Economy and Agriculture: The Future

As I explained previously, the number of farmers and folks who live on farms is at an all time low in this country, having dropped from 90% in 1790 to less than 1% today. Why is that, exactly?

Well, the way conventional farming works these days makes it very hard to make a living just by being a farmer. According to the EPA, 40% of farmers list another occupation other than farming, and another 14% of farmers are retired. The implication is that farming is just not that lucrative.

Au contraire, says the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. According to a 2010 study of theirs, farming can have quite the economic impact for a region... but you have to do it right. 

The study analyzed the impact of expanding fruit and vegetable production in six states in the upper Midwest (IL, IN, IA, MI, MN, WI). The study looked at 28 different fruits and vegetables, but did not include crops that are already being grown in ample quantities (e.g. sweet potatoes, corn and apples). The study examined two different scenarios. The first looked at the economic impact of increased production on the farm level; the second scenario at the impact of increased production for 28 metro areas in and around the six states.

In the first scenario, the study found:

• Increasing production of 28 fruits and vegetables in the six states could mean $882 million in sales on the farm level, more than 9300 jobs and $395 million in labor income. 
• If half the increased production were sold in producer-owned stores, this would mean 1405 establishments, 9652 employees, and over $287 million in labor income.
• Only 270,025 acres would be needed to grow the needed produce, roughly the same as the cropland in just one of Iowa's 99 counties.
• The job gains would be significantly higher than the number of jobs produced by the same number of acres under conventional production. For example, increased fruit and vegetable production in Iowa would result in 657 farm-level jobs, compared to just 131 jobs currently available with the same land under corn and soybean production.

In the second scenario, the study found:

• Increased fruit and vegetable production for the 28 metro markets would result in more than $637 million in farm-level sales and 6694 farm-level jobs - there are currently only 1892 jobs available under corn and soybean production in the area.
•  An additional 6021 jobs would be created due to the farmer-retail direct economic impact of the increased production.

Here's what I take away from this study: there is no substitute for diversified farming. Growing a large number of different crops not only makes a farm more marketable to consumers (who wants to just buy corn all the time?), but insures that if you have one crop fail due to a poor year, you have a back-up with your remaining crops.

Also, diversified farming is far better for soil health - growing the same crop in the same area will deplete the soil of necessary nutrients. Not to mention, the deer will know exactly where to find your green beans. Tricky devils.

So now we can agree: farming can, in fact, be enough to make a living. But there are still obstacles for those who are trying to make it in the farming business. So stay tuned in the days ahead for Part III!

Goblins, Ghouls and Garlic

Since it's that time of year where vampires take center stage, I thought garlic would be a pertinent subject. And it just so happens that we planted 2.5 rows of it this this week. What serendipity!

Garlic has got to be one of the easiest crops in the history of putting things in the ground and watching them grow. You take a clove, bury it about three or four inches down, and leave it over the winter... and voila! By spring, you have an entire head of garlic that you pull out, cure, and can store for what seems like an unending period of time.

I'm simplifying things a teensy bit, of course. But garlic is actually very easy, requires fairly little maintenance once the planting is done*, and if it is cured correctly, it won't go bad for a long, long time. Compared with pretty much any other crop, garlic is just about scraping the bottom of the "I need constant supervision" chain.

Of course, you do have to plant the garlic first. And that can be quite a process.

First, you start with a head of garlic.

Every head of garlic comes with many cloves. Each clove, if planted, can produce another head of garlic. You want a head that is plump, with fairly large, well-formed cloves.

Since you're planting the cloves separately, you have take them apart.

Multiply this by 50 pounds of garlic.**

Once the cloves have all been torn asunder and any rotten ones removed, it is time to plant. In the past, Susan has done this by using the very labor intensive method of digging four trenches in each bed, laying the cloves out, and covering them with dirt. Brian, however, stepped in to save the day.

This device is called a dibbler. Seriously. Brian made it out of scraps in the garage, based on the devise he used last year to plant garlic.

The dibbler is 30 inches across, so it fits our beds perfectly. The pointy bits protruding from the bottom poke holes in the dirt, into which individual garlic cloves fit quite snugly.

One person "dibbles," going ahead of the rest of the crew and dibbling the row with hundreds of tiny holes. Everyone else follows, poking the cloves in and brushing dirt over the top. What could be easier?

Garlic also likes to be mulched, so I guess I know what we'll be doing with the forty bales of hay that arrived this evening.





*If you're growing hard-necked garlic, you do need to watch for scapes, the curly green tendrils that grow in the spring. If you let scapes grow, the garlic will be ruined, but cutting them back sends all that energy back into the bulbs, and THEN you can eat the scapes. What could be better?

