New/updated @ eXtension

This is a Weed 'Em and Reap Part 1 video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o81gVz3sXeg

Mark Wheeler, Pacific Botanicals. Grants Pass, OR.

This is another weed control piece of equipment. It’s actually made to rake hay. It’s a hayrake. This does a similar job to the Lely tine weeder, however its much more aggressive. I got the idea for using this from a piece of equipment made in Yakima, Washington by Northwest Tiller Company. They make what they call a finger weeder and it looks almost exactly like this machine. The thing about the Northwest machine is these tines are much more delicate and thin and they bend easier, whereas on this hayrake, they’re very stiff. They don’t give very much at all.

These tines or fingers come around and they just rake the soil perpendicular to the direction of travel. You can see that the leading edge tine is shorter. What this does, if there are any grass clods or residue in the way, it removes those first and then these come in and scrape the soil. This is PTO powered, it's not ground powered. What you can do is run this at any rpm you want and you just adjust the gear that you’re in. If you need a lot more aggressive control and you need these tines to go over the plant many times, you go in a low gear. However if you just want do a light once-over, you go in a higher gear, say up to 3 or 4 mph. Usually, though, I run this machine fairly slow, at about 2 mph. It seems to do a good job on most weeds.

I use this mostly on second year perennials, in the early spring. You could also use it on annuals in the summer, or smaller plants if you set it very light. Sometimes when we’re going to harvest a root crop, we have to mow the tops of the crop off first and sometimes in cases where you have a large amount of residue sitting on top of the root crop that you want to dig, you need to move that residue off the field before you can move a digger through. So we’ll run this hayrake through and rake it off in front of the digger. Then the digger can see right where the roots are and dig them out.

If you look to the rear of the machine you’ll see a couple of adjustable wheels. These go up and down and you can adjust the depth and the tension that these tines hit. These tines will go almost 2 inches deep in the ground if you want. In general, we run them much lighter, just brushing the top of the ground.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3276

This is a Weed 'Em and Reap Part 1 video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJnZti7P6N4

Mark Wheeler, Pacific Botanicals. Grants Pass, OR.

This is a Lely Tine weeder and this type of weeder has been made for over 50 years. This particular one has four rows of tine. You tend to run this very fast through the soil because its action is by shattering little clumps of soil and killing small weeds. It’s very good on seeds that have germinated but you really can’t even see them yet. It just picks them up on the soil, turns them over and dries them out. This is probably the most effective about three or four days after a rain or an irrigation where the top of the soil is drying out and the weeds have germinated and they’re very small. This will just take that crust and flick it off the growing crop plant.

This is used in a variety of crops. You can use it in grains, small grains, rye, wheat, oats, before they come up. Then when they get to the two-to-three leaf stage, you can hit them again. You can use them in potatoes for beds, before emergence, after emergence. They’re used a lot in corn, direct-seeded crops, before emergence and then at the three- leaf stage again. If you use this on direct-seeded crops, I tend to seed my seed a little thicker, because it will kick out an occasional plant when you have the tine going straight down a row. This is not a problem. It’s kind of disheartening to watch. You just grit your teeth and go down the row and you know some plants are getting kicked out. But you seed it heavy enough; it will be no problem at all.

On transplanted crops, this has more of a limited application because it takes at least two weeks for a transplanted crop to get rooted enough before you can use this and then, by that time, your weeds might be too large for this to be very effective, but in some cases it can be.

Whenever you use this piece of equipment though, it's good to use it in the afternoon when it's hot because plants tend to have less rigidity, less moisture in their stems when they’re hot and they bend over easier. They don’t break as easily and they come back up quicker. It works better at high speeds. It works well in rocks. It won’t get all the weeds around a rock if the rock is big, it’ll just bounce right up over the top of the rock when you go.

These tine weeders come in a variety of widths. Anywhere from three to four feet wide to thirty feet wide depending on your application. This particular one is ten feet wide and it covers all four of our rows because we’re set up on a four-row system.

One advantage of these, if you move this back to the last notch on the back, it puts more down pressure into the ground. If you move it up here, this one would barely touch the ground at all. Which means if you had a row right here and you just wanted to cultivate around the row with this machine, you could move this up to the front and leave a gap of no tines hitting the ground where your crop is, and then the ones on the sides would cultivate right beside the row.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3275

This is a Weed 'Em and Reap Part 1 video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_R-fTC7uYk

Suzy and Robelee Evans, Foundhorn Gardens. Days Creek, OR.

Robelee Evans:

This is the Reigi mechanical in-row weeder, made by Univerco of Canada. One of the features I really like about this is the simple design. It's very practical and it's very affordable and really light-weight. It has a few moving parts and it's easy to grease the few parts and it's easily accessible. It would be easy to repair or work on it.

The PTO shaft turns these discs that spin the belts which transfers the movement down to the discs with the tines. These are the spinning discs that come in two sizes: seven inch and eleven inch. You use the smaller ones for closer spacing. We find this one [eleven inch] works better for something eighteen to twenty inches between plants in the row. These optional shield attachments are used to minimize the throwing of soil and rocks away from the plants.

Suzy Evans:

One of the great advantages of the Reigi weeder is it's easy to see what you’re doing. You don’t have to twist your spine looking behind you. It's easy to manipulate. It’s not hard on the arms and it's actually pretty fun. I’ve gone for probably a couple hours straight and Robelee is looking back and going, "You sure you‘re not tired?"
I’m going, "Go! Go!"

It’s low-stress. We love it.

The Reigi is very effective on both small and much larger weeds unless the large weeds are very densely packed. This field was cultivated by the Reigi about two weeks ago. We’re just going through it for the second time. You can see it does a really good job of removing the soil from the roots. The Reigi can be used on a variety of widely-spaced plants, such as squash, strawberries, cabbage-family plants, as well as herbaceous and woody perennials. In a direct-seeded squash field such as this, the Reigi can be used to both weed and thin. We’ll plant at a higher density since it's much easier to thin then it is to transplant.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3240

This is a Weed 'Em and Reap Part 1 video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zjrin_nGmU

Rob Heater, Stahlbush Island Farms. Corvallis, OR.

