Volume 11, Number
2                                         
November 5, 2007

The Farmer

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Making "useful land" useless

by Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

According to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics, in 2004 85-95 percent of
farm household income has come from off-farm sources (including employment earnings, other business
activities, and unearned income). For the 82 percent of U.S. farming operations that have annual
sales of $100,000 or less, off-farm income typically accounts for all but a negligible amount of
farm household income. This means that for a typical farm family to survive financially someone has
to work another job off-farm. But even among the largest farming operations (the 8 percent of
farming operations with annual sales exceeding $250,000), off-farm income accounts for 24 percent of
farm household income, on average.

These statistics show that for a person to go into farming they must have a lot more than land to
survive. And when you add in the increasing levels of property taxes, owning land can be a burden or
liability instead of an asset. In the past, land ownership was a sign of wealth and farming a net
generator of wealth. So much so that Benjamin Franklin said that there were only three ways to build
wealth: 1. conquer it, 2. steal it, or 3. plant a seed. So how was land transformed from something
valuable and useful, a builder of wealth for some, into a useless liability to others? To understand
this one must study how economic conditions outside of the farm can render a piece of fertile land
useless for agricultural purposes.

History shows that the Nile Valley of Egypt and in particular the Delta region was the most
valuable piece of agricultural real-estate in the ancient world. However, Rome increased the tax
burden on the land that by the 3^rd century after Christ, Egyptian farmers left their land
and moved to the interior of Africa out of the reach of the Roman tax collectors and soldiers. Rome
could not replace these farmers so Rome soon fell after this because she could no longer pacify her
urban population by giving them free food confiscated from Egypt.

Now we can compare this to the modern day Rome called the U.S.A. and see how she has used, then
abused her farmers and how history may repeat itself. America took the land from the Native
Americans and then brought over seasoned farmers from Africa and made them farm as slaves for white
people which made the southern plantation owners both rich and powerful. The North was threatened by
the wealth of the South so northerners sought to take away the South’s advantage by freeing her
slaves. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation "freed" the slaves in the states
that broke away from the Union and not the slaves of those states that stayed loyal to the Union.
The South lost the war and her slaves. However the agriculture of the South began to rise again
during and after Reconstruction as now freed slaves began to use their knowledge of farming and
large labor force to take over the land once owned by their slave masters and turn them into wealth
generating machines.

In 1896 an obscure document arises called the "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of
Zion" in which a scheme was laid forth that would strip people of their land by first loading
the land with debt. We quote: "It is essential therefore
for us at whatever cost to deprive them of their land. This object will be best attained by
increasing the burdens upon landed property – in loading lands with debt…we want is that
industry should drain off from the land both labor and capital and by means of speculation transfer
into our hands all the money of the world."

From 1865 to 1910 Blacks had risen from slavery where they owned nothing to acquiring over 16
million acres of land, mostly in the South. To stem this tide white merchants loaned seed and
supplies at high interest rates (usury) to freed Blacks. Land was held as collateral and payments
were accepted in cotton only. Black farmers were therefore forced to grow cotton to pay off their
debts and had to reduce the production of food for themselves and the growing black economy
developing in small towns and cities in the South. Increased debt load plus a rash of lynching over
the 30 year period from 1890 to 1920 effectively drove millions of Blacks off of their land in the
South into the ghettoes of the North to work for the northern industrialists.

However, the whites who took over the land needed labor which they no longer had or could trust.
The U.S. government through research developed at the USDA and at colleges funded by USDA research
grants began to invent labor saving equipment and chemicals to replace labor. To pay for this
equipment and increased production costs the government made low interest loans available to white
farmers and not black farmers. Over time the whites developed a competitive advantage that drove
many more black farmers off of their land and their children into the cities.

This depopulation of the countryside and reduction of black wealth was not happening fast enough.
So in 1962 the Committee for Economic Development outlined what they called "An Adaptive
Approach" in which they stated: "Net migration out of agriculture has been going on for 40
years, and at a rapid rate. Nevertheless, the movement of people from agriculture has not been fast
enough…" This "adaptive approach" recommended that 1. vocational agriculture
courses in rural areas be scrapped, 2. agricultural prices be substantially lowered
and 3. temporary income programs be instituted to protect the most "suited for
survival."

Of course the farmers "suited for survival" were mostly white. But now even the white
farmers are finding it hard to stay on the land as the income figures quoted earlier in this article
indicates. Yes, research and science have produced many marvels as farming has become more
industrialized. One cotton picker can pick the cotton that it would take 200 workers to pick by
hand. However, that one cotton picker may cost $250,000. The farmer must grow and harvest at least
1,000 acres of cotton to justify purchasing one cotton picker. This industrialized cotton farm must
then put out at least $300 per acre in the beginning of the season for fertilizer, seeds, chemicals
and labor and wait at least six months to receive any return. So now he must come up with $300,000
for operating expenses, plus living expenses, the payments on the cotton picker and the other $500
per acre worth of other farm equipment. He may be carrying a debt load on just equipment of $750,000
against which he must put his land at risk as collateral. Without this equipment his land has no
value in terms of cotton production, but must be put at risk in order to farm cotton. We took cotton
as an example, but the same story can be told across the board for any agricultural commodity.

The property tax on our 1600 acre farm in Georgia is about $23,000 per year. In other counties in
Georgia and in other states property taxes are even higher. So a farmer can not just hold land until
commodity prices get better, because he must make some type of income to pay the taxes.

So the "system" that first made land useless for the economic well being of Blacks in
the South is now making land useless for farming, period. As owning land becomes more of a liability
than an asset, one can feel the "Fall of America", as prophesied to us by the Honorable
Elijah Muhammad, drawing closer.

Volume 12, Number
2                                        
November 2, 2008

The Farmer

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Truth has teeth

By Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us in "How to Eat to Live" that there was little
pure food on the market. He taught us what to eat and what to stay away from. Following in his
footsteps the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has warned us not to trust the "merchants of
death" who sell us death in the form of processed food.

In the past the ratio of processed to fresh food in the grocery stores was 70% processed to 30%
fresh. Now the ratio of fresh food has gone down below 20% leaving the average consumer to choose
between brands of processed food which they believe is safe because the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) is supposedly looking after their health. However, the FDA is under the same type of corporate
influence that distorts findings and pays scientists to look the other way or even fabricate results
to protect their "bottom line".

Over the last few years the "Farmer Newsletter" at www.MuhammadFarms.com
and the Final Call Newspaper have been on the look out for poisons within America’s food system.
In particular we exposed the health hazards of both MSG (monosodium glutamate) and HFCS
(high-fructose corn syrup). Evidently the truth has teeth because the processed food industry is
spending a lot of money on ads to allay the people’s fears of these two substances. Evidently our
and others efforts to warn the public have resulted in reduced consumption of those items containing
these substances to the point that the industry has to launch a media blitz to confront the enemy
(the consumers) at the pass.

Back in September of this year the Corn Refiners Association started a $30 million dollar
national advertisement blitz to calm the consumers fears over the relationship between high fructose
corn syrup, obesity and diabetes. Their ad goes like this: A mother pours a child a flavored drink,
a younger woman offers her boyfriend a Popsicle — then both are confronted about the health
effects of high-fructose corn syrup.

Their response: The sweetener is made from corn, has no artificial ingredients and is fine in
moderation.

Maybe it is "fine in moderation" but if you read the labels on every soda brand, except
one or two small insignificant brands, you will find high fructose corn syrup. More than 10 percent
of Americans’ daily calories come from fructose, including high-fructose corn syrup, with
sweetened beverages the largest source of the syrup, according to an Emory University study
published this year.

None of the advertisements cast the manufactured sweetener as "natural," though they
could, following a letter written in July by a supervisor with the Food and Drug Administration’s
Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The supervisor, Geraldine June, wrote that
high-fructose corn syrup could be called "natural" because it’s corn-based and contains
nothing artificial or synthetic.

The letter was in response to the Sugar Association petitioning the FDA in 2006 to clarify the
definition of "natural," complaining that its use in describing high-fructose corn syrup
was misleading because corn’s original chemical state is altered significantly during processing
into syrup. Using enzymes, the cornstarch molecules are broken down into the simple sugars, glucose
and fructose. A team of researchers in 2007 at the USDA, led by Dr. Meira Field, found that
laboratory rats were not negatively affected when fed glucose, but when fed fructose they had
anemia, high cholesterol and their hearts enlarged until they exploded.

MSG is another food additive taking it on the chin lately. Even the Food channel and the Weather
Channel are carrying the ads of the soup war between Progresso (owned by General Mills) and
Campbell. The Campbell Soup Company struck the first blow September, with ads in The Inquirer, the
New York Times, and a slew of papers around the country.

"Bring your dictionary," one ad declared, and the ingredient list for a can of
Progresso’s "Italian-Style Wedding" soup, which was shown alongside the ingredient list,
about half as long, for Campbell’s new Select Harvest version of the same soup. The headline over
Campbell’s version said, "Bring your appetite."

The ad highlighted such Progresso ingredients as sodium stearoyl lactylate and hydrolyzed corn
protein. "No artificial flavors. No MSG," Campbell’s ad said of its Select Harvest soups.
"Real ingredients. Real taste."

Progresso fired back in October, buying its own full-page comparative ads in The Inquirer, Times,
and other papers where Campbell’s ads had been published. The ads announced Progresso’s plan to
remove MSG – monosodium glutamate – from its entire line of about 80 soups.

