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• Wick Communications
CHARLIE JOHNSON believes organic farming is about more than healthy soil. He believes it’s also the cornerstone of healthy, vibrant rural communities. A newly cultivated field of soybeans reflects the labor-intensive nature of the work.
CHARLIE JOHNSON believes organic farming is about more than healthy soil. He believes it’s also the cornerstone of healthy, vibrant rural communities. A newly cultivated field of soybeans reflects the labor-intensive nature of the work.
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(Editor’s note: Agriculture remains the state’s largest industry, with livestock production and related industries contributing $5.6 billion to the state’s economy and crop production and related industries contributing $3.3 billion. Under that broad umbrella, agriculture wears many faces. This week, the Madison Daily Leader will look at some of those faces.)
Talking about organic farming with Charlie Johnson is a bit like looking through a kaleidoscope. First, light shines through one pattern of thought and then the pattern shifts – more light, different focus, new pattern.
No matter how the pattern shifts, though, one theme runs through the conversation – life and community. The life of the soil, the life of the community.
Johnson’s ideas are well-honed and elegantly expressed, in part because organic farming is labor intensive. Johnson spends long days in the tractor – 14 to 16 hours a day at this time of year. He, two of his brothers and his son Jordan will go through the fields over and over until a crop canopy is formed and weeds no longer get the light they need to grow.
On Monday night, he was cultivating a field of soybeans, eight rows at a time, traveling between three and four miles per hour to protect the young plants. Across the road, the long clean rows showed the work of the previous day.
“My dad wouldn’t allow anything to be used on the farm that couldn’t be put on the tip of his tongue,” Johnson said.
He doesn’t remember when his dad adopted organic farming practices, buthe believes it was in the 1970s.
After years of doing the tedious work of tilling fields, both before and after planting, and cultivating them two or three times a year as the crops become established, Johnson remains as committed to the practice as he was in 1981 when he started. Not only has he not wavered in that commitment, but he’s also become a strong advocate, serving on boards and speaking at conferences.
“I believe putting chemicals on the ground is not right,” he said. “It’s aborting the life of the soil.”
When challenged about his choice of words, he stands behind them.
“Soil is a community of life – fungi, bacteria, worms,” Johnson explained. He is not alone in believing this life needs to be protected.
The USDA has a series of “Healthy Soils” flyers. One is titled “Healthy Soils are: Full of Life.” Explaining the role of each organism in the “natural, symbiotic system that leads to healthy soils,” it describes how they “cycle nutrients back to the plant, allowing it to grow and flourish,” which in turn makes agriculture both more sustainable and more profitable.
The Johnson family is so committed to this philosophy that even before there were price premiums for organically grown crops, they embraced the philosophy, using a six-year rotation cycle with four crops. The also have a cow-calf operation but don’t market the beef as organic.
“They use a lot of our alfalfa hay,” Johnson explained.
Alfalfa is important to their rotation cycle, both as a smother crop, to clear the fields of weeds, and to put nitrogen into the soil. Other soil nutrients come from cow manure, pelletized chicken manure and rye, which they plow into the fields as “green manure” to add organic matter.
The USDA’s “Healthy Soils” series also includes a flyer which talks about the importance of organic matter and provides a long list of benefits. Among them are stabilizing the soil, storing nutrients, retaining carbon, increasing water infiltration rates and reducing runoff, and encouraging root development and penetration.
Even with the cost of diesel fuel rising – which will have an impact because their field work is done with diesel-fueled tractors – Johnson believes the cost of farming organically will compare favorably with traditional farming.
“It’s a lot cheaper than the herbicides and other chemicals. It’s a lot cheaper than the technology in the seeds,” he said.
With long hours spent in the tractor, Johnson has had ample time to think about what he does, why he does it and the broader implications of organic farming. He has come to believe the labor-intensive nature of organic farming is one of its benefits.
“You depend far more on management and labor of the person,” he said, noting this means you need “more feet on the ground,” more people engaged in doing the work.
“We have more people engaged in farming when we’re not using chemicals,” Johnson observed. He believes this, in turn, leads to more vibrant communities.
He used his family as an example. Four families farm around 2,500 acres, 1,600 of which are tillable. The rest is pasture land, hay ground, sloughs and trees. With a traditional operation, a single operator – or maybe two – could farm that ground.
“You can have high school kids in your classrooms or Roundup in your fields. You can’t have both,” Johnson said as a final argument for organic farming.
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