Today begins the first day of the wheat harvest. Its a little early but things have been so dry. We are on the verge of experiencing a drought. The wheat we started cutting today is the hard red winter wheat my husband has always grown. It is grown in what some people might call with conventional farming methods. The hard WHITE winter wheat will be harvested last. This is what the farmer refers to as "my wheat". He planted it at my request and there was a lot of legwork involved in finding the seed...but more on that later. He agreed to leave "my wheat" chemical free and I'm very anxious to compare the two, especially the yield.
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| Incredibly beautiful day |
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| Office for the day |
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| I'm glad I don't have to bale all that straw |
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God Bless,
Kathy
oh I will be very interested to see the comparison of chemical vs chemical free. So funny that we call it "conventional" to add chemicals, when that's only been done for the past 2-3 generations, before that green manure crops were conventional :) We planted oats this autumn into an area that previously had been heavily cropped using chemicals. We only used an organic fertiliser. Friends who planted at the same time with (as my husband calls it) "proper" fertiliser have already fed theirs out, while ours is growing strongly, but not very high yet. We have some organic mix of microbes to spray out soon, hoping that will help. I can see why "conventional" farmers would struggle with the reduced yields if they tried to convert to organic, it takes time to repair the soil, but once it has recovered, at least we will never buy fertiliser!
ReplyDeleteHi Liz!! I could write a book and started too...LOL. We love to use green manure on our crops..but he still puts nitrogen on a lot of things as well as spraying for bugs and pests. There are so many things I'd like to change about the way we farm but when he agreed to give me a few acres for "my wheat" , I felt like we had a meeting of the minds. LOL - reguardless, he trys to be a good steward of the earth and I love him for listening to all my crazy ideas.
Deleteoh goodness...it's time to bale hay, makes me tired just thinking about it. farmers do NOT make enough money for what we/they do!
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