Young Farmers Conference 2013

Last week found me in Tarrytown, NY for the Young Farmers Conference, an annual event for young and beginning farmers held at the Stone Barns Center, home of the famed Blue Hill restaurant. Because of the limitations of the facility, they have to restrict how many people come, so unlike MOSES last year with 3,000 participants, Stone Barns was at capacity with about 300. That means every year people get turned away from their lottery-based sign-ups and those who make it are super excited to be there. Instead of doing a full play-by-play of the whole event, I'm just going make a few lists here before posting some pictures. The whole 3 days was filled with new ideas, both from the workshops and presenters and from conversations with other participants. No doubt I'll be referring back to things that I encountered at YFC in future blog posts!

Workshops I Attended:

  • Sustainable Hog Production (full day seminar)
  • Why Every Farm Should Have a Sugaring Operation
  • Agroforestry
  • Beekeeping for Beginners
  • Electric Fencing
  • Welding
  • Whole Animal Butchery

With the exception of the full-day seminar, these workshops were each an hour and a half, which was time enough for an introduction to the topic, some specifics and Q&As, and a nudge in the right direction for more resources and information.

Speakers and Full-Conference Events:

  • Staged reading of the verbatim play "Farmscape" and Q&A with playwright
  • Krysta Harden, USDA Deputy Secretary
  • Wendell Berry in conversation with daughter Mary Berry
  • Chellie Pingree, congresswoman and farmer from Maine
  • Kathleen Merrigan, former USDA Deputy Secretary and person behind the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative
  • Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill
  • Cheryl Rogowski, amazing, socially-conscious farmer and MacArthur genius
  • Klaas and Mary-Howell Martens, groundbreaking NY farmers
  • Social hour, barn dance, and lots of meal-time conversation over really good food

Fun facts, tidbits, things to think about from the conference:

  • From Tom Frantzen: while we may not agree with the methods used by industrial agriculture, we need to recognize that when it comes to efficiency and profitability, they do everything for a reason. When we prioritize humane treatment, quality of life and sustainability, we inherently make compromises in other areas. This is one of the "brutal facts" that we need to confront.
  • Pigs can be used to eradicate invasive species like multiflora rose!
  • The Practical Farmers of Iowa are doing amazing things and I need to spend a few days poking around that website.
  • You need to boil 40 gallons of sap to yield one gallon of maple syrup, which means that syrups is one of those crops that really needs a certain scale to be efficient. Small-scale aggregators who drive around buying raw sap from farmers and boiling it down using super-energy efficient burners is a solution to this problem.
  • Lacking this infrastructure, plain maple sap can also be a marketable commodity! Think of the popularity of coconut water and of local food - these combine perfectly in maple sap, which can be guzzled outright or used to brew coffee, make soda, cook, etc. Think of the possibilities!
  • To be considered Agroforestry, there need to be three levels of production. For example - canopy (trees/lumber/fruit), forages (grasses and legumes), animals (pigs, cows, bees, etc.)
  • A 1% increase in organic matter in topsoil sequesters an additional 10 tons of carbon per acre.
  • You can use a close-planted stand of evergreens like an overgrown/abandoned Christmas tree farm for an "outdoor living barn" to shelter cold-hardy cattle like Scottish Highlands during the winter.
  • Nurse bees, who take care of the eggs and larvae in the hive, are the youngest of worker bees and don't yet have stingers.
  • On each flight, a bee will keep collecting pollen from the same species as the first flower it encounters.
  • The pesticides that are thought to be a possible cause of colony collapse are fat soluble and may be stored in the wax (fat) in beehives, so using a method where the bees rebuild their wax from scratch every year, like top bar hives, might be effective in slowing the demise of the honeybee.
  • An electric fence is only as strong as its ground, which should be much bigger than you would think. The point is to be enough conductive metal in the ground to attract the current going through an animals nose and to the ground through its hooves to complete a circuit, which is what actually makes the shock.
  • You should always recharge deep-cycle batteries before they drop below 40% of their charge for maximum utility.
  • Never buy a used welder from a welding shop - they use them all day every day! Buy from a place where it gets more gentle/occasional use.
  • Having even a small welder means easy on-farm repairs and fabrication for tractors, greenhouses, etc!
  • Coppa is an alternative to prosciutto that still has beautiful marbling but due to its size only take a few months as opposed to over a year for a whole ham.
  • Finally, according to Wendell Berry, our generation will always be living on the "margins of a bad economy," which means that we're going to have to "learn to use the things that other people have given up on - including maybe land."

I'm off to the airport for a holiday visit to family in Argentina! More in the new year!

 

 

Big Weekend: Fire & a Fair!