"Campbell’s has 95 soups made with MSG," the headline said. "Progresso has 26
delicious soups with no MSG. (And more to come.)" Tom Forsythe, a spokesman for General Mills,
which is based in Minnesota, said Campbell was responding to Progresso’s success.

"We have been focused on taste and weight management and [on] bringing innovation to the
market," Forsythe said. "More than three million households have moved to Progresso soup
in the last two years alone. So we do think we have Campbell’s attention."

Campbell, which still claims nearly two-thirds of the ready-to-serve soup market, says
Progresso’s focus on MSG misses the broader point of Campbell’s new product line: recipes that rely
only on recognizable ingredients.

While both companies are competing to get rid of MSG in all of their soups they still try to
claim that MSG is just another taste enhancer. However, what the proponents of both MSG and HFCS
fail to accept is that enhancing empty calories and making people addicted to junk food are causing
people to eat themselves to death. We at Muhammad Farms have seen at first hand how people respond
to naturally grown and naturally ripened vegetables and fruits. The taste of what is truly natural
is easily discernable over the products of this artificial world and if given the choice the people
would choose natural. However, because of the preponderance of the artificial stuff on the market
and the increased dependence on processed food due to laziness of the people, many young people have
never had truly natural unprocessed food.

Until all of our people are awakened, we will continue to grow the best food, promote the
establishment of food buying clubs across the nation and do the research to help the people take
"a bite out of crime" with the teeth of truth and cut off the blood stream of the
"merchants of death". Please continue to support the Three Year Economic Savings Program
so that Muhammad Farms can increase your health and make the "merchants of death" sweat.

 

 

Volume 11, Number
4                                        
November 29, 2007

The Farmer

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Horror Stories from the Countryside

by Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

 

On pages 37-38 of his book Message To The Blackman in America, the Honorable Elijah
Muhammad wrote in 1965:

"The worst kind of crime has been committed against us, for we were robbed of our desire
to even want to think and do for ourselves. We are often pictured by the slave-master as a lazy
and trifling people who are without thoughts of advancement. I say, this is a condition which
the slave-master very cleverly wanted and created within and among the so-called Negroes…

The slave-master passed laws limiting the so-called Negro in land ownership or limiting the
areas in which such purchases or even rentals could be made…[T]he so-called Negro faced pressure
against his becoming a farm owner and pressure from the white community that he remain a tenant.
We encountered credit difficulties, hardships of repayment of loans and hardship with white
executives from whom the loans must be asked."

To bring this up to date and backed by statistics, in 1999 we asked black farmers in Terrell
County, GA to give us a list of 10 black farmers and 10 white farmers that were farming and had
dealt with (Farmers Home Administration) FmHA in the early ’80’s. With this list we went to the
Terrell County courthouse where the loan files and deeds are kept. From the loan files we developed
a list of FmHA transactions of these farmers and from the deed records were able to obtain
information on the amount of loans, collateral attached, interest rates and terms.

In 1978 according to the Census of Agriculture there were 31 black farms in Terrell county
averaging 148 acres each. However of the 10 black farmers that were still alive in 1998 only 6 (six)
still owned land and none were actively farming. The average size of land holdings was now 13.84
acres, an average loss of 134.16 acres. This represented an average loss per black farmer of
$224,450 in terms of land, buildings and equipment at today’s prices ($1,673 per acre). In other
words the black farmers in Terrell county lost about everything from 1978 to 1998. What happened?

In 1998 the 10 black farms averaged 13.8 acres, while the 10 white farms averaged 272 acres. Now
if we compare the number of loans received by each farmer according to the loan records at the
courthouse, we see that the 10 black farmers received an average of 4.3 loans from 1978 to 1994,
while the ten white farmers received twice that amount, 8.2. But what is more shocking is that none
of these black farmers got any of the 3% interest rate loans that were supposedly set aside in 1978
and 1979 to help redress the ills already incurred against black farmers. Instead, in Terrell County
five white farmers received a total of $943,480 of the 3% loans in 1978 and 1979. In fact according
to courthouse records, one white farmer alone received $532,850.

In addition, while helping the black farmers determine the economic damages done to them by the
USDA, we were told many stories about how the USDA county supervisors got rich by taking black
people’s land:

1. Many black farmers told us that as long as they did not try to get loans to buy land, they
could sometimes get operating loans. But as soon as they applied to purchase land they were most
often disqualified and not given additional operating capital, if they were lucky to buy that land
otherwise.

2. When a black farmer did get an operating loan, he had to pay it all back within one year
regardless of how his crop turned out. When a white farmer had a bad year, he was allowed to set up
payment plans or loan restructuring, while the black farmer’s land was sold at auction.

3. Black farmers had to put their land up for collateral for an operating loan, while white
farmers could use the crop itself as collateral.

4. Local judges and law enforcers would ignore a higher court’s order to stop a foreclosure on
a black farmer.

5. Most black farmers were never told that they could put 50 acres of marginal land in pine trees
and get their loans deferred for 25 years without additional interest charges.

6. Black farmers were almost always given "supervised loans" which meant that they had
to go to the FmHA office to make any purchases, adding time and delays in their operations. In
addition they seldom knew how much money was still left in their account, nor how much of the income
that they were forced to turn over was actually placed against their debts until foreclosure notices
came.

7. Black farmers were seldom given loans to buy top notch equipment but forced to buy old
equipment from white farmers who had loans from FmHA, or the local banks, allowing these farmers to
dump worn out equipment and get the down payment for new equipment.

8. Yield information was distorted at the USDA local offices to insure that black farmers did not
get government subsidies or insurance payments. On average from 1982 to 1992 white farmers received
$1,023 per acre in farm subsidies, while black farmers received only $274 per acre.

9. A common method of hiding discrimination in a given county was to always have one are two
black farmers that would get money and a few white farmers who would be denied money. Usually a
token black farmer was allowed to sit in on the agricultural committee meetings, but not allowed to
vote.

10. When black farmers were forced into bankruptcy, the courts would pay off the white creditors
while leaving black creditors stranded.

11. And maybe worst of all, many of the children of these black farmers who lost their land
blamed their parents and not the system that victimized them.

We will end this with the words of the Honorable Elijah
Muhammad:

"All of this is part of the clever plan to discourage my people from wanting to own
producing land for themselves and to cause a great dislike within them for having anything to do
with tilling, cultivating, extracting and producing for themselves as other free and independent
people. It is a shame! This shows you and I what white America is to us and just why we have not
been able to do anything worthwhile for self. They want us to be helpless so they can mistreat us
as always. We must come together and unite. It is time." (MTBM, p. 38)

Volume 9, Number 12                                
November 26, 2006

The Farmer

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Food: New Weapon of Mass Destruction

by Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

Exodus 1:10 and 19

10 Come on, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when war
occurs, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land.

19 And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women;
for they are lively, and are delivered before the midwives come in unto them"

Now since the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, taught us that the Ancient Egyptian did not do this to
the Children of Israel, but this was a prophesy to be fulfilled in this day, we must observe the
practices of the modern "Pharaohs" or presidents and defend ourselves against their plans.

On September 28, 2005 former Secretary of Education, Bill Bennett stated on a radio broadcast and
we quote:

 

"But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that
were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would
go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your
crime rate would go down."

Now let’s look at some of the policy debates and research done to fulfill these goals. In June
1997 Jane’s Defense Weekly reported that former defense Secretary Cohen "quoted other
reports about what he called ‘certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that
they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races." More can be read about biological
warfare in a recent publication by the British Medical Association entitled, "Biotechnology,
Weapons and Humanity" where it states that "Genetic engineering of biological agents, to
make them more potent, has been carried out covertly for years…" p. xviii.

But what is more disturbing is testimony which has surfaced in the South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission around "Dr Death" (Wouter Basson): "There were revelations
of research into a race-specific bacterial weapon; a project to find ways to sterilize the country’s
black population; discussions of deliberate spreading of cholera through the water supply;
large-scale production of dangerous drugs; …"

Methods of population sterilization include inoculation under false pretenses and poisoning the
water and food supply. The international biotechnology firms have become more intrusive into third
world countries in their attempt to control all germ plasma of the planet. They go into an area and
collect the local staple germ plasma, break down its genetic code then patent that code and variety.
They then try to force the local farmers to buy the corporation’s seeds threatening them with
patent violations if they plant their once native varieties. When America invaded Iraq, one of the
first moves that it made was to force the Iraqi farmers to turn in their seeds and buy Monsanto’s
genetically modified seeds.

The recent "Rice Genome Project" is heralded as a great break through and a step in
locking down the genetic code of the other main food staples including corn and wheat. Now rice can
be manipulated at will, even inoculated with vaccines to "prevent" diseases. Could one of
these "diseases" be "overpopulation" of an unwanted ethnic type?

Cyrus Vances’ 1980 "Global 2000 Report to the President", and Al Gore’s book,
"Earth in the balance" suggested that the world was quickly becoming overpopulated. Al
Gore suggested in his book that the rapid growth in human population was leading to environmental
degradation and that the world should institute a "Global Marshall Plan". The first tenant
of such a plan would be "Stabilizing World Population". Mr. Gore, the former
Vice-president, demonstrates his points by focusing in on three countries as examples of
overpopulation; Kenya, Egypt and Nigeria. These are the only countries that he mentions and they all
are interestingly on the continent of Africa.

