Rain Makes Corn... and Potatoes

Despite the leaf hopper eating all of the potato leaves, the potatoes have been coming in strong this last week. We have had so many potatoes that we have been harvesting double shares of our potato crop to the shareholders. Potatoes can be a long and dirty process to harvest. You start off by pulling the plant out of the ground, roots and all, and then you use a hand trowel or pitchfork to unearth the 6-10 potatoes that are hiding. Somehow, I manage to get most of the soil in my boots every time I harvest. 

We have been having a decent harvest of corn but now we are starting to move into the juvenile crop. I expect after this rainfall the younger corn will be ready for harvest and we will have corn coming out of our ears. At Moose Hill, we usually aim to harvest about 500-1,000 ears of corn a day. This means bringing potato sacks through the rows and harvesting 50 ears of corn per sack. These sacks can get pretty heavy, but at least I don't have to go to the gym after work!

A lot of my time on the farm, I spend thinking about the contrasts between small scale organic farming and industrial farming. I was a girl raised on an industrial farming philosophy through my education at the Norfolk Aggie and through the National FFA Organization. I learned that production agriculture is not as bad as it looks on the outside, that most farmers receive a bad reputation from ignorant outsiders that see the treatment of their animals and assume it is animal abuse. I believe that industrial farming is a very efficient method in producing the most product in the least amount of time. But is it the most environmentally efficient? Is it the healthiest for our bodies? Is there negative effects when it comes to Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO)?

At UMass Amherst, I have a secondary major in Sustainable Food and Farming. Here, there is some hostility towards the industrial farming industry. There is a lot of talk of Organic, Local, and Non GMO. While, I see much of their points and may have drank some of the Sustainable Food and Farming Kool- Aid myself, there is still a lot that I question in this faction of agriculture. How sustainable is an organic product that had to be shipped from halfway across the world? What if the GMOs are more environmentally efficient? For example some GMO's decrease the need for pesticides (which would make it more environmentally efficient I assume) or creates crops to be more water efficient for places with little rainfall like the Water Efficient  Maize for Africa Project (WEMA). The question that it all comes down to; can local agriculture feed the world?

I try to educate myself on the many divisions of this industry and recently finished reading Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. The author gave great insight on many different aspects of the agricultural industry without asserting himself or his reader too much to either side. It was a book more of observations than opinions, which I appreciated. I would recommend reading it to those who are interested in learning more about where some of their food comes from.  

We live in a world of many opinions and ideas. Maybe, none of us are right. I think, we need to impart changes in our agricultural system. But to what extent, I am not sure. Do we eradicate the current system and go completely local? Or do we meet in the middle? Do we start increasing vertical farming and closed ( or cyclic) system farming? Maybe we need a variety of these to make ends meet. Improvements will not happen overnight but we can always be working towards improving what we have and working towards decreasing our impact on the earth. 

Weeding is the Name of the Game

Coming back to the farm after a weeklong road trip to Georgia brought so many new changes! It was hard to believe that the era of strawberries was coming to an end and that the greens were still going strong.

 Down on the farm, a lot can change in a few days. All of the sun and rain we have been having allows crops to grow so much faster than you would expect. We have already started to harvest the zucchini and cousa and the carrots are almost ready for their first day of harvest! These carrots have been long awaited. The other farm hands, shareholders, and I have spent countless hours tending to our carrot  crop in the hopes of receiving some substantial and delicious carrots.

 As I have come to realize on the farm, weeding is the name of the game. Without weeding, your crops will become overrun by weeds, will be difficult to harvest, and will not be a substantial size. With carrots, this is an especially important task. They are delicate creatures and if overrun by weeds they will only produce scrawny, less-than-nutritious-or-delicious carrots.

All of the weeding and personal investment in the carrots has me looking forward to the day when we can harvest these vibrant vegetables and have a little sampling for ourselves. I know the horses at my other job are looking forward to a sampling as well!