Abstract
In the fall of 1986, I launched my first experiment with organic. I prepared two twenty-acre fields for winter wheat planting, side by side. The first field would be chemical free. I had been growing alfalfa hay there for the past few years, so I hadn’t been spraying it with herbicide. And since alfalfa is a legume, I had plowed it into the soil in place of synthetic fertilizer. I took a soil test to measure how much nitrogen I got from the alfalfa and found that it was pretty high: ninety-five pounds per acre.
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Notes
- 1.
I wasn’t alone. Data from the USDA’s Economic Research Service show that in 1984, Montana farmers paid just over $157 million for pesticides, fertilizer, lime, and soil conditioner. Their net income that year? A loss of $112 million. And their government payments: $239 million. Without the federal subsidy, you’d think farmers might have learned their lesson and tried to lower their input costs. But in 1985, Montana farmers spent another $134 million on chemicals. That year they lost a whopping $333 million: the worst year of the 1980s. But again, Uncle Sam helped them cover the chemical bill, to the tune of over $220 million. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, “Farm Income and Wealth Statistics, Value Added Years by State,” 2018, https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17830#Pa3316c27a2b94883b3008821125d2680_8_110iT0R0x26.
- 2.
Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, “2016 Cover Crop Survey Analysis,” www.sare.org/Learning-Center/From-the-Field/North-Central-SARE-From-the-Field/2016-Cover-Crop-Survey-Analysis.
- 3.
D. Bigelow, “A Primer on Land Use in the United States,” US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 4 December 2017, www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/december/a-primer-on-land-use-in-the-united-states/.
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© 2019 Bob Quinn and Liz Carlisle
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Quinn, B., Carlisle, L. (2019). Going Organic. In: Grain by Grain. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-996-8_5
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