My wife, Carol, doesn’t normally call herself an artist, but the images accompanying this post could be called some kind of still life art, even though rendered with her own hands using real objects, not with brush and paint. The multicolored shapes in the basket are an assortment of peppers she just harvested before the first frost, and the red shapes on white background are tomato slices in the electric drier. Our son-in-law loves peppers, the hotter the better, and so he and our daughter have supplied us with pepper plants of varieties I never knew existed and most of which I can’t eat. But who would want to eat such a beautiful table decoration anyway?

It is no surprise that gardening and farming inspire art. The partnership between nature and humans in the act of producing food can’t help but produce beauty too. A shelf full of home-canned vegetables means food security, but the real reason we delight in them is that the food just looks so pretty sitting there in rows in the cellar. The act of laying by food is its own reward even before we eat the stuff.

I made a shock out of the spent sweetcorn stalks in the garden last week and put a few pumpkins around it. Visitors ask me why I went to the trouble. I had to shrug. Not sure. Just think it looks pretty. Reminds me of whole fields of shocked corn, the subject of who knows how many paintings and photographs from the past. Many Amish farmers now have hitch carts which they are allowed to use to pull corn pickers and grain harvesters with their horses. So they don’t really have to shock all their corn and oats anymore. But many of them go on doing so anyway. If you ask them why, they will say that the straw they thereby harvest as a sort of byproduct of threshing is worth as much as the grain. But down in the deeper recesses of their souls I will bet anything, they do it because fields of corn and oat shocks look pretty.

Pumpkins make another good example. We grow pumpkins, even weird kinds like Cinderella which we don’t even eat. We grow the Cheese pumpkins for that. One of our Cinderellas this year was so heavy we had to get our muscle-bound grandson to carry it out of the garden. So why do we grow the big, stupid things? Because, well, they’re pretty.

In fact, the market for pumpkins is soaring, even in these recessionary times. Why? Pumpkins make nice homey decorations. The same with gourds. The same with bittersweet, a bouquet of which adorns our entrance way at this very moment. There is so much artificial and plastic crap around, the human spirit yearns for the homespun and the real.

One tends to grow philosophical about it, even, heaven forbid, metaphysical. Last night, here at the beginning of October, I was still able to pick a pint of luscious yellow raspberries that we grow, courtesy of another person’s kindness. They just look so beautiful in the basket. Years ago, I wrote that yellow raspberries are hardly worth the work because they are too susceptible to diseases. A man in Minnesota, whom I do not know to this day, sent some plants with a note: “Try these and change your mind.” I don’t know the variety, but he was right. The philosophical question is: Do they look beautiful to me because I love their taste? Maybe they look beautiful because they remind me of the beautiful person who sent them to me.

The notion that good taste might come before beauty doesn’t hold true, actually. To me, an eggplant is profoundly beautiful. That deep purple color is just so stunning. But I don’t much like the taste. I just like to look at them.

Perhaps I should view this question psychologically rather than philosophically. Maybe the colors of the harvest glowing in the slanting harvest time sun quickens the human spirit in a very special way, as Monet would say. A psychology book I once read claimed that purple was the favorite color of geniuses. I don’t know how anyone could arrived at such a non-sequitur but hey, sounds good to me.
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This article was originally published on Gene Logsdon's blog at OrganicToBe.org.

Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land), The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life, and just released: Small-Scale Grain Raising, Second Edition: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers.

I never knew why August was a good time to apply barn manure to farm and garden and Fall even better. We just did it then because there is usually a lull in other pressing farm work. Now I find out from the consensus of opinion among the experts on barn manure a century ago that we’ve been doing the right thing.

The reasons are rather long and involved, but I will try to give the short version of it. First of all, in Sane Farming, as distinct from Progressive Farming or Successful Farming or Business Farming or Profit Farming and the whole nomenclature of Forked Tongue Farming, livestock and chickens are out on pasture or free range applying their fertilizer themselves to the grass and clover during most of the summer and fall months. The farmer, unlike the proprietor of a animal confinement operation, only has to deal with the manure of winter and early spring.

