Cultural Growth

No, I'm not talking about attending an opera or going to an art exhibit, nor were Petri dishes involved. I'm thinking more about food; there are many ways to grow food, and they break down into a few different “cultures”.

Agriculture
Most definitions of agriculture equate it to tending the ground, and the basis of most farming is making sure the soil is optimized to produce as much as it can. There are college degrees involved with tending the soils, so I won't try to get into details.

• Tilling the soil is mechanically preparing it for plant growth. This includes plowing, discing, and all of the other methods of turning the soil to loosen it up for the new plants while killing some of the weeds.
• Fertilizing the soil replaces or adds nutrients that the new plants will need to grow.
• Cultivating is the process of mechanically removing weeds and pests after the crop has started to grow. This cuts down on the competition for water and nutrients and removes things that could harm what you're trying to grow.
• Pesticides are common chemicals used to kill anything that could harm the crop.
• Irrigation supplies the needed water when nature doesn't cooperate or you're trying to grow something in an area that won't normally support it.

It's hard work and you're at the mercy of the weather and markets, but someone has to grow the food.

 
Permaculture
Working with perennial plants (those that live more than one year) to produce food is the basis of permaculture: rather than planting a new crop every spring, producers will set up fields that don't require the annual dirt-work to yield a crop. You'll still have to deal with weeds, pests, and proper nutrition for plants, but the crops don't change from year to year. Vineyards are a form of permaculture, and some of them have been using sprouts from the same root-stock for centuries.

There are also other definitions. Some would roll the concepts of “holistic” gardening into the idea of permaculture, by doing away with the basics of farming like separation of crops and use of rows to make tending and harvest easier. Others consider planting annuals and letting them “go to seed” so they naturally reproduce the next year a form of permaculture. Like most things in life, opinions vary.

Aquaculture
Raising fish or seafood instead of plants is not very common in the USA, but is practiced around the world. In aquaculture, fast-growing fish are kept in an enclosure and fed to produce a good source of protein. The Tilapia that you will find in your grocery store was likely grown in an aquaculture facility, and much of it comes from Asia where the conditions can make a cattle feedlot or hog confinement building look like a 5-star resort. Catfish and a few other species are “farmed” in the US and the various government agencies treat it like any other animal facility (they regulate them).

On a small scale, setting up a mesh enclosure in a stream or river and adding fish is as simple as aquaculture gets. Feeding them may be a challenge, but that's normal with any animal operation.

 
Silviculture
The growing and cultivation of trees, silviculture is normally seen in orchards and forests. A form of permaculture, silviculture is fairly labor-intensive because most fruit trees are grown from grafted root-stock. Put simply, the tastiest fruits don't grow on sturdy trees, so nurseries will graft a tasty fruit branch onto a robust breed of tree. This means that the seeds from the fruit of that tree will be of the tasty variety and may not grow as well as the “parent” tree. New sprouts of the base tree need to be removed every spring to allow the tasty branches access to water and nutrients. Harvesting from trees takes specialized equipment, and often time will require multiple trips through the orchard since fruits will ripen at different times.

Mixing shrubs and trees into pastures to give livestock a source of shade and protection from the elements is a good example of silviculture. Using trees that bear fruit or nuts adds to the potential yield of the pasture and will attract wildlife.

Forestry is the growth of trees for use as wood and is the ultimate silviculture, but you're talking decades instead of months to get a crop. Proper management of forests is a very involved and somewhat controversial subject in some areas.

Polyculture
Using a blend of all of the above to produce food can work.

• Planting annual crops between the rows of an orchard.
• Grazing animals in a well-established orchard (saplings will get trampled or eaten).
• Setting up an aquaculture tank next to a greenhouse and using the fish wastes to fertilize the plants.
• Mixing crops that mature at different times to get the most yield per square foot.

Growing food is important for long-term preps. Being completely self-reliant is a good goal, but not very many people will be able to achieve or sustain that. Grow what you can, as much as you can, and find ways to trade, store, and use what you produce.

