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!

Farm Math and the Unpriceable Deliciousness of Snap Peas

Back on the math train we started last week, we did yet more number crunching this winter for the first time. I promise I will move off math for next week!

Because we are a CSA farm, we’ve never done an item by item cost of production analysis because we know that some of the crops we grow are simply not going to be profitable. I know that it probably costs us $11 a quart or something crazy to grow and harvest peas and get them into the shares, but they’re so important and delicious that we will never cut them out.

But since we kept extra time and labor records this year and inflation made for uncomfortably crazy prices in farm supplies, it seemed worth the effort to take a week and crunch these numbers for the first time. It also is the increasing “in” thing to do, as a lot of farmers in the northeast are getting to our certain age and establishment level and looking ahead to the big questions—can we stay in business as a farm? For those with kids, what does it mean for their chances to get out into the world—do they have money to send them to college? Can we ever earn enough through farming alone to save for retirement? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but we do know that it’s likely worth digging in to our farm’s specific numbers more these next few seasons.

And don’t worry members, we aren’t planning to cut beloved crops from the CSA, but it’s more that we just want to know when we are growing something that’s costing more than we think it does.

There’s storm’s a’coming, Pa!

In the past as a CSA, we just calculated the average of what it costs to run the farm and stay in business, and then divided that out over the number of beds we have on the farm. So if a crop brings in less than $600 per 200 linear feet of bed space, we have to pay to produce it. (It’s not that it’s not profitable, but that it’s negatively profitable!) If a crop brings in more than $800 per bed, then it contributes to our income from farming. Crops that fall between these two numbers can go either way, depending on how much labor they entail.

This is why we don’t grow a few crops at all. For instance, sweet corn on our farm (with 2013 pricing) yields about $162 per bed of saleable product, which means it costs us $450 out of pocket for every bed we grow. We don’t mind growing some crops that are below average value, but growing an acre of corn for our size CSA would literally mean that both Matt or I would have to work an second off-farm job overnight during the growing season just to subsidize that corn (and we farmers need our beauty sleep)!

If we don’t get enough sleep, we go out into the world camouflaged as vegetables

Cost of production is a funny thing though, because a farm in a different place or with different tools might find sweet corn an easy crop for them. We aren’t set up for sweet corn and there are so many corn pests around here is why our economics on corn are so terrible.

Big farms (or ones that aren’t mostly growing for a CSA) usually specialize in a small number of crops and run very tight cost of production analysis because if you’re going to sell 1 million units of carrots you need to make sure that it doesn’t cost you fifty cents more per unit than you’re selling them for.

I find this sort of thing incredibly interesting because it’s like a giant math problem with infinite intangible variables.

Like peas, how much do we really value peas?

The first peas of the season (which I promptly ate and did not share)

Sure, you can get them in the store for a couple bucks shipped in from Mexico or China or someplace much cheaper than here but are those ones worth eating at all, even at only two or three dollars? Whereas in June, we’re all starving for fresh vegetables, everything that’s ripe is a root or leafy green, and then all the sudden there’s this insanely sweet podded treat. Of course it’s worth double or triple the price of those bland off-season snap peas!

Now maybe none of us are crazy enough that we would want to pay $8 for a pint of peas, but that’s why you are in a CSA 😉 For every box of peas that costs twice to grow over what it’s “worth,” in a CSA we can afford to produce it by growing a crop whose production costs are half of what it's “worth.” In short, you should thank that bunch of kale for doing the work of subsidizing those snap peas!

Any guesses who’s doing double duty in this share box?
The kale, onions, and eggplant are doing a little overtime to make up for the (slightly underperforming) mini peppers and beans :)

Doing this whole cost of production analysis for the embarrassingly first time in 20 years of running a farm (in my defense, I’ve been a CSA the whole time) turned into a surprising ego boost since my estimations (of dividing the farm into beds and rating crops as what percent they under or over-perform) were 100% on the money.

Our time analysis (in last week’s blog) surprised me, but our crop cost analysis, not so much. (If you want to find our biggest loser, we posted it over on our Instagram feed.)

But I won’t keep you in suspense, it’s broccoli, the bane of my farming existence and surprisingly beloved by more people than you expect.

