Dear Friends,
Saturday, I sat down at my desk with a stack of bills, looking for our diesel statement. Earlier in the week, I’d gone into town to order a tank of fuel. There, Miss B, who runs the Bulk Plant and doesn’t miss a thing, told me that her terminal was in short supply, and so to conserve her allocation, she wasn’t filling farm tanks completely. If you called her for a fill-up before you were empty, she’d take you off her delivery list!
The price had increased by $1.15 a gallon since our last tank fill in January. Why? The Iran War and closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In the same week, fertilizer prices have increased 40% off an already elevated base price.
On a working farm, diesel isn’t a luxury. It’s how we feed cattle, bale hay, and plant oats, corn, soy, wheat, rye and sunflowers. When the price jumps, the whole farm feels it.
On the plus side, Mt. Folly is organic, which means we do not use synthetic fertilizer. (Industrial farms use nitrogen fertilizer produced by the HaberBosch process, a high-energy method that takes nitrogen from the air and hydrogen from natural gas, squeezes them together, and turns the pairing into ammonia for fertilizer. So some of the inputs to make fertilizer are trapped in the Middle East. The rest is logistics and greed.)
Mt. Folly’s 2014 decision to go organic was more about keeping dangerous chemicals out of the food supply than geopolitics. I’d done the same with cattle, creating no-antibiotic, no-growth hormone beef back in 1984.
Little did I know that learning to grow our own fertilizer with clovers and vetches, to make compost, to make biochar, was a geopolitical move. But it is.
What does this have to do with the inflation we all feel right now? Conventional long-haul food – raised with heavy synthetic fertilizer and trucked great distances – has a lot of embedded diesel and natural gas cost in it, and that cost has to go somewhere, probably to you.
At Mt. Folly, we are trying to build a different kind of system, and you help keep this experiment going: hemp, cover crops, birds and nature, cattle on grass, pigs in the hollers, and a new generation of farmers who see a future.
With gratitude from the farm desk,
Laura
PS. This week, we are putting on sale our New to CBD Bundle and our CBD and
turmeric bundles. If your joints are feeling as creaky as our gates after this winter, take a
look.