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Good Food, Good Systems

12/15/2011

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Over the last twelve years, I’ve worked hard to develop systems at Rock Spring Farm that consistently provide our customers with clean, ready-to-use vegetables and herbs. As the farm grew beyond the size that could be operated by just one or two individuals, I’ve had to learn how to communicate the how-and-why of what we do to an ever-growing and ever-changing crew of individuals who flow through this operation from year to year.

I’ve had ample opportunity over the last few years to learn that I can’t possibly do it all myself. This wasn’t an easy lesson for this farmer to learn. I didn’t get into this business to manage people – in fact, like most farmers, I didn’t get into this business to manage a business! I got into this business to drive tractors and dig carrots and listen to the birds sing. But having employees on the farm enables me to make a living at the same time that it allows me the flexibility to pursue other projects beyond the day to day work of growing rutabagas.

Having well-trained and empowered employees also has a tremendous impact on my and my family’s quality of life. Without a competent and invested crew, I wouldn’t have the ability to leave the farm for days at a time on vacation, or even to attend mid-day events in town on days when we need to pack CSA boxes. And it’s not just vacations, but my ability to have an impact on the world of organic farming by serving actively on non-profit boards and providing education, outreach, and consulting to farmers around the country (not to mention co-directing the MOSES Organic Farming Conference).

On a small, diversified operation like Rock Spring Farm (we are the largest organic vegetable farm in Northeast Iowa, but still a rather small operation in the overall scheme of organic produce), everybody plays a variety of different roles on the farm. We don’t have a food safety manager who dedicates all of their time to watching out for regulatory and common-sense compliance; even a packing shed manager ends up riding on a transplanter. The fact that everybody has complicated and multi-faceted roles to play on the farm means that everybody needs access to a diverse array of knowledge about how to accomplish just about every task on the farm.

Last fall, when we decided to pursue a food safety certification through the USDA-GAPs program, we had to begin to document our procedures and improve our record-keeping to demonstrate that we did indeed implement the procedures we had documented. This has led to an effort to document our practices throughout the farm, an ongoing process that we expect to finish this winter. While’s it’s not a substitute for elbow-to-elbow training, a good operations manual will help ensure the continued smooth operation of the farm, and the consistent production of good food, good soil, and a great quality of life for everybody involved in the farm.

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Bob Quinn and Dryland Vegetables

12/11/2011

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At the Sioux Falls Organic Conference last week, I had the pleasure of meeting visionary organic producer Bob Quinn, from Big Sandy, Montana. Starting in 1986, Bob transitioned his ranch from conventional alfalfa, beef, and wheat production to an organic powerhouse in northern Montana. Up in zone 3 with some 2,000 acres in production, Bob has even been experimenting with organic vegetable production without irrigation - and that's no joke in that environment.

With the vegetables, Bob has experimented with wide spacings to minimize plant demands. Last year, I read a book by Steve Solomon called Gardening When It Counts, which described Solomon's efforts to grow vegetables at low cost and in the most reliable way possible. (As near as I can see it, Steve Solomon is the real deal. He founded Territorial Seed Company, which carries all kinds of great stuff from gardening year-round out out in Oregon; he's written books on plant breeding and varietal selection for gardeners and small growers; and now he's got a modest homestead in Tasmania. Really, how cool is that?) Wide spacing was key to that. While a lot of attention has been paid in the last thirty years of market farming literature to the virtues of maximizing production on each piece of land, I think this idea of farming more land less intensively really makes a lot of sense. If you don't live in the city, why not use more land, less fertilizer, and less water, and make the work of weeding and mechanical tillage just that much easier?

As a movement of organic market farmers, I think we have tended to value high production per acre over high production per unit of effort. Yes, productivity-per-acre helps us put less acreage under plow, utilizing our land resource better and reducing up-front capital costs for land - but it requires more labor per unit of production than less-intensive production. Wider spacing can allow for better utilization of mechanical weed control, certainly - and if it reduces irrigation requirement as well, then you've saved on that labor, as well. Solomon writes that it encourages the development of more robust, more resilient root systems as well. 

Especially since good help is so hard to find, particularly once you get beyond one or two key people. For most of the expanding market farmers I have met, finding those good people becomes one of their biggest challenges. So why not do whatever you can to save on the expenses of weeding and irrigating, two jobs that nobody really seems to enjoy?


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Illinoisans Drink Atrazine - and it's not good.

12/2/2011

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I'm never sure who's crazier, those of us who feel surprise and outrage over news like this, or the nozzleheads who continue to profit off of it.

Not only does Atrazine appear to cause cancer, its presence in ground water appears to cause irregular menstrual periods, altered hormone levels, delayed puberty, and pregnancy loss. All of this based on studies of municipal tapwater in Illinois, so we're not talking about a few rural wells. We're talking about the water used by a huge part of the population in the Midwestern corn belt.

You can read the article in Scientific American here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=atrazine-water-tied-hormonal-irregularities

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Vision

11/29/2011

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"If I could just get it on paper, I might make some sense of it all."
- Jimmy Buffett, "If I Could Just Get It on Paper"
from the album, Somewhere Over China
Several years ago, while reading software designer Joel Spolsky's column in Inc. Magazine, I realized that although he called it Joel on Software, the content had enough relevance to an audience of entrepreneurs across the full spectrum of businesses to provide valuable feedback to an organic vegetable farmer in Northeast Iowa.

That's when the idea for Chris on Farming dawned on me. Not that I ever expect to get a column in Inc. Magazine, but I'd already spent several years speaking to and writing for beginning farmers, organic farmers, consumers, and others about farming, philosophy, family, and food. And occasionally, what I said seemed to have some effect on the people I was saying it to. I wondered if it might appeal to a larger audience, and if I could translate some of what I observed and experienced into something meaningful.

I hope that Chris on Farming becomes something valuable in the community of people who care about food, farming, and life. I've been blessed to have so many wonderful people share their farms and stories with me, and to have had so many opportunities to learn through my own successes and failures. I hope that the insights - as bold as that sounds! - that have come from those experiences, when translated into pixels on a screen, will have meaning to the people who stumble onto these pages.

Thank you for coming here. Thank you for having a listen and giving a slice of your attention to these musings.

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Purple Pitchfork is a project of Renewing the Countryside, a non-profit dedicated to rural revitalization and collaborative farmer education that serves as the home for these resources Chris Blanchard created.
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