Mean Storms and the Frustration of Resilience

Tomorrow is the first mean storm of the season.

I alternately think of them as smashy storms, Russian roulette storms, or staring-down-the-barrel-of-a-gun storms, but whatever you want to call them, we are kind of over them.

They are not over us.

Here in upstate NY, our latitude and water access insulates us from the worst parts of climate change. Sure, we can get flooding and drought and an occasional brush fire, but nothing in the apocalyptic realm of what much of the world might see on that front.

When it stops raining outside like these glorious last weeks, we can make it rain inside.

But mean storms - those thunderstorms that toss down an inch or four of rain in a half an hour, sometimes accompanied by 70 mph micro-bursts and hail of varying durations and sizes - are the one extreme weather hazard predicted to increase dramatically over the next decades here.

When I was a kid growing up in northern Indiana, I loved sitting on our west facing porch and watching the thunderheads and lightning build up over Lake Michigan. I’m the same distance and direction from Lake Ontario now, but I can’t enjoy the truly amazing views sky views off our escapement over the lake plain, because I’m racing around like a maniac battening down hatches and row covers and greenhouses and saying frantic prayers that they all survive.

And the older I get, the more I worry about how many of these storms we can physically, psychologically, and financially handle as a business. And then I worry even more about how many disasters any of us (especially my farming peers so much more on the margins all around the world) can handle.

When it rains, sometimes it pours! Not this year’s picture (we are waiting to plant outside tomatoes till next week when the soil is warmer!)

It took us two years and working a second job to financially dig out of the hole from our last direct hit by a super smashy-storm.

I’ve been picking away at a blog about resilience and how I kind of hate the concept and expectation of needing to be resilient all the time. There’s a lot of excellent critiques around this topic by much smarter people than me, all of which are countermanded by a big push on how farmers need to build resilience because we have to keep doing our food production thing regardless of a little climate change.

From the face of it, we are a “resilient” diversified farm, and we’ve been building systems and investing in structures that move us to a position to become even more so. We strive for all those good things you’re supposed to do like capturing carbon and increasing soil organic matter and boosting biodiversity, but frankly there’s only so much you can do when you are growing fragile plants amid increasingly intense weather.

Losing our winter greens crop to an intense windstorm last December.

“Resilience” takes deep supplies of that physical, mental, and financial fortitude that extreme weather saps from us all.

It takes that extra $50K or $100K in the bank to replace crops or materials that get smashed.

It takes a supply chain where you can order a replacement for what you need.

It takes farmers that can see their year’s work or decade’s work trashed to pieces, but who have the umph or mojo to rebuild.

It takes customers that are willing to accept crops that arrive late or have lower quality.

When we talk about resilience in agriculture, and the government puts money on the line towards that end, it’s for the big farms or the “simple” farms (not that any farm is simple, but it’s a lot easier to get crop insurance when you grow three commodities than when you have small amounts of 100 things planted) and it doesn’t cover the real full cost of losses.

Protecting crops, but at a cost (and not always perfectly if we get a lot of wind)

For farms of our scope and scale, the only support in these disasters is in our customers who keep shopping with us even when our leafy greens look like crap (to this day, I’m kind of amazed at how many of you all were fine with three weeks of very holey lettuce after our big hailstorm!), of neighboring farms who share any plants or crops they can afford to give away, and of affected farmers willing to take on an additional job or three or a second mortgage to fill the financial holes.

And this is where I worry, because we are all scraping and stretching so much thinner now.

Last week we had a few equipment breakdowns and seed failures and there wasn’t an easy replacement for some of them. If we lose a tunnel or a tractor, for the first time I don’t know if we could find or finance a replacment.

Covid has consumed all the air in the global room for over two years, but during all this time, weather keeps getting more extreme and food production harder. Covid exposed so many of the weaknesses in our systems further, but I worry that we didn’t all learn the lessons about uncertainty that we could have.

Maybe tomorrow’s storm will hit us hard, and maybe it won’t. Maybe it will hit a farm two counties over. Maybe that farm has taxpayer funded crop insurance or a spouse working a good off-farm job that helps buffer the loss, or maybe they don’t.

