Organic Vegetable Growers Share Tricks of the Trade at 9th Annual NW Farmer to Farmer Exchange

The annual two-day NW Farmer to Farmer Exchange was recently held at Breitenbush Hot Springs in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains just west of Mt. Jefferson. Since 2003 Oregon Tilth and Organically Grown Company have generously helped sponsor the exchange which filled to capacity again this year, with 38 farms represented by 86 people, plus children and babysitters. The dozen workshops are a series of roundtable discussions led by experienced organic farmers. In the first (and most popular one) all attendees described a couple of “Ahas” or “Uh ohs” from their 2010 season. Each evening several people shared slide shows of their farming adventures. Below are some notes from the sessions Nick and Maud were able to attend.

Ahas and Uh Ohs

Two farmers explained how they’ve enhanced their quality of life on the farm. One got out of the packing shed and realized how much she enjoys harvesting. The other started taking 2 days off each week with her husband during the growing season and got a community kitchen up and running on the farm so they now have privacy in their family kitchen. Another farmer decided to get smaller rather than getting out. They reduced their farm size from 30 acres to 20 acres. Their labor costs went down only slightly, but their gross sales increased and net profits increased substantially. A couple of growers were glad to start using a bookkeeper to help with payroll and other paperwork. One recommended www.paycycle.com.

One farmer lost tomatoes to late blight because they were being watered with sprinklers on the same schedule as the squash, now they will irrigate the crops separately to keep the tomato foliage drier. In contrast, another grower with lower disease pressure switched to irrigating at night with timers because the wind dies down and irrigation efficiency increased. A couple of farmers reported increased yield and quality when grafting tomatoes. They preferred side grafting over top grafting, and recommended the instructional video at Johnny’s Selected Seeds (http:// www. johnnyseeds. com/), and thought these more vigorous plants might sometimes need pruning. Goat skin golf gloves were praised as work gloves, because they don’t have seams at the ends of the fingers.

One farm liked their new Japanese paper pot transplanter as long as percent germination is high in the trays, see the video at http://www.smallfarmworks. com/. They used it for corn, cut flowers and salad mixes. The 5000 WD transplanter was also favorably reviewed, the grower uses it with a 4-row setup and explained that it was easier for 4 workers to get along than 6 (http://www.mechanicaltransplanter.com/). A youth farm manager liked using 288 Speedling trays with inexperienced young workers. One grower recommended Androse Engineering for equipment to handle drip tape and plastic mulch (http://www.andros-engineering.com/). Every year someone says how great it was to develop a good working partnership with a local welder to develop simple equipment.

Some CSA’s said they were having more trouble filling shares, apparently because of the recession. Several innovations were shared including: 1) working with employers to provide drop off spots at work places; 2) sell $10 of vegetables per week per person through an employee wellness program; 3) payment options like accepting food stamps, credit cards and post-dated checks; 4) smaller shares and allowing customers to choose their vegetables; 5) allowing members to save money on shares by helping pack the boxes; 6) increasing marketing efforts.

Several growers were glad to make improvements on their farm. One simple innovation was putting springs on deer gates so they never accidentally get left open. A few people built insulated rodent proof rooms for storing seed and some crops like winter squash and sweet potatoes. Another was relieved to finally have a concrete floor in his repair shop.

Food Safety

During a session on food safety, farmers discussed the Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification process. One farmer shared his own experience of becoming GAP certified after the Organically Grown Company, one of his primary wholesale accounts, requested certification. He explained that certification was fairly straightforward because he uses only groundwater, raises no animals on his farm, uses no animal compost, has no neighbors with livestock, and has very little wildlife pressure. The major challenges he faced during the certification process involved the creation of new documents to track relevant farm activities, and enforcing members of his crew to fill out the new paperwork.

Producers also shared information about the new federal food safety legislation that moved through Congress and is now in the rule-making stage. The bill passed with the Tester amendment attached; the amendment stipulates that any farm grossing under $500,000 per year is exempt from USDA food safety standards. While many small farmers in attendance fall below the minimum gross, mid-sized producers expressed concern about the potential for more regulatory oversight. These farmers talked about ways to stay under the $500,000 threshold, including making a farm publically owned or splitting the farm into several distinct businesses. Another farmer suggested that while new federal regulations on the horizon may be intimidating, a greater threat to small and mid-size farmers is the difficulty in finding insurance companies that are willing to cover them. Participants agreed that good recordkeeping and a clear understanding of the regulations that apply to their farms are critical for managing their legal risks.

Growing Seed

Whether a farmer is saving seed for their own propagation or growing commercial lots of specific varieties for companies, seed production can be easily be integrated into any scale of farm operation. Producers who attended this session represented a wide spectrum of experience in seed growing. Several veteran seed growers shared basic information with long-time vegetable producers who have never saved any of their own seed. Experienced seed producers explained some of the differences in saving seed from wet-seeded crops, like melons, peppers, and tomatoes from dry-seeded crops, including lettuce, onions and broccoli. Wet-seeded crops require a fermentation period, while dry seeded crops can be harvested from the plant stalk and immediately dried down. The books Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth and Breed your own Vegetable Varieties by Carol Deppe, as well as the Organic Seed Alliance web publications (seedalliance.org ) were cited as resources for people interested in seed saving.

Also touched on were the differences between open-pollinated and hybrid seeds. While hybrid varieties

may result in more reliable and uniform plants, their seeds are generally not worth saving as they express the genes of multiple parent lines with a wide range of unpredictable characteristics. Finally, producers discussed concerns about GMO crops and the impacts on the viability of organic seed.

