At the Sioux Falls Organic Conference last week, I had the pleasure of meeting visionary organic producer Bob Quinn, from Big Sandy, Montana. Starting in 1986, Bob transitioned his ranch from conventional alfalfa, beef, and wheat production to an organic powerhouse in northern Montana. Up in zone 3 with some 2,000 acres in production, Bob has even been experimenting with organic vegetable production without irrigation - and that's no joke in that environment.

With the vegetables, Bob has experimented with wide spacings to minimize plant demands. Last year, I read a book by Steve Solomon called Gardening When It Counts, which described Solomon's efforts to grow vegetables at low cost and in the most reliable way possible. (As near as I can see it, Steve Solomon is the real deal. He founded Territorial Seed Company, which carries all kinds of great stuff from gardening year-round out out in Oregon; he's written books on plant breeding and varietal selection for gardeners and small growers; and now he's got a modest homestead in Tasmania. Really, how cool is that?) Wide spacing was key to that. While a lot of attention has been paid in the last thirty years of market farming literature to the virtues of maximizing production on each piece of land, I think this idea of farming more land less intensively really makes a lot of sense. If you don't live in the city, why not use more land, less fertilizer, and less water, and make the work of weeding and mechanical tillage just that much easier?

As a movement of organic market farmers, I think we have tended to value high production per acre over high production per unit of effort. Yes, productivity-per-acre helps us put less acreage under plow, utilizing our land resource better and reducing up-front capital costs for land - but it requires more labor per unit of production than less-intensive production. Wider spacing can allow for better utilization of mechanical weed control, certainly - and if it reduces irrigation requirement as well, then you've saved on that labor, as well. Solomon writes that it encourages the development of more robust, more resilient root systems as well. 

Especially since good help is so hard to find, particularly once you get beyond one or two key people. For most of the expanding market farmers I have met, finding those good people becomes one of their biggest challenges. So why not do whatever you can to save on the expenses of weeding and irrigating, two jobs that nobody really seems to enjoy?

I'm never sure who's crazier, those of us who feel surprise and outrage over news like this, or the nozzleheads who continue to profit off of it.

Not only does Atrazine appear to cause cancer, its presence in ground water appears to cause irregular menstrual periods, altered hormone levels, delayed puberty, and pregnancy loss. All of this based on studies of municipal tapwater in Illinois, so we're not talking about a few rural wells. We're talking about the water used by a huge part of the population in the Midwestern corn belt.

You can read the article in Scientific American here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=atrazine-water-tied-hormonal-irregularities

"If I could just get it on paper, I might make some sense of it all."
- Jimmy Buffett, "If I Could Just Get It on Paper"
from the album, Somewhere Over China

Several years ago, while reading software designer Joel Spolsky's column in Inc. Magazine, I realized that although he called it Joel on Software, the content had enough relevance to an audience of entrepreneurs across the full spectrum of businesses to provide valuable feedback to an organic vegetable farmer in Northeast Iowa.

That's when the idea for Chris on Farming dawned on me. Not that I ever expect to get a column in Inc. Magazine, but I'd already spent several years speaking to and writing for beginning farmers, organic farmers, consumers, and others about farming, philosophy, family, and food. And occasionally, what I said seemed to have some effect on the people I was saying it to. I wondered if it might appeal to a larger audience, and if I could translate some of what I observed and experienced into something meaningful.

I hope that Chris on Farming becomes something valuable in the community of people who care about food, farming, and life. I've been blessed to have so many wonderful people share their farms and stories with me, and to have had so many opportunities to learn through my own successes and failures. I hope that the insights - as bold as that sounds! - that have come from those experiences, when translated into pixels on a screen, will have meaning to the people who stumble onto these pages.

Thank you for coming here. Thank you for having a listen and giving a slice of your attention to these musings.