Farmlead.com organic feed oats

[wd9]

Odd response.

By all means, keep doing what you're
doing. I'm not trying to convince you
otherwise, I was hoping you could even a
tiny bit back up the organic holistic
natural healthy farming regeneration
from somewhere (but can't explain to
someone as unenlightened as me) no
inputs required method of farming.

Frustrating!!!!!!!!

[hobbyfrmr]

wd9, Parsley pretty much sums it up. If you really want to learn more, do an internet search and you can read for a week straight. NewAGTalk is an American site like this, but plenty more agronomy information in the Crop Talk section. Plenty of scenarios, good and bad. If you dont agree, then go to the store and invest in more crop protection/production.
I agree with Pars, industry will call it mining or any other bad thing. This way, the "good" farmer will continue to buy product thinking he is doing good and the organic is bad. Us against Them. Same old song. It works great. This way the conventional guy aways has someone more inadequate than themselves to be criticized.
Something else I find, is, that the conventional farmers are more than happy to pay big dollars to rent that nasty, dirty, weed polluted, no fertility, mined out land when the organic farmer retires. I know some big organic farms in sask just left the industy, leaving a vacuum of 220,000 bushels of milling oats and 90,000 bushels of feed barley that will never be organic.
I am very happy for them.

I like discovering organic feed oats bids of $6.25/bushel delivered to SW Manitoba, and relaying it on a marketing thread. I think that is a good bid.

[hobbyfrmr]

That should read, the big organic farms left organic production, went back to conventional production.

[nibs1]

I had a good sized conventional grain farm,had full bins piles of grain on the ground, still could not pay for the inputs got tired of working for the" company's " so went organic and have never looked back, love what i am doing way more relaxing.When my neighbors are out working late in the spring and fall we are usually done and enjoying life. I seed the crop and plow down crop in one pass then work the plow down in the next year. I grow HRSW and am getting 13% protein,just had a call last week looking for wheat under 13% AT $16 picked up no dockage.I can live with that.Organic is not for everyone but dont knock it until your try it I have done both and wont go back.

[wd9]

No point asking anymore. Every search for
scientific articles on the matter always
end up the same:

Expectations about the superiority of
organic farming methods with respect to
nutrient use efficiency, soil fertility,
nitrate leaching and nutrient recycling
are not justified by scientific studies.

[hobbyfrmr]

wd9,
The original post was an organic grain price bid posted on a website called farmlead.com.
commodity marketing.

If you want very good agronomic advice goto the local retailer meetings. They have very well schooled agronomists(?) agrologists(?) I cant recall the term. Free coffee,free lunch. Normally FCC or a big lender is there for a presentation as well. I used to really enjoy them. I dont find them quite as valuable anymore.
My retail service outlet people were very good. They provided me with excellent advice, and the very best service. They have a very good business even today.

[hobbyfrmr]

wd9, I think newagtalk.com look under crop talk forum. There is pages and pages of different agronomic practices by farmers in North America.

yellow blossom sweet clover, red clover, hairy vetch, black medic tillage radish, and sanfoin. Whatever you want. Irrigation, Calcium, daikon radishes, fall rye cover crops. Intercropping barley and peas, oats and peas, wheat and flax.peas and canola.
Insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, diahreahcides. Its all there for the learning.

[parsley]

There is such a wealth of agronomic research,
it's overwhelming. Farming practice research
have been a source if university income for
decades. I'm painting kitchen cupboards, so am
too lazy to also take the time to compile a list
from the throngs of research papers dedicated to
rotations and interplantings and delayed
plantings, to make them available wth a click.

Another odd response. Pars

[hobbyfrmr]

Sorry Pars, I forgot about delayed planting. Early planting vs. late planting,planting according to the moon phase, pre emergence tillage, post emergence tillage, postharvest tillage,, tillage according to the moon phase. cutting out weeds in crop. Cutting weeds for forage, cutting crop for forage. Planting forages for fodder. Planting cereals for green feed, spraying cereals for yellow feed.
etc.

[wd9]

You would think tilling would be a forbidden part of organics?

1. Use of fossil fuels
2. polution.
3. Destroying of the life going on under the surface that supposedly

What i've learned from article searches is that the leaching of
nitrogen is higher per bushel in an non nutrient added method then one
with added fertilizers.

Parsely, a common theme in an organic discussion is the anger
reciprocated from questions being asked that move out of the holistic
and into actual scientific questions. I ask the questions cuz i have
read this stuff, and have questions, not to attack your way of doing
things. Hope this is clear. Stuff doesn't add up from what is said to
what is written in almost all the science journals i have read.