Fertilizer Basics: Chemical

It's been 4 or 5 years since I mentioned fertilizer chemistry, and with spring around the corner a lot of farmers and gardeners are getting ready to plant this year's crop. The science of soil chemistry is a college-level subject, but I'll try to cover the basics and give you a base to build upon.

I'm not going to get into which fertilizer you will need for each crop or condition; that's an industry in itself known as Agronomy and I don't have the space to cover everything here. Do your research on what you're going to grow and take notes on what to look for that indicates possible nutrient deficiency. Unfortunately, without access to a lab and soil sample, you'll have to plan your fertilizer use by how the previous year's crop did.

Fertilizer is anything you add to the soil to provide nutrients that your plants need to grow and yield. A properly fertilized filed or garden will produce more and better food, so the cost of the fertilizer is usually offset by the increase in yield. This applies even if you're growing flowers: a properly fed row of flowers will give you more and bigger blooms and leaves, which is handy if you're growing herbs. Trees can also benefit from being fed the right things, especially when they are transplanted or young, as getting a good start means a longer life and a sturdier tree. I'll look at commercial (chemical) fertilizers in this post and cover manures and organics later.

Chemistry Ahead!

Plants require various chemicals to grow and produce fruit. They can pull carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen from the air and water around them, but they also need two classes of nutrients in smaller quantities.

Macro-nutrients are needed in fairly large amounts and are used in the production of the building blocks of life like carbohydrates and proteins.

• Nitrogen (N): Essential for protein synthesis.
• Phosphorus (P): Used to create new cells for growth and allow stored food energy to be converted to chemical energy.
• Potassium (K): Helps maintain water balance and transpiration in the leaves of plants.
• Sulfur (S): Part of many amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
• Calcium (Ca): An important part of nutrient transport through a plant and used in enzyme production.
• Magnesium (Mg): Used in the photosynthesis of sunlight to carbohydrates.

Micro-nutrients are trace elements that are required in much smaller doses for optimal health, like the vitamins we give children. 

• Zinc (Zn): Mostly used by the plant in growth regulation and protein production, one of the main limiting factors in plant yield.
• Iron (Fe): Used in enzymes and helps make other nutrients available to the plant. Fe is also critical in the production of lignin, which is part of the plant stem or stalk.
• Manganese (Mn): Makes S and P more available to the plant and is also used in enzyme production.
• Boron (B): An important part of building and maintaining cell walls within the plant.
• Chlorine (Cl): Important for many energy-transfer reactions within the plant, this one is rarely in short supply.
• Copper (Cu): Activates many enzymes and is used in protein production.
• Molybdenum (Mo): Used in the root systems to help bacteria bind N into a form that plants can use.

Commercial fertilizer is usually marked with a series of numbers separated by hyphens. The macro-nutrient chemicals are listed in the order of N-P-K and represent the percentage of each available in that fertilizer. These are the three numbers you will see on most bags of fertilizer in the garden shops and big-box stores. Urea is a common form of N, and it will be marked 46-0-0.

Some specialty fertilizers will have more than three numbers, with S and Zn being next in the list, so you may see something like 12-40-0-10-1 which tells you it has 12% N, 40% P, 0% K, 10% S, and 1% Zn. Ammonium Sulfate, a common fertilizer used to lower the pH of soil, would be designated 21-0-0-24 (sometimes 21-0-0-24S). Boron, Iron, and the others are usually designated with their chemical symbols.

Commercial fertilizers are heavily regulated, I have inspectors from the state come by and grab samples of what we sell every few months. The lab tests ensure that we're not “cutting” the expensive stuff with cheaper chemicals to cheat our customers, and I get the results back to make sure my suppliers aren't cheating me. Certain chemicals lend themselves to, let's say, “recreational” uses and are further controlled by various government agencies, and a certain monster that I will not name blew up most of a federal building with a rental truck full of fertilizer-based explosives resulting in that form of fertilizer no longer being on the market.

The meth labs used to steal anhydrous ammonia (NH3) for one of the steps in their recipe, so we had to have locks on every single valve on every single tank that holds it. The cartels in Mexico can make meth in bulk and ship it cheaper than the idiots can make it locally, so we've seen a huge drop-off in NH3 thefts. I used to get Sulfur in 2000 pound bags, but since a person can use it to make black powder the BATFE has made it a paperwork nightmare today.

