Improving the Farm
/This week I’ve taken a detour from our normal winter planning activities to work on a presentation for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of NY’s annual conference, which is happening this weekend in Syracuse, NY!
I’m talking about “In-Season Troubleshooting on a Vegetable Farm,” seeing as dealing with trouble seems to be my main skill set (or maybe it’s just we have the bad luck to get lots of opportunities to deal with things going wrong?).
Either way, I’ve come to the conclusion that the psychologically best way to get jazzed about the fresh, new growing season that is about to start is definitely not by looking through years of your photos to pick out all of the ones that are of disasters and farm troubles. Yes, I’m one of those weirdos that takes photos of all the bad things, and they hide there in our hard drive waiting to pop out at you between all the innocent gorgeous photos of shares and fields.
Remember when I was bit by a brown recluse? Yup, I stumbled across that scene in there in all its graphic glory (ick). How about when our tractor engine blew up? Check. When it rained 4 inches and everything flooded? Got it (only which time, since that happened three years running?). Deer damage, dead chickens, insect damage, weeds, if something was going wrong, I probably took a photo of it like some sort of demented disaster photojournalist.
After a few weeks digging into depressing pictures, I felt pretty down these past few days, asking myself, “Why am I doing this anyway?”
But yesterday, as I started sliding everything into the PowerPoint, patterns started showing up. We may have bad luck, but we do learn from our mistakes. We may have bad weather, but we have fundamentally shifted our farming systems bit by bit to deal with the nasty storms. We are nowhere near farming perfection (but is anyone?), and we don’t have the capital budget to make a few of the upgrades we need, but setting out these farm troubles in order, there emerges a steady improvement trend.
For instance, check out this early photo of our potatoes, when we were growing varieties less resistant to leaf hopper damage:
The variety on the left has no resistance, the one on the right a little bit. This was the year when we started thinking about changing varieties up.
Now look at a more recent crop after we switched to resistant varieties grown in organic systems (so they are bred to be used to bug pressure):
In addition to sturdier varieties, we now plant larger pieces of seed potato at wider spacing, which makes the plants healthier and gives them more space for airflow, to reduce disease.
We aren’t perfect potato growers, and how we produce them is totally different than we have on any other farms in the past, but we are certainly better potato producers for the challenges of our site (and that’s why we are able to have them in the CSA share more, when at first we couldn’t afford to grow as many!).
Here’s another fun contrast—this picture is our second season in Idaho (all our fields are named after states—if you hear us at market sounding like we are talking about fun vacations or trans-continental trips, it’s likely just us talking about farm chores and where to harvest things!). Here you can see that the soil is thin, rough, and completely covered with nasty husk cherry seedlings (they can become weeds super easily):
That picture is between 12 and 14 days since tilling and seeding (so less then two weeks without weeding!).
Since we now know that all the intense spring rains make for big flushes of weed carpets, we started using tarps in earnest last summer. The tarps smother the first round of weeds that germinate and can help keep nutrients from leaching out of the soil in heavy rains. Check out how nice they look, and this picture is after a month without any weeding:
My brother is a computer programmer, and in some of that field they use “agile” management, which I like to think about when I get frustrated (or as in the last week, discouraged) on the farm. When you work on software, you start with a “minimal viable product,” and then every week or two, you complete another iteration round of work on it, making it just a little bit better. They are accepting that they won’t be perfect at first, and just structuring work to focus on being better, not perfection.
As farmers, even as flexible, diversified farmers, we have a tendency to have our whole season planned out and set up in one shot, which means when things go wrong, it can sometimes feel like the whole season is a disaster.
One of my realizations this week is that we need to keep focusing on shifting to a mindset where our initial summer crop plan is the minimum viable product, but one that leaves space for us to do things a little better inside the summer, rather than making all sorts of big changes all in one clump in the winter.
Maybe our first lettuce planting is lousy. But we have 16 more that we can do better with. Maybe the weeds get ahead of us in one field. Rather than beating ourselves up, we just have a chance to do better and stay on top of them in the other eight fields.
And now, I’m going back to finish getting ready for tomorrow’s presentation, and looking at a few of the photos of all the good things that go right on the farm!
