For the sake of brevity, I’m simply calling this further rant, “Farming and Food”.

I grew up on a 160 acre family farm in Iowa. My dad raised pigs, had chickens, milked dairy cows, and used work horses. We had one tractor. We butchered our own hogs, smoked our bacon and hams, and made our own sausages, which were great eating. Our chickens were for egg production, about 15 dozen a week which were sent into town the be sold in the grocery store. And, of course, many times we had a roasted chicken for Sunday dinner (after they had quit laying).

My mother had a big garden in which we had fresh veggies all summer and many things canned for our winter. We essentially raised all our own food. Of course we had to but some staples like flour, sugar, coffee, butter, etc. Every year my dad would buy a half of a beef from another farmer and it was butchered at a a local butcher shop that had large freezer units where we stored the meat frozen until we needed it as we did not have our own freezer until much later. 

All our crops of corn, hay, oats, and pasture were rotated. Animal manure was used for fertilizer. Our crops always flourished. We gave the soil time during rotations to regain what it may have lost in a previous crop, especially corn. We would plow the hay ground in order to plant corn, then disk the soil and corn stocks in for a crop of oats, followed by grass for hay and pasture. So all organic material was returned into the ground which both enriched the soil and added “tilth”.

Occasionally my dad had lime spread on the soil to help with ph balance, other than that no other fertilizers. I remember that dirt being rich and black, and it would crumble in your hands. 

This is what modern organic farming is about and we did it back then because that’s the way farming was done.

Next, changes . . .