I can prepare all I want up here on our hill, just like we can get vaccinated and wear masks, and yet there’s still such yawning uncertainty in farming and in life.

We accept this risk and uncertainty and deal with it, but getting older as a farmer under these parameters feels like we are exponentially aging sometimes. The me of 20 years ago was all excited to build a resilient farm that would withstand climatic changes and extremes. The me of 2022 is like, we can’t agree on facts, at any point we could get blasted by a tornado, diesel costs as much as mid-grade vodka, and we are are all gonna die (okay I don’t really feel all these things all the time, just some days lol).

What I want to know and struggle with as a farmer and a person who loves this amazing place and planet (and most days, our human species ;), is how can we build in the capacity to handle inevitable sporadic destruction and the uncertainty surrounding it, both on the super local farm level or in our wider state/country/world, without resorting to the easy lip service of “being resilient” without recognition of the intense costs and effort that goal will take.

Red sky in morning, sailors (and farmers?) take warning!

The Hopeful Blog of Tiny Farming Infrastructure

The start of this year has been a haul for a lot of us, and I realized that in the bustle of early spring and the gloominess of everything going on this winter, we haven’t shared the more fun things we are doing on the farm for 2022.

The big deal this year in terms of projects is that we are going to do something very different… NOTHING new!

We are trading out equipment that isn’t working well in our farm system! We have a fancy rototiller, but it doesn’t like to be used on hillsides (obviously not great up here in Fenner), so we are swapping it out for a more basic model that doesn’t care about hills!

Okay, okay, that’s not entirely true since I’m about to share a whole long list of new and exciting things coming. However, we aren’t taking on any single large project (like last year’s shed and tunnel, or the greenhouse the year before, or all the equipment before that.

Essentially, we are moving out of farm startup phase (where every year’s just about getting the minimum of things you need to produce a crop) and moving into the phase of making our systems keep working despite the craziness of the world around us. 2022 is becoming the year here on the farm of trying to remove the frustrations and pet peeves that are common for newer farms, and overhaul the systems and equipment that don’t work for us, so we can keep growing our delicious produce!

Farming (and starting a farm in particular) is this weird, multi-generational beast of a profession. The first generation on the land has to pour a lot into capital improvements and building up the system and infrastructure, with the goal of hopefully/ideally making things easier for the next generation (or those same first gen farmers as they get older!).

A tiny improvement… I have literally searched the globe for these rolling dibblers for a decade, before learning that a farmer in NY just started 3D printing them!!! They are lifechanging (and make little indents in the soil of our seed flats so the seeds are all perfectly triangulated in the middle of the cell).

Even after ten years, we are still a start up sort of farm that runs on pretty lean infrastructure. There’s still more greenhouses to build and that long awaited fabled wash-pack barn (one day, one day we won’t wash veggies under a tent!). There’s constantly rotating equipment, road repairs, and then fixing or replacing everything you can imagine as it breaks down or wears out. We spend about 5% of our annual budget on repairs and maintenance, 10% on immediate necessary capital improvements, and another 5% on loan service for those more costly capital projects (like the bigger greenhouses and tractors).

Some days it feels like this basic task of farming just takes SO MUCH STUFF, and we are constantly running around trying to catch up and get established.

This spring’s original plan was to build the one last high tunnel we need. However, between optimistically making that plan last year and getting the re-priced quotes on the tunnel this year, prices on greenhouses almost doubled (eek). Additionally, we learned last year that if the new summer “normal” is 20” of rain in a month, even our well sited tunnels will flood from the bottom up as the water table just keeps on rising (double eek). It just didn’t seem to make sense to build another high tunnel this year right next to the one we are doing major drainage work on.

It was almost a relief, though (once we got over the sadness of not being able to complete the project) to have a reason to slow down and reapportion that greenhouse planned budget solely on tackling the low hanging fruit of tiny, low-cost farm system improvements this year while we let the supply chain wackiness settle down around us. (It will settle, won’t it?)

This road, the bane of Matt’s existence, is finally going to get worked on! Also, we have some killer burn piles going on, should there be a spring farm/CSA bonfire party?

For instance, adding more gravel to the farm road.