On September 18, 2002, Melanie Gosling wrote "South Africans have been eating genetically
modified organisms for the past five years, according to Monsanto, the world’s biggest biotechnology
company."

The article goes on to say that, "…over 100,000 hectares of genetically modified yellow
maize was grown in South Africa, which would increase to 150,000 hectares next year and to one
million hectares by 2005."

But fear not, Monsanto adds comforting words, "The biggest problem with people who oppose
GMOs is that they are ignorant. Already 42 billion portions of GM food have been consumed worldwide
and not one person has got sick from it. People in the United States have been eating GM foods for
15 years," he said.

Other scientists have been working specifically on producing food that would kill human sperm.
Robin McKie, science editor, for the The Observer wrote on September 9, 2001:

"Scientists have created the ultimate GM crop: contraceptive corn. Waiving fields of maize
may one day save the world from overpopulation. The pregnancy prevention plants are the handiwork of
the San Diego biotechnology company Epicyte, where researchers have discovered a rare class of human
antibodies that attack sperm."

However, in their hurried attempts to use their newly acquired knowledge of the genes and their
functions, they have made some crucial errors which render their intended race specific weapons
general poisons that could destroy the fabric of life itself on our planet. Jeffrey Smith in his
book "Seeds of Deception" points out that the method
of genetically modifying a food crop to add a specific protein producing gene was flawed from the
outset. Early theories had predicted that each gene was a specific code for producing one protein.
However, scientists now know that a single gene can produce many proteins depending on a number of
situations and circumstances that scientists are just beginning to explore, but have no way to
control. According to Mr. Smith a single gene from a fruit fly, for example, can "generate up
to 38,016 different protein molecules".

Not only do they not know how a new gene introduced into an organism will operate under different
circumstances, they do not know if in the process of rearranging the DNA they may have damaged it,
causing it to produce life threatening toxins within its host. It seems like the little joke that I
made with the then president of Dupont back in the days of the Y2K scare was truer than I had
expected. I told him that "I hope that the same scientists who tried to put those 4 digits into
the 2 slots on the computers are not the ones working on genetic engineering?" So it seems that
Pharaoh’s modern helpers are busy working on our DNA and the joke and the jokers are on us.

Volume 12, Number
14                                                   
November 22, 2009

The Farmer

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Laying the Groundwork for Muhammad Farms

By Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

As I write, it has been raining for two days and the ground is too wet for me
to continue with the farm work at hand. Yesterday, I used this “down time”
to finish work on our 2010 Muhammad Farms Calendar, so today I can continue
working on this series of articles on farm management.

I give you this background of how I am using my time to give you a glimpse at
what it will be like to manage a farm. Nature and the condition of your farm
work determine how a farmer must allocate his time. Submission to the laws of
nature and the time are essential to farm survival. You may have noticed that I
produce few articles on my website, www.Muhammadfarms.com, between summer and
fall. I usually write more articles in the winter because this is when I have
the most down time at the farm. During the major growing and harvesting periods
of the year, not only is my body tied up in doing farm work, but after the
physical work stops, my mind continues to problem solve and plan for the coming
day and weeks. Farmers must think in terms of immediate tasks to do tomorrow,
intermediate plans for the remainder of the week and how all of this fits into
the long term plans and goals of the farm. A farm manager must anticipate
possible problems and be ready to immediately solve and handle emergencies.

Before we get started in teaching farm management, as future farmers you
should be thinking about acquiring certain skills you will need that can not be
taught in articles or even in a book. You must know how to do at least minor
repairs on equipment. So right now do as much repairs on anything in your
environment as possible and take some classes or workshops on welding, using a
torch, engine repair, electrical repair (A.C. and D.C), plumbing and carpentry.
When something breaks at home, try to fix it yourself or at least pay close
attention to the repair person. When you get on your farm, not only will you be
isolated from many conveniences, you also will not be able to afford to pay
someone every time some farm equipment breaks or something stops working at your
house. They may not even do service calls that far from the nearest city.

Think of a farmer as “Superman” and the rest of the world as “kryptonite”.
There is something called the “parity ratio”, that I will expand upon in the
future, which at its present level indicates that every time a farmer has to buy
some goods or service from someone else he loses. He loses because when he goes
to the market to sell his product he does not get a price that reflects the
time, effort, capital and risk that he must employ to produce that commodity. In
other words the exchange rate between what the farmer offers the market and what
he has to pay for inputs for production is not fair. The farmer has lost ground
in this struggle since 1910. Therefore, a farmer must be as self-sufficient as
possible to survive. If not, he becomes a slave to the urban world. So, start
now and learn all you can about repairing everything you can.

Later we will discuss different aspects of farm management and what we have
found about how good managers think and operate. However, one thing that all
farmers try to do is repair their own equipment. If you ever come to visit us
here in Southwest Georgia, I would like to take you over to see a few farmers’
equipment repair facilities. I would wager that you have never seen so much
sophisticated repair equipment unless you visited an auto or truck dealer repair
shop or tool and die shop. Some of these farmers actually build or at least
greatly modify their own equipment. We at Muhammad Farms have a small workshop
and limited equipment. However, we like to say that if you give me some duck
tape, wood and rope I can make up, repair or modify just about anything (smile).
Necessity and a limited budget are the mothers of invention.

The farm manager not only manages but farms as well. There is a difference.
Gardening can help you understand the basic nature of the production process;
however you need to work on a commercial farm to learn how to produce on a
commercial basis. You need to know how to drive a tractor. You need to know how
to use different farm equipment to do different tasks. You need to know how the
earth responds to the use of this equipment. You need to know how the weather
affects the utilization of such equipment. You must learn how the time and
season dictate the activities of a farm operation.

You also need to understand that not all farms are the same. Most farms are
highly specialized. The USDA has classified farms under broad categories of cash
grain, field crop, vegetable and melon, fruit and tree nut, nursery and
greenhouse, dairy, poultry and egg, and cattle/hog/sheep. So your first decision
is to determine what type of farm are you going to set up?

A farm is more than just some land. It is a system which includes the
infrastructure, buildings and equipment necessary to carry on the operations
done on that land. When we purchased our 1600 acre “farm” in Georgia, there
was no equipment or repair shop, just open land filled with large weeds. We
decided to set up a farming operation growing cash grains and vegetable/melons.

Interaction Between Decision Making and Goals

So why did we decide to set up Muhammad Farms as a cash grain/vegetable/melon
farm? First of all the manager has to make decisions based on both environment,
availability of resources and underlying goals and objectives of the family. In
this case my family is the Nation of Islam.

The manager has to decide on what weights to give different outcomes based on
his value/goal system which may change over time. The setting of goals and the
evaluation of values is another function that the manager is burdened with.

Goals are decisions that act as guide posts for the making of other nested
decisions or represent constraints on what alternatives are looked at when
making decisions. As such, no one or set of goals can be held to be neither
constant over any wide range of managers nor constant over time with the same
manager. Such goals can include; 1) make more annual profits, 2) maintain or
increase family living, 3) avoid years of low profits or losses, 4) avoid being
forced out of business. The ranking of these goals may vary over manager
characteristics of age and tenure of the operator, educational attainment,
number of dependents, assets, net worth, debt-asset ratio, off-farm income,
total land and cropland in the operation, total acres owned, and the proportions
of land and cropland owned.

The profit maximizing motive which is hypothesized to be the prime mover
behind economic decision-making, may not be the key factor for the farm. To
understand business behavior one must look at the business’s overall
objectives which more than not is survival, not short-term profit maximization.
Profits are essential for survival but not to the sacrifice of other goals such
as perpetuity, harmonious relationship within the economy and society in which
it must function, the ability to supply an economic good or service, and being a
change agent within that society.

With this theoretical background let us delve into how goals played an
essential role in our decision to set up Muhammad Farms as we did.

First of all, peanuts, wheat, cotton, soybeans and field corn are the major
commodities grown in Terrell County. A few counties over from us is the largest
watermelon market in the country, Cordele, Ga, but there were no watermelon
farmers in Terrell County when we started farming in 1995. Therefore, if making
a profit was the primary goal of Muhammad Farms, these should probably be the
crops that we should grow. However, my assumption was that we were interested in
feeding our people. Also I believed that the members of the Nation of Islam
wanted products from our farm. I soon learned that this second assumption was
problematic.

This was 1995 and we were gearing up for the historic Million Man March set
for October 16^th of that year. We needed to grow crops that the
people in our cities could see and feel. If we grew only peanuts, cotton,
soybeans and field corn the people, no one in the Nation of Islam or the cities
in which our Mosques and study groups were located would see the products from
our farm in Georgia. This is because these cash crops would have been sold to
local grain elevators and buying stations to be mixed with crops from other
farmers in Terrell County to continue through the established agribusiness
system set up to handle those commodities. And since we did not and still do not
have processing facilities to turn cotton into cloth and cloth into clothes, nor
do we have processing facilities to turn corn into corn flakes or corn oil, we
could not get these commodities directly to our end consumers in the cities.

On the other hand if we grew fresh vegetables, we could ship them directly to
our cities in the raw stage for consumption. This would accomplish a number of
goals. I felt that if our black women could see that we in the Nation of Islam
could possibly feed their babies then they may be more inclined to encourage
their men to attend the Million Man March. This is based on my theory that women
are more concerned about their babies than they are about their men. And since
it was and still is the white man that the black women depends on to get her
food needed for her babies, then it is the white man and not the black man that
she respects. She may love her black husband, but she respects and admires her
white benefactor. Although she may want her black man to be a “man”, she can
not afford for him to upset her benefactor while he can not produce the security
blanket that her white benefactor provides.

