For many of my friends in the northeastern United States, the spring of 2015 is starting off with a nasty dry spell.

Even in a non-drought year, water often goes lacking on vegetable farms because of a lack of infrastructure, poor practices, insufficient monitoring, and a simple failure to get out there and put the water on that your crops need.

In 2012, during the extreme drought that we experienced in the Midwest, I had the opportunity to work with and visit several farms, as well as to drag my own farm through the dust. It was a great year to learn about what to do, and what not to do, when it comes to managing irrigation on your crops.

Use a Pressure Gauge – Running an irrigation system without a pressure gauge is like driving a tractor without a tachometer. Nozzles and drip emitters are designed to work at specific pressures (drip emitters are generally designed to work best at 8 – 12 psi), and you can’t judge those pressures by eye or by feel.

You want to check pressure at the beginning of your distribution lines. For drip irrigation systems and other low-pressure systems, I like the pressure gauges that are mounted on a stake, with a barbed poly connector to tie into the header line.

Monitor Soil Moisture – Nobody has spoken to me more strongly about the potential for irrigation management to maximize yields than Jim Crawford of Pennsylvania’s New Morning Farm. Jim monitors soil moisture using a standard soil probe, and the “Look and Feel” method for analysis. A soil probe like the JMC Soil Sampler with Footstep from Gempler’s lets you take a core sample twelve inches deep without too much bending; you can buy cheaper ones, but this is a nice option for making water sampling easy.

Most guides to monitoring irrigation with the “Look and Feel” method for monitoring soil moisture just duplicate information. Louisiana State University has a guide, Irrigation Scheduling Made Easy, with a better-than-average presentation of the concept and practical applications.

Keep in mind that most vegetables have fairly shallow root systems, generally from 6 – 18 inches. If you aren’t keep that area of the soil profile supplied with adequate water, you’re hampering your crop’s ability to perform.

Size Your Supply Lines – Irrigation systems, no matter how small, have supply lines, header lines and distribution lines. The supply lines get water to the field, header lines get the water to the distribution lines, and the distribution lines put the water in the field. These supply lines should be bigger (or at least not smaller) than the header lines, and the header line should be bigger (or at least not smaller) than the distribution lines.

Too many farms that I visited had supply lines that were just too small, reducing pressure and restricting the flow of water, which reduces the efficiency of water distribution. Beginning farmers especially were relying on garden hoses, the most expensive and least effective option for supply lines.

Set up Overhead Irrigation Systems Correctly – For most irrigation systems, lay out sprinkler heads such that the arc of each sprinkler just about reaches the next riser, and so that the sprinklers are offset from each other in adjacent lines. This ensures full, even coverage.

Monitor Your System – You can’t just turn your system on and walk away. When you turn the irrigation system on, you need to check to make certain everything is operating correctly. Is the drip tape leaking? Are the sprinklers all rotating?

Water at Critical Growth Stages – If you have to triage your water supply, focus the water where it will provide the most benefit. Germinating succession crops is obviously critical if you want to keep a supply of vegetables in the pipeline. Pay special attention to water supplies during tuber initiation for potatoes; fruit set and sizing and tomatoes, zucchini, and other fruiting crops; and head sizing in crops like broccoli and cauliflower.

One farm I worked with during the drought had a massive crop of tomatoes that was essentially dry-farmed all summer long. Just as harvest was getting under way, they got the first drenching rain in months – and cracked every tomato on the vine, resulting in massive crop losses.

If You’re Not in a Drought – If you’re in the vegetable business for long, you will experience a drought sooner or later. In 2012, the farms – beginning and experienced – who had invested in adequate and practical watering systems had their most profitable year ever. Irrigation is one area of the farm where, when you need the capacity, you just can’t get by without it. And there is no reasonable work-around. I’ve watched vegetable farmers haul water in 1,500-gallon tanks during a drought, and it’s a money-losing proposition. Invest now. Not only will the investment pay off in a drought year, but an easy, efficient irrigation system pays off in increased yields every year that you use it wisely.

Jordan Marr at The Ruminant was kind enough to have me on his podcast recently for two episodes talking about successful culinary herb production in a farm operation.  In the first episode, I make the case for focusing on herbs, and discusses the proper sourcing, and subsequent propagation, of herb cuttings.  In the second episode, I talk about how to harvest herbs in a way that strikes a balance between high production and low labor costs.

