No-Till Veggies in Permanent Cover Crops

7. April 2008 by P. Leslie Riley.

I like real life farm success stories much more than university research . . .
Check this out :
http://cedarmeadowfarm.com/default.html

Steve Groff and his family, farm 200 acres of vegetables and crops on hilly land in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He has pioneered the “Permanent Cover Cropping System”, which includes no-tillage, cover crops, and effective crop rotations as a way to increase profits, enhance soil and water quality, and reduce pesticides.

The cornerstone of this system is a unique emphasis on maintaining a permanent cover of crop residues and cover crops on the soil surface and having something living in the soil at all times. All vegetables and crops are then seeded or transplanted into the organic mulch. This permanent cover aids in weed control, has virtually eliminated soil erosion on the farms 3-17% slopes, and has increased soil and water quality.

A passionate advocate for sustainable agriculture soil conservation, soil health, and food quality, Steve started no-tilling in the early ’80s. He later began using cover crops as another soil conservation measure and now plants cover crops based on the succeeding crop that will planted the next year. Some fields have not been touched by any tillage equipment for over 30 years!

Posted in Soil & Fertility, Alternative Crops & Enterprises, Organic vs Conventional Faming, Agrarianism, Family farm Opportunities | Print | No Comments »

NZ Economy Helped by Dairy Farms — Thriving, Subsidy Free, Grass Based

4. January 2008 by P. Leslie Riley.

Mississippi’s once prosperous dairy industry is at crisis levels & may not exist much longer. Commissioner Spell in the Mississippi State Debate said this was a natural consequence of market forces.

Conventional “wisdom” big governement/ big corporation/ big land grant-USDA “experts” agree with this. The belief that they share with all is :
1) Dairy farms must be on a mega scale, confinment oriented, in dry climates, corporate owned heavily financed & with heavy inputs. And that there will be fewer and fewer.
Because of this, Mississippi cannot compete with new non-traditional dairy areas like California, Arizona, Wesr Texas, and Idaho where the arid conditions are “ideal” to put 4000 or 5000 head confinement dairy operations on 40 to 100 acres. Hire lots of help & “efficiently” run it like a factory.
2) This same folks also push for heavy subsidies on milk to “help” family farms ( they never quite say why the number of farms has decreased in direct proportion to the size/ number of dairies)
3) And, “conventional wisdom” is that Agriculture is at worst an impediment and at best a afterthought/ minor component of a healthy & growing economy.

Turning this “conventional wisdom” on it’s head with facts is New Zealand.
New Zealand’s dairy farms are almost exclusively grass based/ family owned
New Zealand got rid of subsidies 10 years ago — and are thriving.
And, according to the article below, New Zealand’s economy is in a slow down, but it being proped up by : the dairy industry.  Go Figure.

There is no reason that Mississippi can’t have a thriving dairy industry again that offers prosperity for hard working family farmers; produces healthier milk, cheese, butter, etc. for  Mississippians (which would, in turn, drive health care cost down); provides better Stewardship of God’s Creation; and is a vital part of economic growth for rural communities.

BUT, as we all know, one definition of insantiy is to continue doing the same thing, the same way, and expecting different results.

 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=195&objectid=10484890

 Dairy bonanza likely to soften slowdown

5:00AM Tuesday January 01, 2008
By Brian Fallow 

The housing market is at a standstill.

The country ended 2007 with some respectable numbers on its economic report card.

The economy expanded 3.3 per cent in the year ended September, while inflation over the same period was 1.8 per cent.

The unemployment rate is 3.5 per cent, a record low.

The terms of trade - relative prices of the kinds of things we export compared with the kinds of things we import - are the most favourable since 1974.

The Government’s coffers are overflowing.

But the outlook is less rosy than these numbers would suggest. On a quarterly basis growth peaked back in March.

The economy expanded as much in the first half of 2007 as it had over the previous year and a half.

But it has slowed markedly since then as households, whose consumption represents more than 60 per cent of economic activity, battle higher mortgage rates and global inflation in oil and food prices.

The consensus among economic forecasters is that private consumption growth will run around 1.6 or 1.7 per cent through 2008 and 2009, the weakest rate since 2000.