Be careful of what you stockpile; if you ever end up in the news, some things can be reported as “bomb-making materials” or “drug-making chemicals”.

With the distinct possibility of disruption of  the delivery of food (and other goods), growing some of your own food is always a good thing to try. If nothing else, you'll have fresh food that you know you can trust.

Food for Thought

For those of you who are new, I work in an agricultural industry in the upper Midwest. We grow a lot of corn and soybeans around here and I have daily contact with the farmers that grow what we all eat.

Things don't look good this year.

• We had a harsh winter, with cold temperatures and snow unlike any winter in the last 30 years.
• Winter set in early last fall, cutting off the normal fertilizer season in late November. This means that the ground needed to be fertilized this spring for a crop to grow to its best potential.
• Winter changed to spring overnight, leading to massive flooding along most of the minor and major rivers. Rain and snow melt can't flow through snow on the ground, leading to water backing up in tributaries and drainage systems.
• A wet fall and bitterly cold winter drove the frost deep into the soil. It takes a lot of sunshine to thaw out dirt that is frozen four feet below the surface. You can't do anything with frozen soil.
• Spring stayed cool this year, delaying the start of field work. There are minimum soil temperatures for things like applying certain fertilizers or pesticides and planting seeds.
• We've seen roughly 50% more rain than normal in the five states around me from March to April. After the wet fall last year saturated the ground, the rain is not soaking in and is either standing in the fields or running off into already full rivers.
• The combination of frequent rain and saturated soil has curtailed the time available to do anything in the fields that aren't still under water. The heavy-duty tow trucks have been kept busy with tractors getting stuck in fields.
• The Army Corps of Engineers is still mismanaging the rivers and dams. Several sources are predicting a repeat of their fiasco of 2011 that wiped out a few million acres of farm production.
• I have several customers who have thousands of acres of farmland that are still flooded. Some of them are not going to be able to plant anything this year, which means no harvest and no income. How long could you go without any income but the same rent/mortgage payments?

All of the above have combined to produce a bad year for crop production. The USDA keeps track of planting progress across the country and publishes a weekly report here. For clarification, they refer to their numbers as an estimate, but they are not guessing at the percentages. Roughly 3,600 people or companies who have frequent contact with farmers and/or can do in-person field inspections send in a weekly report from their area and those numbers are combined to produce the USDA report. My company is one of those reporters, every location sends a weekly estimate to corporate and they forward them to the USDA.

To summarize the rather lengthy report:

• Corn is normally 80% planted by now. This year it's less than 50%. What is planted isn't sprouting well,
• Soybeans are normally about 50% planted, this year we're under 20%. Again, what is in the ground isn't growing well.
• Rice is normally 90% planted, this year it's under 75%.
• Spring wheat, cotton, peanuts, oats, barley, and sorghum are about normal for percentage planted, but were planted late.

Corn takes 90-120 days from planting to harvest, so we're running out of time to get it planted if we expect to harvest it before winter sets in again. Beans grow a bit faster and can be planted later, but economic conditions (mainly tariffs) have depressed the price to where farmers can't make a profit from growing them. We don't grow much of the other crops in my area, but I have talked to people from areas that do and they're in the same situation. Everything is late and not growing very well due to lack of sunlight and too much water.

So, what does this all mean to someone who lives in a city and gets their food from a grocery store? You're going to be paying a lot more for your food in the near future. Stock up on the essentials while they're still fairly cheap because prices are already starting to climb on the futures markets (We update our price board at least once a day). If we have another wet fall as predicted, we could lose some of the limited crop that will be grown this year, further reducing supplies. 

We're about one bad year away from having serious problems feeding everyone that relies on the US farmers. That could lead to interesting times in some areas and starvation in others. Add in the swine flu in China that just wiped out more hogs that the entire US produces in a year, over a million calves lost to flooding in Nebraska alone, and crop failures in Australia, Italy, France, Mexico, Argentina, and the Philippines, and you might see why I think food prices are going to rise rapidly and the potential for unrest around the world is going to rise with them.