Community Supported Agriculture

New to the world of Community Supported Agriculture programs are a couple of web platforms that promise to take the hassle out of CSA administration. Farmigo (farmigo.com) and CSAware (csaware.com) perform a host of marketing, bookkeeping and administrative functions, including billing members, generating pick and pack lists and sending out regular email communication to membership lists. While none of the producers attending this session have used either of these services, several had taken virtual tours of the sites and spoke highly of the potential to make larger CSAs more efficient. Another approach to streamlining Community Supported Agriculture programs is the model of multi-farm CSAs in which a number of farms pool resources and markets. This model may be especially appropriate for a group of smaller farms in which the economy of scale works against the amount of administration required of a CSA program.

Sharing Yields and Harvest Times

To maintain a profitable farm and grow high quality affordable food it is important to understand the cost of production. Growers use this information to set the prices of CSA shares, adjust crop mixes so they focus on profitable crop, to make decisions about new equipment purchases, and to better understand when a crop yield is lower than can be expected. One farm also uses this information at farmer’s markets to explain how they set their prices. Most growers in the room had read The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook by Richard Wiswall (Chelsea Green).

Yield estimates and labor for harvest are both tricky to nail down accurately. One grower kept track of actual harvest time for all her crops and spent the time to enter all that information into Quick Books. Another measured the time to harvest a portion of a bed and extrapolated that out to the whole crop, they also made note of weather conditions so he could adjust expected harvest times accordingly. Some give workers Rite in the Rain notebooks to record all labor, others preferred sign in and sign out sheets.

On diverse farms it is a challenge to account for overhead costs shared by many crops, such as some labor, depreciation, etc. Some budgeting software can attribute these costs more accurately to individual crops such as OSU’s Ag ToolsTM (http://agtools.org/). So far the growers here have been using simpler approaches and include costs like electricity, management labor, depreciation, fuel and other costs in a broader overhead cost category. One grower uses the approach in Table 1.

Compost

These farms compost different types of feedstock such as vegetable packing waste, horse manure, dairy manure and chopped leaves. They compost between about 20 and 600 cubic yards per year. Under the new DEQ Composting Rules (http://www.deq.state.or.us/lq/sw/compost/) farms composting more than 100 tons per year (i.e. at 1,000 lbs/cubic yard, 200 cubic yards = 100 tons) need to get a Land Use Compatability Statement (LUCS) from their County planning department and undergo risk screening by the DEQ. LUCS should not be difficult to get when the composting is part of an agricultural operation, and the rules will probably not prevent farmers from composting when their site screens out as low risk. The risk screening decision is normally in effect for 10 years. Under the new rules farmers now have legal access to a wide variety of non-agricultural compost feedstock.

Some farms in the group use manure spreaders to mix feedstock, one who had also used windrow turners said the mixing is more thorough with manure spreaders, but windrow turners are normally quicker to use. Managing water at compost facilities was challenging for some. Excess water makes piles go anaerobic, and finished compost too wet to apply easily. Runoff from composting facilities can also pollute water. One grower tried breathable compost fleece covers (i.e. Compostex) but found they don’t always protect compost from heavy winter downpours in Oregon. Now he uses 6mm plastic. When building piles, dry feedstock can take a long time to wet. Some farmers spread the feedstock out during wet weather so that it wets naturally. Another harvests green chop for composting when it is wet with dew, so less water needs to be added. Another approach is to mix dry and wet feedstock to get closer to the desired 50-60% moisture.

Composting is an important operation on farms, and there was uncertainty and some frustration in the group about regulatory hurdles to composting, such as the NOP standards, the new DEQ Compost Rules, and GAP standards for food safety. Everyone appreciated the value of composting and hoped that regulatory requirements could be met without making agricultural composting unaffordable.

Cover Crops

Sarah Brown is an Oregon Tilth employee who works with the Natural Resource Conservation Service to help implement the organic EQIP program (http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/eqip/organic/index.html). She mentioned that some cost share money is available for cover cropping. The program accepts applications on a rolling basis, but every year they are cut off on March 4th.

Some growers were interested in relay seeding (inter-seeding) cover crops into late harvested vegetable crops. One farmer had several years of good results broadcasting red clover into winter squash just after the last weed cultivation. He uses overhead irrigation so the cover crop has plenty of moisture to get established, survives harvest in November and produces a good stand by the following spring. Another grower had just tried relay seeding clover (type not specified) into winter squash, but saw reduced yields. Another grower got a thick stand of annual ryegrass in eggplants, but had trouble killing it the following spring. Another said they’d had pretty good luck with crimson clover, cereal rye and red clover in eggplants and peppers, but oats swamped the crop before harvest was over.

For summer cover crops people had successfully used Sudhan grass and Sudex (a Sudhan x Sorghum hybrid). Buckwheat was also popular for quick establishment in a short window. One grower had some success with cowpeas as a summer legume. Some had used spring cereals or other frost sensitive grains (i.e. Japanese millet) as summer cover crops, like Sudex, these crops winter kill with a hard frost and lie down to create a high biomass mulch that decomposes over the winter for easy incorporation.

Establishment can be a challenge, some growers rely on grain drills and said they produce a much more even stand than broadcast spreaders because of the depth control and good seed to soil contact. Another grower using a spreader followed with a ring roller to incorporate. Some of the growers had experience using a no-till drill to plant into crop stubble (i.e. corn). All agreed that cover crops were an important part of their fertility and soil building strategy and plan to continue innovating.

The Farmer to Farmer conference provides growers with unique opportunities to share information, challenges and successes with their peers. Suzy Evans, the Exchange’s fearless organizer, continues to bring leadership necessary to make the event successful. Oregon Tilth and Organically Grown Company offer ongoing sponsorship for the event, which makes it affordable for small-scale farmers. The meeting concluded with feedback and initial planning for next year, as well as heartfelt goodbyes and anticipation for the upcoming growing season.