Episode 34 - Part 1
Episode 35 - Part 2

In any cropping operation, you're going to put a lot of energy into weeds - it's your choice if you want to put that energy into preventing them, controlling them, or dealing with them.

Prevention takes two forms: an ongoing reduction of the numbers of weed seeds in the soil over a number of years, and the use of crop rotations to set following crops up for success.
If one year's seeding is seven years' weeding, then keeping weeds from going to seed is perhaps the most fundamental principle of weed prevention.

The creative and judicious use of crop rotations can also work to prevent weeds. At Pennsylvania’s Beech Grove Farm, Anne and Eric Nordell combine shallow tillage with the following crop rotation in a technique they call Weed the Soil, Not the Crop.  Complete details of their process can be found in their book.

Year 1: Late-planted cash crop
Year 2: Fallow and cover crops to winterkill
Year 3: Early-planted cash crop
Year 4: Fallow and cover crops to overwinter

At Illinois’ Angelic Organics, Farmer John Peterson emphasizes weed prevention using the following four-year rotation:

Year 1 and Year 2: Perennial cover crop
Year 3: Early-season vegetables followed by winterkilled cover crop
Year 4: Hard-to-weed vegetables

On both farms, fertility is applied to the cover crops, and work is done to prepare the soil for the following year, reducing demands on spring tillage work and labor.

Control depends on the right operation of the right tools.

It's easy to invest in weed control tools- it just takes money. It's a lot harder to invest in the will and the systems to use those tools effectively. Invest in basic, versatile tools for weed control - sweeps and knives for the tractor, stirrups for the wheel hoe - then work to get the weed control systems working right before you invest in fancier tools.

Weed control tools must be applied early, often, and well.

Early: The right time to kill weeds is before you can even see them. It takes serious monitoring and awareness to target weeds before they break through the surface, but hoeing or cultivating weeds in the white thread stage hits them at the weakest link in their lifecycle. Every day after they break through the soil surface makes them a little bit stronger.

Often: There is not a magical number of cultivations that constitutes sufficient weed control. You're done controlling weeds when you're done controlling weeds, not after three wheel-hoeings or two hillings. And count on hand-weeding - even with great weed control, a few hardy specimens are likely to slip through.

Well: Time spent adjusting cultivators is an investment, not an expense. Time spent setting things up right ensures that you maximize returns on time you spend driving through the fields. If you farm anywhere other than the desert, you never know when you'll get another chance to kill weeds, so kill every single one you possibly can each time you hit the field with a cultivator, flamer, or hoe.

Dealing with weeds is just depressing.

Weeds compete with plants for sunshine, water, and nutrients, reducing your yields. They reduce the airflow around the plants, increasing drying time and allowing fungi to propagate and bacteria to multiply.

Plus, harvesting in weeds takes more time than harvesting in clean fields - and can keep mechanized harvesters from working at all. More time harvesting means more expense, lost opportunities, and lower quality as it takes longer to move crops to the cooler.

I've picked my share of beans in pollinating ragweed, and pulled my share of weeds out of salad greens. And I must say, preventing and controlling weeds is easier on the spirit, not to mention easier on the bottom line.

Rotational grazers call the resulting growth pattern a "grazing wedge"; at Rock Spring Farm, we called it "the harvest wave" (I've always had a fascination with surfing, and waves sound much more fun than wedges). Sometimes the wave got ahead of us - the chard leaves would grow over-mature and develop spots, or the oregano would show signs of flowering - and we would cut back the over-mature portion of the bed to manage crop quality and productivity.

Surfing the harvest wave allowed us to minimize harvest labor by reducing the number of steps taken because it encouraged even regrowth and discouraged workers from hunting-and-pecking their way through the field. It also maximized yields by helping us identify when a section of the bed needed maintenance to stay green, healthy, and growing.

Unfortunately, most of the discussion around scaling up has to do with growing more acres, rather than doing better on the acres we’ve already got. Farming fewer acres leaves us room to grow our own fertility, and to increase our weed control through the judicious use of cover crops and careful tillage – and doing better at growing at your current scale is a prerequisite for increasing the number of acres under production.

Not to mention, increasing yields has amazing compounding effects, especially when it comes to harvest. Totes fill up faster when you have more spinach per square foot or more beans per plant. Plus, crops get back to the packing house and into the cooler more quickly – not only do you have more vegetables faster, you get a higher quality product, too.

