Here in the Upper Midwest, we still have time to check over our equipment one last time before we get into the field. Actually, if this weather keeps up, we’ll have time to check over it a few more times before we get into the field – which makes it all the more important that everything is in tip-top shape and ready to go. Late springs mean that everything has to happen that much faster, and with that much less margin for error.

I’m always surprised at how much equipment that’s bolted together tends to shift over the course of the season. I’m sure that there are some farmers who don’t have problems with this, but I've always struggled with it. Maybe our bumpy field entrances shake things loose, or maybe I’m just not very good at turning a wrench.

Lots of my equipment at Rock Spring Farm has the three point hitch A-frame bolted to the toolbar that holds the seeders, transplanting units, or other working elements. I was preparing a seeder for sale the other day and noticed that the A-frame for the three point hitch was more than three inches off center. I don't think this is the result of freezing and  thawing over the winter, so this spacing discrepancy means that everything we seeded with that seeder last year - or at least the last time we had it out - was three inches off of the center of the bed.

Of course, if you do any kind of mechanical cultivating, this is a huge problem. One pair of outside rows is six inches closer to each other than they should be, so you’re likely to be throwing dirt on the first row of the next bed with your track sweeps; and on the other side, the pair of outside rows is too far apart, and you’re likely to be missing a strip of weeds down the middle of the wheel track – and that translates into either hand weeding or weed seeds, neither of which we really want more of in our world.

I've seen the same thing happen to cultivating equipment. My Buddingh basket weeder especially has a tendency to drift.

When bolting equipment onto a diamond or a square tool bar, you’ll get the sturdiest mount if you ensure that the faces of the clamps are all equally flat on the toolbar. Tighten one bolt a little, then the next. Taking your time with the initial setup will save time and headaches over the course of the season.

Take the time now to check over the spacing on your equipment, and add it to the list of things you check each time you take it out to the field, at least visually if not with a tape measure.

In my experience and observations, most vegetable growers base their row spacing on two factors:

• Center-to-center wheel spacing on their tractors; and
• Whether they are using a raised bed or flat bed system.

At Rock Spring Farm, we have a 60 inches center-to-center wheel spacing on all of our tractors. The Allis Chalmers G can be set to this width. This also means that most of our equipment also fits on, or is modular to, this spacing: our rototiller is 60 inches (which is a little too narrow), our tine weeder is 60 inches, and our drill is ten feet.

We've used a number of different row spacings in our thirteen years. We started off with the Eliot Coleman-recommended 3 12-inch or 2 24-inch rows. An equipment purchase the next year led us to work on 4 10-inch rows, which left the outer rows 30 inches apart. With this setup, we experienced quite a bit of disease pressure, and mechanical cultivation with anything other than a basket weeder was very difficult.

In 2005, we changed over to a system of 3 15-inch rows, and we have stayed with that ever since. This spacing has definitely improved our disease control by improving air flow, and it has made mechanical weed control much easier. We use our Buddingh basket weeder to cultivate either all three rows, or with an added sweep (purchased from Buddingh) to clean the middle row when we have crops on two rows.

When we stopped using soil blocks in 2009, we purchased a 2-row mechanical transplanter to replace our water wheel planter for every-day use. The new transplanter only plants two rows, so on transplanted crops we tightened up our in-row spacing by about 30% to maximize our productivity. Anne and Eric Nordell have done some in-depth analyses about planting more densely in the row to account for the wide-row spacings they used on their farm. The wider row spacing allows us to back the crops more densely in the row because we have plenty of air circulation; and the plant roots still have plenty of soil to scavenge in. See the illustrations in this online book to see how wide vegetable root systems are: http://goo.gl/S3kMF.

If I had it all to do over again, I would use a 72-inch tire spacing, and set my rows at 18 inches. My 30-inch 2-row spacing right now is too narrow to effectively hill potatoes. Further, my experience leads me to feel that the more dirt I can move, the more potential I have for effective weed mechanical weed control, and since that's such a key factor for yield, speed of harvest, and labor expenditures, it feels like the most critical thing to build an organic vegetable farming system around. However, the wheels on many older cultivating tractors won't adjust that wide without special spacers, which are available but which come with an additional hassle-factor.

Following is the text from an article I wrote for Rock Spring Farm's Eat Better Newsletter in 2009. The Scott Viner has performed well for us through the years. We've learned a few key lessons:

• The forward groundspeed of the tractor must be close to the speed of the belts that carry the roots up to the cutting knives. This is more important for crops like carrots than it is for crops like beets.
• Weed control is absolutely critical. Nothing messes up the Scott Viner like weeds.
• It's harder than you think to find a tractor operator to drive the bin wagon.

I took the following unedited video at Featherstone Farm in the fall of 2012. They shortened the elevator significantly compared to the Scott Viner at Rock Spring Farm, which shortens the drop but also requires the bin wagon tractor driver to operate much closer to the harvest machine:

Rube Goldberg at Rock Spring Farm Link to Original Post at eatbetternews.com

On Tuesday, we took delivery on what may prove to be a life-changing (or at least, a fall-changing) machine, a Scott Viner root harvester. This improbable-looking device pulls behind a tractor, and places carrots and beets directly into a 20-bushel bin on a wagon pulled by a second tractor.

