When input prices soared last spring, many farmers wondered if there might be a better way.
Apart from diesel fuel to run their equipment, organic farmers eschew most of the items on a conventional grain producer’s ever-lengthening shopping list.
They grow their own nitrogen, spread manure for phosphorus and use more varied crop rotational strategies to beat weeds. With fewer expenses socked into inputs, many of them say they can live with lower yields.
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“I always want to compete against my neighbours for the bottom line, but nobody wants to take me on,” said Gerard De Ruyck, an organic farmer from Swan Lake, Man, who together with his son farms 1,000 acres.
“The guy across the road had a real good crop of rye, and I offered to take him on, but he wouldn’t do it because I had a real good crop of rye, too.”
De Ruyck was offered $12 a bushel for his organic rye and regrets not taking it, now that the market has become unsettled.
Choosing to farm organically isn’t all about money, said De Ruyck, who switched from conventional farming in 2000 in an effort to get back to basics and beat the input treadmill.
His strategy includes green manures, which are legume crops grown to fix nitrogen, and feeding the microbes within the soil ecology using liquid fish and molasses.
De Ruyck’s inputs cost roughly $35 per acre, which is much cheaper than a typical conventional input mix of $120 per acre for fertilizer, fuel, spray and treated hybrid seed.
Seventy bushels to the acre for barley and rye is within reach of a skilled organic farmer, said De Ruyck, adding he has grown oats at 70 to 90 bu. per acre.
So why isn’t everyone farming organically?
“Everyone tells them it can’t be done without fertilizer or chemical. The universities tell you it can’t be done. We have to go the States to get information on biological farming,” De Ruyck said.
“If you ask your ag rep here, he won’t know what that is. All they learn is N, P, and K at the universities.”
He said weeds can be outmaneuvered through judicious tillage, which is kept to a minimum to avoid harming the soil ecology. By keeping the soil healthy, pest problems are also minimized. His strategy is to boost the number of good soil microbes so they outnumber the bad ones.
In De Ruyck’s potato market garden, his son found that Brix, or sugar levels, were so high that potato bugs ate only a tiny hole in the leaves before moving on.
“Bugs do not like healthy plants.”
The biggest obstacle for many farmers, he added, is the amount of knowledge and management decisions they have to possess to farm successfully without the “cheat sheet” of purchased inputs. Many, he noted, have effectively given up on learning the art of farming, and instead pay a crop adviser $5 per acre to make all the decisions.
In such cases, their only alternative in a declining margin scenario is to get bigger and bigger in the hope that they might have enough profit left over to stay in business.
“Last year I had a 30 bu. to the acre wheat crop. A conventional guy would call that a disaster. Now, I’m delivering that to the bakeries for $25 a bu., so at even 20 bu. to the acre, that’s like $500 per acre.”
Because he has his own seed cleaning plant, De Ruyck’s certification costs are in the higher range, about $2,000 a year.
“But even one tonne of fertilizer, that’s $1,400.”
Jody Frykas, who farms with her husband, Rick, near Gilbert Plains, Man., said organic crops can give conventional crops a run for their money on good land like theirs where proper management is practised.
Their hard red spring wheat yielded 30 bu. to the acre this year, on a total input package including rent, taxes, fuel, insurance and certification costs that amounted to $41 per acre.
A crop of barley underseeded with black peas cost $33 per acre to sow and yielded 36 bu. of barley and nine bu. of peas.
If she sold it to the flour mill in Elie, Man., in mid-November for the going rate of $17.50 a bu., the wheat crop would have brought in $525 per acre. At a malting price of $11 per bu., the barley would have earned $396 per acre.
“The premium price does outweigh the lower yields,” Frykas said.