Or putting everything in the garage where we pack shares on castors so we can push all the shelving out-of-the-way and have more room to pack boxes.

Or ripping out the floor of our original walk-in cooler so we can reseal it, drop it 6 inches so that we can wheel things in and out of the cooler instead of lifting, and have space to build shelves so that we can store short piles of vegetables rather than just giant tall ones. Because the box of veggies we need will always be the one on the bottom of the giant teetering pile.

We are designing a new greens spinner to amp up our lettuce, spinach, and greens quality and storage life (so many more salad greens are coming!).

The leftover equipment shed wood went into a shiny new extra long potting bench so we can seed more efficiently. We also got a new hand seeder from Japan and can crank out twice as many flats in half the time.

We added sides to the irrigation pump shed so it’s quieter for our neighbors and the pumps are better protected from rain.

We are renting a trencher and adding drainage * everywhere. * Tunnel edges, greenhouses, farm roads, if Matt can trench it, there’s gonna be a trench! (I swear, every time I go out into the field, there’s a new ditch just ready for me to fall into it. Beulah views this as a wonderful expansion of her drinking water system.)

The year of digging everything up to improve drainage has already begun in the high tunnels! In addition to adding French (aka curtain) drains, we are also planning to trench and install a French drain right down the middle in this tunnel.

I wrote out a giant book of how to manage everything in the farm office in case I get sick (my paranoia during Covid is that I’m the bottle neck here on so many systems, like everyone getting their CSA boxes nicely each week!), and I started in on creating some new training and practices manuals so it’s easier for new folks to learn how to do some of the most fun farm tasks.

We formed an LLC (I know, all fancy and cooperate and stuff!), which doesn’t really change anything around the farm, but does mean we legally both own the farm (so no one is just a “and spouse” any more!). This is also kind of a super long term thing for the future if we want to have the capacity to bring in any younger farmers to join us in growing.

And the list goes on… Basically, what feels like the most hectic year in the world ever has somehow become the year on our little farm where we try to address and eliminate the bumps that make a farming task harder the best we can (or at least tackle the ones that are solvable with a little time and thought, minimal amounts of money, and nothing that’s getting hit with wonky supply chains).

We’ll report back at the end of the season to see how many of these little projects have helped!

And lest I forget to mention, the whole point of all the micro-projects on the farm is to make sure we can keep growing delicious veggies for our CSA and farmers markets :) Shares are still available!

On Farm Systems and Being Prepared (but Anti-Prepper)

I ran into a neighbor last week who said to me, “Oh, you must be excited about this year and how good it’s going to be for you with food prices rising for once.”

I know they meant well, and I might complain up a storm as a grumpy old farmer about how food prices haven’t kept up with the cost to produce them over the past decades (and this was BEFORE this past year’s craziness), but the rising food prices are actually much more terrifying to farmers than they are to customers.

The problem is, all us farmers—even us little “resilient” and “adaptable” ones (more next week on my anti-resilience stance!)—have committed to some sort of growing system. Through experience and trials and education, each farm figures out what they can grow and how they can grow it at a price that’s both affordable enough for customers and profitable enough for covering farm operation costs.

Once you find that sweet spot, then it’s time to invest in it and commit to making it work better. Those commitments could include a particular set of tractors and implements, or certain field layouts or greenhouses or barns or market delivery systems and so on. But regardless of what you grow, those commitments cost time and money and trap you into your chosen system.

Height of nimbleness? Our movable tool shed…

We are a small, nimble farm that can make relatively abrupt changes among our diversified mix of about fifty crops. In a crisis, we theoretically could switch and grow all carrots or all potatoes (or substitute whatever higher calorie crop you want here). But we aren’t set up to grow our entire 40 acres of tillable fields in carrots or potatoes. We simply don’t have the equipment, storage and harvest capacity, labor, seed access, materials, and so on. It would take a couple years and likely a million bucks to make that change.