But combining this analysis with being the child of an economist thoroughly unchaperoned in the library stacks (what parents would let their third grader read “It” (I’m paralyzed by clown fear to this day) or sixth grader read Adam Smith?) really just makes me want to go off and create my own darn economic system, possible based around vegetables, because sometimes it feels like our financial measurements are that darn made up.

We can reduce all our products down to commodities and the tight numbers of money and labor in and out, but do numbers like that hold when a good pea picked at the perfect time is such perfection? Or does/should food exist in an intangibly special space beyond the dullness of economic value? And how do we move food system and vegetables beyond the dismal science of economics so that everyone can enjoy the amazingness of a perfect pod?

The Nature of Time

One of the things that I have a love/hate relationship with on the farm is time. Individual days and weeks can sometimes seem so long (especially when that harvest list runs onto three pages!), but since there’s so much repetition of patterns and tasks from year to year and day to day, it becomes hard to hold onto time beyond the general feel of seasonality.

But on a farm of our scale and crop mix, time is the main limiting factor!

Raising diversified veggies on a smaller scale is kind of a crazy thing to do (more on this topic in later blogs). Last year we had something around 700 plantings total, of over 150 crop varieties, and each was handled slightly differently at each stage (seed starting, greenhouse water and heat, planting, cultivation, harvesting, and post-harvest).

When you think of farming, likely tractors and planting and weeding pop into your brain. Yet the actual growing of the crops doesn’t even get anywhere near 50% of our time! We actually always have a few nice young guys call wanting specifically to be hired for a tractor work job each year, which we don’t really have. We use our tractor hard, but even after seven years of what feels like constant use, it barely logged over 2100 hours (that’s the tractor equivalent of a car’s 100,000 mile mark or so). It works out to about 300 hours a year, which spread out over 30 weeks of active field work, is only about 5 hours a week of sitting down tractor time each for me and for Matt!

Note Beulah’s careful supervision of the plow. For some reason, the plow and the field conditioner (but not any of our ten other tractor implements) require constant monitoring?

In 2021, we took out a loan to build a shiny new heated greenhouse. We filled it up almost immediately (I have utterly no idea how we managed to grow almost the same number of flats in our old 17x36’ one for so long—the new one is 30’ x 72’ and literally was filled to the brim).

My old greenhouse was bought in 2004, so this addition really impacted the economics of starting seeds for us. On one hand, we have to pay for the tunnel and the added heat needs, but on the other hand, we are saving A LOT of time on shuffling flats and banging into each other all the time. However, we needed to recalculate what it costs to grow a flat so we know how much to sell plants for, and to guide our annual decision of if things that can be both directly seeded into the field or seeded into the greenhouse and transplanted later make more sense one way or another. (For instance, in spring we transplant spinach since it gets a big jump to be ready for the first CSA boxes, but in summer it’s more cost and time efficient to just seed spinach in the ground.)

All the seedlings getting big for CSA shares and farmers market sales

This greenhouse math and stop-watching seedings started our first year of doing time analysis of how long things take (extra shout out to Rachel for being the best at remembering to do so and leaving reams of helpful notes for me this winter)! In case you are farming along at home, or a math nerd, when the greenhouse heat is running, it costs us between $25 to $40 per day to run the greenhouse for both heating and watering (this doesn’t reflect construction costs or supplies/seeds). Yet what was most interesting to learn is that even with relatively high propane costs, the human time of watering flats costs as much as the heating as soon as it’s over 32 degrees at night (watering well is a skill that just eats up time, but also allows us to really observe crops for potential issues).

This inspired me to do a few more labor time analysis this summer—how many hours do we spend harvesting? Can our harvesting metrics improve? In the heat of the CSA—those 18 weeks where the CSA is going—we spend a solid 65% of our time as a farm team solely picking veggies, so any slow downs in harvest (or speed-ups) greatly impact how much time we have to do other tasks on the farm.

Harvesting daikons on a chilly morning, putting them into groups of ten for efficient boxing and counting!

We were a little short staffed this summer (we strive not to let this happen but some years it does), so I ended up having to harvest one crop for the week pretty much every Sunday morning. This labor shortfall did give me a nice controlled window, however, to time different crops and how long harvest and washing and packing runs.

