When you own a 150-acre farm, having a change of heart about how you do things is a slow, costly process. When you’re a third-generation rice farmer in rural Louisiana — a state with just 23 organic farms — deciding to try to grow brown rice without pesticides or chemical fertilizers is enough to get you certified not organic, but insane.In the mid-’90s, his uncle made him “a heck of a computer program,” which showed that the higher his yields, the lower his payments from government programs. After seeing his money remain steady no matter what he did, “I started trying to figure out how to get out of this,” Unkel said of conventional farming.
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