TWENTY-ONE YEARS OF NOTES FROM OUR FARM: WHAT WE’VE DONE, WHAT I’VE LEARNED PHILIP LYVERS
For the last twenty-one years, our farm has gone from conventional to conventional and organic, to conventional, organic, and biodynamic. I have taken the outline of the records and broken them down into three intervals of seven years ( 3 x 7 = 21).
BEGINNINGS The first seven years, starting with 1998 and going through 2004, saw plenty of changes. My daughter and son came back to the farm. We increased the sow herd from 300 to 600 sows. We built the entire infrastructure for this expansion, plus added more land. We began moving away from soluble fertilizer to organic; because of the manures, we could. Hog prices dropped to 13 cents per pound on some of the first hogs sold from the expansion. Looking for ways to cut costs, we started pulling antibiotics. We have never gone totally organic. Because of the slope of the land, we have to practice no-till, so we use chemicals to control weeds. Our yield on corn for this period averaged 154 bushels per acre. We also started testing manures for fertility in farrowing, gestation, and finishing in 2000.
SECOND SEVEN-YEAR PERIOD: MIXED RESULTS In the second seven-year period, from 2005 through 2011, we used the preps as recommended. We applied the 500 on crop acres through a tea machine and flow forms onto the soil. Later, when corn was over forty inches tall, we applied the 501, one-half teaspoon per acre, with a mist blower. Corn only yielded 71 bushel/acre. It matured and dried down 15 to 30 days early. Quality was not good. Fungal disease destroyed the corn. We did the same thing in 2006, and the yield was better but we had some problems with maturity and quality. We didn’t try the third time, but we did start using preparation 508, horsetail fermented, because we felt we needed silica even though it was a different form. Corn still did not yield, the quality was a little better, but it still matured too fast. During these seven years, we pulled all the soluble fertilizer and used manures and cover crops for fertility. The soil had to adjust to a different system. We had a hard time getting stands of corn and cover crops. We were using peppers of mice and weeds that didn’t seem to
Since I started spraying preparations 500 and 501 together in the fall, I can now say I see the subtle working on the dense “phenomena”: higher corn yields, better quality plants that adjust well to dry weather, do not mature too early, and are less prone to disease. This gave us a means work out how much to apply per acre. Quality of grain was good over all. In 2003, we started spraying preparation 500 and using the compost preparations in the manure pits and compost piles. The first preparations we used were obtained from the Josephine Porter Institute (JPI), then we started making all of the preparations ourselves for future application. 26
work and the quality of the grain was not good. We had also pulled all antibiotics out of the feed for hogs, plus wormers on market hogs and all vaccines, so the quality of feed was very important. During this period, we also tried to use preparation 501 on corn when it was very small and on bare soil. From this, the only detectable results were negative. We were still using preps in the pits. Here, we could see results. Testing manure before
Biodynamics
SPRING 2019