Another reason for producing vegetables that could be seen and tasted in the
cities is that we need to purchase more farm land. The monies needed for those
purchases must come from the people, of which the majority live in the cities.
There is a saying, “out of sight, out of mind.” Our farm is located two and
one half hours south of Atlanta, far away from our major concentrations of black
people. Although everyone in the Nation was excited about the purchase of our
1600 acres of land, that excitement would fade unless they could be constantly
reminded of our existence and efforts. So, growing vegetables and shipping them
to the cities was part of our public relations or marketing campaign to continue
and even increase our people’s support for the Three Year Economic Savings
Program, which is the financial engine for our continued growth in agricultural
economic development and nation building.

Add to this the fact that we did not have any equipment when we got here and
a limited budget to purchase such. Therefore this again eliminated cotton
production. In the Nation of Islam we don’t eat peanuts or soybeans, so we
excluded those crops. However, this was a mistake and we now grow at least 200
acres of peanuts per year. We will explain later.

Vegetable production is more labor intensive; while peanut, corn, cotton,
soybeans and wheat are more capital intensive. We could hire local hand labor
for fighting weeds in vegetables and for picking them in the summer. On the
other hand we did not have the money to purchase the large tractors, planters,
cultivation equipment or harvest equipment necessary for those other cash crops.

Therefore we got an 85 horsepower John Deere tractor and some used plowing,
planting and cultivating equipment with which we could grow vegetables. In fact
we did not even get this tractor until the middle of April. Therefore, I went
out and hired some black farmers along with their tractors and harrows to get us
started in March of 1995.

That first summer we had a tremendous crop of yellow and zucchini squash,
sweet corn and watermelons. We shipped these products in the Final Call trucks
to many of our large cities in the South, East and Midwest. The people were
excited to see both their newly acquired trucks and our delicious and beautiful
produce from their farm in Georgia. However, the honeymoon did not last long. By
the summer of 1996 we were hearing complaints that we were sending too much
fresh produce at one time and the people were not prepared to handle bushels of
corn, squash, okra and the like. We found out the hard way that our people were
not canning, freezing or even cooking meals from scratch. So now we had to start
an educational program, so we set up in 1999 to reach out and teach our people
what was going on at the farm and in the food system. We had to show them
examples of the dangers of what Minister Farrakhan has labeled, the “merchants
of death”. We had to make it clear that this system was killing us through the
food and therefore we needed to get our stomachs out of the enemy’s kitchen
and consume our own produce from our own farm.

In terms of a farm management lesson, we assumed that our intended market had
a certain set of goals, so we thought that we were growing for that market. When
we learned that they did not act upon the principles of “How to Eat to Live”,
we had a decision to make. We could forget about that potential market and
concentrate on making a profit for the farm and thereby follow the farming
systems established in Terrell County, i.e. cotton, peanuts, corn, soybeans and
wheat. We could try and educate them to change their behavior. We could set up
processing plants to turn our raw products into processed goods that our people
were accustomed to. We could continue to grow vegetables but sell them to food
brokers. We decided to do a combination of growing some row crops such as wheat,
corn and even cotton; educating our potential customers in the cities on the
value of holistically grown produce; sell some of our excess vegetable
production to local food brokers and set up food buying clubs in the cities to
be a ready market for our produce.

We even looked into setting up a dairy, but found that the cost of doing so
was prohibitive at the time. On top of this, when you produce milk you either
have to process it and ship it yourself or sell it to local milk bottlers for
them to distribute under their labels. There is a continued debate on the level
of pasteurization that is most beneficial and the legal aspects of shipping
non-pasteurized milk across state lines. Muhammad Farms can not afford to get
into a legal battle with the state or federal authorities and jeopardize the
survival of the overall farm on the milk issue. We probably will have to set up
a separate corporation to handle dairying so as not to put the land that we own
at risk to lawsuits or government intervention. All of these factors must be
taken into account when making decisions on what enterprises to pursue in your
farming operations.

 

 

 

Volume 12, Number
3                                    
November 16, 2008

The Farmer

——————————————————————

It’s just a "Confidence Game"

By Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min

The current financial crisis has focused attention on our financial institutions and how they
operate. Over the last few months I have paid a lot of attention to Congressional hearings on
C-Span, financial experts on the National Public Radio, 60 Minutes, CNBC, financial writers
in the Final Call Newspaper and various internet websites. I have even bought and read
such books as America Theocracy and the Tyranny of Oil.

In many cases the language and terms used in these discussions seem to purposely obfuscate the
underlying truth. Economic issues affect our ability to survive in this modern age of interconnected
financial markets. Yet we know so little about this system and lack a basic economic understanding
to be able to even ask the right questions.

It seems that our congressional people had not done their homework or were not paying attention.
Their solution is throwing taxpayer money at the problem. The general public, according to CNN polls
taken during the debate on the bailout plan, voted against the bailout by 94 to 96 percent. But
congress passed the bailout bill anyway. As of November 16^th, although $350 billion has
been given to the banks, the credit markets are still frozen while the big banks are buying smaller
banks with the bailout money.

Will money alone restore "confidence"? When Treasury Secretary Paulson addressed the
committees in congress concerning the administrations proposed $700 billion bailout plan for Wall
Street and more specifically the banking and financial institutions, he kept saying that there was a
lack of confidence in the markets which must be restored. However, further analysis shows that this
lack of confidence is due to mistrust between the individuals involved in the financial industry. It
seems that people in the industry were misled by others of their peers into making risky investments
while the regulators who were supposed to insure fair dealings and proper accounting methods were
either asleep on their watch or looking the other way. We have found that there were at one time
laws on the books which would have prevented this financial crash, but they were taken off the books
by congress over the last eight to nine years while the people slept and their watchdogs were paid
off.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad has taught us something of the nature of the people that call
themselves "white". We must remember that the financial "system" as we have it
today was set up, is owned by and managed by these same people. Now the Honorable Elijah Muhammad
said that white people can do right as long as there is a gun to their head. However, if the gun is
removed then they will revert back to lying and stealing.

Now, these words may seem harsh and cold and labeled as racists. However, let us look at an
analysis of our current problems as described in an October 10, 2008 New York Times article
entitled "The Reckoning-Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt". In this
article Arthur Levitt Jr, who was S.E.C. chairman in the Clinton administration said, "It seems
to me the enforcement effort in recent years has fallen short of what one Supreme Court justice once
called the fear of the shotgun behind the door. With this commission, the shotgun too rarely
came out from behind the door." The public role of the Security and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.)
was to police Wall Street by enforcing the players to operate under rules set by congress.

On October 26th 60 Minutes aired an interview with Eric Dinallo, the insurance
superintendent for New York. In that interview he said that credit default swaps — essentially
private insurance contracts that paid off if the underlying investment went bad — were totally
unregulated, meaning that the banks and investment houses that sold them didn’t have to set aside
any money to cover potential losses. "As the market began to seize up and as the market for the
underlying obligations began to perform poorly, everybody wanted to get paid, had a right to get
paid on those credit default swaps," he said. "And there was no ‘there’ there. There
was no money behind the commitments."

100 years ago these gambling activities were made illegal, explained Dinallo. And then Congress
made it legal gambling with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which removed
derivatives and credit default swaps from federal oversight and preempted the states from
enforcing existing gambling and bucket shop laws against Wall Street.

To make it simple, a derivative is a financial instrument whose value is based on something else.
In other words individuals and companies were making bets that the people who owed mortgages on
their homes would go into default leaving the lenders holding the bag. When the banks and investment
companies did not have enough money to pay out to the winners, they arm twisted the government to
pay off their bad bets for them. However, even if the bets are paid off the distrust for each other
is so great that they can’t trade with each other or issue new loans. This freeze in the credit
markets is choking the very life blood of our credit dependent economy.

Now it seems that Wall Street is looking a lot like the streets in the Black community. As a
whole, Black people spend over $700 billion per year mostly with people from other ethnic groups.
The mistrust and lawlessness which keep Black people from investing in themselves, also makes
outsiders too afraid to help. I have personally sat and watched police observe drug trafficking in
once viable Black neighborhoods and do nothing. Once the drug trafficking and the violence
associated with it has destroyed the value of the houses in those communities and a new set of
people move in, all of a sudden there is no more drug trafficking.

I have personally had the experience of my former business being robbed and the best thing that
the detectives could do was ask me who do I thing did it. Then when I actually found the people that
did it, they would not investigate because I did not have proof that they had my goods. I had to
actually catch them red handed trying to sell my goods at a flea market before the police would move
in and even then they were reluctant. So what type of signal does that give a prospective Black
business person operating in America? It tells him that he is not protected by the law, but is
responsible for all legal obligations even if he is put out of business.

In working with the Black farmers I found out that they had to put up more collateral than their
white counterparts to receive government loans. Then when disasters struck, they did not get the
same disaster relief that saved white farmers during a drought, tornado or flood. Instead, Black
farmers were still required to pay all financial obligations to the government including compounded
interest on the debt. When these Black farmers went under and their land sold at auction, it was the
relatives of the very government agents that were supposed to help them who bought their land for
dimes on the dollar.

