Field Walk Reveals Healthy Crops

A big part of my job here at the farm is to manage the health and happiness of crops in the field. Every week I take a tour of all the fields and monitor crops and their condition in great detail. During these field walks I generate a list of the activities necessary to keep each crop in each field doing their best. Then it's back to the office to use that information to generate the weeks job lists for each crew here at the farm.

I could not resist sharing some pictures of the Kahout field from yesterdays visit. The beans all look wonderful. We have been harvesting from the first planting for about a week and pictured here is the start of the flowering cycle for the second planting. These plants look great, healthy with a prolific flower set; I hope you are hungry for beans.
The real surprise in this field has been the vigor of our Solanaceae; the peppers, tomatoes and eggplant. Despite a terrible spring that left these plants struggling to grow in substandard temperatures with a deluge of spring rain, they have really come around. We will be harvesting peppers soon, we have already begun harvesting some cherry tomatoes and we are hopeful that the forthcoming warm weather will mean even more ripe fruit next week. I even found a few ripe eggplant.

No Joke

A tractor walks into a bar and tells the bartender it's having clutch problems. After several beers the bartender asks the tractor if it would like another. The tractor responds " No thanks, I think I'll split". Get it? No? That's because it's really not funny.

Above you can see our John Deere 1630 "split". To replace the clutches, as well as facilitate other service work, a tractor is literally split in half. This can be done in several places. The transmission to engine split is the easiest thankfully. The most difficult part is trying to fit the two halves back together. Each weigh in at over 1500 pounds and you must carefully line up a small shaft that is fixed to the rear and fits snugly into a splined plate on the front half. Yep.

GAPs Training (do not go in the forest!!!)

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon at a GAPs training session in Puyallup. If you are not familiar; the GAPs or "Good Agricultural Practices" are a set of federal guidelines meant to improve consumer safety. They are, like many other government generated programs, loosely based on science and firmly based on fear. That said, please understand that at this time GAPs certification is voluntary. We at Boistfort Valley Farm are positioning ourselves to implement a GAPs program in house and intend to seek third party certification in 2011. As the farm has grown we have embraced relationships with institutional customers. It is our pleasure to do business with several institutional buyers that show a very real commitment to providing nutritious food that is sourced locally to their customers. Please see my post regarding the staff at Intel: http://boistfortvalleyfarm.blogspot.com/2009/10/if-intel-is-inside-and-we-are-inside.html
Chefs like Kris Kamp at Intel and Maury Bennett at St. Martins have an enthusiasm for their craft that is equal to the finest Chefs in the finest restaurants.

I must report that when I speak with other small farmers these guidelines are not viewed favorably. They do carry with them a significantly increased burden of paperwork and have elements that are at odds with some sustainable practices especially regarding wildlife and rotational practices that include livestock. The guidelines would have you believe that the presence of wildlife and domestic animals on a farm are a liability, that is a bitter pill to a farm that has just spent so much energy recreating a riparian buffer that is largely geared toward increasing habitat for wildlife and spent so much money and time restoring a barn that houses barn owls and bats. Many elements of the GAPs are just good common sense and we are in favor of the formal nature of the record keeping and policies which address sanitation and cleanliness as well as monitoring of water quality.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=268x3355

Personally I believe that in a world with a food system that can so quickly and broadly distribute a product that is a risk to human health that GAPs are a necessary component of that system. However when it comes to a farm like ours where we can trace back a product so quickly and personally they are largely redundant. We harvest a product, wash it, box it, cool it overnight and then deliver it. We know our CSA and commercial customers by name and are present at Markets. It would be an easy task to trace a head of lettuce from the consumer to the person that packed and or picked it to the field of origin. We already keep careful detailed records as part of our farm management and are not particularly intimidated by the paperwork necessary to complete a GAPs audit. I am a bit torn on the issue of wildlife as liability, or the notion that nature is dangerous and harmful. I often leave the GAPs training exercises with the idea that food might be best grown in a laboratory setting. If what the food safety experts say is true we would have no living dairymen in this country, and truth be told we as a species are probably more at risk of injury from lowered immune system response as a result of over-sanitizing than we are of pathogens present in our food.

http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/ccdr-rmtc/98vol24/dr2403ea.html

Please do take some time to familiarize yourself with this issue, I think we will hear more about this as time goes by and we may soon see a requirement that all farms regardless of size pass a mandatory GAPs audit. In the meantime know that we at Boistfort Valley Farm are committed to your health and to the safety and quality of our produce. We are implementing several practices that will help us to better monitor some elements of our farm in this context, as well as formalizing the practices that are already in place.

