Although it’s mid-February, we feel the onrush of spring breathing down our necks, all the more so in this mild winter. Indoor planting is already underway, outdoor planting will start in a few weeks, and we can tell we’re running out of time for the various projects that might or might not get done before the vegetable portion of the year takes over our lives. Here’s a quick look at some of the things we’re keeping busy on right now.
We’ve made good progress over the last month on finishing our orchard-clearing project. This hillside above our house has a good southern exposure, and we’ve been working for several winters to clear the thick cedars off it and get various fruits established (see our newly added Human History & Management page for aerial photos of this work). We have a hard deadline to finish this spring, as we have more fruit trees coming, and need to put in a good permanent deer-proof fence around the whole area, which means taking down all the trees both within the area and along a wide enough perimeter that future logging won’t drop anything on the fence. On Friday we made especially good progress, as we were joined by a work crew from the Columbia Center For Urban Agriculture. I tried to take some before-and-after photos, but at the small online scale they aren’t as clear as I’d like. So here are some basic views of the area instead.
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This post is part of an ongoing, fascinating discussion/debate between ourselves and a mid-scale organic egg producer from Wisconsin (commenting as “Mac”), sparked by a comment thread on our earlier post about small-farm egg economics. Read that post and thread first, to gain the context of the discussion and the two farm models under discussion. My latest response simply became too long to be a useful comment and stands well on its own as a comparative analysis of the two models, so we’re published it here for further discussion. Also coming in a future post is a long discussion of our justifications for raising heritage breeds and doing our own breeding, something Mac also initially challenged.
We were gone for the first 12 days of January, visiting family & friends, so our records and observations of this month are somewhat incomplete (our farm-sitters did keep up the precipitation records). However, the weather was stable, warm, and dry the entire time we were gone, and has stayed that way since, so I doubt we missed too much. Overall it’s been a lovely month, a mild winter after five harsh ones in a row. We only recorded .66″ of precipitation the entire month, continuing the ongoing dry spell that began last summer. Signs of the extra-warm conditions include snow geese already moving north, and the first flowers blooming (dandelion & corn speedwell, below).
We take our food preservation seriously, finding deep value in detaching ourselves from the industrial food chain and the stress and bother of grocery shopping. We like to keep records of our annual food preservation for our own information, and figure some readers may also be interested in the sheer diversity of foods just this one farm can produce and preserve; it can also be an inspiration to CSA members.
Here’s a mostly complete list of the foods we prepared and preserved over the past year, to feed us through winter and spring of 2011-2012, and in some cases through the following summer or fall until the products become available again (like fresh meat). All we really purchase anymore are staples like sugar, salt, flour, spices, vinegar, oil, and such, and those mostly in bulk so we always have them on hand. All items listed below were sourced from our farm unless otherwise noted.
We’ll be selling eggs to off-farm customers for the first time in 2012, having expanded our laying flock to 35 hens. In past years we kept up to a dozen, which laid enough for our own household and some for workers, but this year eggs will be available to CSA members for $6/dozen. That’s higher than anyone around here is used to paying, so I thought I’d share the economic modelling that led us to this price. For reference, our friends at Happy Hollow Farm in Moniteau county came to the same conclusions, and are selling their certified organic eggs at $6/dozen as well. Our eggs are not certified organic and should not be referred to as such, though we absolutely refuse to feed out anything containing GMOs, whether chicken feed or food scraps.
We’ve finally made the switch to WordPress, allowing us to integrate our website and blog. But the site is still a construction zone with a good-sized to-do list. Feel free to comment on other features you’d like to see (or give advice on some of the items that remain on the to-do list).
We are thoroughly busy now, feeling somewhat overstretched, but looking forward to the onset of our two best market seasons (summer & fall). Spring is just a dress rehearsal. Very soon, we will be in harvesting hell with cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, okra, edamame, tomatillos, squash, and more all demanding near-daily attention, and many other items ready for twice weekly market & restaurant harvests. In addition, this is the season in which most of our fall items are planned and planted, so we are balancing the summer maintenance and sales with that additional load.