Time and time again, I work with farmers who are failing to get top yields because they are missing two key elements of horticulture: weed control and irrigation.

Weed control pays dividends by doing more than just reducing competition. In fields with great weed control, crops like spinach and cilantro have fewer yellow cotyledons and dead leaves, resulting in faster harvests. And if you have plans to mechanize your harvest in any way, good weed control is an absolute must.

Likewise with water – fresh vegetables are made of H2O, and lots of it. The old rule of thumb of an inch of water a week is just that – a rule of thumb. Watering needs vary according to heat, humidity, and stage of growth. Optimum yields may require much more than an inch of water per week – some growers I know apply three or more inches of water during critical growth phases.

Before investing in anything else, take a moment to look into these two critical systems on your farm this fall. Too often, huge improvements can be made without resorting to huge investments – the real issue is the allocation of time and energy into these areas. Doing more with what you have will always be a surer avenue to success – financial, personal, and ecological – than scrambling to do more with more.

If you've got weeds that have already made and ripened seeds still standing in your fields, consider letting them stand through the winter.

A 2006 Iowa State University study suggested that making weed seeds less accessible to predators resulted in increased weed densities the following year.  Tilling your weed seeds into the soil buries them, and keeps them away from scavenging field mice and birds over the winter. Leaving them standing makes them accessible to birds throughout the winter, and shattered seeds can fall on successive layers of snow throughout the winter.

Standing weeds also slow the wind down as it blows over your field. And the wind then drops some of the snow it’s carrying.

It may not feel as pretty or as clean as a freshly tilled field going into winter, but leaving your weeds standing should reduce your weeds the next year, and provide a better moisture boost for your soil.

When I started as a white belt in Taekwondo, I felt like a bumbling klutz - forming a proper fist and putting my hips into a punch didn't come naturally, much less trying to move my left leg in a sidekick. Four years later, I don't require the kind of careful instruction for every new move that I did for those first kicks, punches, and knifehand strikes. My body understands how the different moves all fit together, and what once felt like advanced fumbling has become second nature.

The motions of vegetable farming require a different set of motor skills than texting, driving, and typing, and many employees don't arrive on the vegetable farm with a ready ability to adapt. If you are able to harvest quickly yourself - and I hope you are! - pay special attention to exactly how to do it: put your thumb here, position your wrist this way, slice towards/away from you. Then share that information with your crew, explaining that this is exactly how to do the job at hand. As your people learn the fundamentals of bunching, cutting, and trimming, they will find their own unique styles and be more able to adapt to new crops.

Some hints for moving faster, whether you are just starting out or want to refine your skills:

• Drag containers rather than pushing them.
• If the last motion of harvesting leaves the crop in your left hand, you should be working from left to right, so that your left hand is trailing you.
• Keep the container near the hand that the product ends up in, and never cross your body with your hands.
• Keep supplies like twist ties and rubber bands right at hand, next to the hand that grabs them.
• Don't set down your tools; if you are putting a twist tie on a crop that you cut with a knife, learn to hold the knife while you put the tie on.
• Keep tools sharp; if you can feel the knife when you cut yourself, it isn't sharp enough (but don't bleed on the produce).
• Track progress from week to week throughout the season where employees can see it; that will provide an reinforcing feedback loop for your team.

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.

Effective workstations can have a tremendously positive influence on productivity by minimizing extraneous movement and avoiding discomfort or injury.

The top of the work table should be at elbow height – considerably higher than a standard folding table or kitchen counter. I feel that workers move faster when standing, so we’ve set up all of our workstations for that. Anti-fatigue mats reduce wear-and-tear on knees and backs. We have workstations at two different heights, to accommodate both larger and smaller members of the crew.

Everything the worker needs should be within easy reach. Keeping tools and supplies within a 24-inch radius to the side and front speeds things up enough to make a little nagging worthwhile. We provide a coffee cup at each workstation to store the tools needed for the job at hand. Completed flats are moved to a trolley or cart that requires only a turn and a step to get to; workers without easy access to the trolley slide flats across the table for handling by somebody who can pivot to it.

For filling flats, we’ve constructed a table with walls on three sides. We buy our potting mix in two-yard slings, so we shovel mix from the sling up onto the table, which has the additional benefit of breaking up compacted chunks. Workers mound the mix over the flat with their hands, then shake the flat hard once before using a flat board to sweep the soil from the middle of the flat to the ends.

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.

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?