My formal spin- GAPs:

Personally-They are a neopuritanical neccesity in a world where produce is grown in unnatural quantities and shipped an unnatural distance to an unnatural number of customers with no relationship to the person that grew it.

Professionally-The health and well being of our customers is our first concern. We are committed to actively reducing the risk of food born illness in all phases of our farming operation.

In my last post from weeks ago I said I was going to introduce you to the Munroe field. Well, then it started to rain again, and again, and in between drops we hammered away at the fields and frantically seeded and transplanted. The Munroe field is our most developed right now with the exception of the home place and it shows in these pics. The field in the fore ground is full of potatoes and brassicas; broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and kohlrabi. Behind that, you can see the remay which covers our third planting of beets and carrots as well as the second planting of Asian greens and radishes. Just out of sight are the corn and squash.

Here is the kale up close and personal.

On the day I took these pictures I was running the cultivating tractor, a 1948 Super A. These tractors are an indispensable component of our weed management strategy. They where originally built to replace the one horse on a one horse farm*. The steering is offset so you can see directly below you, and there are rudimentary hydraulics on the belly and rear of the tractor.

We have an arsenal of tools that attach to a tool bar under the tractor; furrowers, knives, shovels, discs, all of which serve a slightly different purpose. We furrow for planting tubers and bulbs, then cover using blades we fabricated from an old CAT blade. We run knives and sweeps between rows of plants to slice out weeds just below the soil surface.

The whole set up is called "cultivision" in the spirit of that eras use of "-O-rama" at the end of words to create a sense of wonder; weed-O-rama. I always get a chuckle out of that because cultivation days are sometimes long. It is not unusual to spend 5 or 6 ours staring down between your feet at the plants as they pass through the shovels which are passing through the soil at 2 miles an hour or so. It would be like watching sand sift through an hour glass for 5 or 6 straight hours. When you look away everything still appears to be moving in and down; you got "cultivision".

*no horses were replaced during the creation of this post

Progress in the Field

We have taken full advantage of the recent dry weather. Pictured above are our fields on the Kahout Rd. Bafaw is in the background and you can just begin to see the clouds thickening into what became the major downpour that put an end to our progress late yesterday afternoon. Patrick and I have prepped and fertilized about 38 of the 50 acres we will have in production this year. We have filled the 9 acres at the Home Place with celery and lettuces in addition to all the perennial herbs and flowers that along with the strawberries constitute a majority of the ground there.
Kahout Rd will be home to our 2010 bean crop the first planting of which is pictured above. I hope you are hungry for beans. Our onions and more celery will also go in these fields along with the Solanacea; tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and last but not least the artichokes. Below you can see the field crew planting onions. We plow, disk, fertilize and then till the ground until it is as smooth as possible then plant the onions by hand. This is probably one of the toughest jobs of the season. The crew finished in just over two long days as Patrick and I rushed to finish plowing and fertilizing the remainder of the field.
We will be planting corn and squash early next week at the Munroe Field. I will introduce you to that field then. We already have our potatoes and some brassicas; cauliflower, broccoli, and kohlrabi in there. Then we will move on to Pe Ell McDonald Rd to prep for the late brassicas and more peas and roots.

Barn is Officially Painted!!!

The barn is shown here with its finished coat of paint and trim. We will slowly build the doors over the course of the summer and hope to finish the interior floors this winter. The end is in sight...

Barn Gets Paint

Well, as I promised; one board at a time Patrick and I replaced and repaired the trim on the barn. The final stage was to rebuild and replace the damaged and missing window frames.
Then we taped her all up and Omar from MDK came back to start in on the paint. The body should be finished today and we are hopeful that the trim will be painted and dry before it starts to rain early next week.