Organic Agriculture Attracts a New Generation of Farmers, Nobody Said It Was Going to Be Easy
June 7th, 2014There’s no app for that.
Individuals might consider vertical cells for salad greens, strawberries and some other crops and larger containers on the ground. I like vertical and containers because you’re minimizing the amount of effort required for keeping weeds down. You can compost the spent soil and recharge it with whatever fertilizer you might have on hand (worm wee, fish emulsion, sea weed, livestock manure, humanure etc.) Spuds and the like can be done in barrels, buckets, bathtubs, tires.
Grubbing around in the soil is grim, backbreaking work. I love the guys in the video, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t see that happening on any sort of scale. More people are going to have to grow more stuff for themselves rather than leaving it up to a small number of farmers.
For NZ: I was looking at a well rotted ponga fern trunk and noticed that sawing it into rings produced what seemed like perfect cells for growing salad greens. These could be set in a shallow tub and flooded with whatever nutrient bath one wanted to use. I haven’t tried it yet, but what I was wondering is if the plants would be able to use the ponga as a growing medium without adding any soil at all??? That old ponga seemed like a compost pile that had been formed into a cylinder. Also, might capillary action keep plants perfectly hydrated if the base of the ponga “pot” was left submerged in the nutrient bath?
Anyway, if you toil in the soil enough, try to keep your organic matter up, try to put enough nutrients in, try to keep weeds down, turn the soil over each season (sorry, tried to make no-dig work for years), eventually, “There has to be a better way,” is a phrase that will get lodged in your brain like a splinter.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
By 9 a.m., Jack Motter had been planting peas for hours.
He pushed a two-wheeled contraption that deposited a seed every few inches along neat rows at Ellwood Canyon Farms, just outside Santa Barbara. As clouds gathered overhead, he picked up the pace to avoid losing days of work to the fall rain.
Timing can mean the difference between profit and loss for the 4-year-old farm.
Motter and his business partner, Jeff Kramer, are part of a growing crop of farmers — many of them young — choosing to produce food without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. As consumers demand more fresh and local food grown with minimal environmental effects, a new generation has taken up organic farming.
The two Brawley, Calif., natives, both 30, have learned that small-scale agriculture is neither easy nor lucrative. Their days on the 15-acre farm start at dawn and end with exhaustion.
Aging crop of farmers
“There’s nothing romantic about it,” Kramer said. “It’s hard work and long hours for little pay.”
Did you see the couple on TV a few weeks ago who had farmed their city property for decades. They’d been feeding the chickens with the produce, and eating the eggs. Then recently they found out that the ground was saturated with heavy metals from past land use and the husband had pancreatic cancer or something similar.. To have tested for it would supposedly costed upwards of tens of thousands of dollars.
My father used to work at the works where they kill the stock, and he used to dread when someone wanting organic status came in. In order to get it, they needed to get their stock tested. The thing is quite often the stock these days still has DDT from the fields they were grazing..
I wanted to avoid spraying my paddock to kill the sea of thistles, but there were no other realistic options.
I love to read about people growing food. I plant by the Moon and this weekend was a good one for planting. I haven’t gone for an organic certification because I figure it is only for the benefit of the US gvmint, and I don’t sell my produce but either can it or give it away to friends and family who can’t or don’t know how to grow their own. But someday I may do all of the above to have some income from my work.
@rmtew – I don’t know how big your thistle problem is but spraying anything (except on poison ivy in my book)is exactly why the people who had toxic chemicals in the soil occurred; and why the butcher groans. My sister has land in Colorado with cheat grass, an invasive weed which spreads like crazy. She spends months collecting the seed, solarizing the soil etc. I think she will win it over. It just takes work and a dedication to eradicating weeds without spraying a.) because of the bees, and b.) there are always long term effects from spraying poison.
If I had a thistle problem (and I don’t know what the size of your property or problem is) I’d be weeding/chopping the plants early in spring and putting some copper nails into the root. They sell them on Amazon, not in stores anymore. Good luck.
If all you do is cut the flower heads off the thistles before they go to seed, you should be rid of them within a few years. It’s a pain, but it does the job. Put them in closed plastic bags and take them to the dump. Do not compost them.