Organic mushrooms

[RPCookin]

Eight tons of compost every year?

We're talking about farming here, not home gardening - even fairly large-scale gardening. That kind of addition is not affordable for farmers with hundreds of acres.

Compost fertilizer is quite practical for large farms. My father-in-law leases his 400 acres of land to two brothers who farm it for him and he takes a share of the crop as payment. The brothers also farm some 2000 more acres of their own land. They mostly grow dryland winter wheat and field corn, no irrigation. They fertilize exclusively now with composted manure.

We do have a bit of an advantage with more than a dozen cattle feed lots in the area. Those feed lots compost the byproduct that comes naturally from their main business of plumping up cattle before they are shipped to packing plants. and the local wheat growers get the fertilizer from them and haul it in by the semi load. This is fairly pure stuff... where they dump the truckload in the corner of the field nothing will grow the next year because the ground is chemically burned sterile by the compost by the time they get it spread on the field.

My father-in-law (age 94 now) was the first in this area to experiment with anhydrous ammonia to enrich land that was mostly worn out and no longer farmed - it revolutionized local farming and made him one of the most successful farmers around here. He was able to cheaply rent unused land from other farmers and get good crops from it. Soon everyone followed his lead. Now he and his partners have pioneered the use of composted manure to replace the ammonia fertilizer that many still use. That seems to be working quite well too, and it's currently still cheaper than chemical fertilizer.

 

[GotGarlic]

Interesting, RP. Good to know.

Out of curiosity, is their operation certified organic?

 

[RPCookin]

Interesting, RP. Good to know.

Out of curiosity, is their operation certified organic?

No, because they do spray pesticides when necessary - usually aerial spraying for wheat rust. I haven't heard of organic wheat, and the corn they grow is not sweet corn, it's field corn used for just about everything except serving at the table as a veggie side dish. It's harvested after the kernels become dry and hard.

Since both crops are mostly used in combination with other ingredients by the time they hit the grocer's shelf, organic certification would not have much meaning, and it wouldn't make any economic sense.

Even the beef we buy on the hoof here is hand raised in small herds, but isn't legally organic because they do use antibiotics if needed. Unlike larger cattle operations, they don't add it routinely to the feed, but only use medication when necessary. That makes the beef organic as far as I'm concerned, but it doesn't meet FDA standards. I can tell you that it's better beef than you'll find in a grocery store.

 

[GotGarlic]

That's what I thought. The primary farmers at our downtown farmers market are not organic, either, but their produce is beautiful and delicious.

There's a vendor that sells organic grass-fed beef and free-range chicken, but they're at least triple the price per pound of other meat, so it's out of our price range.

I did try a grass-fed steak side by side with one from the grocery store once, out of curiosity. DH and I both preferred the flavor of the grocery store steak. Probably because we grew up in Michigan with corn-fed beef and pork.