Two Books for the Farmer in Your Life
by Michael Foley
Whether you’re thinking about starting up a farm, just beginning, or been at it for awhile, the example of others should be an important part of your farming education. Two recent books survey a wide range of small farms – market gardens all – to inspire by example and inform in detail how other folks help the magic work.
Farming on Small to Smallest Scale
Josh Volk’s Compact Farms came out in 2017, boasting “15 Proven Plans for Market Farms on 5 Acres or Less.” Actually, it’s both less and a lot more than that. Volk profiles small market farms around the country, starting with his own Slow Hand Farm (now a part of the cooperative Our Table Farm) in Portland, Oregon. A good start, this, because it begins the book with a farm run very part-time on limited acreage, with limited initial investment. Just the thing for aspiring farmers who want to get their hands dirty and give themselves their own education and the many skills behind a successful market garden.
Volk also looks at some very successful small farms, including Eliot Coleman’s famous Maine Four Seasons Farm and Jean-Martin Fortier’s Les Jardin de la Grelinette. If you haven’t read any of Coleman’s books or Fortier’s The Market Gardener, this is an excellent introduction to each of their styles – though I recommend diving into their books, too. In Coleman’s case, you will learn how a thoughtful farmer examines and tries out options over decades of experimentation.
Less famous farms nevertheless provide a wealth of options for the beginning farmer and lessons for the more experienced among us. There are urban farms, including the Brooklyn Grange, which occupies two and a half acres of high-rise rooftop in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. Soil and tools go up by lift, produce comes down. Meadowfields Urban Farm has two acres of ground leased from the City of Lawrence, Kansas, Common Ground Program. These are farmers who commute, though Jessi and Kevin of Mellowfields live just five minutes from the farm. They are full-time farmers but they built up to their present dimensions from farming a series of urban yards and a CSA of just 10 members. Successful farmers often start small and part-time, an important lesson for those who despair over the price of land and home and equipment.
Volk’s book features a lot of helpful pieces. There is the Backstory, which tells a little about how each farm got started, followed by a map of the farm (behind that promise of “proven plans”) illustrating in most cases just how compact and well-thought through farm plans have to be on this scale. The text covers marketing, labor, water, fertility, tools and practices, harvest, and post-harvest handling and delivery, even office and record keeping – each with reference to the particulars of the operation, tools and techniques that others might try. One interesting piece is the chart of crops with their harvest months and “distribution window.” This is a typical planning tool, but in this case it also reveals some interesting differences. The most striking is that for Full Plate Farm, which focuses solely on a winter CSA. Harvest and distribution runs November through March. Of course, that implies a varied planting schedule up to the beginning of the season, providing cured winter squash or stored potatoes throughout the winter, salad greens as they mature November through January, with a gap in February for the inevitable slow start over the depth of winter.
There is also a wealth of suggestions about tools and techniques and land access. Cook’s Garden, for example, utilizes a simple transplanting cart designed by Stephen Cook, which straddles beds on study balloon tires and is propelled by the occupant with a simple push away from the bed surface. Some of Cook’s other vehicles are featured in photos in the book. Jean-Martin Fortier drops a wonderful hint for users of row cover: store it in old grain sacks marked with the length for ease of application next year. And it came as a bit of a surprise to me how many of these farmers (and those in Andrew Mefferd’s book reviewed below) continue to rely on the simple and inexpensive Earthway seeder, despite all the expensive multi-row seeders that have appeared recently. As for land access, there are all sorts of strategies, from farming on parents’ land, to leasing from urban farming projects, to Cully Neighborhood Farms’ lease from a local church in exchange for maintaining the site and contributing to the church’s food pantry. Adding to the farm’s local cachet, the project took an unexpected turn to educational programs, because the half-acre farm neighbor’s the church’s K-8 school. The Cully Young Farmers Project is funded by a grant from the State Soil and Water Conservation District.
The book starts with general observations about the sorts of things the aspiring farmer has to consider in starting up. And it ends with a helpful walk-through of the decision making process in designing and planning a small farm. Profit is always part of what these farmers plan for, but so is farming on the scale that suits them and their needs. The beautiful page on what “success” means to Kristin Illick and Jeff Frank of Liberty Gardens in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania is a good illustration. Seeing the variations on that theme alone makes the book worth perusing.
No-Till Market Gardening
Surprisingly, none of the farms profiled here have explicitly adopted no-till techniques. But as Andrew Mefferd writes in his new The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution, no-till in all its variations has become a central production strategy for a wide range of farms. There is indeed a “no-till farming revolution” abroad. Mefferd – editor of Growing for Market, my favorite small market-garden trade magazine – confines himself to the small farm, market garden piece of this movement. As he knows from his own earlier experience with no-till techniques, the first approaches were pioneered by larger-scale row crop and grain producers, and many of these were anything but organic, with the grain producers using herbicides on a large scale. (For a look at how large-scale farmers and ranchers employ a more regenerative version of no-till, and the story of one North Dakota farm’s conversion from conventional methods, Gabe Brown’s Dirt to Soil is highly recommended.)