This is what we call an in-row cultivator. It’s built on to a Buffalo cultivator, which is made in the Midwest, I think back in Nebraska. It’s a high-residue, no-till cultivator. We happen to have had a bunch of these that we were using in our crops anyway and decided to make an attachment in here for killing weeds in widely spaced crops, like winter squash and different pumpkins. We came up with this concept of having a blade that runs right down the row that’s killing the weeds that are in the row. We’ve got a pneumatic cylinder that retracts that blade right when it comes to a plant. We’ve added an air compressor on the front toolbar of the cultivator that’s driven hydraulically by the tractor. We’ve got a series of timers and air valves and 12-volt solenoids. Each person riding on the back has a button to push. Right when they hit the button, it will raise that blade momentarily as the plant goes under. If you weren’t to hit these buttons, this would work up the entire width of ground. Every single square inch would get tilled. By hitting these buttons, you ‘re raising the blade and skipping a small rectangle of dirt right where a plant is and that is the only portion of the field unstirred. It just makes a pass. You can take a very, very weedy pumpkin field and go through with this and it looks remarkably clean behind it. The only weeds left, like I said, are right underneath the plant.

There is not a drop of chemical used on any of the squash. It’s flaming, right before it emerges. We’re talking half a day before they come up, its flamed. This comes through, once it gets pretty weedy or once the squash are so big if you wait any longer they’re not going to go through the machine without getting cut up. Hoeing is the final, if needed. Some fields if they’re clean enough don’t even need hoed. In rowing is all we do.
 

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3239

This is a Weed 'Em and Reap Part 1 video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj72soMRqVo

Jeff Falen, Persephone Farm. Lebanon, OR.
 

This is a field of winter squash and pumpkins and these plants were all transplanted. The plants were about that [6-8 inches] high when they went into the ground about 2 weeks ago, I believe. Our strategy here is, because the transplants were so big, to try to push soil around the plants and thereby, basically smothering weeds growing around the plants. To enhance this strategy, when we transplanted, we made a furrow in the ground, a pretty deep furrow. Then we put the plants into that furrow. When we come through with the cultivator, we’ll push the soil back into the furrow and that will cover up the weeds that are growing in the furrow.

This is a close-up view of our squash cultivator. The row of squash would be right here if we were out in the field. These two sweeps are doing most of the work in the row. They are turning the soil up and exposing the weeds to the sun where they die. This sweep in particular is throwing a lot of soil into the furrow to bury the weeds that are in the furrow. Following right behind the sweeps is a Bezzerides spring hoe which finishes off the job by tucking the soil in right around the crop plant and burying any weeds that are real close to the crop plant.

You can see this has been cultivated here and the furrow is filled in and you can’t see any of the weeds that are in it. Right now you can just see little white threads and they’re laying on the surface and they’re going to die.

If the crop is small, a few plants may get buried, less than 1%, which means that the driver will have to walk the field and uncover plants here and there. We consider this a small price to pay to work as close as we do to the crop.

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 3238

This is a Farmers and their Diversified Horticultural Marketing Strategies video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wdusYeEKV4

Paul Harlow and Dennis Sauer, Harlow Farm. Westminster, VT

I’m Paul Harlow from Harlow Farm in Westminster, Vermont here in the Connecticut River valley. Also the farm of Deep Root Organic Truck Farmers, a marketing cooperative that I’m a member of. I farm about 100 acres of organic vegetables right here in the Connecticut River Valley, some of the richest farm land around. What we are trying to do at Harlow farm is to develop a crop mix that allows us to use our labor efficiently, but also to provide the market with the produce that they need at a certain time of year. We try to combine a mix of fresh vegetables including lettuce, kale, peppers, cabbages, with storage crops that can be sold long term, beets and carrots and rutabagas and squash. Harlow Farm has currently developed a pattern of growing the same 8-10 crops every year, figuring that over the course of 10 years, we’ll do well some years and not so well others. Trying to guess what the marketplace is going to be from one year to the next in the produce business is probably not a wise thing to do. Because of the price pressure for wholesale vegetables we have to become very efficient and we really keep an eye on unit costs.

Deep Root I think is known for it’s high quality and we try to constantly upgrade that. Things that we’ve done in the last few years, is we’ve bought a hydro-cooler so now we’re hydro-cooling all our lettuce and kale so that we provide a good fresh product that stays on the market. Other things that we’ve done that are somewhat innovative, are we stem-tag and rubber band to identify almost all of our products. These all have POU numbers, the market is almost demanding now that they have identification, especially the super markets is where the big growth area for organic is. I think that the best things for the co-op, for me and our farm is that it helps if we provide a cohesive marketing plan and that we get together during the winter and try to grow things that each farm does well and that we don’t overlap. So that throughout the course of the marketing season the co-op has a steady supply of the crops that we feel like we need to sell.

My name is Dennis Sauer, I’m a foreman of Harlow Farm in Westminster, Vermont. I’ve known Paul for a number of years and I was a member with him in the Deep Root Cooperative and when I decided to quit farming on my own I went to work for Paul. I was one of the founding members of the co-op, I joined in the second year. So I was part of the process of getting the co-op running and writing the bylaws and setting up the process for how we marketed and dealt with crop production estimates in the winters. The first five years were the hardest years for the co-op, it was a challenge to get the co-op up and running and a lot of the things that we did in those first few years, we’re still using today.

The main advantages of the co-op and the reason that we came together as a co-op was that individually we couldn’t address all the needs of our accounts in the metropolitan area. By combining loads and farmers growing particular crops we were able to offer a wider range of product and fill trucks in order to get the volume that the buyers needed. And that’s still true today, I mean we can fill trailer loads to go to Maryland which one farm could never do, but a combined co-op with various different products can fill the trucks, so that every farmer whether they're a small herb grower or a one crop farmer still gets their stuff to our farthest markets.

