Rye

Now how did we end up doing rye? Initially it was a cover crop, to be destroyed and used as a smother crop. The variety we chose was Elbon Rye released by the Oklahoma State Agricultural Experiment Station in 1956. It is long stemmed and produces a lot of organic matter which makes it perfect for smother crops.

It seemed a waste to destroy a crop what we could grow in the winter, as it is our wet season. We decided harvesting the grain would be a good idea especially since we had purchased a combine for dry beans. We also stumbled up on a sturdy table top flour mill to grind it into flour. Couple that with some inspiration we got from Pungo Creek Mills Indian Cornmeal on the east coast, we decided to found our own flour and meal business. The wisdom of this venture has yet to be realized. We have rye and our packaging and sales effort is just ramping up.

In the middle of this we have corn and peas growing and a limited amount of water available for both. The corn requires more so when we deploy drip irrigation next week, the corn will receive the water. If there is time we will re-deploy and water peas. Hopefully rain will come and help out.

We have been blessed with adequate soil moisture up to now.

As for the rye, we did harvest the grain, and we still had plenty of dead mulch. We no-tilled peas into the mowed down stubble. These peas are growing with very little weed pressure.

As for the future of small grains on our farm, I am unsure. I am looking for a suitable drill for planting them and more acreage on which to plant. Returns for small grains, if you do not mill them yourself, are small.

We sell our flour for the very reasonable price of $3.75 per 2 pound bag. Yes, it is more expensive than store brands. What you get for that price, is zero percent chance of cross contamination. Elliott Family Farms only mills low gluten grains below 12%. We are not marketing this to folks with celiac disease. We are, however, marketing to folks with concerns about where their food comes from and how it is processed. Rye is purported to have other beneficial aspects. I am a diabetic and I eat it.  Within reason. To me, a carb is a carb and that is how I count them. If you are going to eat a carb, I suggest something made with our flour.

You may buy the flour directly off the farm or through eBay. The price is $4 on eBay because of handling.

Corn

We took a hiatus from corn of about 10 years? Not entirely sure. Sweet corn is a good local seller if you have adequate moisture, good fertility and low insect pressure. Two Primary Pests... the European Corn Borer and the Corn Ear Worm. Control of these pests is easy with low level chemicals like carbyl, or an uptake material like Lorsban. But, they are chemicals. Sweet corn, especially the new hybrid sweet corns are insect magnets.

Organically, you need to approach these pests from the deterrent side.You might try small squirt bottles  of canola or olive oil in ear tips, just a drop or two as soon as the silks show signs of drying. A solution of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) or spinosad. Vulnerable species of insects exposed to spinosad become over stimulated, become exhausted, cease to eat, and die usually within two days.

There are a variety of horticultural oils that are effective controlling ear worms. Fortunately, I do not have any examples to show you at the moment. Most infestations occur at mid season and we are mostly past that at this point. Variety selection is helpful in deterring these pests as well. Stowell's Evergreen, an old heirloom sweet corn with long shelf life, has a really heavy thick husk that resists attack. It is not as sweet modern hybrid sweet corn cultivars but it doesn't contain unhealthy amounts of sugar either. It tastes more like corn.

Our native American varieties are not immune to disease and pests, but seem to be more hearty in some respects. They do not have the yield potential of modern hybrids but they grind well into cornmeal. I am told, the blue varieties, when made into spirits, have a blue tint.

Corn requires fertility. The story of using fish to fertilize corn plants goes back to colonial times. Fish are good. That is why we use a fish emulsion fertilizer to feed our corn. We also rotate legumes on corn land and sometimes inter-seed southern peas with corn. The whole nitrogen fixation thing. We did that on part of our place this year.

We do not do sweet corn as we do not have a corn head for the Chisholm Ryder and have no plans to buy one. Large quantities of sweet corn really need to be hydro cooled rapidly and the ears graded and stored in refrigerated storage immediately. We have none of these capabilities and we are not going to expand that direction.

Corn meets one of my grandfather's most strict criteria. Farm for yourself first. Cash crops come later. Once harvested and dry, we make cornmeal from it. Hominy can be made from it. Combine that with beans and peas and you can make it through the toughest of times. Dry, these food items will feed a family for a long time. Keep enough to replant and sell the excess as cash crops.

How we Start a Crop Year

Where to start? We actually start in October. By then all the old crops are gone and the wind is cool and the nights can be downright cold. This past season it was still dry as the preceding summer. We had no choice but to do minimum or no till because of the lack of soil moisture. It was still akin to planting in the desert. This video shows just how dry and dusty it was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BCeR7Oqtv4 We plant, hoping, praying for rain. It got worse before it got better. Because of the dry soil, germination and emergence did not occur uniformly or sufficiently robust. The mustard you see us planting with the Tye drill only yielded 60 ponds of seed off a 2 acre plot. Normal yields are around 2000 pounds per acre. The crop was a failure on that account, but since we only planted 6 pounds of seed and harvested 60, our goal of increasing the seed to a more viable amount was achieved. I would like to repeat the planting on a larger scale next season. We also planted Elbon Rye in this session which fared much better than the mustard, yielding a low but very viable 25 bushels per acre of grain this spring. Winter crops do delay spring planting six to eight weeks. It is possible to drill corn and such into rye or wheat in February but not southern peas. Cowpeas like it hot, and our native American corn varieties prefer it hot as well.So we delay.

We prep the garden in the fall as well. Compost time. Lots of it if we can get it. If we raise our own onion plants, we plant the seed in October. We start tomatoes In a hot bed or green house in February as well. We use a 3 pint hitch Caroni Rotary Tiller to prepare land that is not no till. A subsoiler is handy to crack the seed zone open and allow roots to penetrate to the subsoil and moisture. It also allows moisture to migrate deeper in the soil instead of running off in a rain. This a major concern for mostly dryland farmers.

Peas and corn follow cereal crops in June. Immediately.

I would like to plant more winter grains on more acreage to be marketed to conventional grain markets. The crops would qualify for Federal Crop Insurance and I believe our antiquated methods and equipment will allow us to do well on acreage up to 100 or so without compromising our time. These crops could be followed with soybeans or corn.

I am dumbfounded that the Farm Bill has to be held hostage by food stamps. If the Farm Bill was a separate affair, there would be no question of passage. That is for another blog post on another day.

In the meantime, planting crops cannot wait on politics. If it did, we would all go hungry.

Methods and fertilization... organic is tough to do. Let no one kid you, especially if you do it on a large scale, it is expensive. We use mechanical fertilization and we use smother crops. One of the reasons we used Elbon Rye was because it produces a huge amount of organic matter that we no till into. This organic matter suppresses weed growth, theoretically allowing our crops to spread to full canopy before weeds emerge. This method is called organic no-till. That is the cost efficient part. Fertilization, especially with corn is another issue. We prefer to use Neptune's Harvest Fish Emulsion fertilizer to fertilize everything. Fortunately our corn does not require as much nitrogen as conventional hybrid varieties so this is adequate for everything.  Bat guano is our next best option.  Its like Brylcreem, a little dab will do. Buying compost to cover large acreage is cost prohibitive.

The crop year really never ends. You simply do the work required in that season while planning for the next.

Crops

If you have kept up with us on Facebook, you know we raise southern peas on small acreage in East Texas. That continues. Like many small acreage farmers, we have dealt with the lack of farm laborers by mechanizing. We haven't expanded, frankly, because our markets are local and there hasn't been the need. Squeezing a profit from this little place is difficult in the best of years, so I have a day job. Actually it requires my absence from the farm 20 days at a time. That makes timing critical.

We have expanded out growing season to include winter cereal crops which we will sell unground and clean, food grade whole or ground into whole grain flour. This year, we only have rye. We discovered this is a very difficult grain to move even though our whole grain rye flour makes the best blueberry muffins I ever ate.

Rye is difficult to bake with. It has such a small glutens that it does not rise well. Glutens are essential to nice puffy soft baked goods. We market it as gluten free, though all cereal grains contain at least a tiny amount of them. Glutens are sticky proteins that serve as thickeners. They are a natural part of grains and are released by working the dough. As yeast works in the mixture, releasing carbon dioxide, gluten traps the bubbles and stretches, causing the dough to rise. Most people mix regular flour or add packaged gluten to the mix. Gluten free bakers often add xanthan gum, guar gum or a mixture of the two as thickeners to cause the dough to rise.

Marketing to folks who use it has been a challenge. We have been really successful with muffins and it is the use we are pushing for the product. They are the easiest to make and are delightfully sweet and robust.



We used dried blueberries but fresh will work just as easily. Avoid using blueberry pie filling. You will end up with green muffins and the dough consistency will be way off.



We are raising two types of native American corn and planning to market whole grain cornmeal from this. One is White Eagle, a blue corn with white zones on the side which often form a white eagle. The other is a tri color corn that forms three ears per stalk, all different colors. Both make superior cornbread.



We are only growing a seed plot of the White Eagle corn because we could only acquire a few seeds. With a little luck and some rain, we hope to produce at least 50 pounds of seed to use next year.

Then there are the peas, late because of the rye and mustard we had on the place, we did not plant till June. Most of the corn was planted I June as well. Many of my neighbors had poor pea emergence anyway because the nights stayed too cool all the way into early June. Southern peas like heat.

We have two harvesting machines on our farm. One is a Chisholm Ryder MDH, a big self propelled green bean harvester and a 1959 Allis Chalmers All Crop 90 pull type combine. I love my All Crop and would kill for it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObDRgxx1Npk

Peas are $30 a bushel shelled, we get about 6 quarts from a bushel of unshelled peas. You are, thus, buying a bushel of unshelled peas which USDA standards define as 38 pounds. Unshelled price u-pick is $25 a bushel. I will not pick them for you unless the bean picker is operational. Otherwise I use the combine.

We will be harvesting the corn in September, most likely. In October we will be planting winter cereal crops. All of our crops are non-GMO heirloom naturally raised crops. We are not certified organic but we use organic practices.