Look at the "evil" field. Maybe five percent of the total, usually less, is taken over by Indian Tobacco. Look at the Amish field. Closer to thirty percent.
And they burn. And they cut during fallow at intervals to catch weeds. Some of them, and there was a big debate about it, even used biological controls. (Pests that target specific weeds.)
And it's still there. Hell, it's hard enough to get rid of with herbicides. And its root structure strangles out everything around it. Let fucking Indian Tobacco get loose in a wheat field for long enough and you might as well move to Florida and retire.
And don't even get me started on mustard weed! I really fucking hate mustard weed!
But we were talking about corn. So let's talk about burcucumber. Sounds cute, right? It's a combination of two words, the first of which is "bur." Don't know if anyone reading this has ever dealt with burs. They're the things that stick onto your legs when you're walking through grass in summer. Burcucumber doesn't have really nasty burs, but it's a climber. It climbs like any viny plant. Let it get into a corn crop and it will climb right up and kill the plants.
And all weeds, no matter how minor, take away nutrients from your crops. They are a pain in the ass.
So, you can do industrial things to get rid of them. From a paper on weed management and burcucumber:
"Management: Soil applications of Balance Pro or postemergence applications of atrazine, Beacon, Buctril, Classic, Cobra, glyphosate, or Liberty."
You know, herbicides. Get out there in your spray truck. Call in a crop duster. Corn's a monocot. Burcucumber is a dichot. (grass vs. broad-leaf plant) Some herbicides (2-4-d: Brush-Be-Gone) only killed dichots. If you didn't get it with the first application of Roundup you can get it with Brush-Be-Gone. In the case of soy, which had been "genetically modified" to be resistant to glypho (Roundup) you can go ahead and spray 'em anyway. I do so love modern bio-tech.
Or, you can manage it by tilling fallow fields (not a great use of anyone's time), burning at appropriate times and, most especially, weeding. (All but the last, by the way, causing more damage to the environment.)
Weeding. You know, get out there with a hoe and hack away at the weeds. Better make sure you get all the roots and especially get them before they seed. Or next year is going to be worse. And worse. And worse. Gonna spend a lot of time on your knees. Backbreaking work. Stoop-work, the worst kind. It will kill you fast. Ask any Mexican farm laborer.
But those guys were mostly doing it at harvest. You'd better be doing it all summer. Hell, spring, summer and fall; there are weeds that spring up all three seasons and you need to get them young.
If you've got an area that's large enough to support four people and some to sell, you're going to be weeding all the time. Or you're not going to get enough to support the foursome.
And you still will have more weeds than those evil bastards using chemicals. Ask the Amish.
Then there's pests. We're sticking with corn again. Corn borer. Ever picked up fresh corn at a roadside stand and when you're shucking it there's this big fucking caterpillar which has eaten, like, half the kernels? You go "Yuck!" and toss it out. But a bunch of the rest has the same shit?
Corn borer. And your friendly roadside farmer is an organic nut. Welcome to the reality of organic farming on the sharp end. If it doesn't have a worm somewhere, it's industrial. If it has a worm, it's organic. If you're eating something organic, there has been a worm involved. Guaran-fucking-teed.
And if the worms are eating it, people can't.
Prior to the advent of modern pesticides and other pest prevention methods, pests and infections (corn gets sick, too) caused a loss of 25% of all crops before they could be consumed. That's a lot of fucking food.
Digression again. Ever heard of a guy called Thomas Robert Malthus? As in "Malthusian Equations"? There was a book called The Population Bomb that was based on Malthusian Equations. Basically, according to Malthus, people reproduce a lot faster than food production can be increased. (Geometric vs. arithmetic.) Thus every so often you're going to get a massive famine since the amount of mouths outstrip the production.
Malthus did his study and wrote his treastise just as the industrial revolution was getting into gear. And for his knowledge of the day, organic farming by human and animal labor, he was absolutely right. There was a regular cycle of population growth stopped by famine throughout the world prior to the industrial revolution. See the upcoming thing about Marie Antoinette. Not to mention Les Miserables.
What changed it was industrial farming methods. Period. Dot. Everybody on earth would occasionally be going through a widespread killer famine if we all went back to organic farming worldwide. Simple as that. I hate "all organic" nearly as much as I hate mustard weed. More, probably. Mustard weed just evolved. Organic farming nuts have brains. They just can't use them.
But the good organic farmers (oxymoron, I know) are going to use tricks to keep it to a minimum. They'd pick the corn. Very labor intensive, again, but get a bunch of people out there looking for the corn borer eggs on the surface. Getting the eggs off. Looking for caterpillars or grasshoppers (they're fucking locusts, okay?) and picking them off by hand. Have a big fry at the end of the day since you might as well get some protein from your fields.
The tofu=eaters were not good organic farmers. They were not good farmers. They were not good horticulturalists. They thought they could be grasshoppers (fucking locusts) and just prop their feet up and wait for the food to fall into their mouths.
"Summer time, and the living is easy . . . "
No. It's not. Traditionally, spring and summer were when people starved. Back in medieval times the lords would store the grain and if you had been a good worker, when your personal stores ran out you could go to the lord and get grain to feed yourself and your family. If not, starve. Sometimes stores didn't make it all the way through the next harvest. They had huge problems with pests. (See above.) But that was the general idea.
There wasn't any food. Crops weren't coming up. There was nothing to eat.
There was nothing to eat.
This is referred to as famine. It hadn't happened to the U.S. in a century or more. And even then it was, to an extent, localized. 2020 was the first widespread famine the U.S. ever had. In 2019 it was still localized until the example of Lamoille became fucking national policy!
But I digress . . . Again.
There was still a certain amount of fuel. Most people had run their fuel out but there was still some. And there was always the leather-personnel-carrier. (Shoes.)
People started wandering. The tofu-eaters started looking for food, any food. The grasshoppers were turning into locusts and starting to fly.
There was food. Grain stores from the previous year were at near record highs. Even the winter wheat harvest hadn't been awful, despite the weather. And there were, alas, fewer mouths to feed. By June there was some movement on emergency distribution.