Crop Rotation Craziness (or rotations based on the land rather than schedules in books)

I wanted to name this “Ignoring the (Crop Rotation) Experts,” but that title is way too loaded these days! However, in terms of crop rotation, I increasingly find the rigidity of ideas on how to do it chafing.

This past weekend, I sent in our organic certification application.

A lot of that application is submitting records and forms and attestations and showing how you can trace products from seeds to end sales. I know that there’s lots of talk that organic certification is all bunk and not very uptight, but I can guarantee that our certifier (NOFA-NY) is strict enough there is always a lot of groaning about additional receipts that need to be dug out of the deep files. And by deep files, don’t be thinking it’s a nice organized cabinet in the back office—it’s a set of poorly labeled boxes buried deep in the attic!

One of the challenges for us with our February certification paperwork due date is that you are supposed to know where everything is going to be in the fields for the upcoming season (as in, your crop planning is completely done), and be able to explain your crop rotations.

For non-farmers/gardeners, crop rotation is essentially the idea of shifting what you plant where each year so that you don’t have the same crops in the same place forever.

The advantage of moving stuff around like this is that if your plants get disease or pests ideally those issues will stay in the one spot in the field where you had a problem and not travel to the spot that you plant your crops in the next year.

We don’t worry about crop rotation in our U-Pick flower gardens because there is just such a diverse mix of plant families there to start!

I know a lot of gardeners stress out about this, but IMO (not sure if I count as an expert to ignore here or not) if you have a backyard garden that’s 10 x 10, crop rotation doesn’t matter as much because you’re already planting a small and diverse mix of species, so the issues crop rotation deals with in theory shouldn’t be hitting you too hard. (Exception, if your garden is 100% tomatoes year after year or something similar, you could run into problems and might want to consider diversifying your plantings or starting a rotation of spots).

But when you start planting like we do of beds upon beds of related vegetable species, if you don’t rotate what you grow where, diseases can build up really fast. Plus, as organic farmers we don’t have great pest and disease control options. Yes, there are things that we can spray that are allowed in organic situations, but most of them don’t work very well and cost a lot more than conventional spray options (and you have to apply them way more, so labor costs go up). Our goal with crop rotation is to plant things in a way that we don’t have to spray and that they still stay healthy.

Crop rotation is one of the funny areas in gardening full of super rigid ideas and proscriptions. Unfortunately for the ease of filling out our organic application, our farm’s process is the opposite of rigid.

We have a lot of fields that were supposed to all be the same size and length but they aren’t. Our land has these odd little seeps and hills and gullies and areas of good and bad soil and spots with more or less wind. Over the past decade as we learned about the locations of all of these little non-conforming zones, we’ve tweaked and changed our fields around so now they aren’t uniform, they aren’t mathematically neat in the sense of being easy to crop plan around, and they can be a total hassle for managing materials around (do you cut your row cover to 150 feet or 200 or 285 or 315 feet?).

Up close you can’t tell how annoying irregular the fields are in length! Confession, though, the older we get the more we like the fields like this one that are only 150’ long, cause it’s only 75’ to haul out zucchini! also, this is from 2020, or the last year before we started splitting our crops into smaller plantings that are separated by other crops.

In short, our farm is terribly set up in terms of efficiency or ease of planning. Old school farmers would be quick to point it out, and likely ask why we aren’t growing in that gorgeous six acre lower field where we could have long beds and everything in one space. They are totally right, if you look at farming as a system of rigidly applying straight lines and strict rules onto the earth. And they would also be right in their context of farming—when you are only using the best land, which is uniform, flat, and well drained.

Alas, many first-generation farmers like us now can no longer afford that type of land as it’s also more valuable for houses and big box stores and parking lots. That leaves folks like us farming up in the hills on ground that was long ago abandoned by vegetable growers and left to field crops and cows.

Our soil is still perfectly fine and grows good veggies. But the land was pretty clear to inform us that it would not grow nice vegetables if we imposed a straight line, long row system onto it. We started that way and tried to make it work, before we realized that the effort to maintain consistent 200 foot long beds across the farm was more headache than we wanted. That nice perfect lower field has two diagonal seeps, a water table that backs up from the neighbor’s woods, an excessively healthy deer population, and soil microbial levels that are “100% pathogenic” for vegetable crops (yes, we tested). It does, however, grow some killer hay.

