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!

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!

Weather Roulette (the annual weather complaint blog in which your trusty farmer gets a bit Debbie Downer!)

[WC (weather complainer) warning - this is my annual cathartic weather venting. I’ll shut up after this, I promise!]

What a spring.

From a seemingly early start that morphed into what feels like unending wet gloom, it’s been a wild and muddy April and May this year.

The driest day we’ve worked ground so far this season is wetter than the wettest conditions we’ve ever worked land before. Working soil when it’s too wet can lead to problems like poor germination of seeds, a damaged soil structure, or crumbly, clumpy soil that makes weeding a PITA later. We’ve been focusing on building up our soil to be better, so it pains us to treat it so mean.

But on the plus side (I guess?), it’s actually been so dank and dark the weeds aren’t growing this year either.

Good news for this field… it dried out enough this week (thank goodness) and I’m seeding beans here today!

I try not to complain about the weather, I really do. [Matt wants to go on the record that he disagrees with that statement.]

I know that as a farmer, we throw ourselves into nature and hope for the best, but expect at times the worst. Plus, all our great, loyal customers and CSA members are stuck with us in this gloomy spring and hardly need their farmer complaining too!

The thing is, sometimes I do complain (hey, I’m only human). And sometimes after I complain, it’s been suggested that I just change careers to something that doesn’t rely on the weather.

And yes, Matt and I could pack it in and go do something else that would definitely be easier and more profitable. But that just solves the problem of increasingly damaging and erratic weather for two people.

Don’t worry, thanks to the high tunnel and our field raincoats, we still have veggies (this is last Saturday)… they are just slower than normal!

I’m a total podcast addict, given how much time I spend alone in the fields. I LOVE PODCASTS. Well this week, I listened to a grand total of four podcasts where at some point the discussion came to rural areas struggling with the economy/tariffs, farmers dealing with bad weather, or these situations combined. And in each case, the podcast hosts or guest, most of whom I normally respect, took some variation of the position that farmers/rural folks just need to change to more economically profitable careers and/or move to urban areas.

This got me steamed to the point of becoming that crazy lady who heatedly calls in to said podcasts.

Yes, on an individual level, a farmer or even ten thousand farmers can change careers or move. But at some point, WHO is going to grow our food? On an individual level, extreme weather fluctuations stress me and our farm out. But on a bigger picture level, extreme weather fluctuations terrify me, because I know how hard they are on food producers, and it’s not just our farm dealing with this, but the farms growing food for 7.5 billion people.

This is from last year… we haven’t had enough sun for rainbows yet in 2019!

The west has fire after fire, and is running out of water for both communities and the main produce production zones for the nation. The mountain west had snow this week, the plains have floods and tornadoes and hail, the upper Midwest and northeast (including us) are swathed in Mordor-like gloom with rain every other day, and the southeast is getting a bit of all of the above.

Yesterday’s initial forecast, when announced back on Tuesday, was for a medium chance of tornadoes and hail.

Not rain or mist or thunderstorms, but weather potentially so extreme there’s nothing we can even do about it. Thankfully, conditions shifted and let us off the hook, at least until Saturday when the next front comes through.

I know that weather changes and varies, and I know that climate change is this terrifying behemoth that it’s hard to wrap our heads around what we can do about it. But there’s just so much more darn energy in the atmosphere, that every storm and every weather alert has me jumping.

It’s like a game of Russian roulette, when you pray for the clouds to miss your farm each time, but know that if they do, it’s your neighbor on the other ridge or across town who will be SOL. Last night we could even see the violent rain (hopefully not hail) falling, and it was so close we know the farmers getting slammed by it.

If all of our nation’s farmers who feel like they are looking down the barrel of this roulette game changed careers this week, would we have anybody left to grow our food?

In the short term, the answer is yes, since we are just one minuscule cog in the international food system. Small, local farms sell at the edges of the same markets as giant multinationals, who are able to buy from the cheapest products anywhere on the globe. If Midwest farmers get drowned out this year, these big companies just source their soy and beef from farmers in the newly razed forests of Amazon Brazil. If NY bulk milk costs a few pennies higher to produce per pound, they just ship in milk from cows raised in massive air conditioned barns draining western aquifers.

These big companies don’t care yet that growers in some regions are dealing with weather extremes because they can shift to buy elsewhere for the same low prices. But when these far off Amazon producers or Texas desert dairies get their turn in the weather roulette disaster zone and the big food corporations come back to look for their original producers for soy or dairy or vegetables, what farmers will have weathered their turn at roulette and still be left?

Customers who buy local (and if you’ve stayed with me so far, I’m guessing this is you!) do a big part in helping the farms that work outside this system keep growing and keep our local communities vibrant and green and alive. (THANK YOU guys—I know that we and our fellow farmers at local markets hugely appreciate and rely on your support, especially in crappy years like this spring!)

Tiny Beulah thinks our customers are the best!

I also urge all of us, farmer and eater alike, to do what we can to learn about and try to mitigate climate change, whether that’s driving a bit less or putting pressure on our government to do more, so that we can make sure our next generation has plenty of delicious food to eat in the future.

Our takeaway as farmers this spring is that we have to get more and more agile, even as we try to figure out what that means—smaller operations, with more crops like mushrooms or livestock? A larger operation with more land under protective high tunnels? Starting to plant trees and nuts and fruits? Making protective raincoats for all our fields (don’t laugh, this strategy is what allowed us to plant this year’s peas, spinach, and lettuce on time!)?

And how do we keep our hope up as the clouds and mist continue to swirl around us? (I can answer that, it’s coffee, ice cream, cheese, and beer. Oh, and more coffee.)

Whatever we choose, it’s clear that we have to get smarter and quicker each year if we plan to survive the increasingly close rounds of weather roulette.

Now go out there and try to mow a bit more lawn (hmm… maybe we can just all agree to give up lawn mowing if it rains so much?) before the next rainstorm rolls through!

I know, the sky isn’t always being mean here!

Daylight Savings Edition: When Do Farmers REALLY Get up In the Morning?

Farmers in general get a LOT of questions, but this is actually the one that we get the most, and there is no good answer. (There's a farmer joke that the only answer people want to hear is 5:30, a time that is neither psychotically early or deviantly late!)

My answer is that as a vegetable farmer, I'm like a plant and get up at the same darn solar time everyday, but since that time is sunrise, it falls all over our fake human clock! [Full disclosure: I grew up in one of the non-time-changing states, Indiana, and 20 years later, I remain incredibly bitter about time changes for a solid month after they happen!]

Historically, farms all had cows to milk, and it's most comfortable for the cows to get milked at evenly spaced times each day, which means on a two a day milking cycle, you find farmers milk early (say 5am and 5pm) to eat dinner at a normal-ish time and see their kids before bedtime. Even now, dairy farmers (or farmers who work a second job) will often be out there in the barns at 4 or 5am doing chores. The cows don't care when they get milked and the animals don't care when they get fed, as long as it's evenly spread out and consistent, so a night owl could milk at 8am and 8pm and from the cow perspective, that would be cool (from a cultural perspective, the other farmers might give you a hard time!).

For us veggie growers, schedules vary more, which is why I don't have an easy answer to what time I get up, because dawn right now falls a lot later that it does in July. In the spring and fall, when we are out in the field but days aren't long enough for all our work, we tend to get up earlier to maximize daylight hours. However, in the summer when days get close to 16 hours, we at Hartwood Farm certainly aren't rising at the 4am breaking light!

There are two main reasons (beyond wanting more sleep) why we intentionally don't start working at 5am (when lots of folks think we start work--thank you all for having such high opinions of our ability to be up and at 'em so early).

First, in the north we don't have as much heat as California or Florida, but we get a lot more dew. We want to harvest crops when it's cool enough for best quality, but we don't want the crops to be too damp with dew, or the act of harvesting among wet plants can spread plant diseases around the farm from one dew laden plant to another (and for an organic grower, plant diseases are the bane of our existence that we work really hard to keep from spreading).

Some farmers are super early birds, so they brave the dew and get going at sunrise even in our area, so you can see a huge spread in start times for vegetable farms, including as early as 4:30am (ugh) and as late as 9am (decadent). For us, we don't want to be jerks to our poor employees with long commutes and we don't want people to burn out (which can happen fast when you start working long hours at manual labor if you aren't used to it!), so we have our team start at 8am in the cooler spring and fall months and at 7am in the summer months (only dropping down to 6am if we get a heat wave). We usually start harvesting from the most heat sensitive crops (the greens) to the least (tomatoes), which is why we don't have a lot of good photos of the greens, as we are always picking them in low light or with harsh early shadows (like below)!

So there's two votes from Matt and I to switch to Daylight Savings Time on a permanent basis... and if you have 7 minutes, the funniest take on farmer wake up times (and IMO the funniest CSA promotion video ever--I promise you no "Sky Eggplants" in our shares), can be found in this gem from Hugonaut Street Farm.