Thankfully, the garlic harvest is nearly complete with only one variety to go, and most varieties look fantastic. Expect to see cured garlic at our stand from mid-July through the rest of market season. Garlic times itself perfectly to need harvesting and processing toward the end of our June lull; a few weeks later and we’d go insane trying to handle it along with everything else.
Our squash have been performing well, supplying Cafe Berlin with up to 30lb a week along with market sales. We’re fighting a major outbreak of cucumber beetles, which chew up the blossoms & plants and spread disease; for the past week we’ve been spending around an hour a day hand-squishing hundreds of beetles a day. This is the reality of organic farming, especially on our farm which refuses to use any sprays at all. Demonstrating the necessary optimism in the face of evidence to the contrary, we just transplanted out another 180′ of young squash plants which will hopefully take over when the first set finally succumbs:
Many things are hard to photograph this time of year, as close-ups tend to look like a sea of green. Here’s a look at our cucumber plantings, lush and flowering heavily but also attractive to cucumber beetles. We hope they last long enough for good sales:
Two very worthwhile online pieces caught my eye recently, and are worth taking the time to read this weekend.
The first is a recent summary of developments in the Senate’s food safety bill, which is moving forward rapidly. According to this online piece, advocates for small and direct-market farms have made some real headway in offering amendments to ease the pain of this over-ambitious set of regulations.
Of course, a close reading of the article demonstrates just how foolish some of the original legislation was. For example,
FDA will also be prohibited from requiring farms and other food facilities to hire consultants to write food safety plans or to identify, implement, certify, or audit those plans.
Well, that’s nice. Are you serious that the original plan WOULD have required us to hire consultants to comply with the new regulations, and it’s only through the action of lots of advocates/lobbyists that this was changed? Lovely. Also,
FDA will be instructed to provide flexibility for small processors including on-farm processing, minimize the burden of compliance with regulations, and minimize the number of different standards that apply to separate foods.
Also very nice. Except that it means very little, given that the people who ultimately determine HOW to “provide flexibility” and what all these other vague terms mean are usually political appointees. I have no faith that over the long run the FDA or USDA will be continually staffed by people familiar with and sympathetic to small farms. So why pass legislation that can just as easily be ignored or misinterpreted by the next generation of leaders? Once this is passed, we’re likely stuck with it; we need to stop passing laws that are only effective if the right kind of people are in charge.
Assigned reading #2 is a long piece from the Riverfront Times of St. Louis, offering a nicely evenhanded discussion of the growing faceoff between the Humane Society and agriculture, both nationally and in Missouri. The issue at stake is animal rights in agriculture, and who will influence legislation setting standards for animal treatment in all settings from CAFOS to dog breeders to small, independent farms. This was fascinating to me, as it nicely captured the difficult position small farmers like us end up in when polar opposites fight. We have little interest in supporting corporate agriculture, but when a well-meaning advocacy group pushes an agenda too far in the other direction, it has the potential for lots of unintended consequences. This is exactly our concern with overdoing food safety legislation, and it was interesting to see a similar trend playing out in this case.
The fundamental problem, as in many cases, is that the proposed solution doesn’t actually go to the root of the problem. If you wish to stop the practices of corporate agriculture, you need to understand why they exist in the first place. Cheap food is in demand, and government policies make it easy to achieve that through corporate means. Simply attempting to ban certain practices will be no more effective than banning drugs without dealing with the reasons people use drugs, or why they produce them.
Also of interest in this piece was the current situation of Troy Hadrick, the rancher who cooperated with Michael Pollan to track a single steer’s life in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Hadrick feels betrayed by the negative publicity his cooperation produced, and by the perceived animosity toward farmers in the general public. I see his point, though I read the book differently as criticizing only the end result at the feedlot, not the practices of independent ranchers themselves.
I don’t have time to go into more detail. Both pieces are well worth the time to read and think about. Reactions welcome.
This week will probably be the busiest of the year so far. We have glorious weather forecast all week, clear skies through Friday with steadily rising temperatures into the upper 70s. It is desperately needed in order to begin truly drying out the ground. That drying will kick-start a huge project list that has been on hold during this three-month stretch of frozen/soggy conditions. On the potential agenda: