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

Farm Week: May 20-24

There is nothing like a week of humidity and heavy downpours to really reinforce the importance of weather to someone who works entirely outdoors. When one is essentially camping, that importance becomes magnified: every trip to the bathroom or the kitchen sink involves planning. When those downpours are not just downpours, but veer into the territory of lightning, hail, and tornado warnings, the camper does not have a basement to hide out in. Instead, one must take cover, say, under a nearby concrete bridge. Hypothetically, that might have happened this week to some hypothetical semi-campers.

On the hottest day yet, with a humidity so thick you could cut it with the dullest of better knives, we transplanted about an acre with of beets, zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Before making a beeline for a dip in the stream, we covered about a third of them to protect them from potentially damaging downpours. Had we heard anything about hail, we probably would have tried to cover the rest of them, but the damage wasn't as bad as it could have been. The plants that were still small had less surface area to damage - the large leaves of older, larger plants were a bit holey after the hail. We had taken advantage of the heat to move our not-so-chicky chickens out to the pasture, which meant that we had to go rescue them after the huge storm. The rain continued all week and into the weekend, so we and the chickens are itching to get outside next week, when the weather looks much much more enjoyable. Meanwhile, I hope the riverbank holds up!

Thinking about: weather patterns, Bluths, good breeding

Eating: fresh-picked greens(!), farro salad, avocado and freshest egg breakfast tacos

Reading: Kelly Klober's Dirt Hog, Michael Ruhlman's Ratio, Jane Smith's The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants

Farm Week: May 13-18, 2013

Another week of extreme temperature changes, from an overnight frost at the beginning of the week, to high seventies and sunny on Thursday. Last weekend brought some rain and some dramatic fog and winds to the valley, but we had a great weekend nonetheless. We stewed up a mean old rooster into jerk chicken stew, sat around a bonfire, and I even brewed up some beer. Unfortunately, the mad temperature swings this week made a consistent fermentation temperature impossible - hopefully the beer didn't suffer too much!

The chicks turned two weeks old, and are hale and feisty as ever. They're getting close to full feathers, at which point they'll leave the brooder for the great outdoors! We also ordered our next batch of chicks - this time fifty instead of twenty-five! We have two outdoor "chicken tractors" at our disposal, so we'll be able to get a nice rhythm going this summer with batches of chicks coming in every three weeks. That means that eventually we'll have batches going out every three weeks, which will be the harder part.

We opened up our largest block of field yet this week, preparing for a large wave of transplanting and direct seeding. The first step in that process was mowing the cover crop, which Dan accomplishes by driving his bush hog backwards over it, his reasoning being that with such a tall crop, the wheel tracks would leave a large portion of the rye intact. After Dan C. mowed, we hooked up the chisel plow and I did my first big plowing job. The nice thing about plowing up a large field is that you can drive more in figure-eights or loops instead of doing lots of tight little turnarounds after each pass. I had a great time, and it was oddly relaxing. The next day's task of rototilling that same swath was not as relaxing, however. The machine itself is louder, and is much more sensitive to rocky soil -  it was much slower, bumpier, and louder than plowing. I didn't have to worry so much about straight lines (as when rototilling and punching beds), the purpose being to mix the remains of the rye into the soil for a faster digestion.

Thinking about: pork possibilities, blooming, organic matter

Eating: jerk chicken and sweet potato stew, homemade meatballs and risotto

Reading: Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King, Kelly Klober's Dirt Hog

On Being a Planner

I have always been a reader of books, a collector of facts, and a maker of lists. A quick look through the detritus of my desk in college would reveal crumpled half-sheets of paper filled with to-do lists partially crossed off. When staring hundreds of pages of reading and hundreds of words to write, I would always start by making a list. Often, I start a to-do list with things I have already finished, just to be able to cross a few things off. Evidence of recent productivity seems to assure me that future productivity is possible. On a larger scale, planning comforts me. When Caroline and I would fight when we were little, often we would make up during a weekly forest preserve hike, walking a ahead of our parents and planning grand things for our shared room that never came to any fruition. It didn't matter that these excitedly discussed plans never materialized - the planning of it was enough to bring about a sisterly cease-fire. When I was living in Chicago after college, working two jobs and saving every penny, list-making kept me sane. Every night, I would count the cash I had brought home from my waitressing job and stash it in my bank (the cigar box under my bed), noting the total in a ledger. In another small notebook, I kept careful track of my weekly spending, taking any overspending out of next week's allowance. Every few weeks, I would check and see whether I was on track with my saving - my planned budget for weeks spent in Florence and Bologna providing incentive for the late nights and early mornings all summer.

Now, some of those habits have solidified, and I have fought against other inclinations. I still keep careful track of all of my monthly spending and saving. I keep a list of books I've been meaning to read, possible topics for future blog posts, things I should look up next time I have internet. On the other hand, because I am at heart someone who wants all of the information possible before I commit to something, I have started to force myself to not have plans occasionally. Visiting a new place without having looked up everything to see and do there has been a new experience for me recently. Taking a long bike ride without a route planned out beforehand. Passing a Sunday without a to-do list. Getting in a car with friends and without plans.

Last week, the first of our periodical visits to other farms in the area through the CRAFT program caused me to reflect on my penchant for planning anew. The topic was cover crops and compost, and the farmer whose farm we were visiting (Paul) was describing the different pairs of cover crops he uses, focusing on two sets in particular. Both (ideally) get planted around Labor Day. The oats and peas grow all fall, but are "winter kill," meaning that the cold weather kills them off completely. Winter rye and vetch sprout in the fall, then lay dormant all winter, before rapid growth in the spring. If you till rye in too early, it will keep growing where it can, becoming a nuisance. Therefore, where you plan to cut in early spring crops, like onions, early brassicas, or potatoes, the winter-kill combo makes much more sense. That way, you're getting the full benefit of a cover crop without having to fight with it throughout the growing season. This requires knowing where all your crops are going next year before Labor Day every year, which requires quite a bit of planning. Dan doesn't follow a strict crop rotation schedule, preferring to decide on the spot where to plant each crop, relying on his memory to make sure, for example, that the onions are far enough away from last year's onion field or that brassicas are similarly more mobile than the flea beetles. He seeds each field in winter rye as the harvest finishes, choosing to battle the rye as necessary in the early plantings in order to grow as much new organic matter as possible. Paul, on the other hand, knows a full six months ahead of his first tilling what he's going to put where and sows his cover crops accordingly. Of course, Paul's farm is very different that Dan's in a few significant ways, such as a wildly different soil type and levels of mechanization. Paul's menagerie of tractor implements makes his style of cover cropping feasible.

Soil types and equipment aside, this discussion of cover crops has made me reflect on what kind of farmer I will be in this respect. All signs point to an abundance of planning! I think my list-making transposes directly to the daily chore-list of farming, my personal budgeting becomes enterprise budgets, and my compulsive reading becomes continuing education. My penchant (with Caroline) for rearranging furniture will no doubt become a love of planning crop rotations, cover crop timing, and seeding schedules. Dan's ability to improvise and think on the fly is admirable, but so is Paul's ability to create systems and stick with them. The farm fits the farmer, and judging by my track record so far, my farm might skew a bit more towards Paul's. I doubt I'll stop planning anytime soon, and I have a few years of daydream-planning ahead of me when it comes to my future farm. Now if only I could get into the habit of keeping my room neat and tidy . . .

Farm Week: May 6-10, 2013

This week brought the full range of spring weather, including some much-needed rainfall. The trees are waking up, and the view up the hillsides in all directions from our little valley becomes greener every day. The winter rye is over knee-high, and the smell of apple blossoms has caused me to stop moving and breathe deeply at least once per day.

Now a little over a week old, our broiler chicks are bigger and more fully feathered every time we feed them. They're still small and cute, and they still have a few weeks to go before they go outside. We decided not to buy organic feed because the price was prohibitively high, but we did find some conventional feed without all the unnecessary antibiotics. If the farm were certified organic and we were selling them formally to the CSA members, we might have made the decision to shell out for the organic feed and price the birds accordingly higher. Instead of going for the omnipresent fast-growing hybrid Cornish Cross, we opted for Freedom Rangers, which is a breed known for its hardiness and its foraging, which makes it the perfect bird for pasture-raising.

This week brought a bit more transplanting, and lots of cultivation. The same amount of transplanting that would have made us tired and sore a few weeks ago is now just a matter of course. The first round of spring carrots also needed to be thinned - Dan chooses to over-seed these notoriously bad germinators to avoid long gaps between carrots so we all sat down in a pathway and weeded and thinned the carrots to 1-1.5 inches. It is very slow-going, monotonous, and miniscule work. I loved it. We've done some hand-hoeing, which always makes for some great conversation as we move down the rows. The carrots also provoked hours of interesting conversation, but for some reason I have a skill for this particular task, and after awhile I was too far ahead to take part. So I put on some old-timey fiddle and banjo music and somehow my fingers moved even faster.

Another highlight this week was the first CRAFT visit of the season. At first twice and later once per month, all the apprentices from sustainable farms in the area get out of work early on a Monday and gather on one of the participating farms for a two-hour workshop followed by a potluck dinner. This week's topic was cover crops and compost, and I'm working on an essay about the thoughts the tour and workshop provoked. For now I'll say that I'm really looking forward to these visits all season. Even besides the workshops, I think it's immensely instructive just to see how different farms are set up and how they operate. The potluck was great, too - good food and good conversation, and I'm looking forward to many more.

Thinking about: bare feet in the soil, wide-brimmed hats, smells of spring

Eating: Pita with homemade hummus, avocado, apple, and homemade sauerkraut

Reading: Michael Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef, Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King

Farm Week: April 29 - May 3, 2013

This week brought warm, sunny days and cool, frosty mornings. No hint of rain, and the beds are becoming more and more dusty as we cultivate. The rye cover crop is knee-high, the peach trees are in bloom, and the hillsides are slowly changing color as the trees bud and then leaf out.

We spent three days on our knees on black plastic, punching holes and putting in first onion and then strawberries, thousands and thousands of each. Toward the end of each day, we went loopy, fingers sore from punching through the plastic. But to stand at the end of the day with piles of empty black trays and rows upon rows of little onion soldiers at attention really gives you a sense that you've done something. Something that you thankfully only have to do once a year.

Towards the end of the week, we got our potatoes and leeks in the ground, side by side in a field we're now calling the soup field. We planted our potatoes by hand, laying them out in two staggered rows on the beds and walking over them to punch them into the earth. As the morning grew warmer, we took off our shoes and socks and used our bare feet to punch the potatoes down.

In another sign of spring, our 26 Freedom Ranger chicks arrived in the mail on Thursday, less than 36 hours since they hatched over in Pennsylvania. In a bit of an ironic twist, the galvanized tub in which we set up their brooder sits right under the killing cones nailed to the wall inside the barn. Nine weeks or so from now, they'll come full circle, but right now they are cute little cheeping bundles of spring.

Thinking about: sunscreen, life cycles, cover crop trade-offs

Eating: local grass-fed burgers, purple rice and borlotti beans with roasted root vegetables, balsamic and sweet potato risotto

Reading: The Best American Short Stories 2004, Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot