Mean Storms and the Frustration of Resilience

Tomorrow is the first mean storm of the season.

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

They are not over us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Real Life Biodiversity on the Farm: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind

The forces of nature are definitely one of the things farmers struggle with constantly (and okay, complain about). But after reading Wild Farm Alliance’s Biodiversity Guide (https://www.wildfarmalliance.org/biodiversity_guide) we realized that we don’t share enough about the even more awesome natural experiences that got us into farming and have us going back outside every day!

The thing about farming I couldn’t live without is being outside so much of the time and having the opportunity to see a stream of amazing, once in a lifetime events of cool animal interactions, year in and year out. Like thousands of close encounters with deer, rabbits, groundhogs, coyotes, mink, muskrats, foxes, and all the amazing birds. While some of those get-togethers aren’t always ideal (mink that’s prowling around the pond this winter, you better keep out of my hen house!), others are magical.

Small farms like ours are actually a pretty awesome natural environment thanks to their “edge” effect. This is where the woods hit the fields, in an edge that includes all the brushy bits and hedgerows that surround and split our farm. These edge zones are where you can see all the animals of the field hiding out for shade, all the animals of the woods sneaking through, and all the animals that just like to live in between the two environments in that thick in-between brush. It’s an incredibly rich reservoir of wildlife, a harbor for beneficial insects and predators, and a habitat for so many native plant and animal species.

As a small farm with smaller fields, we end up with more edges than the larger farms that surround us, which means that over the past six years, more and more critters are figuring this out and moving onto our farm. Each year we see new species and more birds and more good bugs (and yes, the edges also harbor bad bugs and plant diseases, but our hope is that in time the good will conquer the evil). We love seeing this because it means that we are succeeding in our goal to create a productive agricultural environment and good food while still supporting healthy animal populations. And while sometimes nature and its animal minions butt heads with us, for the most part we celebrate all the diversity around the farm.

For the blog this week, we wanted to take a few minutes to share our five favorite mini-animal interactions, and hopefully prime your eyes to be on the lookout for some awesome animal sightings of your own when you are U-Picking!

The Great Horned Owl creepers

First of all, I LOVE Great Horned Owls. All my life I’ve dreamed of seeing them in the wild, but despite spending most of my hours outside, I still never saw one until we moved to Fenner, where our farm is filthy with them. You think you are all alone doing chores, but then start to feel like you are being watched, and if it’s light enough, you might spot an immense silhouette of owl on a high branch against the sky.

In the woods around here, you regularly hear two owls: the Great Horned Owl is hoots most like the stereotypical owl (lot of “Whoot Whoots”), while the more common Barred Owl is smaller and has the call that sounds like “Who hoots for you?” Three years ago, we learned about the Great Horned Owls’ far less pleasant juvenile screeching phase when two baby owls hatched in the woods next to the farm and began serenading us with their god-awful noise every night. While we miss getting glimpses of the owlets, for our sleep and sanity we don’t mind if none nest nearby again!

Our most awesome owl experience came last summer while trying to catch a raccoon that had killed off 8 chickens (one of the times we got grumpy at nature). The best way to catch chicken killers is by baiting a trap with the dead chickens since they generally come back to the scene of the crime. In this case, a teenage Great Horned Owl must have seen a nice plump chicken just sitting there and decided, "Don’t mind if I do." The poor owl the next morning was quite peevish in the trap, snapping their beak angrily at us, but fine when released.

And in case you are wondering why I find these majestic guys creepy… well as someone who spends a lot of time alone in the fields, I am a bit of a podcast addict. One that sucked me in despite my normal aversion to any sort of true-crime things is the Criminal podcast. Specifically, this “Animal Instincts” episode where Great Horned Owls may or may not play a part in murder… http://www.thisiscriminal.com/episode-one-animal-instincts-1-31-2014-2/.

Birds that Block the Sky

The most amazing animal experience we had at this farm was in the first spring when we moved in. It was honestly a rough start, having moved to a place where we knew no one and neither of us having a job, and then starting a farm with no money on new land in a new community. We were in the front yard arguing about one of the many things we were debating over at the time, when eventually we realized that the flock of birds that was passing over was more like a river than flock. Millions of millions of millions of starlings and red wing blackbirds, in a sinuous curving line, almost so thick it was hard to see the sunset sky beyond them. For 16 more minutes they flowed above in waves.

It was truly one of the most amazing things either of us has seen, as the last stragglers floated north, all arguments forgotten amid the vast scope of moving nature. It made us a bit mournful to think about how even more spectacular the greater migrations of the now extinct past must have been, but also appreciate the starlings more, that even as an invasive species on this continent they adapted. And each year we enjoy seeing the mumerations of starlings and the redwings, but have never again been under that flowing feathery river… fingers crossed to be that lucky again.

A Knot of Toads

Our third year on the farm was the plagues of Egypt season, where we had eight of the ten biblical plagues hit at some point during the season. One of these plagues, however, was the cutest plague we’ve ever seen, that being five zillion or more miniature toads. Everywhere you went for a month, were mini-toads. Millions of millions of mini-toads, each smaller than a good size housefly—toads in the grass, toads in the greenhouse, toads in the lettuce heads, toads in the truck, toads up your pant legs. Walking was a nightmare as you tried to hustle the cute little things out of a patch of ground to put your foot down. Every year since then, we see a few of them, but nothing like that summer’s cuteness invasion.