I have to confess here—while harvesting is typically most of our team’s favorite work on the farm, it’s hands down my least favorite activity (which is too bad, because I’m the fastest harvester so I never get excused from it). What I love to do is WEED. I could weed 12 hours straight and be happy as a clam. Unfortunately, I never get to live my dream because we spend so much of our time managing the farm to have fewer weeds that I have to harvest rather than embrace my OCD heaven with a hoe.

Harvesting again… note the sad deficit of weeds in the background.

Anyhow, we didn’t perfectly capture everything, but the result of all this recordkeeping was that we have our first look at where we actually spend time on the farm (rather than where we “feel” like we spend time on the farm).

Because the feeling of time lies. If you are having fun or in the zone (or me with my hoe), you can look up and be amazing that it’s afternoon or the sun is setting. But other things FEEL like eternity. For instance, when we go into the zucchini or cucumber mines, it feels like all four of us have been harvesting fruits out of their scratchy walls and floors for eternity (or at least three hours). But the darn stopwatch tells us it’s only been 45 minutes.

This temporal reality check was super helpful this winter as we think about upgrades for the 2022 season. We farmers so often think about equipment upgrades on field work (like new plows or tillers or all that stuff), but through time analysis, it became clear that we really need efficiency tools to help with harvest and washing of the veggies! So greens spinners and more shade tents and things on wheels. A super unsexy cooler floor overhaul. And of course so many more tote bins to harvest in to!

More math next week! But we did a story (saved in favorites) on our Instagram if you want to see more of the time breakdown numbers!

Walking a Mile in Others’ Muck Boots—Farmer Dramas and Impostor Syndrome

It’s January, which means it’s the season of farm conferences. In this pandemic year, it’s the season of a LOT more farm conferences than the one or two events we normally would attend in person, since all education is now online.

My monthly calendar looks like I’m back in school, with at least one class three or four days a week for the next couple months. Wherever I am on the farm, if I’m within Wi-Fi range and have my headphones on, I’m probably listening to a webinar.

One thing that I love about being farming is this sheer bulk of information we need to process, and the different things we can tweak to be just a little bit better. Every year, we use language and science, biology, geometry, chemistry, marketing, financing, graphic designing, accounting computer programing, and a truly staggering amount of algebra. (Seriously, diversified vegetable farms are algebraic machines—if you have x members who get 3 cucumbers a week and y members who get 4 cukes a week, and you get 2 cucumbers a foot for three weeks from one planting, calculate how many feet of cucumbers you need to guarantee 8 weeks of adequate member cucumberization…)

No cukes, but tons of other algebraically derived peak summer veggies!

It’s been one bright light this gloomy winter to have the chance to refresh old ideas and hear from farmers with new research—even if we just learn just one new thing from a two-hour class, that can really help us get better food from our farm to our members. So far, I’ve learned a new member database system (with free software to boot!), alternative long-term storage strategies for keeping winter squash, and that we can store a wider range of crops for winter (radicchio and cauliflower, I’m gunning for you!).

Yet it’s also been frustrating to hear a bit of the absolutism that seems to reign now from our veggie fields up into government and industry.

Just like in the bigger world, us farmers get into hot dramas. (Bet you non-farmers didn’t know that!)

And maybe ours are even more intense than “normal” drama, because we’ve got opinions and they have ample time to germinate and grow/fester as we drive our tractors, push hoes, or wash carrots stuck alone in our own minds. I have seen people almost come to fistfights over soil management, watched dozens of arguments about pesticide use, seen friendships break up over grazing management (as well as two marriages end building greenhouses), and personally been told what a lousy farmer I am way too many times to count. I have a friend out of the dairy industry who swears it’s only us vegetable farmers that have drama—her theory being that we northern plant growers have too much darn time in the winter to stew, unlike the dairy farmers that wake up at 4am *every* day, and are constantly too tired to argue!

Rutabagas ain’t got no drama! We are excessively successful at long term rutabaga storage—let us know if you have a hankering!

I wanted to write this particular blog as a boost to the other smaller farmers out there, as well as all you home gardeners, homesteaders, and backyard gardening wannabes, to encourage us all to work within our own systems and constraints and learn what works best for the land we are working with—which may not be what works best for others’ land! As a gardener/farmer, you are in the process of becoming the number one expert on your site, and your learned experience will give you guidance to help figure out your way of growing.

