Week 12

Yesterday after market, Aaron from Humble Stump Farm and Maya and Phelan from Little Big Farm stopped by for a beer in the orchard.  They are both part of the smaller is better trend in small farming and I always enjoy hearing their perspective.  As we walked around our fields, a little weedy, a little poorly managed, I contemplated the trend.  The idea is to stay small.  In order to do this you farm very intensively with little cover cropping and often filling a bed with a new planting as soon as you finish harvesting a bed.  There is also more of a focus on crops that are the most profitable and therefor that type of farm tends to be less diverse.   Very small farms often have permanent beds and less of a need for tractors and all the implements that go with them.  All systems have their advantages and disadvantages.  With an impending move (to who knows where) Kelly and I have been having a lot of discussions about what we want our farm to be and how we want to manage it.  We like diversity, we like tractors and we like cover cropping but that doesn't mean we can't take some new ideas and mix them in.  We are still very small (7 acres) in terms of most farms and at our size I feel like we should be able to create a little bit of a hybrid farm in a way that makes sense.  There are some things that are not practical to adopt at our size, but it is important to remember that there can be more than one way of doing thing something and just because something is working okay doesn't mean you shouldn't try to improve on it.

On the other side of the spectrum is large scale organic agriculture.  We receive a publication put out by the Organic Trade Association, which does many things including lobbying the state and federal government with an organic agenda.  Of course not all organic farmers think alike and sometimes they push policies that people don't agree with.  They don't only represent large scale organic agriculture, but naturally many of their members are larger corporations.  There were some interesting statistics in the recent issue about the rise of organic agriculture.  For example, in 2016 there were 17,525 certified organic producers, a 13 percent increase over the previous year (we were a farm that certified for the first time in 2016) and organic vegetables made up 14 percent of all vegetable sales.  As the organic industry grows and organic food becomes more readily available, smaller producers like us will have to find ways to distinguish ourselves.  Hopefully we can do that with both quality and freshness.

Anyway, when I am not looking at Petfinder for a friend for Tucker I like to think about this kind of stuff!

Alright, back to the food.

Carrots
Colored Bell Peppers - should be some beauties to pick tomorrow.
Broccoli
Cucumber
Slicing Tomato
Melon
Potatoes - Pinto - We are growing two striking potatoes this year.  One is Masquerade which is purple and white and the other is the one you are getting today called Pinto which is red and gold.  We tried them both and my favorite is the Pinto.