I grow most of the corn my family consumes...so I was interested in your remarks re corn for the sake of friendly discussion.
If the term "organic corn" to you means corn grown completely without any synthetics or chemicals in the form of pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides or any other "cide" , then that is what I grow. Cost has absolutely nothing to do with how I grow it.
However, my only cost is the seed...since I grow a hybrid variety, I cannot usefully save the seeds. The nitrogen for my corn is sourced from 100% renewable sources. Most of it is a by-product of the cows I raise which would otherwise just go back into the environment. Some of it comes from fish out of my ponds which is again 100% renewable.
So many people get hung up on
terms.
Terms can have any meaning anyone wants to assign to them...and that is way too often the case in gardening.
I prefer to NOT use those terms. Rather, I use what my ranch and Nature provide and renew it each year. I have as near a closed system as possible. As relates to corn, only the seed comes from outside the system.
I grow it for taste and nutrition...not for cost savings but only the cost of the seed is in play. I dare say "the highest corn price of all time" is significantly off the charts higher than an ear of my home-grown corn and more importantly cannot remotely compare in nutrition and taste to my garden-fresh corn.
All my nitrogen takes is sunshine and water...and if we don't have those, then our problems will be catastrophic indeed.
Yes and i fully support what you do. Nitrogen fixation is viable, in the sense that you will get great sustainable yields. And the manure and compost can keep you going indefinitely, so long as it remains a closed system. There's something awesome about that level of self sufficiency. And it's well suited to a home garden level.
But farmers can't maintain a closed system. They're shipping out hundreds of bushels an acre every year. Those nutrients have to be replenished. The nitrogen is the easy one. It's in the air and all it requires is electricity to put back in the soil. Lightning puts something like 10lbs an acre N annually. (It's a little more complicated than just electricity because the more energy efficient process is making ammonia from very clean hydrogen derived from natural gas, but if natural gas wasn't there we could get the hydrogen from electrolysis of water or go back to nitric acid production which doesn't require any natural gas, which isn't scarce for this purpose anyway)
So i don't see why urea or anhydrous is anything we should be moving away from. That might not have even been the point
@roadrunner was making. There's just this idea, very popular to the Internet, that chemical equals bad. Many times it's true, especially when it comes to eating residual pesticides and herbicides and fungicides, but synthetic nitrogen is a major factor in global food security and i really don't know what concerns anybody about it's use.
Why not legumes? Basically because they take time, land and energy and it's easier to synthesize the nitrogen and get twice as many crops. For small scale non critical applications, legumes make free nitrogen. But I'd rather see the land be more productive than try to be a purist to some romantic idea of how it was in the good ol days. For a gardener, even a bold gardener who grows all his food, it can make sense to be independent from the industry.
And i think you're talking about sweet corn which has a much higher labor to fertilizer ratio. Most of the cost of an ear of sweet corn is getting it to the consumer before it spoils. Gardening is awesome because you get really high quality vegetables. You pick a variety that might not be suited for commercial production but can't be beaten. And it's a shame consumers bought based on looks and swayed the market so much. I raise old chicken breeds and there's less white in the egg but the yolk is very comparable to grocery store eggs. Basically modern eggs are more watery than they used to be. And we wet age meat to sell that extra oz of water. Anyone over the age of 50 can tell you beef ain't what it used to be. And all the produce in the store is less nutritional because it's been bred for absolute maximum yields which equates to more water/less nutrient density. Are they still selling jumbo strawberries that are hollow.
Field corn has traded at a record high of 8 some dollars a bushel. That's 17 cents an ear or so. Organic field corn is 20% higher than that record and currently corn is 4.60 a bushel. If you ate 2000 calories of field corn a day for a year, it would only cost 40$. I cannot produce 8 bushels "organically" for 40$
I'm not saying modern agriculture isn't wasteful. There's runoff, there's erosion. My grandfather saw all the erosion happening post wwii and made sure to let the trees grow up around the creeks, and have proper fencerows. Short term we lose some yields but long term we aren't to blame for all the top soil washing into the gulf of mexico, erm america.
We can afford to sacrifice yield for a good reason. Heck, we're putting like 40% of our corn into automotive ethanol in a net negative energy production. I think you get the point
And I'm the kind of guy that grows cabbages and watches the caterpillars destroy them because if I'm going to eat pesticides, i might as well go to the store. I do get some yield to be fair.
We can breed plants resistant to insects and fungus and we can get in the garden with a hoe and weed. And crop diversity would do us some good. And you know I'm working on these things. If you want a non sweet native strong flavored plum (makes top notch cherry pies) that has absolutely no pest problems let me know
On a side note, i often see people say manure is too hot to put directly on plants and i think what they mean to say is, dont plant directly in straight fresh manure. But you'll get better nutrient conversion if you just set the "hot" manure around the plant like mulch, still growing in good soil, and you won't lose the initial water soluble nutrients
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