To understand why this winter manure is a better fertilizer if allowed to age or rot for a few months in the barn  (a whole year would be better) before application, I had to forget everything I thought I knew about composting. Garden composting, or heat composting, as I call it, is speed composting, the idea being to let the compost heat up and break down the organic matter into humus as fast as possible. Also, the heat kills any harmful pathogens that might be in it. But in the process of aeration, a compost heap loses a considerable amount of its plant nutrients, especially nitrogen. The oldtimers called it fermentation. (If you doubt what I’m saying about the disadvantages of fast composting, you can find plenty of documentation in the literature— I like a sprightly-written book about human manure, The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins.)

Winter manure is stomped into what is called a “manure pack” in the barn by the animals as straw is spread on it regularly for bedding. It slowly composts  anaerobically,  that is without oxygen, so there is very little leaching or fermentation. And as little as  two or three months of  this anaerobic composting destroys most of the human disease pathogens, if any are present (very doubtful), say compost scientists. By late summer and early fall, that bedding  manure has cured, or aged, or in old-time parlance “rotted” properly. Most of the manure odor is gone too, replaced by a pungent earthy smell. The whole problem of odor which so plagues the animal confinement industry is avoided.

I have learned how to peel or pry layers off my sheep manure pack with a pitchfork. Each forkful is a little over a foot square and about two inches thick. I haul the forkfuls ranked on the back of my ancient pickup to the garden and place the “squares” on the soil surface much like laying down tile on a floor. Yes, sometimes I use my hands rather than the fork. The dry “squares” can be nestled up close to the plants because there is no ammonia leaching off to burn leaves as would be true with fresh manure. To be totally safe, I don’t put the manure up close to any lettuces or other salad vegetables. Manure not needed on the garden, I spread with my old manure spreader on the strips out in the pasture field where I plan to grow field corn the next year.

So today as I write in August, the whole garden except the sweet corn patch  is mulched either with this manure or leaves and grass clippings. My heavy weeding chores are over for the year. The corn shades the ground enough by now to stop any  vigorous weed growth except around the edges of the patch, which I can hoe easily enough. The grass and leaf mulch I like to use around vining plants like melons and cucumbers in July because as soon as the vines start trailing out all over the place, rotary tilling weeds among them is impossible.

By next spring, the manure will have sheet-composted away to humus.  The main reason I mulch part of the garden with grass and leaves is that I’m afraid if I treated all of it every year with this super-nutrient manure, the soil might get too rich. Is that possible?

I half-jokingly suggested about a year ago that animal manure—used livestock, horse, and chicken bedding—was going to be the hottest commodity on the Chicago Board of Trade. There are indications now that such a seemingly absurd prediction might not be so absurd after all. Last year the prices of some farm fertilizers shot up to over a thousand dollars a ton. Ammonium polyphosphate is still nearly that high. Deposits of potash in Canada, a main source of our potassium fertilizers, are declining. Natural gas, from which commercial nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured, is rising in cost as other uses compete for it. Long term, there are reasons to believe that the era of abundant manufactured fertilizers is passing.

There is nothing funny about that prediction. Nor should organic farmers feel vindicated. If we run out of commercial fertilizers, there would be no way we could avoid a precipitous decline in crop yields while farmers switched to all-organic methods. It has taken us a couple hundred years to reduce the organic matter content in our soils to the low levels of today and experts say it might take at least half that long to build them back up again. Getting enough manure and other organic wastes to make up for a shortage of commercial fertilizer would be an enormous challenge requiring changes not only in agricultural attitudes but cultural attitudes as well.

It is however difficult to suppress a smile at the irony of the situation. For years shit has been seen as something so repugnant that the word itself was scrubbed from polite conversation. One of the main reasons for the ancient prejudice between urban and rural cultures was that before Fels Naptha, the odor of manure lingered on the skin and clothing of farmers. To become truly civilized came to mean escaping the barn and pretending that offal was not a part of life. Make it disappear. Flush it down the toilet.

