"How can I get a crop, survive, pay my bills, and at least leave the land as good but try to build it better?" Photo: Organically fed dairy cows Steven MacKinnon of New Argyle made the switch to organic farming in the mid 1980s after he saw how hard he was pushing his dairy cows to produce milk and while he was watching his vet bills skyrocket. Like many chemical farmers, MacKinnon was spending ten to fourteen thousand dollars a year on fertilizer for his crops and another twenty-five hundred or so on veterinarian bills. At the time MacKinnon had forty cows and wondered for whom he was making money, himself, the vets, feed companies, or the fertilizer companies. Realizing those people weren't getting up at six a.m to milk, he decided to reclaim some of his costs. "The best any us can hope for is to try to understand nature and then try to work with her. So if you can learn what it is, or what her cycles are, the better you can understand and then the more liable you are to succeed at it." Looking around his barnyard MacKinnon decided to compost the manure. Photo: Composting Manure According to MacKinnon, manure is usually looked at as a waste product and generally anything labeled waste isn't given any value. However, he looked at it as a natural resource and put it to work for him. Starting in February, the manure is removed from the barn with a loader. Every couple of weeks MacKinnon spreads it in piles about fifteen wide and about sixty feet long. Initially the heaps are about six to eight feet high but shrink to less than half that size by the time they are spread in the fall. He spreads about four hundred bushels of compost per acre. MacKinnon says it takes about twenty extra hours, in total, each year to compost, turn, and spread the manure. "I feed the soil so that the soil can feed the plants, so the plants can feed the cows. That's the way we think now. Before, we used to worry about just feeding the cows." Photo: Rich forage mixture MacKinnon grows a forage mixture which includes four kinds of timothy, clover, trefoil, and alfalfa. He also grows mixed grain consisting of peas, barley, oats, and also grows wheat. Now that he doesn't spray his crops he's getting a lot of natural vegetation returning to the soil including vetches which give good variety to the cows' diets. MacKinnon chisel plows all his excess straw back into the soil. He says it's putting lots of carbon back into the ground and the nitrogen from the peas in the grain mixture helps break down the carbon. MacKinnon's soil is so healthy that six weeks after he chiseled the straw back into the ground last year it had all decomposed. He says some chemical farmers are plowing up the same straw two years later because the ground is dead and it isn't breaking down. Photo: Blade of grain an inch wide MacKinnon says at the time, there wasn't much information on organic farming and he had to search on his own until he found what worked for him. He says even now he doesn't know exactly how everything works. MacKinnon says composted manure does something for the land that we can't explain or at least we don't have methods for testing right now. He maintains you get a feel for the soil and you have to get your hands dirty. He says eventually you start to understand what each crop takes out of the soil and what it puts in, however, you're not always going to be one hundred percent right. Even though he doesn't have all the answers MacKinnon has figured out that organic farming takes in the following four components: air management, water management, decay management, and fertility management. If you leave out one of these elements you don't get the proper conditions for optimum soil life. When MacKinnon made the switch to organic growing he really didn't expect the same yields as he was getting previously, in fact, he expected to take a loss because he wasn't forcing the ground with chemical fertilizers. Today, he's pretty much getting the same amount of cereal crops and forage and although his cows might be producing a little less milk it's costing a lot less overall to produce it. "If you're not getting paid more for producing organically you have to find ways that are still practical and within your financial means. It's no good having a big piece of equipment to do organic stuff if it's going to put you out of business." Photo: Five foot high grain With no chemical sprays to control weeds, MacKinnon had to turn to other methods. He bought an eighteen foot spike harrow for that task. Many farmers work the land and plant at the same time so that they are only germinating and killing one generation of weeds. To give his crops a fighting chance, MacKinnon works all his land first, which might take him four to five days. He then starts over again and gives it a second cut and then broadcasts and harrows in the grain. That extra week to ten days ends up killing several generations. He says if you give the grain enough of a chance to get ahead you can go in with the harrow and give it an "awful woolin" and it'll bounce back. Once the harrow has been through there's not much ground that isn't undisturbed. MacKinnon says when he's done, what was once a nice green field will often end up red again because so much soil has been disturbed. MacKinnon tries to get his grain harvested in September which gives him lots of time for regrowth and winter cover. When he's cutting the grain he'll have another tractor sitting with a chisel plow equipped with eighteen inch sweeps. As soon as he's done he goes over it at a shallow depth cutting off any cooch grass or weeds. This method also throws up some soil to start breaking down the straw and germinates any grain that fell. On October 31, 1995 MacKinnon had grain regrowth that was a foot tall and peas that were sixteen inches. He says when you harvest the grain a little earlier, the bacteria and worms work better in the warmer temperatures resulting in better soil conditions. As well, because the soil quality is richer and less compacted, MacKinnon uses an eighty horsepower tractor to pull his chisel plow in the fields. Most manufacturers recommend one hundred and twenty horsepower machines. "It's up to us to put up as good a product as we can and they'll do the best, they'll give all they can for what you give them." MacKinnon maintains about thirty-five head of dairy cows. Before switching to organics some of his best producing cows would only last about two years before their health would start to go; either their udders would go or their feet, or perhaps they wouldn't get pregnant again. Today, with feed of ordinary dry hay, peas, oats, barley, and wheat, they last much longer and have fewer health problems. After he got over his previous idea that all cows should produce identical amounts of milk, MacKinnon accepted that some were going to do better than others. That's when he started treating them as individuals with different needs. Today, he has a cow that's sixteen years old and still producing milk, although the average age is eight or nine. On the health front, the MacKinnons don't have the problems they used to. " We were seeing all these health problems and sickness, you hated even to go out to the barn. We'd go out to the barn, we have a lot of calving in the winter time, and if five calved, three or four of them would have milk fever and maybe two would even go down and they'd be out in the aisle and you couldn't get them up." Since the switch to organic, Steven MacKinnon says he hasn't had a cow go down with milk fever in seven or eight years. As well, in the past he would have to trim the hooves of thirty-six out of every forty cows every year for what he thinks was overfeeding of protein. Today, he trims about four. Another benefit; the cows are eating less grain. MacKinnon's theory is that the blend is nutritionally better balanced and they don't have to eat as much to get the benefits. Steven MacKinnon claims since the switch, farming now is ten times easier and a hundred times more fun. Although he doesn't have less work, he does without the stress of financial debt and the chemical bills. " You'd just be paying off last year's fertilizer when you had to order this year's. We don't worry about that anymore. Same with the chemicals. You don't have the debt that you used to. You had to be borrowing money all the time just to keep up and you were pushing everything so hard. You had to buy new heifers and your machinery was wearing out quicker. It was like a treadmill. The faster you run, the faster you have to run, and you can't stop." "If there was no difference in money, even if I was losing a bit I would still do it this way because you don't feel like you're hurting the animals, hurting the soil, or hurting yourself, or the equipment, well the equipment is inanimate so it doesn't really matter but it matters in your pocketbook when you have to replace it. So you feel a lot better, like I said, it's more of a challenge."

Some photos and technical information courtesy of the P.E.I. Department of Agriculture and Forestry