Leaders, like the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, for years have accused the government of
conspiring against the economic and moral development of Black people in America. He has been
ridiculed and laughed at for his, what they call, "conspiracy theories". We will not go
into detail over the history of what has been done to Black people. However, the result has been a
people who lack confidence and trust in each other to invest money with each other to establish
businesses and institutions like every other community in America.

Black people should take heart at the financial crisis in America because the chickens have
finally come home to roost in the high perches of Wall Street. Like Wall Street, we must find ways
to trust one another. Like Wall Street, we must develop a new view of the world that gives us faith
in a productive and secure future. Like Wall Street, money by itself can not restore confidence,
only the truth and a set of restrictive laws or codes of behavior with unbiased enforcement can
guarantee our success.

Volume 11, Number
3                                           
November 16, 2007

The Farmer

———————————————————————-

From ‘White Robes’ to Black Robes: Hanging nooses, stealing land

by Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

Lynching has taken on a more sophisticated appearance since the hay day of racists who hid their
identity behind ‘white robes’ as they terrorized a whole people off of their land. There has
been a new rash of ‘hangman’s nooses’ displayed on high school and college campuses. When a
group of Black boys in Jena, LA would not be intimidated by such a display, the new cowards now
hiding behind "black robes", sitting where justice should sit, saw fit to put these Black
boys in jail.

When thousands rallied to protest the judge’s decision, this Louisiana White man in
a"black robed" decided to find another reason to put one of the 6 defendants, Mychal Bell,
back in jail on another charge. It is good that Black people are responding to the "hanging of
nooses". However, that kind of noose may hang one Black person, but the stealing of land
affects a whole people. We must begin to understand the brand of "high tech lynching"
occurring beneath the radar screen of our ‘righteous indignation’. Take the Grant Family for
example.

The Grant Family along with nine other Black farmers was
first foreclosed on in 1976 by the Halifax County, NC FmHA office after three years of county wide
disasters. The Grant family decided to fight rather than give in to the loss of home, farm,
equipment and a way of life. The Grants were a mere $10,000.00 delinquent with a farm operation, in
good years, grossing hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Matthew and Florenza Moore Grant were the parents of six children, pillars of the community,
strong on their faith and participants in their respective churches. The Grants signed a Consent
Judgment against their property in 1981 in an agreement that USDA would release farm equipment and
the Grants would withdraw a discrimination law suit. This according to USDA was a "settlement
of sorts" that would allow the Grants to continue farming and move on with their lives, but the
USDA refused to work with them or their five grown children on a means of repayment of the
delinquent amount. According to one of the Grant children, Gary, Matthew Grant was actually told by
the FmHA District Director, "It does not matter who you go to see, who you bring or what plan
you come with, we are going to sale you out." Mr. Grant further believes that they wanted to
take their land because approximately 100 acres of the Grant Family farmland boarders the Roanoke
River in Tillery, NC, a prime area for development.

The Grants like many other farmers filed Civil Rights Complaints with USDA that were never really
acted on. In 1997 when the Black Farmers & Agriculturalists Association (BFAA) was formed, it
was Matthew Grant who pushed his community group, the Concerned Citizens of Tillery (CCT), to unite
its Land Loss Fund with BFAA. This was done and the two groups moved forward in supporting the
Pigford vs. Glickman class action law suit.

However, the Grants continued on their Administrative Process. On March 2 and 4, 1998, before the
Pigford vs Glickman Consent Decree was brokered, Matthew Grant and USDA Civil Rights officers signed
a "FINAL RESOLUTION AGREEMENT" which was to give the Grant family $350,000 and debt write
off. However, this is now November of 2007 and the Grant family has not received the payment nor the
debt write off.

When there seemed to be no settlement for the family, Matthew and Florenza Grant, in October of
2000, became named plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit comprised primarily of North Carolina women
and African American farmers. The case is called Wise et. al, v. Veneman, and is presently
pending before the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. At this point, again, the Department of
Justice (DOJ) denied their attorney or the Grant family to hold legitimate talks with the USDA to
get this case settled.

Upon the death of Matthew and Florenza Moore Grant, their son Gary R. Grant and other heirs
attempted to seek a settlement. The requirement by DOJ was that the family withdrew from the Wise
et.al, v. Veneman law suit, which the family was willing to do, but not "with prejudice"
as the DOJ was requiring.  However, knowing the reputation of USDA, the Grant Children would
not accept that but were willing to withdraw "without prejudice," meaning if they could
not get a settlement with USDA they could return to the courts for justice.

To withdraw "with prejudice" means you cannot bring such charges again.
This is something that every Black farmer in Pigford agreed to basically when they agreed that
no matter what the finding, they gave up all rights to pursue any other solutions to their case, and
many of them did not understand this.

The Grants have maintained records since their struggle began in 1976, including hand written
notes taken during meetings and all correspondence to them and by them over this 31 year period.
They actually have an "archive" of information on their struggle and openly talk about it
and the documents.

Now the Justice Department in a final attempt to take the land from the Grant family has issued a
"Writ of Execution" to be served on November 20, 2007 in the Federal Court in
Raleigh, NC.  A "writ of execution" commands the Grant family to satisfy the judgment
by levying on and selling all property in which defendants have a substantial nonexempt interest,
and by executing upon the family farm property. This means the Court can order the sale of
the Grant property right out from under them unless they satisfy a judgment signed by
their father in 1981 for $54,503.81 that is now, with interest, billed at $192,456.55.

However, if the USDA would just pay the $350,000 owed to the Grant family, then they could pay
the judgment. The Grant family is caught in the same type of "catch 22" situation that has
and still is forcing many Black farmers and their families off of the properties bought by their
ancestors.

When the "Farmer’s Newsletter" published the article "Cloned meat is old
meat" some of you may have thought that we were "crying wolf." Recently the governor
of California has made it legal to put cloned lamb on the grocery shelves with no label indicated
that it is cloned meat. The saying of "a wolf in sheep’s clothing" has been brought up
to the modern era of genetic weapons manufacturing.

Everyone might not want to be a farmer, but a people should have the right to farm and defend
themselves against chemical and biological warfare. The Grant family needs our help and support. The
President of the United States with a flick of his pen can stop any foreclosures on the Grant family
farm property. Our first step should be a letter writing campaign to the President to use his
executive powers to stop this pending foreclosure and force the USDA to live up to the piece of
paper it signed in 1998. An example of such a letter can be downloaded at both www.muhammadfarms.com
and www.bfaa_us.org.

The struggle of the Black farmers to keep their land and grow us some wholesome food continues
and we must show our support to the Grant Family and other Black farm families in general. Write to
this President, the modern "Pharaoh" to give him one last chance to do the right thing and
set our farmers free from the ‘last Plantation’, the USDA. However, history shows that
"Pharaohs" do not generally understand "right", only might. Today, racists wear
"black robes" and killers hide within our food. We must organize and take to the streets
before we lie dead in the streets killed by the laboratory designed "wolves in sheep’s
clothing", while our land is snatched from beneath our feet by "high tech lynchers".

Click here for copy of Letter
to President Bush

Volume 12, Number
13                                                           
November 10, 2009

The Farmer

——————————————————————

The Science and Business of Farming vs. the Art and Hobby of Gardening: Part
I

By Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

It is customary for me to write articles to be no longer than 600 words or
two typed pages so that they could fit into a newspaper column. However, this
time I am not trying to bring a bit of news or a warning about the food system
or a growing tip for your garden. Now I must get down to the business of
teaching which will take more time and space. Now it is time to teach you how to
think like a farmer, so please be patient with me as I try to grow this crop.
(smile)

In the Spring of 2006 I was blessed to visit Cuba as a guest of The Honorable
Minister Louis Farrakhan. While there I noticed the many gardens throughout
Havana along with produce stands next to these gardens. The city residents would
go down to their local garden produce stand and pick up the day’s vegetables
to fill out their menus for their daily meals that they cooked at home.

When I got back to the states in 2006 I encouraged the members of the
Ministry of Agriculture to promote home and urban gardening projects across the
country. This effort had three purposes. One was to provide fresh produce to our
city cousins across the country. Another was to give our people a taste of how
nature worked since most of us have been spoiled by city life, junk food and
fast food restaurants. As the people attempted gardening they would have a
better appreciation of what it takes to produce food and thereby be more willing
to support our efforts in the Ministry of Agriculture by increasing their
donations to the Three Year Economic Savings Program.

We are quite pleased with the success of our gardening program and will take
some credit for the national resurgence of home and urban gardening. We are also
quite grateful for the increase in the monthly donations to the Three Year. But
now it is time to shift gears and move towards the third reason for instituting
the gardening program. We plan to grow some farmers from our many gardeners.

We are not forsaking our gardening program, however we have to select a few
of our gardeners and prepare them to be farmers. At our 2009 Saviours’ Day
Convention held in Chicago, Minister Farrakhan announced his desire for the
Nation of Islam to obtain 2 million acres of farmland. A friend of mine made a
little joke which got my attention. She said that a group of believers from
Atlanta were discussing the Minister’s plans and said, “Who is going to farm
that 2 million acres of land? Oh, Dr. Ridgely, all by himself.” Ha, Ha, that
ain’t funny (smile). I have a hard enough time farming 1600 acres of land,
much less 2 million. Therefore, I would be wise to find or grow some help.

