Our neighbors have farmed their land for the past 5 generations, and I chanced to meet the farmer tonight when I was out in my garden and he was examining his corn crop. We talked about his crops, commodity prices, and then corn. I mentioned my little experiment as if it was some crucial knowledge that the world must know (a little dramatic, but work woth me) about the corn plots with and without fertilizer. He chuckled politely and told me 'Corn won't grow without fertilizer", and that although I will grow some stalks, there won't be any corn cobs unless I fertilize the soil. I told him I did not use any commercial fertilizer, mostly manure, to which he replied that I must have used a lot of manure, and that if I did not manure the ground again before the next year, that crop would not grow.
I had researched growing corn and I kept running into the term "heavy feeder"... but that really was not that informative. You see, I thought that if you turned over the soil, planted some corn seeds, got some rain, that the corn would grow. Nope. It doesn't. And to think that corn is the number one source of animal feed... I wonder if Tyson is worried about this...
Thinking about this further, it would seem that all that corn farm land in Iowa purchased in 1035 exchanges and arranged by Wall Street investment banks is really under the Sword of Damocles/Amonium Nitrate fertilizer, derived from natural gas, and any hiccup in the natural gas market or supply and POOFF!! the value of those corn fields is zipity do da.
2 comments:
Interestingly, the Amerindians managed to produce maize without any artificial nitrogen fertilisers, or cows for manure, for thousands of years.
So it must be possible...
They would bury a fish where they planted, which must have helped.
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