for well grown food, they could afford to do it the right way.

Smaller and better works for climates and evironments that support it--Japan, Korea, Washington State, etc, etc. This primarily means vegetable, fruit, and in heavily, heavily gov subsized regions (japan, korea) rice production. Smaller and better, IMHO, does NOT work for corn, wheat, and other grain production. Real world vs starry eyed mother earth news neuvo back to landers.

And how do you do that? Agmantoo may be able to support 1 unit (cow/calf) every two acres on his superbly managed operation in N. Carolina but in South Dakota it would require 40 or 50 acres per unit. Microclimates, soils, grasses, management, etc, etc all affect how many animals land can hold. How would you enforce this--carte blanche limits or hiring another 10,000 Department of Agriculture employees to ensure compliance given specific land conditions?

Another authoritarian socialist that as a "plan." Just what is needed!

Homesteaders grow enough to feed themselves and maybe have a little left over for sale. I hear that Ernie even grows hay and uses a scythe.

A farmer is growing massive quantities of food to sell. A scythe operation would not work to well as you would starve.

Who will produce the food to feed the world if every US farmer reverted to garden farming?

What really stuns me is the absurdity of it all.

There are thousands and thousands of farmers out there working the land and growing crops. They are always looking for more efficient ways to get things done. THey are members of associations and take periodicals that swap information.

The farmer pays the fuel bill. And the equipment bill. And has to live with the consequences of decisions. Working the land is equipment and energy intensive. ANy normal, thinking human would believe that the farmer has worked all of this out and, if it could be done more efficiently, and therefore more cost effectively, it would be done.

But authoritarian socialists never see it that way. Sitting at a desk at Atlantis, they know better. They know better than thousands upon thousand of farmers out there trying to eek out a living. But, you see, authoritarian socialists do not have to live with the consequences of their decisions.

When they fail in the market place of ideas, when they are unable to convince the farmers with debate and argument, the authoritarian socialist hides behind the health/safety/environmental rules to implement their agenda. "It's for the children!" "So, your against clean air?" ad nauseum.

But authoritarian socialists never have to answer for the consequences of their actions. When the farmer goes bankrupt from decreasing yields, or when people are starving from decreased crop yields, the authoritarian socialist melts back into the background to fight another day. It, after all, was not his fault.