Farm Week: June 24-28, 2013

This week dawned hot and muggy and stayed that way. A few times, the humidity condensed into afternoon thunderstorms, but we were thankfully spared the kind of downpours that have become all too familiar. As long as these daily deluges stay under a quarter inch each time, and maybe even closer to a tenth of an inch, we'll be fine.

As the fields slowly dry out, we've been able to get the tractor through some of the most important beds needing cultivation. Besides our usual harvest load, we kept up speed transplanting this week, getting a bit closer to caught up after weeks and weeks of rain delays. We've also started to get almost caught up on cultivation, through a mixture of actual cultivation and a bit of traige - cutting our losses. We hoed everywhere this week from a rocky hilltop to our lower fields, in mud and puddles halfway to our knees.

We also got our latest shipment of chicks in the mail, moving us up to a temporary population of three different flocks of birds at once. We're slaughtering our biggest birds next weekend, so we'll be back down to two flocks in another week. Dan (my business partner in this chicken venture) hadn't processed chickens before, so we decided to do a practice run of four of the biggest birds so that when we do the big harvest next weekend, we're all on the same page. We're grilling one of those birds up this afternoon, so I'll let you know if a bird you raise from a day-old chick really tastes better than a store-bought factory-raised chicken.

Thinking about: scalability, full-diet CSAs, trust

Reading: Kristin Kimball's The Dirty Life, David Sedaris' Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Eating: wraps with bacon, borlotti beans, chard, and garlic scapes; overripe strawberries; sugar snap peas

Fun With Farmers: The Greenhorns Solstice Mixer

This past weekend, I took the back roads up to Keeseville, NY, about 120 miles up the Hudson River right next to Lake Champlain in the beautiful Adirondacks. The occasion was a Solstice Mixer hosted by the Greenhorns, an awesome organization of and for young farmers. I had a great time, met a ton of awesome young farmers, toured three great new farms cooperating in really inspiring ways, and learned some great stuff. For once, I made myself take pictures so I would have something to show for the weekend. Click through the slideshow below for a blow-by-blow of the weekend!

 

Farm Week: June 17-21, 2013

Sun, glorious sun!! After a few short but heavy showers early in the week (what's a week without rain this season, after all), we finally had a few days of sun! Our fields are by no means up to code yet, and the tractors are slowly taking back land from all but the muckiest lowlands on the farm. There are still areas with standing water, some of which has been there for about a month now. That means the heat and sun this week also brought out some new visitors: mosquitoes! It's gonna be an itchy summer!

This was only the second week with a full harvest-load, but we're already getting faster at the whole process, which means more time for the all-important fieldwork that has been neglected for these past few soggy weeks. At long last, we were finally able to use the tractor in some fields, so we started clearing the docket of our seed and transplant backup. When the ground is too wet to till or cultivate, you don't only stand to lose crops under water and weeds, but you're pushing back the harvest of all of those crops you aren't able to put into the ground. Our CSA members have been so supportive so far, voicing for the most part how impressed they are that we're delivering them full boxes of vegetables after all this weather. We can only hope that all of this understanding carries over into late July and August, when the boxes might get a little light from all of the crops that were hit so hard this past month or had to wait way too long to get into the ground. Today was a long day of transplanting, the first in a long time. It was at once exhausting and exhilarating. At the end of the day, we were all hot, tired, toasted, and covered in mud. But looking over all the rows and rows of squash, cabbages, tomatoes, greens, celery, etc., that we planted today, we all had the same feeling of accomplishment. Things are starting to look up again!

The solstice is this weekend, and I'm heading upstate early tomorrow morning to spend the weekend celebrating the occasion with other young farmers in the northeast, courtesy of the Greenhorns! I love living and working on the farm, but it will be great to have a change of scenery and meet a bunch of other like-minded people. So look out next week for some pics and inspiration from the event!

Thinking about: movements, expectations, sun-warmed strawberries

Reading: Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, David Sedaris' Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls

Eating: foraged oyster mushroom and bacon omelette, local all-beef hot dogs, last year's beet chutney with local goat cheese on crackers, fresh-picked strawberries

Some Thoughts from Real Writers

I've been reading lots lately, and not just farming books. Here are two passages that I loved from books I finished this past weekend.  

From "Up, Simba," a David Foster Wallace essay that appears in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays about the 2000 McCain campaign:

"The fact of the matter is that if you're a true-blue, market-savvy Young Voter, the only thing that you're certain to feel about John McCain's campaign is a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit, that there's nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen."


From Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

"We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment where everything was possible. And there will be a moment where nothing is possible. But in between we can create."

 

Farm Week: June 10-14, 2013

Soggiest week thus far. We've had about 25 inches of rain in a little over three weeks in our little green valley. With only a handful of dry days in between the wet ones, the fields haven't been passable with the tractor of hoe for more than a few hours at a time in the past month or so. We put in about an acre of large summer crops in one day last month, and then the deluge started that very night with a memorable hailstorm. For a look at what 25 inches of rain and a month without a hoe does to a stand of tomatoes, look at the greenest photo below. The fields have standing water (these past two days, even running water!), and a few crops seem to have melted right into the soil. In the next week or two, we're going to have to make some decisions about what crops to try to save and where we'll have to cut our losses.

In situations like this, the CSA model can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you don't stand to lose large portions of income like you would were you relying on farmers market sales. On the other hand, the 250 people who pre-paid for their weekly vegetables are expecting full boxes all season long. Over the past few days and weeks, almost every shareholder we run into around town or on the farm has had the same reaction to the weather: they notice it! Someone picking up their produce at the grocery store might only be slightly inconvenienced by some inclement weather, but our shareholders have been looking forward to fresh vegetables all winter and spring, and were just getting ready to pick up their first share of the season. But as they start to anticipate visiting the farm (or their local CSA drop-off) for their first time this year, they start to notice that it has been raining quite a bit recently. Everybody seems to be thinking about us when it rains these days, out there slogging through mud and rain in our boots and bibs. That personal connection with the farmer is what makes it possible for our members to understand why the box might not be filled to the brim for a few weeks this summer, and that is the beauty of the CSA model.

Despite the weather, this was our first week harvesting a full load for delivery and pickup, and we most definitely improved in speed and efficiency as the week progressed. My stint as the only person who hadn't cut themselves with the sharp harvest knives came to a close on Thursday in the cilantro, and I'm hoping that will tide me over for awhile. I drove the White Plains route again this week, a task that both reminded me of the joys of rural living and provided an opportunity to practice the ancient art of zen traffic-sitting.

Next week, we can only hope for a sunny, dry version of this past week, in which we harvest so quickly and efficiently that we have oodles of time to finally transplant the crops that have been waiting out this weather and to save some of the potential losses from the past month's saturated excesses.

Thinking about: dry heat, time management, trade-offs

Reading: David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, George Saunders' Tenth of December, Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Eating: chicken I personally killed, plucked, gutted, cleaned, and cooked a variety of ways, homemade refried black beans, kale risotto, rainbow chard, small handfuls of fresh ripe strawberries

Farm Week: June 3-7, 2013

In a milder week after much May weather, we slogged through much mud on the farm this week to do an escalating battle with weeds. Monday brought a visit from the CRAFTers, and Dan and Tracy's assigned topic was the CSA model and the finances behind a CSA farm on this scale. The apprentices really appreciated his openness and transparency in talking about the financial realities of running a CSA farm, because so many of them work for people who would never disclose their financial situations, or that came to farming with lots of family resources. Dan and Tracy's start-up story is full of lucky turns, but they relied mostly on their hard work to slowly build a farm at a comfortable scale.

This week brought the first substantial harvest and subsequent vegetable delivery. They organized the CSA calendar in such a way that the first harvest is the only one that week, providing a way for us to learn the mechanics of harvesting all the different vegetables, as well as the routine that takes vegetables from the ground to a box in the back of the van. We started harvesting right away in the morning, wearing our bibs to keep dry in the mud and the dew. This week's harvest included salad mix, spinach, arugula, dandelion greens, komatsuna, scallions, dill, and turnips. We bring big plastic bins out to the fields and fill them with rubber-banded bunches or loose leaves, depending on the crop. We bring them back to the packing shed, where we wash them in large tubs of cold water and stick them in the cooler. After the greens have dried off a bit, we come back and bag them to the appropriate weight before sticking them back in the cooler. The next day, we started in the packing shed, first counting out the right number of boxes (this time 83), then filling them in the right order (heaviest first, most crushable last), moving down the rollers in the packing line and ending up in the back of the van. We flipped a coin to see who would make the first delivery, and I won (or lost, depending on your point of view). I ended up driving down to White Plains, NY, which was a little more than two hours each way. Next week, we'll ramp up to the full harvest schedule, which will be about triple this week's. At the same time, we'll be battling the weeds (now in full force) and the wet weather (which shows no signs of letting up).