The key to the co-op is cooperation and which takes a lot of effort on the part of the farmers you know, meeting in the winter deciding crop production levels, deciding who gets to grow what, how much of what based on previous sales, on packing conditions. Particular items like quality, who gets rejected, who decides what gets rejected, all of these things are things that individual farmers would never have to do on their own, it’s pretty much their own decision. Whereas in the cooperative you have to honor the wishes of the entire cooperative and for farmers who tend to be fairly independent that sometimes causes problems, to have someone telling them what they can't do. So it’s a challenge all the time, but the benefits are that you can get your products in the markets that you otherwise wouldn’t reach. Originally all it took to be in the co-op was a commitment of crops and a 100 dollar-a-year membership fee, but we quickly realized that without an equity investment by the growers, the farmers sort of treated the co-op, when they needed the market they used it but when they didn’t, they didn’t use it, they went elsewhere to get a better price. And the co-op also needed equity to buy equipment, office equipment and pay the managers and some sort of security. So what happened is that now it’s required for the growers to own equity shares.

‘My name is Chris, hi. I’ve got a question for you, is there any way you can get 20 zucchini by Friday? Well I’m screwed then cause Kevin wants 20 zucchini by Friday and I don’t have any. No I don’t think there is either. I’m better call him right now.’

Definitely the benefits of the co-op and I think definitely they’re not as tangible as the markets, but the growers' involvement with each other, the planning year to year, knowing what each other is going to grow, knowing how their going to grow it, varieties, talking about, you know, there’s a lot of on-farm research, people share information, they share equipment. And also it’s just, you avoid the isolation of farming on your own farm, you get to talk to other growers on a regular basis and sort of share the ups and downs which is a valuable experience for a lot of farmers especially in a market that’s price driven and downward-price driven, so it’s helpful to have other people that are under the same pressures that you are. And in the wintertime it’s nice for the growers to get together and I think a lot of them enjoy the process.

This video project was funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6051

This is a Farmers and their Diversified Horticultural Marketing Strategies video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWBqxmcio6k

Dave and Chris Colson, New Leaf Farm. Durham, ME.

We’re Dave and Chris Colson, we’re from Durham, Maine and we’ve been farming here in Durham since 1982. I started the farm with my parents in 1982 and we started marketing in 1983 and we’ve been marketing chiefly to restaurants and natural food stores ever since then. We are cultivating twelve acres. Three and a half acres of vegetables, the rest are in green manure rotations for soil fertility. All of our produce goes off-farm, we deliver to the Portland area twice a week and that makes it easier for us to schedule the rest of the week for harvesting two days a week and cultivating, maintaining the fields, the crops. Currently we’ve got two natural food stores and about five restaurants that we deliver. In addition we’ve added a couple of food buying clubs or food coops to take the place of one very large cooperative natural food store which closed last year.

We started marketing, going to farmers markets back in the early days and my dad did a lot of the actual farmers market selling. He didn’t like sitting at farmers market - he’s an active kind of guy and we found by the end of the market, prices were dropping and we didn’t feel like we were getting the price we needed to get for our vegetables. So my dad knocked on a couple back doors of health food stores and knocked on the door of a couple restaurants that we knew chefs of and they were all eager to take the produce and so we’ve been marketing pretty much to restaurants since then. We’ve felt that for the quality and the type of vegetables that we were growing, which in some ways are probably a little bit unusual for people especially when you get originally into the mesclun salad mixes. What we were looking for was an educated consumer and we found that the chefs were about as educated a food consumer as we could find. We’ve noticed that chefs talk to each other, our names will be passed around and one of the best ways we’ve found to pick up restaurant accounts is with the culinary herbs, having fresh culinary herbs. We sometimes will deliver just culinary herbs to a restaurant for a period of time and then they will suddenly discover that, oh we’re growing lettuce and other things as well, so that’s a great way to get your foot in the door.

There were a few things we tried that didn’t really work out for us. We started marketing to some larger outlets, colleges, stores and whatnot, bigger restaurants. We found that when we had to work through a purchasing agent they weren’t working directly with the food, they didn’t see the quality they were getting and only were basically concerned only with the bottom line. When you work with the owner chef, you have someone that’s working with the food, that knows what they’re getting for their dollar and is willing to pay for it.

Some of the things that we’ve found to be important when dealing with the chefs particularly and also with the stores is to make sure you let them know when you have something available and follow through with the phone calls, don’t wait for them to call you for an order, but take the initiative and have a regular schedule so that they know when you’re going to call and that you are going to call. We have regular delivery days so they know exactly when the produce is coming in and when we agree to deliver something to them, we deliver just that item and in the amount that they asked for. If there is a problem, we can’t get something, we’ve overestimated, then we call them back as soon as possible and let them know what’s happening. It’s that communication that we’ve found to be the biggest point in our marketing. And over a period of time when you work with a dozen or so of chefs or buyers you develop a personal relationship with them, and that personal relationship is really what makes the marketing click.

A few years ago, we decided to get a computer for the kids’ homework, but realized that we could use an accounting program for the farm. This accounting program not only generates the invoices, but it also keeps track of how many pounds of broccoli, heads of lettuce etc, we’ve sold over the season. At the end of the year we can then look at which crops we benefited from and which crops we need to drop. The other information we can get from this program is which customers bought over our minimum amount, dollars wise, and then we can plan the next season’s customer list based on that program information. I’m not a businessperson, I’m not an expert in marketing and I wouldn’t even have predicted that I would be in this position in a business. I tend to think of myself more as a creative artsy person. I guess I’m really a people person too, because its those contacts that I’ve made over the years that I really value, and I feel that we are loyal to our customers and they are loyal to us.

This video project was funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6050

This is a Farmers and their Diversified Horticultural Marketing Strategies video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yedIS3ky0YU

Norman Grieg, Grieg Farm. Red Hook, NY.

Hi I’m Norman Grieg we’re at the Grieg Farm in Red Hook, New York. We’re located about 100 miles north of New York City in the Hudson Valley. The farm is 550 acres and it’s a fruit and dairy farm. We’ve changed crops over the years, but it started just with apples, strawberries and crops for the cows. As we’ve found that we wanted to go more retail, we’ve created retail season so now we have asparagus, strawberries and peas in June. In July we go into blueberries and summer raspberries and then fall raspberries starting in August with apples, blackberries, pumpkins and then Christmas trees at the end of the season.