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That is in spite of household incomes being underpinned by brisk wage growth, the prospect of tax cuts and a tsunami of dairy cash.

The problem is that the necessities of life - housing, food and energy - are gobbling up a larger share of people’s incomes, leaving less to spend on other things.

The housing market has flipped from one in which house prices were climbing and borrowing costs were low to one where house prices are flatlining but borrowing costs are rising.

After doubling over the the previous six years house prices, as measured by the Real Estate Institute’s national median, have been going sideways since May.

But the long boom has pushed the average house price to six times the average household disposable income, nearly twice its long-term average.

Households with mortgages are consequently carrying much more debt relative to their incomes than they used to and are more exposed to interest rates.

And with fear and suspicion now the dominant sentiment in international credit markets, the days when New Zealand banks could tap cheap money offshore to fund home loans are over.

Two-year fixed mortgage rates are now the highest they have been for nearly 10 years.

The average mortgage rate being paid is around 8 per cent, the highest since October 1998, and the Reserve Bank expects it to approach 9 per cent by 2009.

About 30 per cent of all fixed-rate mortgages, representing a quarter of all mortgage debt, come up for an interest rate reset over the next 12 months. At currently available mortgage rates these borrowers will face increases of 0.7 to 1.5 percentage points.

Meanwhile the plateau in house prices is expected to turn off a phenomenon which has turbocharged the domestic spending side of the economy in recent years: the wealth effect.

That is when people borrow and spend some fraction - a few cents in the dollar - of the increase in the value of the equity in their homes, allowing spending to grow faster than incomes.

The biggest new factor on the positive side of the income ledger is the prospect of a bumper dairy payout.

It will pump about $4 billion more cash into the economy than last season, says Westpac chief economist Brendan O’Donovan. And it will all get spent, he believes.

While some farmers will take the opportunity to reduce their debt, others will borrow to expand their operations. Rural land prices have already risen sharply as farmers do what they always do and capitalise improved returns, O’Donaovan says.

“In aggregate they won’t be paying down debt, they will be leveraging up.”

But it takes time for higher farm incomes to flow through the rural towns to the big cities.

And every silver lining has its cloud.

The global “agflation” that is boosting dairy farmers’ incomes is also making trips to the supermarket an increasingly expensive business.

Likewise the tightness of the labour market underpinning wage growth is partly because of a dwindling of net migration inflows as a widening income gap lures more and more New Zealanders across the Tasman.

The Reserve Bank forecast inflation to be above 3 per cent all through this year.

Crucially, it also expects it to remain in the top quartile of its target band of 1 to 3 per cent through 2009 as well, even with interest rates and the dollar remaining at their current elevated levels.

Those projections assume $1.5 billion worth of tax cuts, which may well prove to be on the low side, and do not include the impact of the emissions trading scheme on transport fuel costs from the start to 2009.

This makes for an environment in which the central bank has little”headroom” to accommodate further upward pressure on inflation.

Yet the international environment might deliver just that.

The global credit crunch could well get worse before it gets better.

If 2007 is anything to go by, when global risk aversion goes up the kiwi dollar goes down and investors lose their appetite for the carry trades which underpin the exchange rate.

That might be blessed relief for exporters but it pushes up the cost of imported goods.

The biggest uncertainty overhanging the economy in 2008 is how the global credit crunch, arising from the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, will play out. Rising global interest rates would be bad news for us, a country up to our neck in debt.

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This story was found at:
Copyright ©2007, APN Holdings NZ Limited

Posted in Foriegn Agriculture, Alternative Crops & Enterprises, Organic vs Conventional Faming, Over Regulation of Agriculture, Sale of Meat Direct to Consumers, Lester Spell, Mississippi Politics, Grass Farming, Dairy Farming, How Agriculture affects Everything else, Smaller Government, Freedom in Agriculture, Rural Development, Farm Subsidies, Difficult Issues in Agriculture & Rural Life, Agrarianism, Big vs Small Farms, Mississippi Agricultural News, Family farm Opportunities | Print | No Comments »