Thinking about: pollen, saison yeast, essays

Eating: wraps of all kinds, spicy radishes, sweet juicy turnips, greenest greens, eggiest eggs

Reading: Gene Logsdon's Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, George Saunders' Tenth of December

Farm Week: May 27-31, 2013

Spring came back with a bang this week, with some hot and humid weather, a little bit of an overnight downpour, and lots and lots of sun. The farm is still a little soggy from last week's deluge, but the near-90's heat has started to do it part to dry the beds out. Some crops have bounced back well from the hailstorm last week, but some of the crops in the lower fields are still a bit waterlogged (check out the picture below from earlier this week). We're also bouncing back from a grey week, soaking up the sun, then starting to sweat, then sagging, then righting all with a dip in the stream after work.

We spent much of this week battling weeds that for some unexplainable reason took rain and heat and sun as a sign to explode into being all at once. It's been a bit too soggy to drive the cultivator, but we did what we could with hoes (and sometimes hands). We also planted sweet potatoes this week, which get shipped up from somewhere down south as slips. Slips are basically one step removed from planting a potato directly, giving us in northern climates a head start on the sweet potato's long, warm growing season.

We also got our next batch of chicks in the mail! Fifty fluffy little things that look so much smaller than we remember our now-month-old chicks ever being. We won't have to be as worried about the chicks being too cold anymore, but now the hot days mean that we have to keep a careful eye on the water level for the birds outside.

Thinking about: harvest knives, hydration, uphill bicycle endurance

Eating: fresh salads! radishes! turnips! scallions!

Reading: Mary Roach's Gulp, Julie Klausner's I Don't Care About Your Band

Book Report: Dirt Hog

Back in February at the MOSES conference, I spent what seemed like (and what may have been) hours in the bookstore trying to decide which of the many books to spend my allotted money on. The spread was overwhelming, covering every conceivable topic of interest to the organic farmer. I made a few visits to the bookstore over the course of the weekend, unable to sufficiently narrow my choices. By the end of the weekend, two talks had narrowed down the choices for me. First, Mark Shepard's permaculture talk had the desired short-term effect of prompting me to buy his book. Second, a panel on organic hog production left me underwhelmed, and sure that there was a more truly sustainable model. Kelly Klober's book Dirt Hog found its way into my to-buy pile and the ever-increasing to-read pile. Incidentally, when I got the most recent MOSES Organic Broadcaster, the Acres USA ad on the back page featured these two books! I guess I'm not alone in my book-buying habits.

The organic hog production panel that spurred my purchase was based on practices that mimicked conventional hog production, simply substituting organic grain for conventional feed. With all grain prices rising indefinitely, this mode of production ignores many of the problems of conventional hog operations while continuing to work the narrowest of profit margins. The men on the panel discussed things like the fineness of grind to maximize feed efficiency. What I took from that particular panel was not a desire to emulate their practices but an important reminder that the "organic" label is not necessarily the paean some wish to believe.

In this book (subtitled "A Hands-on Guide to Raisin Pigs Outdoors...Naturally"), Klober selectively tackles another facet of conventional hog production: large-scale indoor operations. His audience is not necessarily CAFOs, but rather the family hog farmer of the lower midwest (Klober is from Missouri) that has responded to pressures to get big or get out by mortgaging himself to the hilt by building larger and larger hog barns. Klober instead advocates for simple shelters and outdoor production, either on pasture or in a drylot. He does practice a bit more of a natural approach to hog production, but he relies heavily on conventional grain feed and a just slightly less heavily on antibiotics and other medications.

The book does provide very good insight into the art of choosing a sow or a boar for breeding, good husbandry practices, and the relative strength of purebred and crossed genetics. He has raised mostly breeding stock for about 50 years, selling feeder pigs and his own whole hog sausage as a sideline. His descriptions of what to look for in a healthy sow with good genetics will no doubt be useful to me in the future, and the breeding programs he espouses seem sound. While I certainly learned plenty from the book, it definitely raised more questions for me than provided answers. I need to look into humane hog raising practices, the organic guidelines for hog producing, the feed value of unorthodox crops, and much more.

Read this if: you are a hog farmer looking to decrease your overhead; you have a strong interest in animal husbandry