I’ve always thought of the New York City market as our local market and the way that people happen to come, is instead of advertising to the world, we target local newspapers. The upper east side in New York City has its own newspaper, Greenwich Village has its own newspaper, Brooklyn Heights has its own newspaper, so we target neighborhoods where we think they would have the disposable income to have automobiles to travel for a weekend or a day off and we advertise classified ads in those local newspapers because if you try to do radio or television for metropolitan New York City it’s prohibitively expensive, but if you can target those as your local market it’s possible.

My family has been in the pick-your-own business since 1949. It started as a gleaning process after we’d harvested for wholesale on a small acreage of strawberries. In the sixties we had a write-up in the New York Times and we were picked out everyday so we decided that should never happen again. We added another 15 acres of strawberries that next year and now we need a write up in the New York Times every year to pick the crop. But it’s interesting how the market has changed over the years. In the 50’s everyone came in a station wagon with four or five children and mother and father and they would wait all year for the three weeks that strawberries were ready and pick 100 pounds of strawberries per car and take them home and spend the day freezing and jamming. And that doesn’t happen anymore. The market today, the public comes a single headed household maybe with one child, or a young couple out for a day in the country and they’ll pick eight or ten pounds of berries and not know what they’re going to do with them all. But then they will stop at the market and pick up a jar of jelly and shortcake and heavy cream to go with it. But the trend in the industry is that the pick per customer has gone down. The trend on our farm is that we’re harvesting the same total number of pounds of berries each year, but there are three times as many customers. We have more and more people who come from a greater distance and stay for a longer period of time so we tried to create a greater point of interest for them and so we have a small petting area, we have a picnic area, we have a place where they can feed the fish beside a place where they can cut their own flowers, or visit our nursery, or visit our market and bakery, or stop and see the dairy cows. So we try to become a destination agriculture rather than just a pick-your-own place.

One of the interesting but difficult aspects about pick-your-own is that if you have a field of produce, it’s really like stocking the shelves in a store and you have to have inventory on the store shelf for the public to come. So you’re constantly dealing with the shelf life of the product on the plant. On a crop like apples, sometimes you have a two-week window to pick the apples even though the flavor may be perfect on a smaller window than that. But it’s a job always to match the public attendance and pick vis-à-vis what you have in the crop and there are a lot of ways to manage that. One of them is to target your advertising. If I see I’m going to have a hot week and I’m right just before peak in strawberries I know I have to advertise heavily that week to get the public to come. The other way to do it is not to do any advertising and let the people come when they want to, and then pick what they don’t pick and send that to market or sell it retail at your farm stand.

I’m a dairy farmer and I’ve been taking care of animals for years and when we started having the public come to the farm, the only way that I could think about it as a farmer was - now we just have another kind of animal on the farm. And so when I think of pick-your-own, there’s a part of it that’s just grazing and its not very different than your dairy pasture. The area closest to where the public comes in gets grazed very heavily and the area at the far end doesn’t get grazed at all. So if you can constantly control where the entrance to the pasture is, then you can pick all the crop. When people come to pick-your-own at the farm, where they park their car is very important. You can walk a little bit to the crop, but Americans don’t like to walk and if they pick much crop, they really don’t want to walk carrying what they picked back to their car. So the length of row, we’ve gotten so we never plant anything that’s more than 280 feet long and preferably with parking at both ends of that.

Information is key even in the farming business, especially in pick-your-own and how you communicate with your customers is something that has to be done very efficiently. We used to do mailings for each crop, then we did quarterly newspapers and now we collect e-mail addresses and by doing that it’s much less expensive for us as the farmer and the information is much better, because we can send weekly e-mail bulletins for free.

Farming has to work, not only for the customer, but for the farmer as well. And you have to decide what it is you want out of farming. For me, once we went to a situation where we were entirely open to the public, then it’s easy to add other things that are public. At the Grieg Farm what we do new each year is what keeps it exciting for me as the farmer.

This video project was funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6049

This is a Farmers and their Diversified Horticultural Marketing Strategies video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyy3WrdLios

Rich Romer, Gourmet Greens. Chester, VT.

Hi my name is Rich Romer, we’re here in Chester, Vermont and I have a little company here we call it Gourmet Greens. We grow soil-grown sprouts, about 800 pounds a week we sell mostly to health food stores and food coops around the northeast, but we do ship anywhere in the country by UPS next-day air. We’re a different animal than most sprout growers because everything we grow, is grown on trays of soil. We fill the trays, basically cafeteria-sized trays, we also use some 10x20 flats. We fill them with soil, then we spread the soaked seed and let them germinate for two or three days and then we separate them to the shelves under the grow lights. And most of our four products mature in eight days. When they’re ready for harvest we bring them off the shelves to the harvest table and cut them with a single edged razor blade into tubs, bring the tubs to a bagging area and package them into 3 ounce bags and 1 pound bags. The four different things we grow are sunflower sprouts, that’s what we grow the most of, over half of what we grow is sunflower and we also grow radish, snow pea greens and fresh wheat grass.

We’ve always been located in a rural area where we didn’t have a big market for our products locally so we have to get them out to a much bigger geographical area. A few years ago we developed a website, someone here in town was making websites. We didn’t even have a computer at that point, but he got something going and the nice thing about marketing on a website is that the orders come in through e-mail and you can deal with them at your convenience you don’t have to run in and answer the phone and all their questions. Some of the website contacts do call you by phone but most of them will deal with e-mail and they give us their credit card and their e-mail and we send the order out. And it’s a way to reach a much larger market; we’ve shipped things to Malaysia at this point. We do get regular e-mail inquiries from Britain and Africa and different people are interested in primarily wheat grass, they don’t have too much interest in the other sprouts, but we want to sell more growing supplies and wheat grass juicers because we can add those things without making a bigger building or getting more employees. And the best thing about having a website is that we have a storefront to the world right now. It’s a very limited product line, but there are enough people looking for what we have to offer so we going to be putting more and more energy into developing our website. With the website we do have a storefront but we don’t actually have people coming to our door. We do spend a lot of time just trying to grow the sprouts to get them out so when we actually have a live body come to our facility, it takes a lot of time to deal with them. And the return on what they might buy is not that great.