I used to make this statement, “It would be easier to make some black
farmers Muslims, than to make some city Muslims into farmers.” Well, I am
probably not qualified to do either, but I must attempt both. As vice-president
of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association (BFAA) and fighting for
justice for the black farmers in their class-action lawsuit against the USDA, I
discovered that most of the black farmers are way beyond their prime and many
have died in the 10 year period of the lawsuit. This fact was really bothering
me until I took another look at who was actually doing the farming on the large
commercial farms in Southwest Georgia.

Yes, most of the commercial farms are owned by white people. However, many of
the skilled labor and production management is done by the black hired hands. On
top of this fact is the situation that most of the white commercial farmers are
also getting older and because of the reduced profitability in farming, many of
their children will not take over the farming operations, but will probably sell
the land after their parents die. This means that a lot of very skilled black
farm labor and black farm managers will be looking for new opportunities once
‘massa’ is dead. So this is one pool of farmers that we can draw from to
help farm 2 million acres. I estimate that we would conservatively need about
500 good farm managers and 10,000 skilled workers to successfully utilize 2
million acres of farmland. Of course these are just estimates. But even to make
such estimates requires a lot of understanding of the science and business of
farming, which is a lion’s step away from the art and hobby of gardening.

So now I must begin to teach the science and business of farming to those of
us who have made the first step into gardening. What one must first realize is
that you can grow almost anything in a controlled environment on a small strip
of land. Successful gardening requires a lot of time, attention and care per
square foot of your garden bed. Gardening is very labor intensive, but can yield
high quantities of produce or beauty per square foot because of the amount of
care and attention to details that a hobby gardener can devote. However, when
one stretches out to acres instead of square feet, the game changes
significantly.

When you grow vegetables in your home garden for your own consumption, you do
not have to worry about making a profit or covering the payments on land and
equipment. However, when you start growing acres of crops, costs and returns per
acre and returns on investment become major factors. To start us off I will use
navy beans as an example of a crop that can be grown in a garden almost
anywhere, but is commercially grown in only a few areas of the United States.

As I was thinking about how to start training farmers and farm managers, I
thought about and dusted off my Ph.D. dissertation that I completed in 1987 at
Michigan State. The title of the manuscript is “Evaluating Decision Rules and
Planning Tools in Farm Decision Making: A Conceptual Framework.” My advisor
and head of my dissertation committee at Michigan State, Dr. Hepp, told me on
completion of my dissertation that I had actually accomplished three
dissertations in one. My main objective was to develop a framework for
evaluating the benefits of computer aided planning tools in farm management.
However, this task required that I had to develop conceptual frameworks that did
not exist just to do my primary analysis. The development of these frameworks or
models that I pioneered could have been another dissertation all by itself. One
day I hope to publish this dissertation as a book and make it required reading
for my students.

I learned many things about how good farm managers think during this study
and I use that frame of mind and scientific analysis in tackling the real world
problems that I face as the farm manager for Muhammad Farms. While finishing my
dissertation, I took a teaching and research position at my Alma Mata, North
Carolina A&T State University. In the beginning of my “Computer
Applications in Agricultural Economics” course I would tell my students that,
“In the past you have been taught what to think. But in this class I will
teach you how to think.” It was fun to see those bewildered faces trying to
figure out what I was talking about. However, many got it by the end of the
semester and learned how to think in the process.

This reminds me of what I heard the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan say,
“There is no such thing as a dumb farmer.” That is right. If you are dumb,
you had better learn fast or you will not be farming long. Farmers have to
handle a lot of information and make a lot of decisions. I like to say at
Muhammad Farms, that I solve more real problems in a day than most people face
in a year. I say “real” problems because they affect the bottom line of how
the farm will fare financially and the safety of the workers. However, for most
hourly workers, they get paid the same amount of money each week regardless of
their performance. But the farmer only gets paid after a good performance of his
crop. A farmer must do everything correctly and then he will have a fifty
percent chance of making a profit. White farmers have been able to cover some of
their risks by government subsidized crop insurance programs or direct payments
from the government. The black farmers’ lawsuit was to address the fact that
these programs were not made available to black farmers.

Of course non-farmers have a lot of problems too, but many of them are
self-inflicted and made out of mole-hills that they grew into mountains because
of boredom. My talk may seem boastful, but believe me I do not consider myself
much smarter than a wild deer, a fact that I will explain latter as we talk
about growing navy beans commercially. Deer and navy beans don’t mix (smile).

Navy beans grow quite similar to green beans or snap beans. In fact they look
very similar and if you pick navy beans in their green succulent stage, they
taste quite like green beans accept they are a little stringier.

You can grow navy beans in gardens located in any of the fifty states as long
as you have 100 days of frost free weather. The pods are fully matured after 75
to 90 days and even if you get a heavy frost after the pods have filled out, you
can still have a crop of beans.

Be sure to plant the beans in a sunny spot and water your plants twice a week
unless you have a rain that week. One of our beginning gardeners asked us
whether she should continue to pinch off the yellowing navy bean pods from her
plants that she was growing in her backyard. We had to tell her not to pick off
the yellowing bean pods, because you want all of your bean pods to turn from
green to yellow to brown before you harvest them. In fact you want the beans to
rattle in their hulls before you pick them. Navy beans should be picked dry.

You should look out for insects and critter damage. Wild animals love navy
beans, therefore to protect them you can put up a small fence around your
garden.

The Ministry of Agriculture included navy beans among the 13 crop varieties
that we made available in our garden seed package for a 50 by 50 foot garden
plot. We knew that one 50 foot row of navy beans would not produce enough dried
beans for two bowls of navy bean soup, but we wanted them to learn about the
process of growing navy beans.

Navy beans prefer a mild climate with ample rain during the growing season
but not at harvest. Michigan is number one in navy bean production. Other major
producers of navy beans and other dry edible beans include North Dakota,
Nebraska, Colorado, California and Idaho. Very little if any navy beans are
grown in Georgia due to a hot dry climate during the early summer and a moist
climate in the late summer and fall.

Since we purchased our 1600 acre farm in Georgia and because the South is
where the majority of black people live, we wanted to grow some major staples
for our Nation. Although South Georgia is well suited for many vegetables and
even soft wheat, no one grew navy beans commercially in this area when we
arrived. So naturally all of the farmers and farm experts thought that we were
crazy for trying to grow navy beans here. After contacting the University of
Georgia to find out that no one there knew anything about growing this crop, a
good farm manager would simply leave it at that and not try to grow navy beans
until the University of Georgia had done some research and come out with
recommendations on how to proceed. Of course we could not wait that long with
the fall of America at our door.

When doing scientific analysis of a problem, scientists try to eliminate as
many variables as possible to concentrate on a particular variable to see how it
affects the performance of the item under investigation. However, a farmer has
many variables that he can not control or cannot afford to control. To
experiment he must determine that the value of that knowledge far outweighs its
cost and those returns or profits must show up before he runs out of time and
money. Scientific research is usually publicly financed or subsidized because no
one farmer can afford to do so. Another way to research is to produce enough
data points to cover the number of variables that you may have, then do a
multivariate analysis to pin point the probable factors that have the most
influence. Of course each year you experiment costs time and money and again you
can go broke in the process.

To grow beans a farmer in Southwest Georgia must choose a proper seed variety
and must contend with early and late frosts, drought conditions, heat, weeds,
insects, disease and wild animals. After 13 seasons of experimenting, we think
that we have learned when best to grow the beans and how to control for disease
weeds and insects. However, after controlling all of these factors we have
discovered that the deer trump the deck. In fact many of the problems that we
were having were caused directly by the deer or the deer were a contributing
factor to other problems that reduced yields.

We have tried many different methods to control the deer, many of which were
recommended by the Agricultural Extension service. However, none of them were
effective and one county extension agent laughing opined that if I were to
discover a fool-proof method of keeping deer out of beans, we both could get
rich.

For 13 seasons we have attempted to grow and harvest navy beans with varying
degrees of success. We had to determine how weather affected the crop, so
different times of planting were tried. We observed that navy beans grew like
green beans and all commercial green bean growers chose only irrigated cropland
to grow beans on. However, we did not have ample irrigation until 2005 and
Southwest Georgia was in a drought from 1997 to 2004, so the blistering heat
burnt up many of our bean fields.

The irrigation system that we installed consisted of 6,800 feet of 8 inch pvc
pipe sunk 36 inches deep costing $27,000. This provided water outlets for 205
crop acres. The water is pumped by a 140 hp John Deere motor. The water is put
on the crop by a hard hose traveling gun system for which we paid $30,000. The
irrigation pond had to be dug which cost $10,000 and the 6 inch well which feeds
the pond cost $14,000. Therefore the total irrigation system totaled $81,000 or
$395 per irrigated acre.

When we were successful at getting some beans to harvest, some of them would
have little brown spots caused by insect bites. Since we did not want to use
insecticides, this caused major quality issues. Of course there is a machine
with a laser eye that can pick out the bad beans and spit them out with a burst
of air. Large pecan farmers here in Georgia use this machine in their grading
operations and they cost about $2 million. We have sorted out these spotted
beans by hand, but the labor costs would force us to sell the beans at a price
above what the white man charges in his stores. And although our Muslim family
asks us to grow the beans without chemicals, they have not been willing to pay
for “organic”. I guess they just pray for “organic” or pray over the
white man’s beans that do not even claim to be “organic”.

