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Paul Gebhart shares his philosophy of farming.

Arthur Gebhart always had a reputation for being an agricultural leader, so maybe it wouldn't be a surprise to the late farmer that his son has become a leading proselytizer for some rather unconventional practices.

"That's not braggin' or complainin'," said Paul Gebhart from the home about 6.5 miles northeast of Edinburg on Shelby Electric Cooperative lines that he shares with his wife Cindy, and their three children. "Sometimes you ought to complain because you iron out the headaches," and those who follow benefit from your mistakes, he said.

Arthur Gebhart was among the first in the early 60s to start planting narrower corn rows. He bought one of the first corn heads that allowed shelling on the combine and he bought a grain dryer for their 850-acre farm. So it was part of his pioneering nature to be among the first to put down chemicals. Their yields did rise. But then, they noticed, new weeds would pop up.

"So then this new chemical that would come out to control that weed would always cost more, and your yields might be going up for other reasons, but they wouldn't be going up because you missed a few weeds. In other words, people believe their yields will go down because of a few weeds. Well, that isn't necessarily so," he said. American farmers were cleaning up weeds for cosmetic reasons, he began to think.

"I got weeds growing around my farm. That's part of the ecosystem," he said. "There were weeds here when I was born and there'll be weeds here when I die and I don't care how hard I work in between, there'll still be weeds. Weeds are an indicator and the good Lord put them here for a reason."

Weeds are an indicator and the good Lord put them here for a reason."

Then he and his dad began to focus on cost reduction, and began to think fertilizer ought to be applied only where and in amounts that soil tests indicated it was needed. Gebhart began to think the important thing was keeping the soil's nutrients in balance and he began to reject the notion that chemicals were the answer.

"If you don't get an economic benefit from that, why are we doing it? A lot of people still believe if they put a dollar's worth of fertilizer on, they're going to get a dollar and a dime's worth of production. When we were the first ones to fertilize, we got about $10 or $15 back for every dollar we spent. But then the soil adjusted. The response was less to a dollar's worth of fertilizer, and prices and ratios started jumping and getting crazy to where now I think there are a lot of people putting in a dollar's worth of fertilizer and getting 90 cents back for it."

They began to cut back on fertilizer and herbicides. A few weeds appeared. Their yields weren't as high as their mid-60s county-wide record of 181 bushels by hand test and 165 actual. But they were high.

"So I thought, well, if we were the first ones to fertilize, maybe we can be the first ones to quit fertilizing. Maybe, if we were the first ones to put on chemical, we can be the first ones to quit putting on chemical."

Now, he said, he focuses on cost and doesn't worry about yields. "When farmers go to the coffee shop and talk, it's important. 'Oh, my corn made 180 bushels,'" And the next one says, 'Well

ILLINOIS COUNTRY LIVING NOVEMBER 1997

	"And lo and behold those beans just kept growing and looking good"
(Top) What's the key to a bountiful harvest? Rotation, rotation, rotation. Small grain is planted every third year and under sown with a cover crop. (Above) Bucking the trend, Gebhart sidesteps the option of running a large confinement hog operation, opting instead for an environmentally friendly "quality over quantity" approach.

mine made 190!' If you lost $30 an acre, what was the relevance of the conversation?' I would like to talk about, 'Well, my corn made $50 an acre.'"

During this time, Gebhart's new thinking was fueled by Acres USA, a 28-year-old monthly magazine about organic farming published in Metarie, La.

Then Arthur Gebhart was diagnosed with a very rare form of prostate cancer. Two years later, in 1978, he was dead at the age of 53. While his son says he can't prove it, he strongly suspects the chemicals caused the cancer that led to his father's relatively young death. He notes that his grandmother died of breast cancer and Gebhart since has determined he is infertile (the Gebhart children are adopted).

"We have some hormones involved in our food chain and our bodies that are kinda screwing things up," he said.

Evidently, he has deduced, his family is genetically more susceptible to cancer. He further deduces that, if that is true, he's at the greatest risk; he was on the farm and around the chemicals from childhood.

"That started making me think, 'Maybe we shouldn't be putting as much of this stuff into the environment.'"

DDT was supposed to be safe, but turned out not to be. "What's safe? Safe and safer?" he asks. I just decided to back up and eliminate that risk for me, number one. That's me, personally. It's just a personal thing. I don't want it around me.

"Number two. If we're screwing up the environment, I don't want to be responsible for that, one, two, three generations down the road."