One of the keys to our marketing success is that we do have a product that we can grow year round. So it gives us a steady cash flow and we can keep people employed on a longer basis. Growing a good quality product with a good shelf life is the most important thing to having a successful farm business. If you have all the media and promotion and the newspaper articles won't really help in the long run unless you have a good quality product.

This video project was funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6048

This is a Farmers and their Diversified Horticultural Marketing Strategies video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztF_49xUbuA

Jan and Rob Goranson, Goranson Farm. Dresden, ME.

Hi I’m Jan Goranson and this is my husband Rob Johanson. We’re at Goranson Farm in Dresden, Maine in the mid-coast region of Maine. We are on a farm that I grew up on, about 35 years ago my parents bought it and farmed primarily potatoes. In 1985 I started farming with my father and since then we’ve turned this farm into a diversified vegetable operation.

We have 36 total tillable acres of which 8 acres is now in potatoes, 6 in sweet corn and ten in diversified small crops. We have 12 acres of that is in rotation with cover crops and green manures.

The markets that we currently have are our farm stand and farmers markets, we go to four different farmers markets throughout the summer and we have a few wholesale accounts. The farm stand brings in the bulk of our income, about 48%. The farmers markets bring in about 36% of the farm income and the balance 16% is wholesale. One of the innovations that we’ve brought to the farm has been a community supported agriculture program, which we started some five years ago now; we currently have 175 families in the summer program. Our community supported agriculture program is set up a little different than a traditional one, in that people pay up front, but for paying up-front they get a discount. So they can use that credit at the farm or at any of the locations off the farm where we are selling. Which we’ve tried to make it as easy and as inclusive as possible to try to get as many people, you know, involved and interested in what we’re doing. We also do a winter share program that is set up in the very traditional manner; they come once a month for a box of vegetables, storage vegetables. The retention rate in our CSA has been high, we did make a change a year ago where if people had a credit left on their CSA account with the farm we would roll it toward the next season, but what we changed was that they would have to use everything that they paid for in the spring, that year. And so people in October, November get a postcard from the farm saying, you have this amount left on your account, if you don’t use it by the end of December, it will be gone. And so it encourages people to come in at the end of the year and buy that quart of maple syrup or pick up some extra squash and potatoes for the winter.

The keys to our marketing success are quality, variety and listening to our customers. They give us the feedback that’s required to let us know what they want and how they want it and we’re very attuned to that. One of the things that we’ve found that helps us to pull this all off is that we’ve divided the roles. Jan pretty much takes care of the marketing aspect of the farm and I pretty much take care of the production end of it. Of course we’re always talking about the whole, so there’s a lot of cooperation and discussion that goes on between us.

This video project was funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6047

This is a Farmers and their Diversified Horticultural Marketing Strategies video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zev5EEhDFnI

Michael Docter and Linda Hildebrand, Food Bank Farm. Hadley, MA.

My name is Michael Docter and this is Linda Hildebrand, we’re at the Food Bank Farm here in Hadley, Massachusetts. This is a community supported agriculture farm, a CSA as we call them in the jargon. It's a 500 member CSA, that means we have 500 shareholders who purchase a share in the harvest every spring, and that entitles them to come by the farm on a weekly basis and pick up a steady supply of organic produce. We’re also a project of the Food Bank and what that means is we donate half of what we produce here to agencies served by the Food Bank. The farm is financially self-sustaining while we are owned and operated by a non-profit. The income we generate from our shares is sufficient to pay for the entire operation of the farm, our salaries, as well as the food that we donate and sell to our shareholders. It is a financially sustaining entity without any government subsidy.

We are bound by our mission to give away half of what we grow, so we have to be pretty efficient. And that’s why we selected the CSA model because we felt that it’s actually a fairly lucrative way of farming. We cut out our transportation costs, Linda and I never leave the farm, we cut out our refrigeration, all of our packing costs, we cut out our money handling and accounting costs. We like to think of marketing as the easy part for our CSA. Selling the initial shares was not very difficult. We got our lists out - 5,000 person list of people who donated money to the food bank, environmental organization lists, we put up brochures on bulletin boards in community places where people had a positive association with that institution, the Y, the daycare that everybody loved, that kind of thing and we came up with our members very quickly and easily for our first year. The problem is that keeping members is really the difficult thing, retaining members from one year to the next. Most of those initial members who joined for sort of political reasons or because they wanted to help out the food bank or social concern reasons, they left pretty quick as soon as they realized they had to eat a lot of vegetables. The biggest limiting factor we’ve found with our CSA and the CSA as a model is that people want choice, this is America after all. If you go in there and tell them, as we did during our first initial years that, thou shalt take a head of broccoli this week and thou shalt take a pound of carrots, it drove people nuts. So what we did, is we looked at the supermarket model and we figured we needed to offer them more choice. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken those 80 varieties of vegetables and put them on a table and said to people, you take what you need. We’re able to control the volume by the size of the bag, but they’re able to control what they need, because they have a variety of vegetables they can choose from. We offer three distribution days per week - Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And on a given day we could have about 200 shareholders walking into the share room and that’s a lot of people to satisfy.

Every vegetable has just a short window when it’s at peak flavor, and our customers expect the freshest vegetables that we can grow, and in order to accomplish that, we plant successions - we’re always planting things. For instance, lettuce and greens go in every single week. Every week we have a fresh supply. Carrots have a very short window when they’re at peak flavor and so every two weeks we’ve got carrots coming in. So we always have a plentiful supply of the staples people expect - we always have corn, tomatoes, broccoli - those things we offer every single week. One thing we also try to do is we offer specials, every once and a while we’ll bring in some fennel or we’ll bring in some kohlrabi. People don’t want those things every week necessarily, but it really keeps people’s interest up and it gives us a chance to educate folks on some other types of vegetables that are out there.