When it comes to market gardens, as Mefferd writes, there are probably as many different versions as there are farmers. Which makes this survey of 18 farms particularly valuable – there is a lot to learn, a lot of techniques to assess and maybe try out. The books starts with an overview of no-till, what it is and the recent history of its development, embedded firmly in two large points: its contribution to addressing climate change, and its unique suitability for start-up and small-scale farms. On the first score, tillage is now recognized as a major contributor to climate change, releasing carbon long stored in the soil through the action of plants, not to mention the fossil fuels consumed by tractors. No-till promises not only to leave the carbon where it belongs, in our soils, but to enhance the soil’s capacity to absorb carbon, hold water, and maintain a healthy biome of micro-organisms.
On the second score, Mefferd notes that no-till enables aspiring farmers to start up with very limited investment. Lowering the amount of investment and of land needed to start a farm, will mean more farms. “And what we need is more farms of all sizes everywhere,” not just the bigger organic farms too often envisioned by the organic movement. If small farms lack the so-called economies of scale that larger operations supposedly enjoy, Mefferd adds, “the cumulative effect of the efficiencies of no-till enables one to run a commercially viable, living-wage farm on a very small footprint.” These are compelling arguments, and the case studies that follow only underline their truth. There are farmers here who have scaled-up, a bit, and farmers who have found they can scale down and still make a living. And nearly all find they can farm with less labor, not more, despite a turn to non-mechanized means.
How they do so varies enormously, as we said. Some rely on cardboard mulches to break down weed and crop residue, some on straw, some on planters paper, some on heavy doses of compost. Cover cropping looms large in the arsenals of most of these farmers, but it also presents special challenges to having a workable bed come planting season. Many have found that they are building soil, even on very poor substrates, much more quickly than was once imagined. And as the percentage of organic matter in the soil grows, yields increase and pest pressure diminishes – exactly the promise of the original organic revolution. Weed pressure also decreases radically, though many no-till farmers take special measures to control weeds (more on that below).
Not all these farmers have sworn off motorized equipment. Dan Pratt of Astarte Farm in Hadley, Massachusetts, uses a roller-crimper mounted on a small tractor to crush the stems of mature cover crops prior to planting directly into them. The roller-crimper approach was pioneered in Pennsylvania by the Rodale Institute and a few conventional farmers for large-scale row crop cultivation. The system requires relatively heavy machinery, precise timing and larger-sized transplants, which are planted directly into the mulch left by the crushed cover crop. Here the cover crops themselves, their decomposition as mulch, and the absence of tillage contribute to building soil rapidly.
Ricky Baruc of Seeds of Solidarity Farm, on the other hand, emphasizes the utility of no-till for “farming anywhere.” “How do you grow where the people are? That’s the thing. You’re looking at pieces of land that aren’t suitable for equipment,” or that isn’t good for cultivation, period. The challenge is to open it up to farming, because, again, we need a lot more farmers. Ricky’s solution is cardboard mulch. He simply lays down sheets of cardboard, covers it with straw or inexpensive manure to hold it down and keep it moist, and plants into it with a dibbler when it is good and soft after two or three weeks. Or layer the cardboard over an inch or two of compost or manure, then top with straw. Worms and microbes quickly inhabit the soil, no matter how poor, and begin the process of turning it into workable beds.
Ricky and several others surveyed also use silage tarps for “occultation,” a technique popularized by Jean-Martin Fortier. The tarps (some use landscape cloth) are laid down over a cover crop that has been cut down and left in place or even over sod in new fields. Over several months in colder weather, much more rapidly with sunshine, the residues break down and create a rich environment for worms and micro-organisms. Occultation eliminates both tillage and the time-consuming task of gathering up crop residue or digging it into the soil. And it creates a compost in place that can nourish new crops.
Arkansas farmer Andrew Schwerin uses deep straw mulch to overwinter beds. He spends perhaps $750 an acre on straw in large rolls, which can be simply rolled out over his beds. In the spring, after it is broken down somewhat, it is pulled back to warm the soil a few days in advance of seeding or transplanting. With bigger plants like tomatoes or peppers, the transplants go directly into holes in the straw. Schwerin uses plastic for occultation occasionally but recognizes the problem that removing it and disposing of it presents; he much prefers the straw. In fact, one of the scarcely recognized problems in the book is the increased reliance on plastic, and the pollution it entails, in the practice of occultation. The plastic breaks down after a couple of seasons, the ends of the landscape cloth fray. Silage tarps are UV-resistant, polyethylene plastic, a relatively benign plastic, and longer lasting than ordinary black plastic; but they too wear out. And the disposal of agricultural plastics is now a major concern, as plastic residue floods the world’s oceans, our soils, and even our drinking water. As Sonoma County flower farmer Hedda Brorstrom puts it, “Part of me thinks, ‘I feel like this is really good to not be tilling.’ Another part of me feels like I own way too much plastic.”
