The Rural Voice, 1982-02, Page 6More beans
Prices, lack of marketing board make kidney beans attractive to some
When the cash goes out of cash crop
farming it's time for quick reassessment.
And the farmer who doesn't adjust will
soon be doing something else.
Reacting has never been a shortcoming
for Ray Brown, of R.R. 6, Goderich,
whose six hundred acres of Ashfield
Township have long been considered
fine, productive plots of land.
With insignificant exception, they've
been known as corn acres. That is, until
last year. That's when Brown planted
seventy-five acres of Sacramento light
ted kidney beans. This year he plans to
double that, and he says a season or two
later he'll probably be up to two hundred
or three hundred acres.
The son of a fisherman, Brown has
worked with crops all of his life and he
knows a bit about everything from
tooacco to tomatoes. Part of that know-
ledge came from firsthand experience,
part from his two years at Ridgetown's
agricultural college.
But most of it was gathered during the
fifteen years (to the day) that he sold for a
chemical company. Each day he talked to
farmers about their crops. He talked to
good ones and bad ones and he learned
from all of them. And what he learned he
has since put into practice.
The thirty -eight-year-old Brown has
now had his own operation for seventeen
years. Within seven or eight miles of each
other are three Brown farms, parcels of
one hundred, two hundred, and three
hundred acres, all fully drained.
PG. 4, THE RURAL VOICE/FEBRUARY 1982
RAY BROWN
Their owner's decision to go into beans
was based on soil needs. His decision to
stay with beans is based on economics.
"I mainly got into them for rotation," he
says, "but if things stay the way they are
it will be for dollars."
As Brown puts it, "I can't grow corn
for three dollars. Corn is a high energy
crop, lots of fertilizer, lots of input costs.
The input costs are phenomenal. It used
to be that fertilizer was the biggest input
oust but interest charges have overtaken
fertilizer costs. In the next year the good
operators and the tough operators are
going to survive."
Brown predicts a huge increase in bean
production this year in Huron County. In
his words, "It will be beans from fence
bottom to fence bottom." The bean
market, he says, "can't be screwed up as
easily as corn because there are just
limited areas in the world where you can
grow beans."
Considering last summer's drought in
Ashfield Township (just one day of rain in
more than a two-month span), Brown is
happy with the twenty-two bushels an
acre he harvested in the fall. He's happy,
too, with the more than 5220 net profit
per acre. He needed about 52.85 a bushel
just to break even on his corn.
"1 guess I was lucky," says Brown,
"some guys didn't do as well with them
(kidney beans) as I did. I put mine in in
June. I spring ploughed and I was waiting
for a rain but I never got it. So where
some guys put them in earlier, mine went
in later. This year I'll do the same, they
won't go in until June."
The kidney beans appeal to Brown for a
couple of reasons. Firstly, their planting
and harvest demands don't conflict with
corn (under normal circumstances), and
they make for a more balanced and less
hectic work schedule. And a lot of corn