Chemistry for Preppers: Soil pH

Spring is finally here (at least according to the calendar), the time of year when some of us start to pull out the plans we made over the winter and start working on our gardens. Seeds should have been ordered months ago -- although there are still plenty of high-priced packets in the stores -- so it's now time to start playing in the dirt.

Since I don't live where you do, I can't tell you what or how you should grow in your garden, but there are some basics that apply. Soil pH is one of those basics and is chemistry-related, so I'm going to blend a gardening/farming post into a chemistry post. I'll even try to keep the math to a minimum.

What Is pH?

It is a number that represents whether something is acidic, neutral, or basic. Technically, that number is the negative logarithm (base 10) of the concentration of H+ ions present in a solution measured in moles per liter.

To break that down, if you measured how many moles (explained a few weeks ago) of H+ ions were present in a liter of a solution, you'd get a number. That number is commonly expressed in “scientific form” as a small number times ten raised to some power, like 1.8 x 10^6 which is a short way to write 1,800,000. Logarithms were used before the invention of calculators and computers to make working with large numbers easier and quicker. Multiplying two numbers is the same as adding their logarithms; dividing two numbers is the same as subtracting their logarithms.

You can find log tables in old math books, but the concept is similar to the “scientific form” of expression: every number can be expressed as a power of ten (1 = 10^0, 10 = 10^1, 100 = 10^2, 1000 = 10^3 and so on). For numbers between 1 and 10, the exponent (the number that ten is being raised to) is going to be a fraction of one. Lets go back to that example of 1,800,000 and find the logarithm for it.

1,800,000 = 1.8 x 10^6

Since there is a multiplication sign in there, we can find the logarithms for the two parts and add them together. The log of 10^6 is simply 6, and by looking on a table I see that the log of 1.8 is 0.255. Add the two together and we get 6.255 as the logarithm.

When dealing with pH, the number of moles of H+ ions per liter of solution is going to be a lot smaller -- generally between 1 and 10 mol/l. The pH scale is the inverse log of that concentration, so we need to flip the fraction upside down. Say we have pure water, which will have some free H+ and OH- ions floating around in it. They balance each other out at about 1.38mol/l H+. The log of 1.38 = 0.14, which is about 1/7, so the inverse log is 7/1, which is how we get the “neutral” pH of 7.0 for pure water.

Acids will have a lot more H+ ions present, so the inverse log will be smaller; alkalies will have fewer H+ ions and have a larger inverse log.

How pH Affects Plants

As plants grow, they take nutrients out of the soil. This can change the pH of the soil enough to hinder the growth of future plants. Fertilizer, especially manures that are too “green”*, can swing the soil pH enough to slow or stop plant growth. The dreaded “acid rain” that we were all warned about in the 70s and 80s can affect topsoil over time, as can ashes from forest fires carried on the wind. Trying to plant a garden in a new spot, or on soil that has been moved, can be a challenge if you don't make sure the soil is ready for planting. All of these, and more, are reasons to check the pH of your soil.

Plants generally prefer a slightly acidic soil. According to the Old Farmer's Almanac and various other sources, a pH of 6.0 to 7.0 works best for most crops. If you need to fine-tune soil for a specific crop, the optimum pH range for several common plants are found on this site, but I'll list a few of the common ones.

• Corn: pH  6.0-7.0
• Beans: pH   6.0-7.0
• Potatoes: pH   5.8-6.5
• Tomatoes: pH   5.5-7.0
• Onions: pH   6.2-6.8
• Garlic: pH   5.0-6.0
• Carrots: pH   5.0-6.0
• Cucumbers: pH   5.0-6.0
• Cabbage: pH   5.6-6.6

How Do I Check Soil pH?

There are several types of electronic soil testers on the market, and they all work about the same. If you have access to one, they make testing a lot quicker. If you don't have one, then we need to find another way to check pH.

