The Big Chill was already setting in. Soil temperatures, which is what the little instructions were based on, were not following normal progression. The tofu-eaters and retirees and the rest of the grasshoppers who now thought themselves ants put the seeds in the ground and waited for the crops to roll in.
And, by and large, they didn't sprout. Some did, they happened to have gotten the soil temperature right. Those were, by and large, caught later by the fact that it was "a year without summer." Frosts continued into June and started again in August. Corn does not do well under those conditions. It can handle frost when it's near harvest. It does not handle it well when it has tassels.
Speaking of which: Then there was the insistence on "organic." I know, I know, how many hobby horses can one person have? But bear with me.
Up in Minnesota we've got our fair share of Amish. Nobody is bothered by them. They're not "us" but we're not "them" so it works out. Nobody wants to try to sing kumbaya with the Amish and the Amish won't even consider singing kumbaya with us. "Clannish" doesn't begin to cover it.
But they farmed organically. I mean, it was like their religion, right? They had been doing it for a long time and they were not stupid. They paid attention to what worked within the constraints of their culture. They used every trick in the book that wasn't a violation of their faith. They were, hands down, the best truly organic farmers in the United States.
Their harvests averaged half of my dad's evil farm corporation. The only reason they were able to stay in business at all was that they had so few needs and everyone worked for, essentially, no pay. They ate what they harvested and anything left over went to buy the very few things they couldn't make themselves.
They were excellent organic farmers. They were not excellent farmers. Excellence in farming is how much use you get out of a patch of soil. My dad was an excellent farmer.
The best organic farming in the world is hugely inefficient compared to industrial farming. All the kumbaya types that wanted everyone to go to organic farming simply could not do math. Say that everyone was suddenly forced, by some sort of edict, (like, say, The Emergency Powers Act and a fucking Presidential Order) to do organic farming. We won't even talk about horse-drawn plows, just no genmod seeds, no herbicides, no pesticides, no "nonorganic" (a contradiction in terms, by the way) fertilizers.
Look, the U.S. was and is beginning to be again the world's bread basket. We produced, and are getting back to producing, 15% of world agricultural production. With about a quarter the workers per ton. But if we had to go to "all organic farming" we'd have had to break three times the amount of land that was farmed. Why three? Because in areas that weren't rapidly urbanizing, good farmland was all in use. That means working the marginal stuff where production falls off, fast.
Three times as much plowing. Three times as much transportation. About five times (for some complicated reasons) the hands. There was already a notable shortage of skilled farm workers; I have no clue where we'd get the extra guys.
And you have to use some fertilizer. I can project places we could get it, they're called sewers. Do you transport it raw? I don't think even the tofu-eaters like the idea of honey-wagons all over the road and they would be all over the road. The transportation network for professionally produced fertilizer was very efficient. Trying to replace it with some massive network of shit carriers was going to be ugly. And then there's the energy involved in transportation.
Again, plenty of studies. Environmental damage from a total switch to organic farming would have been ten times that of the current conditions of mass industrial farming. Don't care what the tofu-eaters believed; that was the reality.
For every simple answer people don't use there are big complicated reasons they don't. But some people can't comprehend big complicated reasons so they cling to the simple answers.
Back to the tofu-eaters in Lamoille. The crops didn't sprout. Those that did did poorly. It was a sucky year to farm, that was part of it. The big part was that the tofu-eaters had no clue what they were doing. And they weren't willing to work nearly hard enough. If you're going to organically farm, you'd better be ready to work ten times as hard as an industrial farmer. And I mean "swinging a hoe" hard. And "picking the corn" hard. (The latter is not harvesting.) Why? Weeds. Pests.
Laying down a bed, industrially, works like this in the simplest possible way. (Understand, this is the farming version of C-A-T spells "Cat." Don't think this little paragraph can make you a farmer.) Start with winter fallow field. Spray with herbicide. Let sink in. Wait two weeks for Roundup to degrade. Spray with ammonium nitrate to "seal" the soil. Some stuff you have to combine these but that's getting into sentences and complex words like complex. Wait a short period of time for ammonia to do its magic. Check soil temperature (if you're good you've guessed the day perfectly) and start plowing and planting simultaneously with a John Deere combination planter. At specified intervals spray with insecticide and herbicide chemically targeted to miss your crops. Depending on what you're growing, you might have to do pollination. (Usually except for the low-grains like rye, wheat and barley.) Pollination is the one thing that is hugely manpower intense. (Oh and picking rocks. I can't believe I left out picking rocks!) Generally it happens in summer and you hire a whole bunch of the local kids to come out and hand pollinate. And they'd better be willing to work for peanuts or it's going to break you.
Harvest when it's ready and get ready to either do a second crop or let the field lie fallow for winter. Repeat.
(By the way, all farmers have some level of debt. Ever signed a mortgage and get the question "Do you want to pay monthly, quarterly, biannually or annually" and look at the banker like they're nuts? Monthly, of course! Are you nuts? Unless you're a farmer. In which case, it's generally yearly. You don't make diddly until harvest. That's when all debts get paid, payments on tractors, payments on improvements to the house, payments on your car. And you'd better have budgeted for next year, including the pollinators, or you're going to go bust. Farmers are planners.)
So, let's say you're growing corn and you don't do all that. You just put it in the ground (at the right time) and let it grow its own way. Okay, maybe you spread the field with "manure" (shit) before you plow. (The tofu-eaters mostly didn't.) But you're not going to use evil herbicides or pesticides.
Well, weeds grow much faster than crops. In fact, it seems weeds will grow like, well, weeds. They get up everywhere. Even in fields that have been sprayed over and over again, they spring up. They are transported by wind, by birds. Fucking thistles are the bane of any farmer's existence. They get carried on bird legs and birds will get into the fields. If you don't spray in a year or so you're covered in thistles.
But wait! I can hear the organic types screaming about burning and cutting and all that. Yeah. Tell it to the Amish. Go look at an Amish field right next to an "evil" field. Let's take wheat since it's easy to spot. Look at the "evil" field. You'll see, scattered through it, some brown looking stuff that isn't wheat. If you don't know what that is, it's called "Indian Tobacco." It's related, distantly, to tobacco but has no value as a crop. Period. It's a weed.