Close Encounters of the Hawk Kind

We have pretty prime hawk territory, even without the temptation of fresh chicken. Rodents are the bane of many a vegetable grower, and we manage them with both the dog’s hunting and by keeping strips around the crop fields mowed super tight to enable hawks and owls a good shot at garden invaders. Every year we have a red tail nest nearby, so we see the big parents working the field most of the summer, before the less coordinated young take off towards fall.

Most of the time, we coexist okay with the hawks, having lost less than a dozen birds to them over the years. That doesn’t mean that they don’t constantly consider adding chicken to their diet. Last year Matt was collecting eggs when one of the hawks decided to shoot down and buzz the chickens. Let’s just say that neither Matt nor the red tail expected to run into each other when he turned around the corner of the house just at Mrs. Hawk zoomed by!

One of the things we like about our “factory farm refugee” hens (we call them that because they are raised totally indoors at the hatchery and don’t see the outside until they get to our place) is that they are a tough breed. They are scared witless of the sky for two weeks, and always retain a strong jumpy instinct of birds flying over, which serves them well for living in a place with so many raptors. Without any roosters to guard, the hens are more alert when grazing, always ready to jump under the safety of their house. What’s funny is that without any roosters, a few hens start to get more aggressive and exhibit rooster-like behavior, and that means that if a hawk goes for the hens and misses, the most aggressive hens will come attack it. From the air, advantage and surprise go to the hawk. On the ground, the chickens have far better speed and agility, and working together, they fight back and terrify hawks away!

Playing Chicken

The chickens of course, draw in a lot of unwanted animal attention as everything wants to eat some chicken. Matt’s funniest chicken encounter came when we worked in the Hudson Valley and he was holding down the fort while the farmer he worked for was away. Part of chores included evening chicken lock-in, which meant watering the hens, checking the nests one last time, and making sure they all made it into the house. Matt had shut the door and was counting the chickens off on the roost… fifteen, sixteen, seventeen,… wait a minute. There was a possum perched on the roost, tucked in tight between two hens, pretending as hard as it could be to be a chicken!

Mr. Le Pew

On Friday, we had a near miss with one of our local Mr. Pepes. On Thursday, Matt finally won the battle with the groundhog that spent most of last summer grazing in one of our fields. I’ll spare you the details, but since one of Beulah’s main farm dog assignments is total control of groundhogs on the farm (one of them can eat thirty CSA shares worth of crops in a month), he spent a good chunk of time playing with her and the deceased groundhog, while feeding her treats.

Thursday’s lesson stuck, since when we were out trudging Friday through the melting snow in the field, Beulah lit up with excitement when she spotted a groundhog-sized creature trundling towards us from the hedgerow. At 200 yards, it clearly looked like a groundhog to me as well, so I was cheering her own as she took off towards it. Yet as the dog raced closer, the “groundhog” started to shuffle around, revealing a long tail and a flash of one small white spot on its head. Its back end facing the pup and tail all fanned out, the mostly black skunk was holding its ground.

I don’t know if Beulah’s instincts kicked in or if she finally caught the switch to overtones of fear in my shouting, but about 15 feet out, she slowed down, looked unsure, and then slowly backed away before trotting back to me. Thank goodness!

I actually love skunks. Along with possums, they are mostly good animals on the farm, snuffling around and eating bugs, though both animals will happily and opportunistically kill chickens given the chance. The only problem is that they don’t co-exist well with dogs. On my farm in NH, I had a tool shed on skids in the center of the field, under which lived Pepe. Pepe would amble around the garden, pal around with the cat next door (they would walk together around the field and go under the shed to hang out), watch me garden from a safe distance away, and in general was an extremely polite little skunk. In our five years together, he never sprayed me or the dog.

One cold spring night I was worried about the freeze overwhelming my wood stove and small propane heater and killing our greenhouse starts, so I slept down in the field to stoke the wood stove a couple times that night. It was gross and propane-smelling in the greenhouse, so around midnight, I moved my cot and sleeping bag outside. I was sleeping soundly until some point in the middle of the night when I suddenly woke up. I looked at the dark sky, blazing with the stars and rising moon, and then turned my head to look at the greenhouse. What I saw instead, of course, was Pepe, his front paws up on the cot, his nose less than an inch from mine, little nose sniffling. We froze, staring at each other for endless minutes, the moon lighting up his glossy little eyes, before he jumped down and ambled off.

These stories are just a fraction of the awesome animals we’ve seen while farming, missing the bald eagles (okay, all the ones we’ve seen up in Fenner have been a bit underwhelming on the majestic part as they’ve all been on the road squabbling over road kill!), the ospreys hunched high over the pond and then dropping down to nab a fish, the foxes and coyotes pouncing on rodents in the snow in winter, or the fawns shyly peeking out from the hedgerows. And then there are the little animal miracles, that aren’t as big and flashy—the turtles laying eggs, the perfect orb weaver web, the bobolinks trilling their flying songs, or the killdeers’ perfect nest (and obnoxiously loud nest guarding). We hope when you visit next, you see some cool animals, and please share anything fun you notice!

P.S. You might have noticed we are bird nerds, it mostly snuck up on us after years in the field, where you start to realize how cool birds are. There are really great links to learn birds at Cornell’s Ornithology Lab http://www.birds.cornell.edu/Page.aspx?pid=1478.