REX OBERHELMAN: $27,000 (Net!) from Five Organic Acres

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PLOWBOY: How do you do that?

REX: By taking samples to them. I worked on my wholesaler for an entire growing year. Every week I went in with produce and asked him for business. He kept saying no, but finally he got tired of seeing me come in and said, "All right, we'll give you a try." Now he's one of my larger accounts.

PLOWBOY: Most people who grow foods organically charge extra for that higher-quality produce. You don't do that?

REX: No. You can't ask a premium price for a product if the demand isn't there for it. I grow organically because we eat the food ourselves and I don't want to eat any poison if I don't have to. But as far as sales go, the fact that our produce is organically grown is basically a freebie we're giving the consuming public.

PLOWBOY: Rex, let's take a break from all this dollars-and-cents talk for a while and get into how you grow your crops. How do you get the ground ready for planting each year?

REX: We work it with a tractor and a field cultivator. I don't plow every year; our soil is loose enough that it doesn't require that. Then we go through and spread compost by hand — we don't have a manure spreader.

PLOWBOY: How much compost do you use?

REX: We make close to ten tons of it each fall by combining manure, hay, and soil. We use about 2,000 bales of hay, the manure from my five pigs, ten goats, 50 chickens, and 20 rabbits; and some garden topsoil . . . all combined in about a 10-1-1 ratio.

Once that's spread, I use a machine that attaches to my old 1946 Allis Chalmers tractor to lay a strip of black plastic wherever we want a row. The machine also lays a dirt ridge on the edges of the plastic to hold it in place.

PLOWBOY: What's the black plastic do for you?

REX: That mulch cuts weeding by at least 60%, helps the soil warm earlier in spring, and stops surface evaporation. It's eliminated our need for irrigation. This year, for instance, we had a very dry spring — only 3.6 inches of rain from planting time until August — but our production was greater than ever because of the black plastic.

Plastic, together with the tires we grow our vine crops in, gives us a head start on the season, so we can put our plants out a week to ten days earlier than normal. And all we have to do to plant is cut slits in the plastic and stick the seedlings in.

After that, we just talk to our plants, observe them, and nurse them so they don't have any insect problems.

PLOWBOY: What pest problems have you had?

REX: Some years cucumber beetles attack the pumpkins and squash. We spray a lime-water solution from the tractor to control them. And Japanese beetles attack our cantaloupe and any tomatoes that have cracks. I don't really have a good, nontoxic solution yet, but we've been able to survive the attacks. Actually, insects aren't our worst problem.

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