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!

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!

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!

What's in a CSA Share?

As CSA farmers, we will be the first to admit that CSAs are a bit weird. I mean, you are getting a box of veggies that you don't have a complete choice over, which in some ways is kind of the opposite of many modern shopping experiences! On the other hand, it's fun because it makes us all try new things (and who knows, maybe find our next favorite vegetable!).

As a CSA farmer, I can tell you that our number one winter planning priority is really trying to nail down the best mix of crops for those boxes to try and make the majority of our members happy and excited by the veggies each week. We spend at least two full weeks each winter just working on this, assessing feedback and how things meshed for the past seasons, and planning out better mixes for the upcoming season. Yup, we plan out every single item in every share for the whole season, though Mother Nature doesn't always cooperate on making those plans work out!

In general, we envision the shares as having a nice mix of certain "types" of crops each week: something salad that you can enjoy raw, something that's a cooking green for all our greens lovers, at least one fruiting or podded crop (for all but the first weeks, as these guys tend to need warm weather!), at least one root crop, and usually one unique or herb sort of crop. During the height of the season when we have more options, we add in more of the fan favorite veggies (broccoli, carrots, and tomatoes), and on weeks where we have some of the more interesting crops or things we know that a number of folks won't like--fennel haters, we are looking at you! ;), we make sure to stock those swap baskets extra well!

This year we made a handy dandy graphic to help share a better sense of what will be in the boxes and in the U-Pick fields each month... let us know if you have any questions, have veggies you want to request, or if you want to sign up for the CSA!

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