For example straight out of the Swedish Crop Production Manual -
Ambitions and Limitations:

Abstract This chapter examines the practice of applying nutrients in
organic or slowly soluble
inorganic form in the belief that plants will obtain balanced nutrition
through the actions of soil
microbes. The organic principle of only fertilising the soil and not
directly feeding the crop with water-soluble nutrients has no support
in science. The release of organically bound nutrients in soil through
biological activity is not necessarily synchronised with crop demands
and occurs even at times when
there is no crop growth. Changes in the soil biological community do
not overcome this limitation.
Despite the ideal of organic agriculture being self-sustaining through
cycling of nutrients, in principle
only on-farm wastes are recycled and most municipal wastes are excluded
due to concerns about
pollutants and philosophical views on life (biodynamic agriculture).
Nutrient supply in European
organic agriculture is mainly covered through purchase of straw, manure
and fodder from
conventional agriculture and by-products from the food industry.
Untreated minerals seem to play a
minor role. The fertility of agricultural soils can only be maintained
over the long-term if plant nutrients
removed, are replaced with equivalent amounts and if added sources have
a higher solubility than
those present in the soil. These conditions are in most cases not
fulfilled in organic agriculture. It can
thus be concluded that the naturalness of nutrient sources is no
guarantee of superior quality and
that promotion of organic principles does not improve the supply and
recycling of nutrients but
excludes other more effective solutions for nutrient use in
agricultural systems.

.....Its why i ask.

[Hopperbin]

You may underestimate the value of a deep rooted crop like sainfoin and how much nutrients are down there as is there 10 years supply or 2 to 10,000?
I don't think one should expect under organic production that your going to remove huge amounts of straw and grain year after year. Say for instance if you lucked out one year and grew a bumper 35 bushel wheat crop I would think that a plow down would be a good option the next, rotating into pasture grazing so as only exporting only meat and reapplying the manure.

[parsley]

Courting my penchant for Swedishness is not lost
on my sensibilities, wd. However, indulgent
Nordic emotion has been somewhat replaced by
reason through natural selection, a trait you
should be relieved has become recessive and
restrained, or else I would merely arrive on your
doorstep, club you to death, and take your farm.

Common sense, though, continues to evade
socialist Sweden, the Fed, Chief Theresa, and
farmers who auto-swallow so-called scientific
studies such as Don'tEatEggs. I presume you still
won't eat an egg.

Science has become what the people who foot
the bill want it to be. Mother Nature laughs
heartily at us. We see the small stuff. She sees
the big picture.

If you already think you can nourish, and afford
to nourish, a plant with a growth-cocktail every
Saturday night, and have ZERO side effects, I
cannot convince you otherwise, anyhow.

Where has common sense gone?

Wall to wall spraying five times on one field in
one season is just as shitty as a bee-allergic
organic farmer refusing to spray a hornet's nest
in his bathroom.

You just want to squabble, wd I don't have time.
lol. Pars

[parsley]

. 

I want to again touch on your repetitive  theme of
'replacing nutrients', wd, but on a personal level.  

I own a piece of ground an hour's drive away,  
which has been in my family since 1883. Old
farmed land. A relative had been continuos
cropping it, conventionally for eight or so years
until in 1987, the land was exhausted. He'd
fertilized and soil tested and replenished, ad
sprayed and resprayed, and crop rotated,  and
sung to it exactly as advised,( he was a
precisionist),  until the hills were finally devoid of
growth, his nutrient-input bills  were doing nothing
except getting him nice pens, and his yields had
become a yearly embarrassment. I find most
farmers don't mind depleting their bank accounts
as long as they can recount their yields in the
coffeeshop. 

He did not renew his rental contract.  I had the
property fenced and the fields sown to a sainfoin
forage mixture in the spring of 1987. The forage
germinated with the help of summer rains. 

I don't think it would have mattered what
nutrients had been spread on the fields. They
were what we call "done like dinner". The final
crop was maybe eight inches high  Worn out  

The forage restored the land. There are no more
bare hills. The forage still  thrives and there are
no longer bare, no-growth patches on the field.
The soill is no longer gray but is black and loamy
again. it's alive and healthy looking.

Experts had no idea what to do with it, and I
thought paving it would be prohibitively
expensive, so organic forage seemed reasonable
to me. 

The experiment was interesting. And I learned
many things about soil. And farming practices.
And money. And experts. Pars

[Hopperbin]

Now see if he can get passed the (don't rent to relatives part) :-))

[parsley]

Hopper, the renter did an excellent job, precisely
as prescribed, exactly as advised. And kept
records. No conflict. But the system was doomed
to failure. Pars