**To put this number in perspective: our 50 lbs. of garlic yielded two and a half rows. Our rows are 90 feet long, so that's approximately 225 feet. To put this yet further into perspective, the farm we visited on Tuesday ordered 150 lbs. of garlic. Radical Roots, an organic farm in the valley, also ordered 150. Waterpenny Farm, which I will talk about in a later post, ordered 220 lbs.

Eggplant Galore

As mentioned in my last post, the Nightshade family is coming in droves right now. That means we have eggplant, and lots of it.

I'm sure many of you have met some of my eggplant friends already. But in any case, here's a little picture tour of our 90 foot eggplant row.

Berenjena

Rosa Bianca

Imperial Black Beauty

Listada di Galidia

Eggplant has been interesting to cook with, and I've had some definite failures that landed me in Mush City. But there were two notable successes recently. The first was Seared Eggplant "Steaks", which I served with a reduced elderflower wine sauce with garlic and parsley. Not as weird as it sounds, I promise.

The other was Eggplant Parmesan:

Not the best picture (forgot to get one before everyone dug in), but whatevs. The weird green things on top are fresh basil leaves. Next time, I'll probably put them on about five minutes before serving so they won't look so decrepit... they did taste very nice and aromatic and basil-y, however. So I'm not too concerned about it.

Incidentally, I made the eggplant parm with fresh tomatoes ALL from our farm. The basil's ours too. I used a mixture of eggplant - a little of everything except the Berenjenas, which I hear are better for stir-fry. The Imperial Black Beauty in particular baked well, and was incredibly sweet and delicious. 

Disgusting Farm Experience #126: Blossom End Rot

It's Nightshade time. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants... they're everywhere. Escape is impossible. Assuming you would want to, that is.

We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 tomato plants, which is actually a slightly conservative estimate on my part. I've literally dreamed about harvesting tomatoes, more than once.

Tomatoes have plenty of problems. Just about everyone's heard about tomato blight, for example, which caused all those problems in 2009 when plant distributor Bonnie Plants sold thousands of infected plants through Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot and K-Mart.

I never heard about blossom end rot before this year, though.

Caused by a lack of calcium in the soil, blossom end rot starts as a tiny brown spot at the blossom end of the tomato. As the tomato grows, it expands to rot away the whole fruit if you let it.

The way we try to prevent this extremely disgusting problem is by spraying the plants with a calcium solution, using our highly fashionable backpack sprayer.

By spraying the calcium as a foliar feed, the plant takes it in and then distributes it to the soil - good news for future plants, since the soil here has an acidity problem.

It does, however, make the skins of the tomato a little tough. Well, a lot tough, actually. We've been aiming for a weekly spray, which - let's be honest here - doesn't always happen.

Even with blossom end rot, we have more tomatoes than anyone knows what to do with. Good thing the chickens like them.

Color Me Happy: The Many Shades of Summer Produce

The tomatoes are finally coming in, and they are delicious.

Remember when I planted these back in May? They're taller than me now. Not like that's a big accomplishment or anything.

We also have eggplant (which I think look like little old ladies - can you see her?)...

Zucchini...

Peppers...

(which are delicious cooked in olive oil over high heat and sprinkled with sea salt)...

...and copious amounts of basil.

Based on the taste explosions I've experienced thus far, the rest of summer is promising to be extremely tasty.

Paperwork and the Farm

The concepts of paperwork and bureaucracy seem antithetical to farming, which we tend to think about as practically the most natural activity one can do, short of actually going to the wilderness and living off the land. The farmer pays close attention to her fields and livestock. She touches the earth with her bare hands daily, is far more in tune with the geography and weather than the average person, and depends upon the well-being of her beets and fennel, grass and sheep for her health and livelihood.

And yet... there is paperwork. A hefty amount of it, too. If you are USDA Organic Certified, that is. Which Brightwood Vineyard and Farm happens to be.

We must write down everything we do on the farm - and I do mean everything. We write down what we plant, which rows, how many feet. We record every "input" (e.g. compost or fertilizer) that goes on the plants. We meticulously catalog how many pounds of every single piece of produce we harvest, how many feet of each bed we harvested, the quality of the harvest, the seed lot numbers, and where it is going.

This, of course, is nothing compared to the leviathan piles of paperwork that Susan faces whenever her USDA Organic Inspection comes around, which it did last week. Documentation proving that her seeds are organic, and if they aren't, a minimum of two letters proving that she tried to find organic seeds and couldn't. Pictures of cover crops and videos of said cover crops being tilled into the field. Lists of every single seed she has purchased in the last year, if it was planted, where it was planted, and organized by a seed lot number that she assigns it. Maps of the farms, showing how they look in relation to one another, storage facilities marked, vegetable fields marked, livestock areas marked... heck, everything marked.