The predominantly urban society of today has energetically (and with good reason) opposed modern gigantic animal confinement operations because of the stench of manure. The confinement operators would like to suppress or mask the smell but to make money, they must house continuing larger numbers of animals cheaply. That makes pollution problems inevitable. Larger animal factories can generate as much waste as the human sewage from a large metropolitan area but, unbelievably, they do not have to handle and treat their sewage the way municipalities do.

So the operators haven't been able to get rid of the stuff cheaply at a fast enough pace. They offered it free to farmers. Not enough farmers were interested. They put it in huge lagoons that overflowed and polluted the landscape. They tried, and are still trying, to make fuel out of it. Not yet practical enough. They sometimes tried to leak it out unnoticed into the waterways, only to be caught and fined by the manure police.

Today, the situation has changed dramatically. With no assurance that grain prices will be high enough to cover the high prices of manufactured fertilizers, farmers are waiting in line at the animal confinement operations, willing to fork over good hard cash to get the lower-priced manure. The laugh of the day now is that maybe manure will become more profitable than the food produced, that the operations will become, in fact and not in jest, money-making manure factories which just happen to produce meat, milk, and eggs as byproducts. This seems particularly possible since some of these factories change hands about as often as partners do in a square dance.

The possibility that all of agriculture might have to rely on animal and human waste to maintain the necessary fertility to keep the world from starving is not at all something new to civilization. Only in the last century or so has it been possible to lard enough chemical nitrogen on cropland to attain record breaking yields while burning most of the organic matter out of the soil. Before this modern “progress,” human society had no other choice than to consider manure—animal and human—to be more precious than gold. At least humans did so in countries that sustained an ample food supply for very long periods of time, as China and Japan did. We all need to read again Farmers of Forty Centuries, by F.H. King, published in 1911, about oriental agriculture at that time. Manure was treated like a precious gem because it was a precious gem. Every scrap of animal waste, human waste, and plant residue was scrupulously collected, composted, and reapplied to the land. So precious was manure that Chinese farmers stored it in burglar-proof containers.

As a result, the oriental farmer for thousands of years maintained an unbelievably productive agriculture. Their little farms produced at the very least five times the amount of food per acre that American farmers were getting in 1907 when King traveled through Japan and China. Those yields still far exceed those of American agriculture even today, except where intensive, raised bed gardening is practiced here. For all practical purposes, a large part of China in 1900 was one huge intensive, raised bed garden. Indeed, the oriental farmer had no choice, because population densities were much higher than anything the United States had or has yet experienced. They either produced huge crops or starved.

Cheap, plentiful manufactured fertilizers and a seeming infinity of farmland allowed the United States over the last two centuries to become the champion wastrel of agriculture (and everything else). One can only imagine the famine and chaos that would result if we continued that kind of extravagance for forty centuries, even if we could. As sources of cheaper chemical fertilizers decline, manure will either once more become the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or population levels will dramatically decline.

There is an interesting development in mainstream U.S.A that just might have significant relevance for garden farming. Record numbers of people are acquiring pets. The dog and cat business is not at all depressed by the recession. (If you are wondering what all this has to do with the Amish, bear with me.) You see evidence of the trend everywhere, especially in advertisements where dogs are shown licking the cheeks of children— this in a society that has an almost manic dread of germs. Pets are the in-thing. Apparently our society is so enmeshed in its mechanical and electronic gadgetry that the human psyche is seeking solace in real life, as in the ancient loving connection that we have always enjoyed with animals.

The modern pet craze is not limited to cats and dogs but embraces many animals, especially horses. (Now you see how the Amish are going to get into this discussion.) Statistics say there are 6.9 million horses in the U.S. involved in various activities from racing, showing, pleasure riding, polo, police work, farming and ranching. The horse business or hobby adds about $112 billion to the GNP. Horses generate more money than the home furniture and fixtures business, and almost as much as the apparel and textile manufacturing industry. In other words, while we generally think of Old Dobbin as a step backward in time in agriculture, horses are very much a part of our modern economic and social lives today.