Dan Heyer and Brooke Selvaggio’s Urbavore Farm, in Kansas City, Missouri, also relies on deep straw mulch. Their discussion of planting strategies to avoid the labor of clearing straw and the disadvantage of exposing the ground to weed growth is worth reading. Unlike Ricky Baruc they also rely on compost deposited in planting holes to fertilize their crops and add to the soil-building virtues of no-till. They started out on ground that was more of less untillable, a former baseball diamond, which now produces abundant, nutrient dense crops. They also started out on a shoestring, refusing to get into debt to start their farm: “We felt like getting into debt was the surest way to fail.” Amen.
Hedda Brorstrom’s Full Bloom Flower Farm uses the whole panoply of methods. To avoid plastic she uses planter’s paper covered with straw; where crop residues need to be broken down over the winter she will use a silage tarp or landscape fabric; and for added weed control she plants very tightly, eliminating the need for plastic netting while prompting her flowers to grow really tall. She even plants dahlias in crates over landscape cloth to fend off gophers and grass and help with drainage.
One way to avoid the plastic is to forego the cover crops, as Hedda does. Despite their advantages for the soil, cover crops require seeding and cutting (or crimping). And a rapid turn around at season’s beginning demands they be cleared or composted in place, now widely done with plastic. Without cover crops the common recourse is heavy applications of compost. Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm have an added recommendation. The Kaisers have done an enormous amount to publicize no-till vegetable production. They’ve come as speakers to the Farmers Convergence hosted here by the School of Adaptive Agriculture; and Singing Frogs has been on the farm tour circuit that is a key part of our Practicum Program here at SAA. They’re great teachers. One of the lessons that stands out from their profile in this book, though, might be forgotten in the generalities of no-till practice and philosophy. According to Elizabeth, it’s the intensification of production that really counts. “Because if you’re not intensive, you’re not actively managing that soil all the time… It’s the intensification, doing three to eight crops per year, many of which are multi-species, that feeds the soil and pays the bills.” Intensification on this scale takes the place of cover crops, as each species nurtures the soil even as it takes away; and the roots of each crop remain in the soil in the Kaiser’s approach, aerating and contributing to soil organic matter. And intensification is also what makes no-till farming so potentially profitable.
Both the Kaisers and Colin Crickmore of Neversink Farm are willing to talk dollars. That is a tremendous help is assessing just how successful no-till is. Crickmore has touted the astounding figure of a gross income of $400,000 on just 1.5 acres. Andrew Mefferd was particularly anxious to understand how this could be done, but he came away from the farm convinced that its tremendous productivity accounted for the numbers. He notes that the Kaisers report a gross income of $100,000 an acre on their three acres. They employ four full-time workers, or roughly 1.5 per acre. “Conor has doubled the ratio to labor to land, and the corresponding output from that land,” employing close to 1.5 people per half acre. The labor costs for both are necessarily high, but not so high that the farmers can’t enjoy a decent income.
Finally, it’s important to reiterate that no-till has enabled many farmers to be profitable without extra labor, and whether they employ paid labor or not, the work is less onerous that it can be on conventional farms, large and small. Crickmore recounts the story of his own hard labor trying to subdue weeds and open up fields for production before he adopted no-till. Then he comments, “I stopped tilling or using the two-wheel tractor because it is much easier, more efficient, simpler and more profitable for us. It has made farming at Neversink very enjoyable. It was the best efficiency improvement we made.”
Both Singing Frogs and Neversink have websites with useful information on their techniques, as do several other of the farms featured in the book. Colin Crickmore and Jean-Martin Fortier also have pricey virtual courses on their approaches, as does Ben Hartmann of Lean Farm fame.
Books Mentioned
Josh Volk, Compact Farms: 15 Proven Plans for Market Farms on 5 Acres or Less (Storey Publishing, 2017).
Andrew Mefferd, The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution: High-Production Methods for Small-Scale Farmers (New Society Publishers, 2019).
Gabe Brown, Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018).
Eliot Coleman, The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1995).
Jean-Martin Fortier, The Market Gardener (New Society Publishers, 2014).
Michael Foley is the author of Farming for the Long Haul and Director of the School of Adaptive Agriculture. He lives and farms (no-till) at Green Uprising Farm in Willits, California.