All this time and effort spent on paperwork appear, to me, completely anathema to the idea of farming. Most of the farmers I know became farmers because they wanted to be linked closely with the land, not so they could sit inside and stare at a computer for hours each week. That's certainly not why I chose this job.

Just how necessary is being USDA Organic certified, anyway? I just finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and he does an excellent investigation of two opposing viewpoints of this topic. On the one side, you have "Industrial Organic": large-scale organic farms that farm hundreds of acres of crops or rear thousands of livestock without pesticides, herbicides, or antibiotics. These include such enterprises as Earthbound Farm, Cascadian Farm, and Horizon Organics - familiar names to anyone who frequents the organic aisle of their local supermarket.

Diametrically opposing these farms is Joel Salatin, the farmer who runs the now infamous (in farming circles, at least) Polyface Farm in Staunton, Virginia. Salatin does organic livestock, but he isn't USDA certified as such. He refuses to be. And Pollan provides plenty of salty quotes to illustrate this point. For example:

We never called ourselves organic - we call ourselves 'beyond organic.' Why dumb down to a lesser level than we are?

And my personal favorite:

Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians - we just want to opt out. That's all the Indians ever wanted - to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches...But the Western mind can't bear an opt-out option. We're going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.

So that's how Mister Salatin feels about the subject. And, honestly, I identify with him to a large degree. Big Organic has no soul - it has compromised the spirit of the organic ideal that started in the 60's.

But, if we compare conventional farming and Big Organic farming, there is very clearly a lesser of two evils. Although Big Organic farms may be "free range" in name only, may look exactly like a conventional farm from the outside, they are much more environmentally friendly. They aren't degrading their soil and polluting the land with pesticides. They aren't pumping their broilers or cattle full of hormones. Said chicken may not be living a life full of chicken enjoyment on the open farm, but at least we, the consumer, know that it is the healthier option, for us and the earth.

But honestly...the best option of all is to go to a local farmer's market and purchase food from someone you trust.

These are the farms that fall in the middle of the extremes. And the choice of whether or not to get USDA certification is a highly personal one that each of these farmers must make. Do their consumers care? Are they willing to put in the extra hours, poring over hundreds and hundreds of papers until their eyeballs bleed? (Figuratively speaking.) For some farms, it's a choice they feel is necessary. For others, not so much.

Microgreen Madness

Although the farm's microgreens production is technically not organic - Susan can't get most of the seeds organically, although we obviously raise them without any non-organic inputs - it's still a fun part of what we do.

Microgreens are exactly what they sound like - tiny versions of plants such as basil (above), mizuna, cress (below), mustard, and so on. We sell them to Fresh Link, a local wholesale operation that provides produce for DC-area restaurants. The microgreens are typically used for garnish... and no wonder, for they are lovely.

We start with plain potting soil, which we put into the trays.*

Today, we're going to plant Purple Kohlrabi.

Using our lovely little seeder, we sprinkle the seeds liberally over the dirt.

Then we tamp them down with our handy tamper.

After they germinate inside, which just takes a day or two in summer, we take them out to the nursury to join the other happy little microgreens:

Well, to be perfectly honest, not all of the microgreens are totally happy these days.

That ugly looking splotch is some kind of fungal growth that has been popping up and decimating the beautiful microgreens. Basil, amaranth and purselane all seem especially vulnerable, although it's shown up in some of the other greens too.




*Did I mention that the main reason I really like this job is that I'm allowed to play in the dirt?

Neptune, Father of Fish Guts

Blog, meet Neptune, King of the Sea Fish Emulsion.

As I've mentioned before, we use fish emulsion* to give our soil blocks a little oomph before transplanting them. The product, which is brown and gloopy and smells strongly of fish, has all sorts of helpful nutrients in it to give those little plants a nice start. Transplanting can be traumatic for a plant, so any help we can give them is great.

The method: in a watering can, mix about 1/8 cup of fish emulsion for every gallon of water. And for the love of Pete, do NOT let leftovers sit around. Get rid of them once you're done, or you will be haunted by the scent of the sea forevermore.



*A fancy term for fish guts.

New Potatoes and New Beginnings

This was a post that I meant to do last week, but due to my afore-mentioned technical difficulties, I'm just now getting to it.

The last two weeks have been full of planting things: tomatoes, peppers, okra, lettuce, cantaloupe, brassica mix and squash, to be precise. There's plenty more to put in the ground, of course. But in the midst of all this planting, it's easy to forget sometimes about what we've already planted... like potatoes, back in early April.