Why this is pertinent to garden farming becomes apparent from what happened a few months ago. At the time when the national banking fraternity was on its knees in Washington, begging for money, news all over the media reported that Hometown Heritage bank in Lancaster County, Pa., was having its best year ever. Hometown Heritage may be the only bank in the world, surely one of the few, that has drive-by window service designed to accommodate horses and buggies. Some 95% of the bank’s customers are Amish farmers. The banker, Bill O’Brien, says that he has not lost a penny on them in 20 years. They obviously don’t have auto loans to pay off and do not use credit cards. They might not need bank loans at all except to buy farmland, which especially in Lancaster County, has risen almost insanely in price. O’Brien says he is doing about a hundred million dollars worth of business in farm loans. To further make the point, an obscure law does not allow banks to bundle and sell mortgages on farms and homes that are not serviced by public electric utilities.

There is plenty in this situation for economists to contemplate, but what struck me the most was the fact that these farmers are buying farm land that can cost them ten thousand dollars per acre or sometimes more, and paying for it with horse farming. And because of their religion, the Amish do not accept farm subsidies that keep many “modern” farms “profitable.” Facing these facts, it is very difficult to see how economists or agribusiness experts can claim that farms using horses or mules for motive power are any more backward, or any less profitable, than farms using tractors.

If you study the great debate that raged in farm circles from about 1920 to 1950 over the economics of horses and mules vs. tractors, (a good recent book on the subject is Mule South To Tractor South, by George B. Ellenberg, Univ. of Alabama Press, 2007), you will learn that the experts never agreed. Both sides finally admitted that it didn’t matter anyway. There was a rising kind of younger farmer for whom tractors were just too alluring to resist. These farmers were going to use them, no matter how much more they cost than horses. Farmers who loved farming with horses wept while they watched trucks haul their teams off to the the rendering plant. They did not get rid of their horses because of the supposedly harder work involved but because they were afraid that if they did not switch, the farmers who did switch would eventually take all the land.

I grew up when horses were still the rule in farming. I had a runaway with a team and a wagon when I was 11 years old, so I know the dark side of it too. Because of the strange circumstances of my life, I worked on horse-powered farms again in my early twenties. I assure you: farm work is no harder or easier using horses than tractors. Each has its pluses and minuses physically. Mentally, farming with horses is more relaxed (they always start in the morning no matter how cold) except during a runaway. The horse farmer I worked for during those years, (1950s) was by no means Amish. He did have a big old tractor to plow his hilly acres. He used horses because he made money farming with horses. He was the best economics professor I never had. The way he farmed wasn’t what you’d find in articles in the leading farm magazines; it wasn’t very pretty. But it was a lot prettier than the Americans lined up at the employment offices today because they opted out of hard work in favor of the great American dream of ease and forty-hour weeks.

I do not speak as an uncompromising champion of horses. I actually prefer my 1950 WD Allis Chalmers which has cost me hardly $5000 total during all the years I have owned it. But that is not my point. I just wonder if we are not making a mistake by not taking seriously what the Amish are demonstrating to us. Given the facts of the matter, I don’t think it is naïve to suggest that young garden farmers take a closer look at horses, mules, even oxen for motive power on their little farms. Quite a few already are. Given the demonstrated yearning that humans have always shown for animal companionship, it seems entirely logical to me that young farmers just might lose their acquired attraction for the tractor one of these days to become horsemen and horsewomen again. The dollars and cents, the Amish will tell you, are on your side if you enjoy being at home and would rather work hard physically on occasion rather than pay for exercise at a fitness center.

With peak oil upon us, think of it this way. You may be able to grow enough extra grain or biomass to make ethanol for a tractor, but it will always be cheaper to grow the extra hay to feed a horse. You don’t have to distill the hay.

Originally published on EnergyBulletin.net.