This past Saturday, we had a great bonfire and party with friends and other farmers from the area. For the occasion, we cooked up a picnic shoulder from one of the pigs that we slaughtered two weeks ago. I decided I wanted to try a twist on an underground cooking method used in Hawaii and the Yucatan with the Chubby Bunny twist. After 7+ hours underground, the results were amazingly delicious. Possibly the best bbq-ed pork I've had in my life.  

On Sunday, sufficiently recovered from Saturday night's festivities, we managed to sneak in an afternoon at the Goshen Fair in between thunderstorms. We perused the livestock and veggie tents, ate the fair food (hand-dipped corn dog! sour dill pickle!), and I even made a spur-of-the-moment decision to compete in the skillet toss!

Farm Week: July 8-12, 2013 (with a poem!)

This week's post is a bit unorthodox, but it actually sums up this week (and the last two months) rather nicely:

It started with the rhythmic patter,
on wood, on canvas, on plastic and fiberglass.
Faint, then constant, then pounding.
It started then it stayed,
at last coming up to a roar
eventually receding in the mind
like so much white noise.
Hours became days became weeks,
the roar ceasing for few precious hours,
supplanted by the resulting rumble of the brook,
near breaching its brown banks,
with bated breath you awaited the flood.

And in and around the rain
you worked, layers of cotton
mouldering under layers of rubber,
hair curling under the humid hood,
toes, soles, souls soggy in your socks.
Staggering through kale,
mud covered the tops of your feet,
passive, feigning innocence,
then violently  grasping your boot,
relenting with an obscene SHLOOP!
Bent scythe-like, you filled your bins,
willing the clouds to part.

And then one day, at last, the heat came.
Your bodies from soggy to sweating and burnt,
your fields from grey to green.
But the relief was fleeting, for bending closer
to the earth, you saw the green not of
nightshades or cucurbits, but of
noxious weeds, galinsoga and sedge,
waging a battle you hadn't time to fight.
You peeled off socks, and sank
to your shins in soaked soil,
clawing to save your precious plants,
each day closer, yet farther from victory.

And on you worked, falling into rhythms:
harvest, hoe, sow, muster for battle.
Hundreds of row-feet planted,
thousands of plants saved. And yet,
another menace emerged, at first invisible.
From the tire-tracks of tractors,
from the lowest fields and pastures,
the winged militia took flight, evoking in you
a arhythmic dance, a slap, a flick,
an equine swing of the mane,
the perfumed attempt at evasion,
And finally, the itch, the scratch, the rub.

And as battle raged in you and around you,
you came upon treasures, buried and not.
The faint pip! of a root pulled from the ground,
the sweet smell when you pop off the carrot-top,
the small snap of the pea as you bite,
the mint and parsley and dill and cilantro,
that force the deep breathing of calm.
And finally, when the memory has all but gone,
you spy that glint of deep red in the greenhouse.
You pluck it, you smell it, your mouth waters.
Bacon sizzling, you reach for the toothy knife,
and at last you remember why you farm.


Thinking about: start-up models, intentional community, creativity

Reading: Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy, The Greenhorns' 2013 New Farmers Almanac, Selected Letters of Willa Cather

Eating: bacon and tomato on sourdough with homemade mayo, carrots fresh from the ground, penne with sauteed broccoli and garlic, some beautiful lemon birthday cake

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

On prophet-farmers

As part of my educational quest this past winter, I took advantage of a couple of classes offered by the Michael Field Agricultural Institute (MFAI) in East Troy, Wisconsin​. The courses attract a wide range of people, including established commercial farmers, hobby farmers beginning to attempt serious farming, and young farmers just starting out. During a workshop on multi-species grazing, two young boys sat in the back of the room taking studious notes. From what I could tell, they were brothers, might have been home schooled, and may well have been involved in 4-H. Near the end of the workshop when the presenter opened up the floor for questions and discussion, the older of the two brothers contributed a series of questions and comments that all began with "According to Joel Salatin," or "Joel Salatin says that..." Without the book in front of him, this young man was quoting statistics like biblical passages. He had obviously done his homework, and that homework seemed to consist of taking the word of one man as The Right Way. While farming is certainly not the only realm given to demagoguery, there are certain strains of the sustainable farming movement that seem prone to follow the word of one man to what seems to me to be an extreme.

For those of you who might not know, Joel Salatin is the owner of Polyface Farms in Virginia, the author of many books on farming practices, and a well-known and oft-cited personality in the sustainable farming world. His most well-known and widely-embraced method seems to be the practice of "mob grazing," specifically grazing chickens under a structure known as a "chicken tractor." The basic idea is that by keeping the chickens contained in a certain area, and moving that area either once or twice per day, you reap the benefits of "free ranging" a chicken in that they forage and scratch for edibles besides the grain you feed them, but by containing them for a certain interval on the same piece of land, you force them to eat more that just their favorite morsels before moving on. Anyways, Salatin has written quite a few books detailing his methods for pastured poultry, produced an instructional DVD, and holds weekend-long workshops on his farm where you can pay thousands of dollars to see him move around his chickens in person. His method has certainly worked very well for him and made him a successful farmer and businessman, but he seems to have ascended to such a position that certain followers will hear no wrong. There comes a point where a novel and unorthodox approach becomes in itself an orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is not, shall we say, my bag.

