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!

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?

What Keeps Farmers Up at Night?

I know, this is supposed to be my week for a happy blog, and I do have some in the works! But, I can’t stop thinking of this newsletter article from yesterday, so my phobias are bumping our happy greenhouse stories to next week.

Here’s the link to the newsletter that raised my paranoia level five notches.

(And yes, maybe I’d be less stressed if I didn’t spend my downtime during a pandemic reading about climate change, but I can’t help myself. It’s a problem I have.)

Let’s get back to HAIL. And insurance.

Ever since we got hammered at the farm in 2017, at the back of our heads every single time the sky turns dark is the question—is this the storm that destroys everything? Part of the decision to buy another high tunnel this year was wanting to put more high value veggies under at least a little bit of protection.

Hail is a weird problem because it’s so spotty and unpredictable. We might get it at our farm while our neighbor doesn’t. Once in 2016 after our big storm, we drove over to Greyrock Farm for an event, which is four and a half miles as the crow flies. Their fields were fine and ours were fine, but between the two farms, we drove through smashed branches and stripped trees.

Calling out hail as America’s most under-rated climate risk resonated with me, because even with Covid and heavy snow in May and random frosts and windstorms, hail is the one thing that deeply scares me as a farmer.

What do you do when the sky opens up like this?

Photo by Matt Morag in Tri State Neighbor article showing hail damage in South Dakota

Or this picture from poor Guadalajara in 2019 when they got three FEET of hail (picture from the NY Times, click on it for the story link)? WTH?

There’s nothing you can do. Heck, even with greenhouses and plant covers, there’s no protection for hail like that.

The newsletter highlighted insurance companies (specifically, car dealership insurers) and how they are collecting more data about the expansion of hail damage in the US. This brings me to insurance, a question we get from folks pretty regularly.

Yes, federal crop insurance is a thing, but it’s not as easy or straightforward as getting a policy for a house burning down, workers getting hurt, coolers failing and turning veggies to mush, or the delivery van getting into an accident (all of which we do have reasonable insurance for).

For crops, there are just so many factors that are part of insurance and of payouts—did the farm do what needed to be done to prevent a crop failure? Was there a real disaster event? Can you prove it? What about crops that are worth more than others—is that radish bunch worth 25 cents or 3 bucks? How do you indemnify a situation with as much fundamental uncertainty as farming?

We are the sort of farm that it’s essentially impossible to insure in a system aimed at commodity agriculture because we just grow so many crops, all in small amounts compared to five thousand acres of wheat or a thousand acre apple orchard. Over two thirds of our veggies go to our great CSA members, which some insurers consider an uninsurable marketing arrangement (since there’s “risk” inherent in the CSA relationship). Other insurance options are based on past income, but even in non-CSA sales at market, farm income fluctuates based on when holidays fall and if it’s rainy at market and what’s going on in a community or down the road. Even now that we’ve been in business long enough to secure a policy, it seems like a bad deal to pay in to something that only covers losses once they hit 50% and then only pays 50 or 60 cents on the dollar after losses hit that point.

Rain, Rain, Go Away! This is from one of the wetter summers (when fortunately we had some tomatoes in the high tunnel as well!)

Instead, we cover up crops as best we can when the sky turns grey, replant when the clouds solidify into hail, trust that our members and customers understand if things happen (in 2017, we were relieved that most folks were cool buying and eating veggies with some hole action), and hope for the best as much as we can.

Which brings me at last to something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year, and that lies at the root of my hail fears: uncertainty.

Most of what is stressful or hard in farming is the constant uncertainty that underlies everything you do when working in a field that intersects with nature. We can do our best, but still might not have success. Sometimes there’s a freeze or hail or injury or just plain old crop failure. We hedge our bets, plan for the worst, and build in all sorts of protections and redundancies, but there is always risk and uncertainty.

I am a super uptight, type A person with anxiety issues that likes to plan and control for everything. I have absolutely no idea why I like farming and survived in this field all these years coexisting with the level of uncertainty farmers have every minute of every day (maybe it’s the beer or the ice cream?).

I never considered the ability of farmers to develop and practice coping skills around uncertainty as something positive. In fact, most of my adult life I’ve worked to be less anxious about uncertainty.

It’s only in a world now shaken up from Covid, where we can’t plan ahead like we used to, or feel confidence in knowing what’s coming, or be able to insure our way to a positive outcome, that I’m finally seeing that learning how to deal with disconcerting levels of uncertainty is a skill I guess I’m okay with having. But it’s also a series of fears, stresses, and experiences I wish that all you non-farmers out there could have been spared, because like hail, uncertainty sucks.

This was the scariest storm cloud of 2020, but it was all creepy menace, but not a mean field destroyer!

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.