Year Two (2013): little did we know that this field would be one of our problem children… the next year we put it all into strawberries and then it rained so hard the water table submerged them all! Years of cover cropping and chisel plowing have eliminated compaction and it even grew healthy beans and potatoes during the 21.5” of rain in six weeks we saw last summer!

I can still remember the day in year 3 when we were like, “Okay, this field wants to only be 185’ long, and that field wants to be 315’ long.” Making that first change away from the “shoulds” of farm layout felt freakier than it should have. But then came year four when we realized that some of our fields just wanted to be at an angle to the sun, not the neat north-south or east-west of farming, but the messy nonuniform sprawling of geometry that matches the seeps and waterflows and slopes of our farm.

Somedays the current irregular messiness causes us (okay, Matt) to lose our minds—farming with uneven field lengths is a hassle more often than not. But other days, like after we got six inches of rain in a weekend with NO major erosion or washouts last year, it feels like we listened to what the fields told us to do, and are going to come out ahead.

All this tweaking and changing things around has left us pretty loosey goosey on our crop rotations.

If you read a book about gardening or rotations there will be rules like don’t put this in the same spot for three years or don’t put that in the same spot for six years. I know super organized farmers that have (perfectly uniform field blocks and...) 10-year rotation plans written out into eternity. We do not have those.

What we do have instead is almost twice as much space as we need each year so that if a field seems to have a problem or a new challenge we don’t have to use it the next year. Sometimes we skip using a field for two years if we really want it to take a break and get cover crops and build up a good carbon and nitrogen level in the soil.

Opening up a new field way back in 2014! This was the start of having extra fields available to rotate through and rest.

We pretend to plan our crop rotations in February using all our records from past years. We look at what grew where in the past five years, and then look at notes of what went on. Were there any weird diseases? How good did the crops seem? Do any of our resting fields feel particularly lush? We crunch some real data, but also go a lot on vibes of how the cover crop looked in a particular field. We make plans, but we don’t etch them into stone until we get into the fields after the snow in May. (And yes, you read that correctly, for those of you who don’t live at higher elevations in upstate New York we have to assume that there will be snow on the ground through the end of April as least half of the time.)

Even once we get growing for the season, every year we end up making at least one major rotational change due to disease pressure or weather. We’ve literally been almost ready to plant fields and then decided that the soil isn’t going to cut it for various reasons (three of our fields have dry zones that can be a problem in drought seasons, three have wet zones that can flare up in rainy years, and 3 are prone to get funky if there isn’t enough sun or wind). Fortunately, we have the capacity to make these major in-season changes thanks to the joy of having fields just hanging out growing cover crops for fertility that can be quickly conscripted into use!

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Are you starting to wonder what our fields look like—this is 2020 before we added “Nova Scotia” field…

Finally, just to make things messier (but also boost plant health and yield), starting in 2021 we began splitting up our crops from growing them in large blocks by planting system or crop family. We started looking at this after the 2018 Alternaria hell year (when that disease wiped out our half acre of fall broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage). Now, rather than planting 20 or 30 bed wide swaths (so 120 to 180 feet) of one crop, we have six beds of broccoli here and three beds of cauliflower there and three beds of cabbage over there in an attempt to break up even further potential disease cycles. This showed good potential in 2022, but also now means instead of juggling crop rotation through 22 separate planting blocks, we are juggling 72 or so uneven planting areas.

Check back in 2027 to see how it’s working for us for disease control!

And hopefully this helps any farmer reading this to feel less guilt if your rotations get messier than you think they should

And finally, apologies in advance to our poor organic certification inspectors, who will always end up with an extra dose of paperwork shuffling to reflect our rotational changes that pop up between February and summer when they come to do the on-farm inspection!

Some years we let our fall brassicas grow as our winter cover crop, which saves time and seed costs, but also lets there be some rocking late season food for pollinators!

Selling Cows and Money Matters

This winter I’ve worked part-time for the Northeast Farming Association of NY, which includes handling technical assistance requests from farmers about organic vegetable production. Most of these are pretty straight forward—helping read a soil test, suggesting places to source organic seeds, or brainstorming pest control options. Others hit me in the gut—like the growing numbers of dairy farmers wanting to learn about vegetable production after this year’s low milk prices forced them to sell off their cows.