Weeds have been a major factor against us in growing beans. Although we did
not want to use strong chemicals to fight weeds in our beans, there were not
many chemicals available on the market even recommended to use on our beans
anyway. Therefore, we were left with mechanical control or cultivation. We had
to insure a weed free planting zone and cultivate tight and often. However, even
after we had done a good job of fighting the weeds up until the drying stage of
the bean pods; it was in those last 20 to 30 days that a whole new set of weeds
would grow in among our beans. And because the pods were drying and easy to be
knocked off of the vines, we could not get close enough with our machines to
destroy the weeds without destroying our crop. This meant that by the time we
mechanically harvested the beans, weeds would either choke up the harvester,
scratch and discolor our pretty white beans or cause them to spoil because of
the moisture content of the green weeds chopped up among the beans.

In 2008 we decided to plant our beans, not in the spring, but in the middle
of summer so that they would mature later in the season. We could afford to
plant them in late August when it usually very hot and dry, because we now had
irrigation. We planted them in late August because the beans set their pods in
60 to 75 days after planting. Therefore the pods would be set by the beginning
of November. First frost generally occurs in the middle of November, so we felt
that our beans would have matured by then and any late weeds would be killed by
the frost, and by the time we were ready to harvest the beans, the weeds would
be dead and dry.

However, Southwest Georgia had the earliest hard freeze ever on October 23,
2008. All of our beans were destroyed, but we felt confident that we were on the
right path, because up until this killing frost the beans were looking good and
the weeds were few. So, we decided to move our planting dates back to the first
and middle of August for 2009. As I write this article (November 10, 2009), the
beans are doing quite well on about 40 of our 75 acres that we planted. However,
the deer have ravaged at least 35 acres of our beans, eating them down to the
ground. We know that it’s them because we see their tracks and we run them out
of our fields, sometimes four times per day, but they come back in the middle of
the night and continue feasting.

From looking at the damaged beans we see that they look like beans in other
seasons that we thought were damaged by the drought or insects or bad soil. It
was the deer, the deer, Bamby and friends all along. Bamby and friends would go
down each row and chew our bean plants from a height of 12 to 18 inches down to
a height of 3 inches. These last three inches of plant would still put on from
two to four pods of beans by harvest time, but our combine cannot get down to
them without plowing into the ground digging up dirt. The dirt would then stain
and scratch the beans causing them to be poor of grade.

This year we will machine harvest the tall beans and hopefully get volunteers
and pick your own customers to hand pick the rest. Of course it might take eight
hours per person to pick one 50 lb bag of dried navy beans.

Back to those deer; of course there is one sure fired way to keep the deer
out. Put up a 12 foot fence around the perimeter of your bean field. Oh, did I
mention that to keep disease out of your beans, you have to rotate navy bean
production so that you grow beans once every three years in the same field. The
two other years you must grow something else. Therefore, if I want to grow 100
acres of navy beans, I would have to set aside 300 acres for their production.
If I want to fence in this area, I would have to fence in 300 acres and not 100
acres. The perimeter of a 300 acre field is 2.4 miles. Therefore, we would need
to put up and maintain 2.4 miles of 12 foot fencing to keep the deer out.

When I told my brother about our deer problem, he said, “Just stop growing
what they like.” That’s pretty smart except, we like what the deer like.
Have they studied “How to Eat to Live”? (smile)

Someone else suggested that we grow a crop of beans as a sacrifice to the
deer. We did, about 35 of our total of 75 acres that we planted, they ate.
(smile again)

As a scientist I have noticed something about deer behavior that gives me
hope that one day we can adequately control them. We noticed that as you walk
through a navy bean field if you can see our house, and you look down, you will
see beans. However, when you move to a position in the field where you can not
see our house, and you look down, you will probably see that all of the beans
have been chewed down. Evidently, the deer believe that if they can’t see us,
then we can’t see them; smart deer. From our house we can see about 60 acres.
Therefore considering the three year rotation plan needed to keep the disease
out of navy beans; we could successfully grow 20 acres per year.

However we have 900 acres of cropland on our 1600 acre farm. Well, I have
solution for that. We simply have to develop a community as I have outlined in
my book “Commonomics: Developing a Post Yakub Economy.” Every 60 acres or so
should have a house strategically located so that the deer can see it.
Therefore, 15 houses with families in them could solve our problem. And
especially if they have loud and playful children, a natural scare crow to every
wild animal, we can be assured that the deer will be few and far between.
(smile) Now the humans can grow and eat navy beans in Southwest Georgia in peace
and ship them to other regions.

 

 

Volume 14, Number 5                                                       
May 7, 2011

The Farmer

——————————————————————

A Divorce with Alimony

By Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

“4. We want our people in America whose parents or grandparents were
descendents from slaves, to be allowed to establish a separate state or
territory of their own—either on this continent or elsewhere. We believe that
our former slave masters are obligated to provide such land and that the area
must be fertile and minerally rich. We believe that our former slave masters are
obligated to maintain and supply our needs in this separate territory for the
next 20 to 25 years—until we are able to produce and supply our needs.

Since we cannot get along with them in peace and equality, after giving them
400 years of our sweat and blood and receiving in return some of the worst
treatment human beings have ever experienced, we believe our contributions to
this land and the suffering forced upon us by White America, justifies our
demand for complete separation in a state or territory of our own.” (from “The
Muslim Program: What The Muslims Want,” back page of The Final Call )

This declaration for true “reparations” has been a central part of the
program of the Nation of Islam for now over 80 years. The term reparations
means: 1. The act or process of repairing and 2. The act or process of making
amends; expiation. Most people know about the past and continued cruel treatment
of Black people in America by Whites and their unjust political and economic
systems. This treatment, during and after slavery, cannot be denied and
reparations to repair the damage done to Black people are justified. However,
when one repairs an object, one intends to use that object again; therefore,
separation must come with reparations so that White folk cannot continue to
abuse Black people.

On the other hand, Blacks have been given the impression by the so-called
Jews that they are our friends and are different from other Whites, and that we
should continue to fight for integration instead of separation. However,
revelations presented in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,
Volume 2 (TSRv2) destroys such a false impression of friendship. It is
possible for someone to be a close friend and even marry someone under false
pretences, only later to be found guilty of deceit, duplicity and
unfaithfulness. Many married couples, who may seem “happily married” from
the outside, shock their unsuspecting neighbors by filing for divorce based on
the grounds of cruelty (having inflicted unnecessary emotional or physical pain)
and adultery, all of which the neighbors knew nothing about.

But now for the troubling reality: TSRv2 allows us unprecedented access to
the private confessions of Jewish scholars and rabbis about their strategy of
using the Black man and woman as scapegoats for their own economic and political
advancement. This history is profoundly disturbing and begins long before Blacks
were brought forcibly into America. The medieval rabbis, seeking to validate
their increasing focus on Africa as a source for slaves, invented the “Curse
of Ham,” which scapegoated ALL Blacks for ALL worldly sins and targeted
Africans for exploitation forevermore. And that only started the racist process.
Rabbi and historian Dr. Bertram W. Korn explained that “many Southern Jews
believed slavery to be indispensable to their happiness and security.”
According to Korn, “[T]he road to social and economic advancement and
acceptance” for the Jews “was made easier by the institution of slavery.”
Both White Gentiles and Jews know the importance of a secure environment for the
development of capital within a capitalist system, of which America is the
greatest promoter and example. After 1865 Blacks thought that they were free and
full citizens of the United States. And for a while, as long as the North kept
troops in the South, Blacks exercised a measure of freedom and economic
mobility. They even established 60 “Black Towns” in the South and bought
millions of acres of farm land. However, according to TSRv2, there was a Jewish
congressman from Louisiana named William M. Levy who on March 1, 1877 persuaded
the U.S. Congress to remove the troops from the South and let the Southern
Whites have their way with the defenseless Blacks. By enacting these Black Codes
both Gentile and Jew intended to thwart any economic development by their former
slaves.

A set of these Black Codes taken together basically eliminated Black people
from legally owning land and going into any other type of business. Contracts
could be voided just because you were Black. How can you do business where
anyone at anytime can void his contract with you? According to another code you
could not even take Whites to court, and in some states you could not even own a
gun to protect yourself, your family and your property. Another code made it
illegal to sell anything that White folk did not want you to sell. Therefore, if
a Black person wanted to participate in normal business relationships in this
capitalist country, he had to do it at his own risk and therefore become an “outlaw”
for doing the same thing that was legal for Whites.

Now, if we couple this with other information documented in TSRv2 about how
the Southern Jews grew from peddlers to store owners to bankers, then we can see
that the Black Codes made it completely illegal for Blacks to move up that
economic ladder of capitalism. And on pages 258-59 of the book (2d ed.) it is
pointed out that these so-called Jews followed Blacks around as peddlers and
grew rich, whereas laws in states like South Carolina prohibited Blacks from “vending,
bartering or peddling any articles or commodities.” Jewish historian Lee Shai
Weissbach found that “the prospect of opening a store with very little capital
was enhanced by the presence of a large African-American population that seemed
to offer a ready customer base for Jewish entrepreneurs.” According to Elliott
Ashkenazi, “The novelty of the American South was the chance to make a lot
more money from traditional Jewish occupations concerned with storekeeping and
general mercantile activity.” We could only be consumers.

