Another Four Crop Rotation

Star-Tribune, via Big Picture Agriculture:

Forty years ago, just as the revolution in agriculture was about to take off, Thompson went in the other direction. He started farming much the way his father had on the same 300 acres. Instead of just two crops, corn and soybeans, he has honed a strategy that includes annual rotations of four crops in five years - corn, soybeans, hay and oats. Crop rotation prevents insects from gaining a foothold in his fields; alfalfa and soybeans help restore the soil's natural chemistry.
Thompson doesn't buy fertilizer -- he gets it from his animals and from town, and it's better for the soil because it contains more organic matter. He controls weeds with cover crops and with a specialized system of tilling and planting.
And he makes a profit: An average of $218 per acre since 2000 -- without federal subsidies -- compared with an average loss of $10 per acre in Boone County, by his calculations. The difference is the money he doesn't spend on fertilizers and pesticides.
"They spend too much money for stuff," he said.
Of course, it's taken him years to figure it out, and to track his progress with meticulous care in a stack of black notebooks. He's bought specialized equipment from Europe and built the manure pit. And had to deal with the watermelons and tomato plants that suddenly popped up in his fields from seeds that came through the sewage treatment process in Boone.
It also requires a lot more time and daily management, plus livestock to eat the oats and alfalfa, for which there isn't much of a market anymore.
Which makes some question how many farmers would adopt Thompson's methods.
"That's the way my dad farmed in the 1950s and '60s," said Robert Plathe, a corn and soybean farmer west of Mason City. "If I have a market, that makes sense," he said. It would also help revive agricultural communities because farms would be smaller and more families could live off the land.
But, he pointed out, it's a lot harder, and few people want to farm like that anymore. Animals require daily care, winter and summer.

The main challenge is the marketing of the livestock.  Small farmers don't have many places to sell small batches of livestock and manage to make much money.  Long term, farmers will need to utilize nutrients much more efficiently than they do now, whether with many more farms having small numbers of livestock or with smaller numbers of geographically dispersed confinement facilities.  Mercer County, Ohio and parts of Iowa have demonstrated that too many confinement facilities in too small of an area are a disaster for water quality.  The four crop rotation might be one way to get to a better future, but we're probably going to need several ways.