One of the things that is efficient about our operation is that we get all of our cash up front. It saves us a little bit of money not having to go to the bank in interest, but that’s not what’s significant. What’s important is we don’t have to handle money all year long, we take it all in and we’re done. So there’s not an elaborate accounting system involved. Now at the same time we realize that there are some things that we really wanted to sell on the farm. We wanted to be able to buy in other local farmers' products, we wanted to be able to make value-added products. So what we did was sell these scrip cards, which is our own little funny money system. They now come in 20-dollar increments with twenty, one-dollar punches on them. We sell them to our members and they can use it in our store essentially. We now have fresh baked organic bread for sale every week, local eggs, a variety of other products that we can sell to them and it’s very quick, we don’t have to make change. We also make a point of everything that we sell we keep in dollar increments, so that it fits into our system very easily.

Another advantage that we have because we’re a CSA from a marketing point of view, we can get instantaneous feedback from our customers. We pick something that morning, a new variety or a new type of display and we will find out that afternoon whether they liked it or not. We can also do a great deal of focus grouping with our members, informally, formally, however we do it. Usually we’re just sitting around the distribution room chewing the fat with our members and asking them, what did they like, what didn’t they like. A favorite part of a lot of our shareholders experience is our u-pick and what we’ve done is taken some of the more labor-intensive vegetables and we’ve put them into our u-pick and we call it they-pick. For instance, sugar snap peas, beans, strawberries, things that take a lot of work to pick, we have our customers pick it and they love it. One of the best things, is people come here to the farm and we have a direct relationship with people. They like knowing who their farmers are and they like the fact that they can call this farm their own. We tell people, 'treat the farm like your own', they can come, they can pick vegetables. There’s pets for them to visit, rabbits and chickens. Its just a very comfortable place for people to be and it’s a good way for people to see how their food is grown and it’s a nice connection with the community for us.

This video project was funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6046

This is a Farmers and their Diversified Horticultural Marketing Strategies video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V7VpEiPJwA

Paul and Sandy Arnold, Pleasant Valley Farm. Argyle, NY.

Hi my name is Paul Arnold, this is my wife Sandy. We farm in Argyle, New York, northeast of Albany. We have a 60-acre farm, 4 acres in vegetables, an acre in large fruit and a half acre in small fruit. We grow 30 different kinds of vegetables and we sell at area farmers markets - there’s 4 of them all together and we make a living on this. When we started out we were in larger and smaller markets and then after we were allowed into one of the larger markets we found that we only needed to sell in four farmers markets a week, so we dropped the smaller markets, because everything we produced could be sold so the extra days were available for field time. Since we only do farmers markets and spend very little time actually marketing, we have extra time to do the weeding and the planting we need to do to keep the farm as efficient as we can. One way that we make a good living here on small acreage is we sell only high quality produce and we get a good price for it at the farmers markets. We bring very little seconds to the market, we just try to sell the premium stuff and if we do sell seconds of anything, we do market it as such.

There’s two things a farmer should really pay attention to when they’re growing, and one is to keep good records so that you know where you’re coming from and know where you’re going to. And the other thing that needs to be really emphasized is to be a better marketer than you are a grower. I think it’s important for small growers to capture the retail dollar as much as they can.

Now we’re in Saratoga at our farmers market. It’s Wednesday from 3-6 and it’s about 3:30 right now and we’re still going pretty strong with customers, the initial rush is over with. And we’re keeping up with restocking and spraying vegetables to keep them fresh looking and the tarp is keeping the hot sun off most of the greens and that’s really important to keep the quality because when somebody comes at 5:00 or 5:30 and that stuff still really looks fresh that’s really important to make those customers feel just as welcome as the ones at 3:00. These people line up here at 3:00 because they know we’re going to take care of them. We’ve got four or five people here ready to service them rather than just one because we know that when they get here they want to be serviced fast and that’s all part of giving good service, is being able to get their order and get on to the next person without them getting frustrated that it’s taking too long.

We try to learn as many customers' names as we can because we have such regulars coming back each week that we make it a point to remember names. Displays on our table are I think really important to what we want to do, you know at the market it really helps, we get a lot of customers that say that our displays are really nice. We try to make it really colorful, our help on the table is presentable and we like them to always give 110% to the customers, the customers are number one. Some of the innovations that we’ve made at our stand to help us in marketing is to make our stand more visible by adding a red and white awning around the outside of it so people coming down to the market can always pick us out. We also have our logo right on the centerpiece in the middle so that people’s focus is right on our logo and remember our name and our farm name. We also are always trialing new varieties - such as this year we have purple carrots and yellow carrots we’re playing with. We have blue potatoes and other things that make our table interesting and people are always wondering what we’re going to have next. We sell beets here in many different ways as you can see. We've got beets here without tops, and beets with tops, and that’s really important that we’ve gotten, get people what they want and give them a choice. We’ve spent a lot of years developing varieties that are, finding varieties that are really good flavored and have really good presentation out here. Chard, this is green chard and we’ve got multicolored chard and the red chard. And we've got all kinds of choices of every kind of variety, the same with lettuces we have all kinds of the Bostons and the green leaves, red leaves and different kind of oak leaves and romaines. A couple different kinds of cucumbers and different onions that we sell and different kinds of zucchini and four different kinds of potatoes and many different kinds of tomatoes, because we do a lot of heirlooms.

We find out if our customers are happy by listening to them at the table and actually asking them questions, because we are actually right there at the farmers market and our customer’s in front of us, we can just keep right on top of what their needs are and if they’re unhappy or anything is wrong we can make it right, right there. But most of the times we’re asking them how did you like those red carrots you had last week or how were the white ones and how were the Brandywine tomatoes that we grow, there’s all kinds of ways that, and also sales, sales are going to tell you, if something isn’t selling and something is not moving on the table we know that there’s something wrong with that product and we’ll start quizzing our customers.