Yup, this is one of my more downer blogs, but I’m writing it because I think it’s important to think about money in agriculture and where our food dollars go. Despite the price of milk seeming high from the consumer end, those dollars don’t trickle all the way down to the farm. This has been rattling around in my head since December’s Guardian article on increased farmer suicides (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-americas-farmers-killing-themselves-in-record-numbers) caught a lot of press in the agricultural world as it captured some of the stress that farmers, especially commodity farmers, are facing, and was reinforced by a more local story about NY dairies receiving information about suicide prevention from their coop last month WITH their milk checks (http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/dairy-cooperative-sends-out-letter-with-suicide-lifeline-and-other-contacts-20180212&&) which was then picked up nationally by NPR (https://www.npr.org/2018/02/27/586586267/as-milk-prices-decline-worries-about-dairy-farmer-suicides-rise).

The US is amazingly blessed with good land. We can feed the world a few times over, but we struggle mightily to chart a farm policy that keeps Americans fed, our farms and environment intact, and lets us all enjoy the healthy bounty of good crops raised well. Instead we’ve taken the tack of commoditizing our food, of raising vast quantities of what we can grow the cheapest (corn, soy, grain), and then processing them into nutritional oblivion. At the same time, we incentivize and reward farms to get bigger and bigger and run on razor thin profit margins so that one disastrous year or a hiccup in the market can flatten even the best producers.

The most frustrating thing with the US cheap food policy is that it has warped agricultural markets and depressed rural economies for decades, but food *still* doesn’t feel cheap to us as consumers because food purchases now vie with all the new expenses in our lives (internet access, cell phone plans, and rising health care costs eat up anything households save on food) and our darn salaries haven’t risen with inflation. According to the World Economic Forum, the US is one of only eight countries that spend less than 10% of household income on food and by percentage spends the least of any county (We’re number one?). From a consumer standpoint, this isn’t necessarily bad, but for the farmers whose life lies in the margins of a few cents more per pound of grain or milk, that’s a brutally low percentage.

The thing that’s frustrating for farmers isn’t that food is affordable (because many of us work hard to be as efficient as possible to keep prices down to feed as many people as possible). What’s frustrating can be summed up in the next picture:

Yup, 8.6 cents on the food dollar going into food production, with only 15.8 cents overall reaching farmers and the remaining 84.2 cents going to marketing. So as inflation hacks away at consumer salaries and the input costs of farming surge higher each year, the actual bit of the average food dollar getting back to the farms is less than two dimes. And it’s this situation that has suicide prevention resources going out with milk checks and me answering calls from farmers that feel the weight of the generations before them as they face losing their farm.

Do you want one more depressing graph?

This one is what I find most challenging as a household with two full time farmers. Farming households look economically sound on paper, bringing in a median household income above the national average. Yet median *FARM* income, the income derived from agricultural activities, is negative, which means there are a lot of American farm families spinning their wheels as fast as they can working all day farming, yet not actually earning any income from that labor! It makes me wonder how many executives at dairy or food processing operations work full time for free?

Beyond helping struggling farmers at NOFA-NY this winter, I also worked on projects that address more vegetable related production challenges. With the proliferation of new technology and growing numbers of farmers markets, grocery deliver services, and CSA-like aggregators, non-dairy farmers are facing looming financial challenges as well as their costs of farm inputs and labor keep shooting up, as retail and wholesale market prices plummet. Even vegetable farmers like us with more flexible marketing options than dairy producers are pinched, with many now selling the same crops they used to sell retail at wholesale pricing that doesn’t cover increased costs of production. In 2004, my take home pay from farming full-time was 35 cents on the dollar. In 2017, it was 9 cents, despite thirteen years of hugely improved production and efficiency.

Farming is one of those careers where it’s not so easy to walk away or make big changes, especially for established dairy operations. Current milk (and produce) prices usually cover costs of production but are hard to stretch over to capitalize new projects, and farm loans and mortgages are variable by the month, so as interest rates rise, producers will struggle to keep up with debt payments they have rather than be able to take on new debt to change gears. It’s also hard for long time farmers to conceive of not farming—how do you walk away from the barn where you’ve spent every day of your life milking in, just like the generations before you?

It’s clear there are no easy answers here—the world is changing and farms have to adapt. My concern as a farmer, a food-eater, and someone who loves our state and our local community, is how do we navigate through this transition without losing the things that are important to us, our community, and our environment? When I look at the ongoing “cheap” food policy where so little of the money spent on food reaches the real producers, I see it buying us an emptying rural landscape with fewer rural jobs and fields that are easier to fill with houses and developments, where we don’t get the chance to have the connection with the food that we eat and the farms that feed us. Yet this question of a broken food system is way beyond the scope of any easy fixes.