• Test strips of dyed paper have an indefinite shelf-life and are cheap.
• If you have red cabbage on hand, you can use the juice to make a versatile pH indicator due to the presence of natural dyes in the leaves.
• Red radish skins and elderberries also make natural pH indicators, but without the range of red cabbage.

How Do I Adjust Soil pH?

Common lime (crushed gravel or limestone) is used to raise the pH of soil.

Powdered sulfur was once the preferred method of lowering the pH of soil, but with various government entities trying to keep all of the dangerous things away from us, sulfur is getting harder to find. (I work with agricultural chemicals, and our insurance companies are really getting anxious for us to stop selling it, due to the fire hazard and liability if someone uses it to make a bomb). Aluminum sulfate seems to be the most common, current choice for lowering the pH; organic matter will break down and cause a lowering of pH as the acid-forming bacteria digest it, but it takes a long time.

Nothing is going to change the pH of your soil overnight. Adding lime or sulfur should be done at least two or three weeks before planting, since it is going to take some time for the microbes in the soil and the chemical reactions within the components of the soil to make use of it, so till it in and wait. Aluminum sulfate does work quicker, taking days instead of weeks, but the effects may not last (the pH may trend upwards) as the growing season progresses.


I hope I didn't make too many eyes glaze over with the explanation of pH and logarithms. Logarithms and how to use them may come in handy if you find your self in a situation where you have reference books, but the batteries on your phone/calculator/computer have died. We sent men to the moon using slide-rules, which are physical logarithm tables for doing multiplication, division, and some geometry functions. Old tech is still good tech to know.

* Manure has to be aged for at least a year to break down properly and provide nutrients. More on that in a separate post.

Farming

This will be the first of a short series on growing food, from the perspective of someone who has lived most of his life in the “breadbasket” of the US. If you're growing food for yourself and family you have a garden, but if you're growing a crop for sale or trade then you have a farm. Truck gardens fit somewhere in between the family garden and the commercial farm with some of the advantages and problems of both. I'll start with what I know best: farming.

The People
Farmers are aging. For the last few generations, farmers have sent their children off to college and not many of them are coming back to work on the farm. I know men in their 60's and 70's that are still farming, or working with farmers, some out of necessity but others because they don't know any other way of life. Finding young workers isn't easy when McDonald's has similar pay and better hours. 

Farming is dangerous. Farm work usually ranks about #4 on any list of the most dangerous jobs in America (police work is usually #8 or #10). Not many people are willing to work around dangerous, chemicals, moving machinery, and livestock that can crush you at all hours of the day, in all kinds of weather, and often alone. Scars and missing digits aren't unusual in a gathering of farmers.

These all lead to a smaller number of people feeding the rest of the population. If a catastrophe were to hit the US, the impact of losing just a “few” farmers would have major repercussions. The percentage of the population that actually grows food has been shrinking for decades, and the size of farms has been growing as family farms are incorporated into larger operations. As farms have gotten bigger so has the equipment, which is now equipped with state-of-the-art electronics to help manage their operation.

The Land
Fields are being reworked to take out fences (GPS has eliminated the need to mark property lines) and terrain features in order to use larger equipment.What used to be done with four-row equipment is now done sixteen (or more) rows at a time. The "big" tractors I used as a teenager are now relegated to hauling wagons and powering augers - they can't handle the new field equipment.

Farms vary greatly in size, from a few acres for a truck farm to several hundred acres for growing grain and several thousand acres for cattle/sheep ranches in marginal land. Regulation of the farming industry is growing, and it is just as easy to file paperwork for a large farm as it is for a small one.

Prime farmland is currently selling for around $10k/acre around here; pasture land (too steep or poor soil to plant on) is selling for $2000-3000/acre. There are a lot of millionaire farmers, but it's all tied up in the land. For tax purposes, a lot of land is held in a family trust - a legal way of passing the land on to a new generation without having to sell half of it in order to pay the inheritance taxes.

Developers building houses for the urban-flight crowd have been buying a lot of marginal land and turning a quick buck planting McMansions in the hills. They don't fare well with the intermittent power and blocked roads that occur when winter rolls around, and most of them aren't built well enough to stand alone in a field without a windbreak and the heating bills are astronomical.