One thing that we’ve done in the past ten years of farming and selling here is just to raise prices little by little and so what’s happened in ten years is most of the prices we started out with have doubled. Some people come to the market and complain about the prices that we have, for instance our blueberries we sell in a half pint basket for about the same price that some other growers may sell them in a pint basket and we merely explain that we have minimum value and that we know what we need to get for that product in order to keep making a living at farming. Over the ten years that we’ve been farming, we’ve increased our efficiency in production and also marketing, we have large customer base which has been important because as we are raising two children we find we need to spend a less time in farming and have a little more time in family life.

This video project was funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6045

This is a Farmers and their Diversified Horticultural Marketing Strategies video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjSpSYLx_3o

Karen and Jack Manix, Walker Farm. Dummerston, VT

I’m Karen Manix, this is Jack Manix, we’re here at Walker Farm in Dummerston, Vermont. We have a diversified operation, it’s two parts, horticulture and vegetable. We farm about 30 acres organically and we have about 14 greenhouses. And pretty much we’ve been emphasizing the flowers over the last 4-5 years because they seem to be subsidizing the rest of the operation. 25 years ago this summer, we came here to visit Jack’s grandfather and helped him with the chores and really liked it and felt like it was where we needed to be. So he taught us about farming, and we tried milking cows, raising pigs, chickens, making apple cider, on and on. We’ve found a couple things that work real well for us, is growing vegetables and growing flowers. And we also live right on a state highway, which has problems, but it also is a great location. Since we have a farm stand right on route 5, we don’t wholesale, we just retail right here and that seems to be working out.

Well we were very lucky when we got started in this business to get hooked up with some good caterers and restaurant owners that helped us to develop our marketing strategy and they taught us that people eat with their eyes. We’ve learned to display with color and presentation. The same thing carried over into the horticulture where we got hooked up with some upper-end gardeners and landscape designers and we did the same thing there. One of the things we wanted to do was to develop an upscale market where people really appreciated fine flowers and good food and would be willing to pay for that freshness so, we really don’t compete with supermarkets because there’s really no way they can match what we offer every day. And so we developed a marketing strategy with our horticultural and catering friends and they taught us what people wanted or what people would want in the future, because they were privy to interesting things coming down the pike. And so working in cooperation with them, we came up with products that really challenged our clientele. In order to keep our upscale customers, to keep them happy, we send our catalogs of our flower material in early spring late winter and they’re able to pre-order for a fee. And we gather up stuff for them and it’s all ready when they come and they can just put it in their car and go. We’ve also developed a website where people can log on and download our catalogs.

I think that the single most important thing for marketing is to have people working in your stand that understand that making eye contact with your customers, being friendly, making a little chat, giving them respect to the customers is your best marketing tool. For someone to come in and feel like, ‘ok here’s a person that we like’, makes all the difference. We also pay our stand people more than our field workers, because we feel that the marketing is where we need to put our emphasis the most. And, just about anybody can grow a good tasting tomato, but it takes an expert to sell a good one. Especially during tomato season. What seems to work for our farm stand is to have lots of please and thank you’s, all of our employees are encouraged to do a lot of that. And to keep everything as spotless as possible, cleanliness is a really nice attribute concerning food. And quality control, everyone’s encouraged, if they see something on display that doesn’t look up to up standards, throw it out.

One of the things we wanted to do was to connect the people who shop here with our farm so we developed this program we called the wrap-around which means instead of people to stop, go into the front of the stand, get back in their cars and go, we widened our display area with gardens and greenhouses and other attractions to bring them around behind the farm and into the fields, so they could connect with the cows and the vegetables and the flowers and really feel like Walker Farm was a part of their life.

Its really important to keep in touch with what your customer needs, and we have done surveys where we ask them what they’d like to see here, how we can improve. And we usually give them a free tomato plant or free flower for filling out the survey. One of the ways we can keep improving our business is during the off-season going to the seminars and educational meetings and doing a lot of reading. And during the season we take time off to visit other farm stands to do a little corporate espionage and stealing their best ideas and using them here because everything we do here, we’ve learned from other people. The main thing is to have fun with your employees and your customers and your marketing will just take off from there. The message that should be given out to all people is that there’s a lot of money in this business and there’s wide-open opportunities in agriculture and even though you hear a lot of doom and gloom stories especially, unfortunately, from the dairy section this is a great field of opportunity.

This video project was funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6044

This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDXCbJNDeL4

Eileen Droescher, Ol'Turtle Farm. Easthampton, MA.

We’ve been experimenting with a combination of Sudex and red clover planted after a cash crop. The Sudex will winter kill and then the clover will come back through in the spring and remain through the next season.

This Sudex was put in after a cash crop in the middle of August. The seeding rate is 3 pounds of Sudex to 2 pounds of red clover per bed. Sudex gives us a lot of biomass and then the red clover gives us the nitrogen. And red clover is something that we can leave in throughout the next year, we do not have to till it down and put it into a crop that will winter kill, because a couple times of mowing and by the following spring, there’s not so much left it goes down very easily.

After the Sudex has winter killed, this is what the field will look like, the Sudex was left in place, the red clover has been mowed four times through the season. It will be left here until spring when it will be spaded down and put into a cash crop. The timing of the planting of Sudex is very important. This Sudex was planted in the middle of August when it was still quite warm, this bed of Sudex was planted 2 weeks later when it had started to cool off so it’s obvious there’s going to be a substantial difference in the biomass created by the Sudex.

This section is an example of needing to respond to something that didn’t work correctly. It was seeded into Sudex and red clover last year, but this spring the red clover didn’t come through very well so in order to reduce our weed problem we spaded in the clover and planted it into straight Sudex at the end of May. We got a great stand of Sudex and this has been mowed three times, it has created a very good weed suppressive situation.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6043

This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt8f2FWTr8Y

Eileen Droescher, Ol'Turtle Farm. Easthampton, MA.

Our field space is divided into sections of 30 beds. There’s a section of cash crop bordered by two sections of cover crop. The next season those are rotated such that the cash crops are now in sections where there was a cover crop. Each of our sections contains 30 permanent beds. They’re mostly 300 feet long by 45 inches center to center. We also keep these permanent beds exactly where they are, we use a spader and drive only on the pathways, walk only on the pathways so the beds always remain the same whether they’re in cover crop or in cash crop.