There’s talk about food prices feeling insane, but less folks are seeing the double and triple rising of other supply costs for farms. Even if prices rise 10%, it doesn’t alleviate a 30 or 50 or 90% cost increase on supplies. We ordered the bulk of our supplies last year, before the current war, and aren’t facing a fraction of the trouble larger farms that are now sourcing their increasingly tight fertilizer or herbicide supplies. Even if big farmers get the highest commodity grain prices in ages, their input costs might turn their growing season into a financial train wreck.

Coming back to the idea of farming systems, as organic farmers we do an insane amount of management around weeds. We literally are managing fields this year for weed reduction in 2024. Putting aside any judgment about farming systems, the majority of ag in the United States manages weeds through herbicides. Likewise, the majority of farmland in the US relies on artificial fertilizers. Most calories the animals we eat are fed and the calories that fill our grocery store shelves, for better or worse, come from systems with high dependence and investment in cheap fertilizer and herbicides (not to mention fuel!). And fertilizer and herbicides are items that anecdotally I’m hearing farmers say they’re struggling to get.

I prefer organic farming (obviously), but setting up an organic farm system honestly sucks. It’s a multi-year commitment to dealing with hassles, frustrations, lost crops, and messy looking fields, not to mention negative cash flow. Yes, you can do it and come out the far end with a better operation and system, but suddenly being an organic farm (or even just not relying on artificial fertilizer or herbicides/pesticides for a year) is not something a 1000 acre grain farm or 500 cow dairy can do on the spot.

We had twenty years of experience in organic agriculture and it still took us five years to conceive of the system to best manage our land’s weeds alone, five years to implement that system, and it’s going to take us another five years to completely master that system. I’m not saying this all to be scary, but more to share that it’s a less certain time to be a farmer than one might anticipate, and that even resilient farms are likely going to struggle.

We have parts of nature hiding everywhere on the farm

What does freak me out is that as a society, we have a very thin grasp on how interconnected and precariously balanced our world is.

These past weeks the internet is full of talks on energy and food independence, including growing your own food and being prepared. Parts of ag internet are full of stories of the Ukrainian farmers not in active war zones trying to get their fields ready to plant, because their country in particular desperately needs that food (talk about horrific uncertainty at the start of a growing season!!!)

And more than one friend or relative has joked with me about how they never worry about prepping, because they’ll just come to the farm and survive with us.

I feel like I have to let you all in on a secret.

Matt and I probably do have the skills and supplies on hand to live off in some post-apocalyptic dystopian future. However, we are both 100% sure that if shit hits the fan we will die. And we are 1000% percent anti-capital-P Prepping. I don’t mean that we’re not prepared to deal with a three-week power outage or a minor supply disruption in farm equipment getting to us, or even a batshit crazy growing season or two.

But when we say we are anti-prepping, it’s because we are acknowledging our intense interconnectedness with our neighbors, our region, our country, and our world. We as a nation and species committed to this “growing” system we have (which I would argue is far from perfect and needs to be improved). But despite needing upgrades, our society would not be an easy or pleasant or cheap thing to go around and quickly change.

Contemplating how we could each prep and survive on an individual farm or single homestead situation is an exercise in pointlessness. In a real crisis, sure, our farm could probably produce food for 10 to 50 households for a year but that would require half the people in those households to work brutally physically hard all the time on it (no fuel, remember), while the other half of the people would need endless amount of ammo to fight off everyone else that’s also just looking to survive.

Prepping feels like an particularly dick move if it involves planning to shoot the hungry grandma down the road who just wants to snag a few carrots for her grandkids!

It’s pointless to prep and plan in a vacuum. And anyone who thinks they can survive and live a life that has any joy in their own little bunker/farm, more power to you but I’d rather go down with the ship.

Of all these crazy Covid years, this winter is particularly hammering home our lesson of how fragile the connections that support us are. From our seeds (grown in desert regions around the world), our supplies (some still indefinitely sitting on a ship stuck “in US territorial waters”), our weather (some of us with no water and others with way too much, stretching all our farm systems at the seams), and our markets (as customers worry about the same instability and costs we do, and buy more shelf stable foods), we feel more like prey caught in a intricate, indissolvable web than that mythical “independent yeoman farmer” of American imagery.

