it's been rather a wet may in northwest indiana and you can see that by the ammount of water that is still standing in the fields around county line road ( i don't recall gulls as typical denizens of cornfields...but there they are in the top photo)...but as you can see by the bottom photo the crops of dense yellow number two are going in...bayer and pioneer both recommend a row spacing of 30 inches for their corn ( they have specs for 15 inch rows and something called twin 30 inch rows [ basically instead of planting rows at a thirty inch spacing, plants are staggered four inches off each side of the thirty inch row line effectively doubling the plant population while still allowing the use of standardized thirty inch row farm machinery....ths statisitics i've read show that productivity isn't greatly enhanced...it increases it around fourteen bushels an acre more than standard thirty inch row planting, but that's not enough to call it the corn planting wave of the future...according to monsanto's website thirty-six inch rows actually allow more yield by giving plants more resources to draw on rather then incresing yield through more plants...the corn in the bottom photo looks like it is in standard thirty inch rows but i didn't hike out into the field with a tape measure] as well as 36 inch rows...by their figures 30 inch and 36 inch rows have higher yields and 30 inch is the norm) so that leaves us with a base point to do a bit of math...an acre has no real fixed dimensions...any size trapazoid or rectangle that encloses 43,656 square feet is an acre...a square acre would be about 208 feet 9 inches on a side...that leaves about 8 rows with 30 inch spacing in a square acre...say a row of mature corn covers an area 2 feet wide...2 feet times 8 rows times 208 feet leaves the corn covering an area of 3328 square feet out of 43,657 ( bear in mind these are ballpark figures meant to provide some basic visualization of the spaces involved in industrial monoculture )...far more of that square acre is open than covered by vegetation and farmer brown is going to use liberty or round-up or some other herbicide to ensure it stays that way...that's why the united states loses so much top soil every year and one reason i am inclined to permaculture as an eventual end for the garden...but there is a problem...scroll down to a photo of the garden and you'll see i'm not doing a whole lot better at the moment...one reason is the annual root crops i'm growing as part of the academic side of the garden, but another issue is tubers...i'm growing tubers because; 1) i like them, 2) they are perennials, and 3) beyond potatoes, other tubers have potential as staples...the down side is you have to dig them up to harvest and most are plant/ replant perennials...so you have to disturb the soil every year and leave it open to erosion...at least for a time...i've been thinking about using a ground cover like okinawa spinach, or new zealand spinach, or water celery ( you could use sweet potatoes, but then you're back to digging to harvest...but it's still a possibility) along with cowpeas ( green manure) during the growing season, then turing it all under at the tuber harvest and the replanting a cover crop of winter wheat over the garden ( and the beds at home) to hold things together over the winter...then turning the wheat under in the spring and starting the whole process over again...it would fix nitrogen in the soil that the winter wheat would recover and hold for the next spring and add organic matter to the garden to feed the worms and make the plot self sufficient...or, at least, immune to chemical fertilizer...nothing particularly original in this...but i am intrigued by using natural processes rather than industrial ones.
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