Because in farming, there is not one right way to do things, but rather a set of myriad possible paths that might fit your land, time, and financial needs. For some of us, that could be no till and deep soft beds tucked in every winter under 12 inches of leaves. For others of us, that might be growing in pots or plant protection under tunnels and greenhouses (pro-farmer tip for fellow Fenner-ins—leaves don’t stay where you put them up here!).

We farm outside of Syracuse, NY on the north edge of the Allegany plateau. It’s the northern end of hundreds of miles of hilly, rising high ground that sweeps up from the Appalachians and Pennsylvania, before dropping 1300 feet to the Great Lake plain half a mile north of our farm. It’s beautiful and green and rolling up here—a big sky filled with swirling clouds, roiling with winds coursing around and over or slapping against that escarpment.

Fenner does skies well (well, when we can see the sky through the snow these days).

Vegetable farming in Fenner is hard as heck. Because we are extra crazy (or maybe not that smart?), we are organic farmers, which makes things even harder. We couldn’t produce on our commercial scale if we weren’t darn good farmers. But some days (or seasons) the very act of trying to grow vegetables up here feels like we’re slamming our heads pointlessly against the wall.

In order to guarantee our CSA members and customers a high-quality product, we do use practices that I’d skip if I was growing in other, more mild conditions. We have high tunnels and row covers, and use some plastic mulches to keep our ground temperatures up, while minimizing soil compaction from the extreme rains of recent years. We rotate fields, try to keep our ground covered (even if only with plastic sheeting), plant soil building cover crops, and encourage air flow and healthy plants. And with all these steps, our land and the effectiveness of our farm systems are slowly but steadily growing better each year.

And yet, even against the lens of that slow success (and knowing that just by surviving as a small farm these days is a success), I am constantly doubting myself, especially when I weigh our farm against growers in more mild climates. (There’s that darn impostor syndrome!)

This is not even a scary cloud for us. Scary clouds are spinning or would already be smashing all the tender veggies up with hail by this point!

We get asked endlessly about expansion and doubling our CSA and growing wholesale. Most times it’s helpful suggestions of people that want to work with us or see us do more or reach more markets. This last year some of those asks were more in the upset range, after we ran out of capacity so quickly to sell any more CSA shares.

Our truth is that we are good enough farmers to know our limits. Sure, maybe we dream too small. Maybe we should go back and manage farms on better land for someone else.

But there’s also such appeal of learning to do something hard and becoming good at it, because sometimes life is hard, and it would be good if we are able to grow local food for community futures in all regions (even our windy, extreme one).

I like the constant learning and challenge of evolving the farm systems as new technology and research comes online. I appreciate how the internet and greater connectivity helps communities that have been growing much longer on this continent share how they manage and adapt. There’s so much to learn and try out there, with eons of agricultural systems already tested and continually being re-tested, that it seems a poor plan to get stuck in one immutable this-is-how-thee-must-grow system.

And I also feel like there’s lots to learn from farms like ours, growers that are plunked down onto the more challenging spots but who still make things work. These past two years, the weather for much of the eastern US was lousy. The weather for us on the escarpments of Syracuse was “normal,” in that it was also lousy, but within our expected range of weather. This isn’t to say we don’t struggle or aren’t terrified of hail and windstorms, but that we are used to those challenges. Our farm systems are set up to operate a commercial organic vegetable operation knowing that we will likely get 4 inches of rain in an hour, 60mph winds (and weeks of 20mph standard breezes), and either eight weeks of daily rain or not a drop of rain. Drought, heat waves, never cracking 80, going from 30 to 90 in a week, heavy snow in mid-May? Been there, done that.

So this is my call for all us farmers and gardeners—to feel more confident in how we grow on our spots, to feel open to constantly learning and questioning and seeking new ways, but to not be judge-y about others who are finding their own ways.

Do you have some farm or garden tactics that you don’t having to use, but really make a difference on your site? What are your favorite farming education resources? I’m partial to NOFA-NY (their conference is running this week) and Cornell Small Farms. And we are always happy to talk with farmers trying to learn how to deal with wind (our specialty!)

Another perfect day in this drought summer (we LOVE dry summers here), where Princess Peapod cruises for shade.