And so we do think about preparation, but it’s only in that bigger context of how we can make food work for our region when things pull tight, rather than just for one isolated farm or family. How can we create shorter supply chains, both to and from the farm? How can we build systems that provide more on-farm soil fertility and weed control? How can we make our local food (and CSA shares) more accessible and easy to use?

My goal is for us to not all become fossils!

Spring is Coming / Sadness and Strife

We’ve been pretty MIA on the internet world these past few weeks. Farming goes on no matter what, but I haven’t been able to dig in and share much from the farm, as it seems so pointless when people and places that you care about are going through hell.

Our sunflowers in the snow, kind of feeling their vibe this month.

I think I started and then erased a dozen posts and more than one blog. I just can’t seem to find the oomph to highlight CSA week or the opening of the greenhouse season amid these insane wastes of war.

From 1997 through 2000, I had many gifts of opportunities to travel and work abroad, ending in the summer of 2000 on a farm in eastern Russia, near the Belarus and Ukrainian borders, where I lived with a wonderful and generous Ukrainian family.

As a young person wrestling to decide what and where to be (that most rooted profession of farming, or working internationally in the conflict resolution sphere that I actually went to school for?), that harvest season in Kitezh magically melded both options.

Even on the grayest days, we often get an afternoon splash of blue sky and sun over the willows

Then that winter, the Middle Eastern study abroad program I worked for was shut down by war, Matt and I met, and then came 9-11 to change the feel of the world around us.

I feel so gifted by this opportunity to be a farmer and the chance to spend my life stewarding a small piece of earth. But I also feel crushed with sadness, frustration, rage, and a sense of helplessness each time a war starts and destroys a place close to my heart (or close to anyone’s heart!).

The fact that it’s been more than one place in the last twenty years because we have so many conflicts in the world is even more devastating.

The days are getting longer, leading to more shadows and new animals moving in and starting denning (I think Beulah is obsessed with the fox that is starting a den in the wetlands. I know where the den is, but for some reason, even with her magic nose she can’t seem to find it…).

Our world is so immense and beautiful and powerful, with surging tectonic plates, battering hurricanes, and the eons of time acting on it. Yet at the same time, life upon earth is still so delicate and fragile and fleeting.

And yet, it’s spring and the season of planting is hard upon us. Our CSA shares start in only 13 and a half weeks. Between now and then lies an insane amount of cleaning and prepping and planting and harvesting and repairing. Even as nightmares go on oceans away, and the case studies of nuclear war games get hauled back out and dusted off, farmers have just one shot to plant each year, and we need to be ready for it.

Two weeks ago we started the first round of seeds for our early spring farmers markets and did something we haven’t done for a decade—the awkward in and out shuffle of flats carried between the greenhouse to the house every night and every morning. This extra hassle saved two weeks of running the greenhouse propane. Matt drove up to New Hampshire to get one of our last big supply orders (since now it’s cheaper to drive and get your own supplies than have them shipped to you!). This week our onions are seeded so the greenhouses are fully on and there’s sparks of germinating green everywhere.

My faithful but short furred greenhouse companion, all of our home walls getting temporarily lined with plant flats (!), and I (Maryellen, and not the real carpenter on the farm) built a thing! (new potting bench!)

The muskrats are trying to build a den in the culvert under the road.

The springtime goose battles over our prime pond real estate began, but haven’t yet expanded into all night shouting sessions.

Forestry work and tree inspection while the ground is frozen, there are SO MANY coyotes hunting our huge rabbit population right now, and Harry the muskrat fighting a losing battle to build his house.

The bulbs around the perennial beds popped up, sharp and green.

The melting snows pulled back in our late fall harvested fields, revealing the detritus of last growing season, filling out our to-do lists with things like “pick up anchor bags” and “pull out trellising.”

Beulah checking out the receding snow—this was the tunnel that lost its cover in December, but we’ll re-skin it in time for tomatoes!

Bombs are dropping and people in Ukraine and in conflict zones across the world are suffering.

And we farmers are over here reliving Groundhog Day, doing the same thing again and again. I can’t decide if the seasonal and daily repetition of farming is contemplative and relaxing, or frustrating and annoying. I just hate this miserable Groundhog Day pattern of another war in another place I love and another vast nation of people whose life will never be the same.