TWENTY-ONE YEARS OF NOTES FROM OUR FARM: WHAT WE'VE DONE, WHAT I'VE LEARNED

摘要

For the last twenty-one years, our farm has gone from conventional to conventional and organic, to conventional, organic, and biodynamic. I have taken the outline of the records and broken them down into three intervals of seven years (3x7 = 21).The first seven years, starting with 1998 and going through 2004, saw plenty of changes. My daughter and son came back to the farm. We increased the sow herd from 300 to 600 sows. We built the entire infrastructure for this expansion, plus added more land. We began moving away from soluble fertilizer to organic; because of the manures, we could. Hog prices dropped to 13 cents per pound on some of the first hogs sold from the expansion. Looking for ways to cut costs, we started pulling antibiotics.