The Definitions 

Acre: 43,560 square feet. There are 640 acres in a square mile (also called a “section”). For city folks, an acre is about 90% of the size of a football field. Fields were laid out or surveyed in square-mile blocks when the middle of the country was settled. A section (square mile) was divided into fourths (160 acres) called quarters, which were further divided into fourths (40 acres).

Fertilizer: Anything that can be used to provide the nutrients needed for plants to grow. Manure was used for centuries, but has been replaced with mined minerals and manufactured blends.

Nutrients: The three main nutrients used to grow plants are Nitrogen (N), Phosphorous (P), and Potassium (K). Fertilizer is often marked with three numbers designating the percentage by weight of these three major nutrients, in that order (N-P-K), so if you see 28-8-4 on a bag you can know that it contains 28%N, 8%P, and 4%K.

Permaculture: Any crop that reproduces itself without human assistance. Meadows, forests, and orchards are good examples. They have lower maintenance, but produce less quantity or lower quality food/feed.

Monoculture: A farming technique that favors specializing in one crop, and often only one variety of that crop. The major downside to monoculture farming is its susceptibility to disease: one potato blight (a fungus-like disease) can wipe out an entire economy based on monoculture farming.

The bird flu hit hard this year and has caused the extermination of many large poultry flocks (tens of millions of birds), which has already raised the price of eggs at the grocery store.

This (2015) spring and summer have been wetter than normal for a large portion of the middle of the country (sorry, California). Since wheat is grown in two seasons (winter wheat gets planted in the fall and matures in the spring; summer wheat is planted in the spring and harvested in the fall), most of the wheat in the fields has been water-logged this year. If it stays wet there is a good chance of mold and fungi starting in the fields, which will reduce the amount of wheat for food/feed use and therefore increasing prices.

Monoculture farming is becoming more common around here; the days of a farmer growing his own livestock feed and raising meat animals are mostly gone. Poultry is raised in factories, beef in feedlots, and pork in confinement buildings. Where most farmers used to grow wheat (for bread), corn (for feed), oats (for the horses), hay (for winter feed), and often some of other small grains (sorghum, barley, flax, rye, etc.), now they specialize in either corn or soybeans, and buy whatever else they need with the money from the sale of their single crops. In other areas of the USA, this specialization leans towards wheat or cotton with the same lack of diversification.

Agronomy: The study of how to best grow plants for human use. It's a messed-up combination of economics, chemistry, biology, geology, and a few others for good measure. It's part science, part art, and usually a whole bunch of experience. Most colleges in the middle of the country offer degrees in Agronomy, but without the experience a new graduate is going to be lost.

A good agronomist can survey a field and tell you what you'll need to put on it to grow a good crop. A bad one will sell you whatever his boss is pushing the most.

Truck garden: I know several truck farmers locally. The typical setup is an older family farm (40 acres or less) that is not economical for raising corn or soy beans, and the family doesn't want to sell the land to a big operation that would be able to blend a small field or two into their existing fields and still make money (I've been on single fields of 500+ acres of corn).

Unlike traditional farming, truck farming doesn't rely as heavily on one big harvest every year to pay the bills; most truck farmers have structured their planting and harvesting schedule to provide income throughout the year. Diversification of your crops minimizes the bad effects of a disease or pest infecting one crop and leaving you broke and hungry. Typical spring harvests are “new potatoes” and berries of all sorts. Summer crops are sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, and string beans. Fall crops are melons and squash with apples and other tree fruits being a minor specialization. Winter crops are rare, but some people have found niche markets with nuts and preserves that they can sell through the cold weather.

There is a growing market for locally-grown produce with a premium price for “organic” anything in nearby cities, so there are customers available. Since most of the sales are made off the back of a pickup (there are some grocery stores that will carry locally-grown produce) and paid in cash, the tax burden implications are clear.

The Wrap-Up
If growing your own food is part of your strategy to deal with disasters, let me know if there's anything I can expand on. This is a subject that is so deep and broad that I'll never be able to cover everything on a blog. I'll be recommending some reading material in the near future, and will take a stab at gardening soon.