Perhaps it's my Unitarian upbringing, or a habit I picked up in academic writing, but I tend to take what I can use from any source and discard the rest. There are some interesting and instructive stories in the Bible, but I don't feel the need to keep an eye out for the great Whore of Babylon. Similarly, there are some tips to glean from people like Joel Salatin, or from the writings of Rudolph Steiner. Just as I'm not going to swallow the Bible whole, I'm not prepared to pick a farmer-prophet and blindly follow him (and it's overwhelmingly him) to the ends of the earth. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm looking forward to continue my agricultural education in the piecemeal way I started, picking tips up where I can and creating a set of best practices uniquely tailored to my principles, my farm, and my soil. There is no one size fits all approach to sustainable farming, which is a significant part of what differentiates it from conventional farming. As Wendell Berry points out in The Unsettling of America, before the rise of large agribusiness in the mid-20th Century there was no orthodoxy in farming. Each region and to a certain extent each farm had its own set of best practices passed down through the generations. But with the rise of the paint by numbers chemical farming, there was suddenly a "right way" to farm advocated by suppliers, universities, and even the government. In my opinion, even though none of the several approaches to sustainable agriculture has the institutional backing that conventional farming enjoys, there is still the danger of creating certain orthodoxies within the movement that prevent farmers from tailoring their own best practices and maybe even leads to the high incidence of people who "burn out" of sustainable farming before they've really established themselves.

I've only read one of Salatin's books, and while I'm not exactly itching to add another Salatin opus to my ever-growing pile of reading material, I'm sure I'll get around to it one of these days. In the meantime, I'll keep reading whatever I can get my hands on. As I finishing digesting these books, I'll post a mini "book report" full of the methods and ideas that interested me most in each. Hopefully, it will be a helpful exercise, and not too completely boring to whoever decides to read my assorted brain-droppings.

MOSES Conference, La Crosse, WI

The last weekend of February, I was lucky enough to attend the MOSES (Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service) Organic Farming Conference in beautiful, frigid La Crosse, Wisconsin. Along with over three thousand other attendees, I spent a glorious weekend meeting other farmers, encountering new ideas, and above all being reminded how much I still have to learn. I was able to attend the conference thanks to a scholarship through the New Organic Stewards program, which encourages young and  beginning farmers to attend the conference. At the conference, the New Organic Stewards also organized plenty of formal and informal ways to meet other young farmers from across the midwest.

It was at one such gathering where the idea for this website was born. First sprawled in an extra conference room in the convention center and later over beers and sandwiches at a local pub, we talked for hours about the farms we envision for our future selves. While I'll probably spend quite a few blog posts in the future parsing and rehashing many of our discussions that night (and that weekend), right now I'd just like to share how that conversation was the impetus for this site, and this blog. On the Planning the Farm section of this site, you can read about my vision for a future farm. One thing you will notice is integral to my future plans is unnamed other farmers. That's where this site comes in. "What if," I recall saying late that night, "I could just put up, like, a personal ad. You know, like in the newspaper? Instead of 'Single white male seeks younger woman for ballroom dancing, fun' I could be all like, "Young farmer seeks other young farmers to join her in a long-term adventure, whole diet food production.' " There were murmurs and nods of agreement around the circle. "Except," I continued, "I guess you would need a lot more information than a little personal ad. To find the right people, you would have to explain your whole idea, and it would have to reach the whole country. No newspaper can do that."

That's precisely when we remembered the one tool our generation of farmers has been able to harness that our forebears didn't have at their disposal: the World Wide Web! The Internet! The Interwebz! Somewhere, in the midst of the brambles of black market pharmaceuticals, pop-up ads, and porn, I could clear a patch and plant my little seed of an idea. I could wax poetical about that future farm all I wanted! Back in that bar in La Crosse, the idea took root (am I mixing my metaphors yet?): I could create a website for a farm that does not yet exist, using it as a way to find potential partners, and maybe even investors. As I embark on my first full season farming in one place, I could use the site to document my own growth and education as a young farmer. By the time I am farming land I can call (at least partially) my own, I will have left an internet trail that other young farmers can follow, perhaps emboldened by my example and wiser for my mistakes. In the next few weeks and months, no doubt my blog posts will be inspired by and make repeated reference to the MOSES Conference. Indeed, I have a complete mp3 set of all of the conference workshops burning a hole in my backpack! For now, I'm glad for the inspiration the conference provided, both to undertake this website and blog and as fuel for the farming season ahead. No matter where I find myself next winter, you can be sure that a trip to a regional conference like MOSES will feature prominently on my calendar.