In 1866 the Southern Homestead Act was passed which gave 160 to 640 acres to
White immigrants, including so-called Jews, to help settle 46 million acres of
public domain land in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and
Mississippi. At the same time Blacks in the South were denied their promised “40
acres and a mule,” and they were not even allowed to purchase land in many of
the frontier states. Our Jewish “friends” did indeed get the Blacks’ 40
acres and more—and never bothered to share.

In fact, while the settlement house movement was developed to help the
immigrant European so-called Jews to successfully infiltrate the American
economic culture, Blacks were being denied entry into the economic sphere—in
both the southern and northern communities—except as menials, sharecroppers
and unskilled laborers. The Jewish settlement houses provided the Jewish
immigrant with employment, took financial care of his family, and connected him
to a Jewish business network that involved Jewish manufacturers supplying Jewish
immigrants with merchandise, training them in the art of peddling, and sending
them into the small inland towns. Soon the Jewish peddler, using the resources
of this network, was able to set up shop in the Black community, and later
establish department stores in downtowns across the country.

The settlement house movement was financed by liberal white churches and
Jewish business men. Jacob Schiff, a Wall Street financier and one of the
conspirators in the 1914 establishment of the Federal Reserve System, financed
two settlement houses. Schiff was recruited by Joel Spingarn, the Jewish
president of the NAACP, to sit on the “black” organization’s board
starting in 1914. Schiff had previously turned down a request by Du Bois to fund
his first magazine publication called the Moon Illustrated Weekly
in 1905, because he did not like the way Du Bois exposed the so-called Jews as
the “inheritors of the plantation economy,” in his Souls of Black Folk.
But now he was Du Bois’ boss, overseeing the publication of the NAACP’s Crisis
Magazine.

Another financier of the Jewish settlement house movement was Samuel Gompers,
who destroyed the bi-racial and cooperative-minded Knights of Labor while
pushing his whites-only American Federation of Labor (AFofL). In fact, it was
Samuel Gompers and his AFofL that ethnically cleansed Blacks from the labor
force, replacing skilled Black workers with immigrant Jews and Gentile Whites.
Meanwhile Blacks remained barred from certain economic arenas and thus were
forced into menial labor. Somebody needed to work the cotton plantations—cotton
plantation workers/sharecroppers drove the Southern, US, and world economies.

 

In the book A History of Jews in America, historian
Howard Sachar wrote, “In 1914, Professor Emeritus Joel
Spingarn of Columbia University became chairman of
the NAACP and recruited for its board such Jewish leaders as Jacob Schiff, Jacob
Billikopf, and
Rabbi Stephen
Wise.” Other Jewish co-founders included
Julius
Rosenwald, Lillian
Wald, and Rabbi Emil
G. Hirsch. We bring these names up in light of the
fact that the established goal of the NAACP was to promote “non-economic
liberalism.” This philosophy, developed by Joel Spingarn, long-time president
of the NAACP and brother of board chairman Arthur Spingarn, called for social
integration and not economic participation for the once slaves.

In light of the business-minded White men that set up and controlled the
NAACP, it seems quite hypocritical for them not to focus on economic development
as expressed by the Niagara Movement, but instead emphasize “social
miscegenation,” which the so-called Jews, claiming to be “God’s Chosen
People”, did not practice themselves and knew would be a thorn in the side of
Southern Whites. On the other hand, the Black men of the Niagara Movement stated
in their 1905 Declaration of Principles that they especially complained
“…against the denial of equal opportunities to us in economic life; in the
rural districts of the South this amounts to peonage and virtual slavery; all
over the South it tends to crush labor and small business enterprises…”—demonstrating
that Black people back then strove toward The Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s
philosophy of economic independence. If left alone, Black people could have
pulled themselves up by their own boot strings. They tried with their many Black
Towns and Black Wall Street—which were later destroyed by Whites. In the
meantime, their White Jewish “friends” were continually shepherding them in
the wrong direction, away from self.

Alimony means “An allowance for support made under a court order and
usually given by a man to his former wife after a divorce or legal separation.”
In light of the testimony presented in TSRv2 describing “irreconcilable
differences,” WE, the Black people of America, now file for a “divorce with
alimony.”

 

Volume 10, Number 5                                                
May 18, 2007

The Farmer

———————————————————————-

Getting "Grounded"

by Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad

You have heard the phrase, getting "grounded". According to the dictionary the verb to
ground means: 1. to have a ground or basis for, 2. to provide a reason or justification, and 3. to
instruct in fundamentals. People who have been divorced from nature and living in artificial
environments may loose their connections with basic realities. Growing your own food in your garden
will definitely help you get "grounded", because the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us
that "agriculture is the root of civilization". If we intend to separate from this present
wicked civilization and build our own, then we must be grounded in the reality of creation and not
the illusions produced by our slave masters’ children.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us that we must have some of this Earth that we can call our
own. Now, if after Hurricane Katrina and how Blacks were treated in New Orleans, you still do not
want some land that you control, well you are not "grounded". If after the repeated news
stories about E. coli in spinach, carrots and broccoli; contamination in baby food, pet food and
feed for animals; pieces of metal in loaves of bread; refusal by foreign countries of America’s
genetically modified corn, soybeans and rice; the mass entry of non-tested foods from foreign
sources; and you still want to live on concrete 20 stories off the ground completely dependent upon
the "merchants of death" to eat, well you are just not "grounded". However, for
those of you who want to get "grounded", let us get started.

First of all the Earth is 7,926 miles in diameter consisting of 196,940,000 square miles of which
57,255,000 square miles is land according to the Teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
However, of the 7,926 miles of the Earth’s total diameter, we humans live on the very top surface
of the crust of the Earth and our life on this Earth is dependent upon just a few inches of those
total miles. If we mess up those top inches, we are out of here.

According to earth science, the thickness of the Earth’s crust varies between 3 and 43 miles
and is composed mainly of basalt and granite. In all the Earth’s crust occupies less than 1%
of Earth’s volume.

Soil in which we grow crops is a very then layer on top of the crust. Soil is considered a three
phase system, consisting of solid, liquid, and gas. The solid phase consists of minerals and organic
matter, including living organisms. The liquid phase is known as the ‘soil solution’, and is the
phase from which plants take up nutrients. The gaseous phase is important for supplying oxygen to
the roots for respiration.

Cultivation, earthworms, frost action and rodents mix the soil producing a porous crumbly
aggregate suitable for planting and germination. Topsoil is the uppermost layer of soil,
usually the top 2 to 6 inches. It has the highest concentration of organic matter and
microorganisms, and is where most of the Earth’s biological soil activity occurs.

Plants generally concentrate their roots in, and obtain most of their nutrients from this layer.
The actual depth of the topsoil layer can be measured as the depth from the surface to the first
densely packed soil layer known as "hardpan". The topsoil layer is formed from the
deposition of eroded material as well as decaying organic matter. Without topsoil, little plant life
is possible. It takes approximately 500 years for one inch of topsoil to be deposited under normal
conditions, but there are 25 billion tons of topsoil lost each year to erosion.

In earth science "humus" refers to any organic matter which has reached a point of
stability. In agriculture, "humus" is often used simply to mean mature compost. Compost
is the aerobically decomposed remnants of organic materials.

Chemically speaking, organic simply means any compound whose molecules contain carbon. However,
when talking about growing food, organic means they were grown without the use of conventional
pesticides, artificial fertilizers, human waste, or sewage sludge, and that they were processed
without ionizing radiation or food additives.

In a future article we will go into the macro aspects of the ground or land. However to get you
started on your own home or community garden, we will concentrate on the micro or small aspects of a
piece of ground where we will utilize the information in the above descriptions and definitions.

In March of 2006 we were blessed to be a part of a fact finding visit to Cuba, sponsored and
accompanied by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan. In Havana, Cuba we were struck with the
number of vegetable gardens on almost every piece of vacant land in the city. We also noticed that
they used a form of gardening called "raised bed" gardening.

In the above information we found that plants grow in the topsoil or about only 2 to 6 inches of
the Earth. A productive topsoil will consist of humus materials and ample porosity for water and
nutrient uptake while providing oxygen to the roots. Since many of us live on concrete and some of
the Black communities were actually built on top of land fills and toxic waste dumps, bringing in
new topsoil is advisable in many cases. You can set up these raised beds right on top of concrete
and still get excellent results.

Recently the Ministry of Agriculture built a set of raised beds for Minister Farrakhan’s
personal garden. Because the Minister had already built compost piles and had aged horse manure into
a fine humus that had been mixed with sand, we used it as the main filler for the raised beds. We
stacked and staked two four by four inches by 16 feet treated lumber to form our 8 inch high beds.

For those of you who do not have access to composted horse manure mixed with sand we suggest a
mixture of one part topsoil, one part composted cow manure and one part fine mulch, such as pine
bark mulch. All of these ingredients can be readily found at Home Depot, Lowe’s, Wal-Mart or
garden stores. There are more expensive premixed potting soils, however you would be paying for the
convenience and not the substance.

An added value of setting up raised beds is that you control the soil content and reduce the
amount of weeds that you will have to fight if you plant directly in your backyard ground. However,
if you have a piece of ground that has good humus and earthworms, you might just want to till it up
and plant and fight the weeds in "hand to hand" combat (smile). Be sure to contact your
local Agricultural Extension agent in your county and ask them how you can get your soil tested for
toxicity and fertility or you can purchase soil testing kits at garden centers. Otherwise just bring
in your own topsoil and compost and "get grounded".