So to move off my downer note, what *can* we all do? One way to start is buying more locally—search out your farmers and buy directly from them so your purchases go to cover costs of production rather than corporate marketing. Local farms are vitally important for ecosystem services (all this open land helps trap carbon, filter water, and provides habitat way better than houses or roads do). Local food is also super fresh—it’s hitting your plate at its peak taste levels rather than getting shipped across the country (or the world). Supporting your local farms and farmers is also fun. Just in our town alone, there are farm festivals, farm tours, U-Pick gardens, concerts, great weekly markets, local food stores, a ton of CSAs, and even dairies selling milk directly to customers.

Beyond buying local and connecting with your farming neighbors, there are also organizations (and some politics) that you might want to pay attention to. On the political side, the Farm Bill is on the docket for this year (hopefully, though it’s not guaranteed given how Washington is recently). The farm bill is a behemoth piece of legislation that bundles a lot of social service programs with farm funding that reaches across the country. It’s certainly not a perfect bill but is vitally important to supporting farmers and food systems.

In NY, we have an invaluable organization called Farm Net (www.nyfarmnet.org), funded largely through tax dollars, and you can encourage your representatives to continue supporting its funding. Farm Net utilizes a network of professionals and volunteers to provide free, confidential assistance to farmers going through difficult times and is a much-needed resource right now. Finally, you can connect with and support local and national farm organizations, with Farm Aid being a good start to finding groups that help farmers (and I of course love NOFA-NY).

And what we are doing as farmers in our small corner of the country? Well first of all, we are keeping on keeping on. We are passionate about growing food for our neighbors and community, and don’t see this fading. From our farming perspective, with it being increasingly hard for farmers of all scales these past years, and the prognosis not great for many of our larger neighbors, it’s reinforced to us why we want to stay as a small farm and sell our food directly in our community. We want to know our customers, help folks enjoy and have fun with delicious, local produce, and open up our fields and farm so that you can see how we grow and connect with nature and the joy of growing things. Being able to sell more locally means we can save money on transportation and marketing and logistics, and we don’t need to sell our product to wholesalers for less than what it costs us to grow it. It also means we can focus on what our customers and CSA members want us to grow—good, healthy food for the community that tastes great. Finally, we are buying local as much as we can as well, to help support our neighbors as well.

We hope you have a great rest of the winter—go explore your local farms and drink lots of milk from local farms and co-ops!

Because all serious blogs need to end with a puppy!

Fruitful Experimentations

The nights are starting to get colder and summer crops are slowing down their production.  So, apparently, are farmers--we've been too busy to blog much during August, but with the shortening days we now have more hours after dark to catch up! Here are just a few random pictures from the last month of what's going on in the fields... we will be blogging more regularly now that the peak busy time of the year is receding!  These picture show some of the different crops we tried out on our new land (which in itself is a total experiment!)... most have been doing well.

Below are our indomitable eggplant and peppers.  We anticipated 1 to 3 fruits a plant, given how north we are.  But so far it's been closer to 10 to 15 fruits a plant, despite considerable flea beetle pest pressure!  The black plastic mulch does seem to boost soil temps just enough to let the plants really thrive, even in a northern region.  Next year we will try some hotter weather loving cultivars too.

Another winner (we hope) so far this year are some of the winter squash, which are mostly giant.  We think for both the eggplant and the squash it's the high calcium soil (since fruit crops tend to like lots of calcium).  Hopefully this translates into sweetness in the squash too!

Another winner (and fruit)--watermelons!  We just grew one variety this year, but they have been very prolific and sweet, so next year we will try adding yellow flesh melons and full size cultivars.  The cantaloupe and honeydew have also been very good--we just need to address the powdery mildew challenges, perhaps by planting a bit earlier.

This is our stand of popcorn.  We aren't really sure how tall popcorn is supposed to grow, but it's about 9 feet right now, despite the drought (though we cheated and had it on drip irrigation).  Ears are starting to fill out now, so hopefully the weather holds long enough for a good yield!

The ongoing drought meant that we had to add another drip zone for our larger fall crops.  Even then, with the soil so dry to begin with, we have struggled to provide enough water for the plants to grow.  We did invest in some row cover (the white stuff in the picture) in an attempt to exclude the flea beetles from the crops.

Overall, the crops seem to be growing well on the new ground.  There has been a few bug problems, but considering how stressed out the plants must be with the drought, the bugs have not been out of control (except on the poor kale).  We look forward to a good fall harvest, and lots of ideas and plans forming over the winter for next year!

More blogging within a week, we promise!