Yes, they are purple. They're Caribè potatoes.* And they were delicious, soft and tender and melt-in-your-mouth-y when we ate them.


And here is Brian, harvesting away:

Anyways. I just thought everyone might like to see the fruits potatoes of our labors.






*It's best if you pronounce it like Speedy Gonzales.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch... er, farm.

Due to some unfortunate events at home, I was in Indiana all of last week. Thus the blogging moratorium.

Although I wasn't present to witness it, the farm kept operating. Plants grew, animals ate, people harvested. And despite my (relatively) short absence, I was faced with plenty of changes when I returned yesterday.

For starters, Juanita the Spanish Meat Goat had her baby - a single boy. I don't have any pictures of him yet.

Second: two of our remaining three ducks ran a-fowl (hee) of a predator in the night, and are now swimming in that big lake in the sky. The last duck has been put in the aviary for protection... where she will soon be joined by the cute little bevy of ducklings that arrived while I was gone. (The red light is from a heat lamp.)

Third: plants grow fast. Really fast. The potatoes, which were a few scant inches tall when I left, are now a foot at least. The buckwheat now reaches my hips, despite being merely knee-high a week ago. And the heirloom tomatoes I planted the other week? Take a look.

This must be what having children is like. One second they're seedlings... and before you know it, they're bearing fruit of their own. Where, oh where, does the time fly?

We also have strawberries now. They are delicious.

And, judging by the numbers of Kermit look-alikes leaping about, it is well into frog mating season.

Sadly, I will be leaving the farm again on Thursday, to return on Monday. Hopefully, there won't be too many more changes in my absence.

Soil Blocks II: The Heirloom Tomato

Today, we continue the saga of the little soil blocks that I planted back in early April.

This week, I started transplanting the tomatoes into one of our greenhouses. Susan grows a lot of tomatoes – we have nearly 600 tomato plants in soil block form. The farm sells them to Fresh Link, a local wholesale outfit that supplies restaurants in DC, and at local farmers markets. We mostly grow heirloom tomatoes, although Susan does have a couple hybrids that she likes.

I was planting Purple Cherokee and Mortgage Lifter tomatoes, which are both heirlooms.* The first step is to water the soil blocks with fish emulsion mixed with some water. The fish emulsion is brown and chunky and smells rather a lot like fish, which gets all over your hands as you plant so you smell like you took a swim in Baltimore's Inner Harbor for the rest of the day.** 

While the starts were soaking up their meal of fish guts, I prepared the beds by setting up the irrigation hose along both sides of the two rows I would be planting. For tomatoes, we use a drip tape that slowly releases water at one foot intervals along the hose, for a nice, gradual soaking that allows the water to reach the roots.

Then, using my trusty trowel, I dug pretty deep holes every foot and a half or so…

…then planted the starts.

The reason the holes have to be so deep is that with tomato starts, you actually want to plant them up to their “neck”, or right under the crown of leaves. The stems underneath will sprout roots, which gives the plant a bigger, better root system.

The next day, I got to mulch these little guys in with old hay, but here you can see them peeking out, all happy and green in their new home.

*The story goes that the guy who developed Mortgage Lifter tomatoes was able to pay the mortgage on his house with the proceeds from his work.                                                           

**Good thing I didn't come to the farm expecting to get my MRS degree or anything.

Potato, Po-tah-to

Yesterday, I had the supreme pleasure of planting potatoes for the first time in my life.

When I was a kid, I remember harvesting potatoes. It was probably my favorite crop to pick from my grandpa's garden. He would hoist the plant out of the air with his pitchfork while I scrabbled through the dirt to find them... it was like a treasure hunt.

Susan, it seems, loves potatoes. She grows six different types, some of which are heirlooms, and almost all of which will be for the farm, not for sale.

The first order of business was preparing the field. We weeded four rows, and dug a trench in each row for the seed potatoes. (That's Brian below - he's one of the other interns.)

Then came the business of preparing the seed potatoes. We cut them into pieces, each of which needed at least two "nodes" on them. Nodes are what eventually turn into eyes.

Some of the potatoes had faces. I named mine.

Fred



Manny



Hubert

We then sloshed the potatoes around in a mixture of mycorhizal fungi and humic acid - the humic acid acts as food for the fungi, which improves the quality of the soil with its presence by increasing the microbial life there. Appetizing, no?

For the actual planting, one person would lay down the potato pieces, skin side up, in the trough. The second person followed with the hoe, covering the seed potatoes and mounding a hill of dirt over them. (Below is Autumn, the third full-time intern on the farm. We are a merry little group.)

Final note: Normally, potatoes are planted in March. By planting later, Susan hopes to escape the worst of the potato bugs... another (less enjoyable) thing I remember from my childhood. We shall see.