Ironically, it was a government set-aside program that allowed Gebhart to begin his grand experiment with organic farming. During the summer months, he grazes chickens on his lawn and feeds them his organic grain. In late summer, he does the same with turkeys. For additional diversity, he and his neighbor, fellow organic farmer Dale Baumgartner, do a little entertainment farming, stacking bales of straw into a 75-foot by 75-foot maze for bus loads of school children to meander through before returning to town clutching one of Gebhart's pumpkins. This year, the fifth for the maze, he's made it wheelchair accessible. And just a few yards away, the two farmers carved another maze into a seven-acre field of prairie grass (which he will bale for some of the most nutritious feed available).

The set-aside land was supposed to have a cover crop and the Gebharts had a mixture of legume and grass growing on it that was beginning to convert to a natural state. It didn't have any nutrients taken off it, or any fertilizers and chemicals put on it, so it was already organic. Gebhart decided to simply plant some seeds and see what would happen. After all, if it didn't work, he reasoned, he could simply mow it under and call it an experiment.

The first corn was disappointing, he said, because it was following grass and there wasn't quite enough nitrogen. But the beans were a different story. "We were scared to death to plant beans because weeds obviously take beans — just cover 'em up, right?" He had only planted a round, or was it two? "We hoed them several times and cultivated 'em. Just worked at keeping the weeds down by mechanical means. And lo and behold those beans just kept growing and looking good and the weeds weren't that bad in them," he recalled.

Those beans produced almost 50 bushels, and all he did was plant some seeds and do a little tillage, "So that's

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"Leviticus says that every seventh year you don't harvest your fields"

when I said, 'you know, I believe you can grow beans organically.' I hadn't been to any organic farms or consulting any organic people — just reading that magazine and just doing it on my own." His interest in reducing his chemical risk turned more passionate. "Then I started going to field days and reading more and gathering more information and realizing that that's the way Grandpa farmed and his dad and all of 'em back then."

He set up a new system based on a four-year rotation and began withdrawing chemicals gradually, to avoid financial disaster.

"It's a burden to go this route because you'll have two or three years of suffering as the soil begins to make its transition back to a natural state," he said. First corn, then soybeans. In the third year he plants small grain (wheat, oats, barley or rye, either a fall-seeded annual or spring-seeded annual) that is under sown with a cover crop (usually a clover or legume or maybe a mix.) After harvesting the grain, the cover crop remains through the fall and winter and comes back in the spring. It will either be grazed and returned to the land in the form of manure, or plowed under. In other words, one way or another, he grows his own fertilizer.

"That year laying out, that's a lot harder for people to swallow. How can you not take anything off of a piece of ground for a whole year and expect to make money on a farm? Well, that's the year you build the fertilizer and if you add the fertilizer bill to the other three years, you'll find that you're not short very much at all.... If we didn't do it, our system wouldn't work," he said.

"That's the building year. The fourth year it rests. In fact the Bible says one in seven. Leviticus says that every seventh year you don't harvest your fields. They rest."

His journey toward organic certification began in the early 1980s and he has been certified by the Organic Crop Improvement Association since 1992. Now Gebhart is president of the association, and he is willing and eager to preach the gospel to anyone who asks.

But, his organic journey is just beginning; his experiment continues to evolve. There is definitely a downside of organic farming, he admits. "It works you to death. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of equipment and that's one of the costs we never could get over," he said. When he went organic, he started fighting weeds with steel, and that was going to mean having to spend a lot in the future to replace equipment.

Poultry fed with organically grown grain fetches a higher price from consumers than birds raised via traditional methods

"That's when managed-intensive grazing hit me. That's when the whole concept of annuals began to look bad to me. Perennials began to look good. Cattle doing the harvesting," he said, would allow him to avoid those heavy equipment costs.

While he raises some goats and hogs now, he plans to add cattle using a system of movable fences. "Just simply a little bit of electric fence and some water pipes allow you to be the brakes and steering wheel of a grazing system and the cattle will do the work. And they increase in value as they harvest," he noted.

Gebhart now is focused on earning more income on fewer acres. He farms only 125 of the 300 acres he owns, four fields of 25 acres and four fields of six acres. "It means that for this acre that's resting, there's three other acres somewhere else on the farm that's producing. They take turns." The four fields of six are such that during the year of rest they are grazed by hogs, who also eat Gebhart's organic corn, and thereby add nutrients to the field.

"Got an offer in the mail yesterday: $20 for my soybeans. That's pretty rewarding when the market's looking at $5 or $6," he said. "It takes a lot of acres under a management system where you don't have much income per acre. Whereas the system we're going to is high income per acre and therefore you don't have to have as many acres. You begin to trade off. It's one way or the other."

— Story and photos by Janeen Keener

Paul Gebhart markets directly to consumers. For information about his product, call him at (217) 325-3250. A membership in the Organic Crop Improvement Association, which sponsors four statewide meetings annually, cost $15. You may write the OCIA at P.O. Box 880, Bloomington, Il., or call (800) 701-6242.

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