I had been part of a crew running a similar device almost fifteen years ago at Harmony Valley Farm in Wisconsin, but had more-or-less discounted its applicability on a farm of our scale until I was visiting with David Van Eeckhout at Hog’s Back Farm east of the Twin Cities for a consulting project this spring. He had purchased one last fall, and put away some five thousand pounds of carrots in just over three hours. When he told me what he had paid for it, it didn’t take me long to figure out that the labor savings could pay for the machine in just one year, based only on last fall’s beet harvest at my farm. I called Roeter’s Farm Equipment, in the heart of Michigan’s vegetable-producing country, within hours of arriving home.

The Rube Goldberg device has belts running every-which-way to power more belts, pulleys, chains, elevators, and knives. Everywhere you look the machine has a grease fitting! A rider uses four different hydraulic levers and two more manual controls to steer, control the depth of two different parts, steer the belt that dumps roots in the wagon, and control the speed of the conveyor. Add three wheels and a conveyor that hangs out about eight feet to the side, and enough rust to indicate that it is certainly older than me, and you’ve got something that appears in stark contrast to the fiberglass-clad harvest machinery used in corn and bean fields.

Here’s how it works: a shoe at the front of the machine undercuts the roots at the same time two points lift and aligns the leaves. Twin belts grab the leaves and lift the roots out of the ground, conveying them toward the rear. Two sets of interlocking knives, rotating upwards like gears, grab the leaves and cut them from the top of the roots, which then fall onto a conveyor. The conveyor moves the roots out the back of the machine, where another conveyor goes up an elevator and dumps the roots directly into a bin on a wagon pulled by another tractor.

When Mark Roeter delivered the machine, we were quite fortunate that he stayed around long enough to put it together (the elevator at the rear shipped separately because the unit wouldn’t have fit on his semi-trailer otherwise), and ran me and Ben through everything we needed to know to get it running today. (As with almost all of the 1960’s vintage equipment I have used, assembly and adjustment required a sledge hammer to make it all work!) He told us to expect some frustration in learning to use it, but we put it in the field first thing this morning and were exchanging high fives just a few minutes later.

From the harvest row to the edge of the receiving wagon is about eighteen feet, so organizing fields to facilitate using the machine will take some serious planning, and we won’t be able to use it to its full extent during the season. Our fall storage crops, harvested at a moment when time is short and labor are both short, are set up to accommodate the machine. We are all very excited!

I’m tired of hearing about how local food is fresher than produce trucked in from California, Arizona, and Mexico. “Freshness” relates to the amount of biological activity that has occurred from the time of harvest to the time a vegetable is prepared in your kitchen. Local food can provide tremendous benefits to a community’s economic vitality, to the flavor and selection of produce, and to a more-secure, less-carbon-outputting food system; but freshness is not a fundamental quality of locally-grown produce.

When I started Rock Spring Farm, I went to a meeting of growers for local food producers in Decorah at which the produce manager of the local natural foods cooperative commented that the lettuce she purchased from local producers didn’t last very long, while the produce from California had a shelf-life of a week to ten days. I had experienced the same thing with local produce on a farm I managed in Maine, and it all comes down to temperature. In both of those times and places, local growers hadn’t invested in the equipment and systems necessary to maintain produce quality.

Within the range of temperatures where plants survive, the rate of chemical and biological processes approximately doubles for every ten-degree increase in temperature. That means that produce stored at 45 degrees will last half as long as produce stored at 35 degrees; and produce stored at 55 degrees will last only a quarter of the time. When we pick a vegetable, we separate it from the source of energy and sustenance that comes from having its extensive network of roots expanded throughout the soil – at this point the portion of the plant we’ve picked begins the process of dying, which in vegetables is characterized by a decline in “freshness” and quality.

Getting produce cooled to the proper storage temperature is the first essential step in ensuring freshness; keeping it at the proper temperature is the second. The large-scale production systems in the vegetable-producing regions of this country dedicate a tremendous amount of infrastructure and energy to getting produce cold and keeping it that way. It is not unusual for a harvest operation to include refrigeration units right in the field, climate-controlled packing facilities, and refrigerated transportation from harvest right to the point of sale.

Furthermore, it’s not just the air temperature of the storage environment that matters – it’s the interior temperature of the produce. Grocery store coolers and home refrigerators do not have the power they need to actually suck the heat out of warm produce – that needs to be done by the farmer. And dunking in cold water (ground water comes out of the tap at around 45 degrees on the Iowa-Minnesota state line) and storing at ambient temperatures just can’t do that.

At Rock Spring Farm, we’ve invested in the cooling facilities and harvest systems that get produce cooled quickly, and keep it cold until it’s sold. Whether it’s planning for harvest to allow time for equipment to cool the produce, our rapid harvest techniques and shading in the field prior to transport to our insulated packing facility, adequate potable water to provide a continuous supply of cold water for initial cooling, our commercial-grade walk-in cooler, or the cold chain our delivery partners maintain throughout the delivery process, we work hard to ensure that vegetables will stay alive – and stay fresh – for as long as possible.