[I thought I’d never get to the seed drill. Yet here we are! This is the last post in this series. The whole thing came from the conversation in the last few lines. What do you think?]
I grow / harvest / raise a lot of my family’s food. My success varies. Sometimes it’s “nearly all”. Other times it’s “maybe 15%”. I used to fret when I didn’t self-generate as much as I wanted. This was unwise. Nature doesn’t work on our stupid human schedules. I gradually learned to ride the ebb and flow of nature. Now I produce quite a bit but I also have the wisdom to keep my workload within a (barely) reasonable level.
The first thing any homesteader learns is that “some” is a big deal. It’s a huge rush of pride! It really does cut down on grocery store shopping. And it tastes like heaven. “Some” is vastly superior to “none”!
Homegrown food creates an internal locus of control. My food’s supply chain has many inputs and I control several of them:
Food = freezer + pantry + hunt + fish + livestock + grocery store
I can increase or reduce any input. The bad news of a wet spring or the good news of a neighbor selling a butchered cow are not life or death worries; they’re just options. I pick and choose among various options.
The equation for most people on earth is simpler:
Food = What I can afford – What isn’t in stock
That freaks me out. There’s not one damn thing under the control of the consumer! It’s why people bitching about the price of a dozen eggs are so bitter. Inflation sucks and there’s nothing we can do about it. A consumer allocates inflation dwindled dollars to whatever is in stock until the situation improves or they spend all their money. It sucks to have no control!
(Note: starvation was more or less eliminated in modern society. I emphasize the word “was“. I formerly assumed it would never come back. I still think it’s unlikely but now I think nothing is impossible. Look how far we have fallen. See how fast it came? Suppose in February 2020 you told people the truth about the future? Schools, colleges, supply chains, and businesses shut down for many months, two consecutive weird elections, people fought over toilet paper, political prisoners in America, concertina wire around the capital, burned cities, nuclear threats against Russia, unpredictably empty shelves, attacks on power grids, $5 gas, $7 eggs, $9 milk… people would have thought you mad! What formerly impossible degradations remain in our future?)
Homesteading is fiscally sub-optimal. People think raising your own food saves money. It does and it doesn’t. The peak moment in cheaply feeding a human might possibly have been Walmart in 2005. (Despite Bidenverse inflation it’s often cheaper buying shit at Walmart than making it yourself. There are exceptions but every farmer, gardener, fisherman, or hunter knows the score.)
I’m cool with spending a little extra to assure my own food. I like control and I’ll pay to get it. More importantly I like the quality! A creepy tube of ground up slimy “burger” at WalMart may be cheapest but it’s never better (or healthier) than homestead food.
Making your own food isn’t. People who refer to homesteading as “voluntary simplicity” are idiots. Any dumbass can pick a box off a shelf and hand over cash (or swipe an EBT card). Buying shit is simple. Sorting out an electric pig fence’s transformer in the middle of a rainstorm is not simple at all!
I gradually increase my skills, gear, and production. Slow and steady is the best way. You can easily work yourself to death otherwise. I started small and worked up. I’ve learned to accept setbacks graciously because I’ve had so many.
I assess what works and what doesn’t. Were turkeys better than chickens? Are meatbirds too gross? Should I have ditched the hens when they were younger?
My assessments put corn as my next target. Corn on the cob is delicious, pigs love it, I can pressure can it, and you get a lot of food per unit of labor. I’m not talking about gardening. Forget your pre-conceived notions about pretty rows of well tended vegetables. I’m too busy to “recreationally garden” like a normal person. I travel often and invariably have to abandon crops at key moments. Plus I’ve got so many irons in the fire that leisurely weeding and simply enjoying the plants is always cut short. A mere 45 minutes weekly, strolling through the garden yanking weeds, is a luxury I don’t have.
Unlike say carrots, I see my neighbor farmers cranking out corn in 40 acre units. They never get off the tractor! I believe corn is uniquely suited to / bred for industrial processes. (I’m aware that farmers plant different cultivars and use Roundup by the ton but there’s overlap with “sweet” corn.) Last summer I tried an “industrial approach experiment”. I edged into a “plant many, let a lot die, hope for the best” variant of “not-gardening”.
It worked!
My corn experiments of last year suggest that corn does ok under some level of being ignored. This year I want to plant more corn and still mostly ignore it. (My new enthusiasm for pressure canning motivates me. Canning corn is a thing people do. I’ve never done it but I’m sure I can learn. Who doesn’t want a zillion jars of yummy canned corn?)
My weird “not-gardening” approach is because I’m limiting my labor input. I’m only human, I only have so much time. I don’t take that into account I’ll just work myself to death.
I planted last year’s corn more or less on a whim. I had an empty pig pen. I can’t mow that area so it was destined to be a weed jungle. Why not sow corn and let it fight it out against the weeds?
My “low labor” method was to hitch my tractor to a disk, run around in the “no sod but not a garden either” soil until most of the weeds were toast, slap some seeds in the ground, add a random half assed bit of mulch a few weeks later, and otherwise call it good.
The first bottleneck is that I put the seeds in by hand (with a hoe). Such a pain in the ass! It wasn’t brutally physical but it was definitely hard work. Any time I’m working that hard I’d be better off cutting firewood. (Firewood is worth roughly $200 a cord and it directly replaces $4/gallon furnace fuel. I get more “bang for the buck” out of firewood than anything else.)
With the corn thing, I’m in it for the long game. Even if I can muscle it out now, what about the future? In 20 years will I have the strength?
Last year, I was rushed for time. Gardening in a rush is frustrating! I planted the last few rows while my truck was loaded for a trip, ready to go, and practically had an idling engine! Maddening!
I want to automate. But how much? I’ve pondered this a lot.
I can plant with a hoe, a manual planter, or a seed drill. These will plant at speeds of turtle slow, semi-slow, and industrial-fast. The physical effort is hard, semi-hard, and sit in an air conditioned cab. Every step up in automation is roughly one order of magnitude more expensive.
Painting with a broad brush a hoe costs $20, a planter is about $200, and a seed drill is about $2,000. (Don’t get pedantic on me… it’s just a relative scale.)
In case you’re not a farmer, here’s some backup information:
Below is a photo of a medium quality hoe. (I didn’t insert the obvious joke. See how classy I am?) This one costs $28 on Amazon. A cheap hoe (the JOKES I’m suppressing!) is a pain in the ass. They wear out if used hard. I’d probably beat it to death in 4-5 years.
Here’s a super bad ass hoe (I’m dying to make a joke… must resist). Now we’re up to $48 on Amazon but it’s a true “forever tool”. It’ll probably outlast the original purchaser, all of his progeny, and the rest of human civilization as we know it.
Below is a photo of a medium-high quality “manual corn planter”. You can get cheaper ones. They cost about half as much and will last about half as long. This one is about $170, it’s a pretty good version of the type. It can plant one row at a time and can plant many types of seed. I suspect it’s 1/2 the labor of a hoe… and easier on my back too. But it’s not even remotely effortless. A high quality brand (such as this) should last for many years (but not forever).
The next object is more or less the cheapest thing a tractor can use to plant corn. I have doubts how long it would last. It costs about $1600 on Amazon. It can plant two rows and it can only handle “big” seeds like corn and beans but it requires almost no physical labor.
Finally we enter true “real farmer” gear. Below is a small (perfectly sized for my tractor) seed drill (also called a grain drill). This one is a little over $4k. (There’s a used market with the associated “used market uncertainties”.) This device can plant up to 10 rows at whatever spacing you want. It can handle basically any kind of seed. I don’t think I could “wear it out” even if I tried and I would be sitting in a cab while the device did the work. (Note: Do your own research! Don’t buy it just because some fool blogger posted a photo!)
Each step up is vastly more expensive which sucks. Each step requires vastly less manual effort which is awesome. What to do?
I know what you’re thinking; “nut up and just do it by hand”. Easy for you to say. I hate manual gardening. This is what it feels like to plant crops with a hoe.
I still haven’t decided what I’ll do. (“Do nothing” is an option too.) Mrs. Curmudgeon helped me think it over but I’m still uncertain. This is a paraphrase of a real conversation we had:
Curmudgeon: “I dunno’ what I’ll do this spring. On the one hand I value a locus of control that’s…”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “Stop! I’ve heard it before! This is why there’s usually chicken shit in the yard and why you were pressure canning big game in the kitchen. I get it.”
Curmudgeon: “Yah, so I was going to buy a $200 manual planter for corn. But I keep thinking it’ll mess up my back. Maybe I should go big with a tractor implement?”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “I’d like to see you survive the spring without needing a bottle of Ibuprofen. How much for an implement?”
Curmudgeon: “Anywhere from two grand to twice that. I’m sketchy on how they work.”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “Ouch! That’s a lot of money to get corn.”
Curmudgeon: “I agree. It’s stupid expensive… but…”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “But what?”
Curmudgeon: “I think about all the things that seemed inconceivable in 2019 that are real life now. These things make food…”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “And?”
Curmudgeon: “So how deep does the rabbit hole go?”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: …
Curmudgeon: “Homesteading is just a silly hobby until it’s not. Then it’s the most important thing ever. When do we hit bottom? Is there a bottom?”
Mrs. Curmudgeon: …
Curmudgeon: …
Mrs. Curmudgeon: “Get the implement.”