After our cash crop, we would seed with rye and vetch or just rye as the season gets colder. Then the middle of next season, around July, that rye and vetch would be put down and put into a cover crop that would winter kill such as oats and peas or Sudex.

This section was in cash crop earlier in the season, it’s now been spaded down and put into rye and vetch. We are on a permanent bed system so the pathways always stay in the same place. The bed is planted with cover crop, we keep the pathways clean so we’re able to find the bed the next year. We use a permanent bed system, mainly to reduce compaction to help maintain good soil structure.

And so it’s the middle of August, we go by beds, so rye and vetch usually gets put down 5 pounds of rye and 2 pounds of vetch per bed. And since we go bed by bed, we just mix the seed according to the number of beds we’re going to put down at that time. This rye and vetch will be allowed to grow until it starts to head out and then it will be mowed, we usually have to mow twice for the rye and then allow the vetch to come back through and flower and then we would mow again for the vetch and then it will be spaded down and put into a winter kill cover crop such as oats and peas.

This is the equipment we use for planting our cover crop. A simple drop seeder that we purchased from Market Farm Implement, it's adjustable according to the size seed that you’re putting down. We incorporate it with a basket weeder. We use a pipe on the back of the tractor that drags along the bed and that helps to create the compaction necessary for faster seed germination.

This is a field of oats and peas, it was seeded in mid August after spading down rye and vetch. The beds are seeded to about 5 pounds of pre-mixed oats and peas per bed. Any of the legumes that we put down, we do inoculate them prior to seeding.

The other part of our fertility system is compost. We have to buy our compost in, it’s rather expensive so we have been using a lot of legumes in our cover crop and are hoping to reduce the amount of compost we have to use.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6042

This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsb7Y2zPCUs

Bob Muth, Muth Farms. Williamstown, NJ.

This is municipal leaves from Monroe Township, our hometown. Leaves were banned from the landfills in New Jersey back in 1987 because they were using up valuable landfill space and we hooked up with the town at that time and started to take them. Initially there were some serious trash problems, but over the years the town worked that out so it’s a very clean product. A lot of people have said that I should be charging some significant tipping fees for these but I’ve never felt that way, we’ve taken them for free all these years and it guarantees that I get a good supply every year.

The bulk of the township’s leaves come in November, December and early January. I prefer to spread when the ground is frozen cause I get virtually no soil compaction at that time. For me that’s December and January, that’s when it’s a very light work load then I can work on these things all day un-interrupted. We spread these anywhere from 3-6 inches deep. We use a New Holland spreader and it’s anywhere from 3-4 passes going at a slow rate with the spreader wide open.

When I started with these I had what I would call a lot of wives tales, people telling me how it would ruin the ground, how it would destroy your pH, you’d need tons of lime to counteract the acidity. It didn’t work out that way at all, I always had a good soil testing program and I saw that 2 or 3 years after we had applied leaves nutrient levels going up significantly especially minors and the pH numbers were actually starting to climb when I was actually expecting them to go the other way. They’ve been a godsend for us.

Normally we like to flail mow very low to the ground, however if there are any residencies or houses nearby we always mow higher and spread into a stubble and that way we don’t have leaves blowing off the fields and creating angry neighbors. This ground was just in vegetable crops and it won't be back in vegetable crops for another four years or so. We put leaves on the front part of the rotation because it gives them ample time to break down. And so they wont create problems later with tying up nitrogen and clogging up the mulch layering equipment. There’s your leaf application right there, that’s all you got left after four years.

Once thing I’ve seen over the years, if you could take leaf mulching and link it with a good cover cropping system, you can really help yourself. Over the years since we started this, we’ve slashed our fertilizer probably by 60-70% or more. There’s no need to apply, it’s already here.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6041

This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n9AamByA6c

Bob Muth, Muth Farms. Williamstown, NJ.

This is Sudex, it’s our main summer cover crop, we like it a lot, because it helps alleviate soil compaction, you can also use it for nematode and disease suppression. Normally we like to plant Sudex around Memorial Day, but this year with the wet weather we got significantly delayed we were planting in June and into July. I spread or plant mine with a Vicon seeder - I’ll sling it out around 25 pounds to the acre and then lightly disk it in.

This is the stage we like to flail it, when it’s about head high or a little bit above, this’ll be about 4 tons of dry matter per acre. Some people tell me that planting Sudex can create a significant weed problem but that’s not a problem as long as you mow it before it shoots those seed heads, that’s why we like to see it mowed it when it’s about head high, not much bigger than that.

Another advantage of Sudex I’ve seen over the years is good weed suppression. If you grow this for a couple years you can significantly reduce your weed population. There’s no light in there for those weeds to get established and grow.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6040

This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7Y9R_luHpM

Bob Muth, Muth Farms. Williamstown, NJ.

Our rotation strategy is one year in high value vegetables or small fruit, in our case it’s strawberries. Then it’s going to be followed by 3 sometimes 4 years where the ground’s rotated out. So in effect we’re only farming about 20% each year of our total 80 acres. I implemented this rotation back in 1987 and I know at that time some farmers thought it was crazy to be resting that much ground in an area where there’s high land values, but over the years I’ve realized some real benefits. We see pest and disease pressure remain at manageable levels, soil fertility has gone way up, and stuff grows a lot better simply by prepping that ground between those high value crops.

I think it’s important to note that that 80% that’s setting fallow is not just laying out there just idly growing weeds, it’s being rested by planter design and it’s all part of the total farm management picture. We’re doing that to improve soil organic matter level and to put the ground or make the ground in much better shape. It’s easier to grow bigger and better crops with each passing year.

For us when a vegetable crop comes out or a small fruit crop, I’m immediately thinking 3, 4, 5 years down the road and what I try to do is implement that rotation so that ground will be in much better condition. It starts by, when the crop is finished, simply leaf mulching. We spread municipal leaves up to about 6 inches deep. That’s the maximum amount you can spread in New Jersey by law. Those leaves are worked in the following year, we then plant either hay or Sudex, that hay or Sudex will stay in for about two to three years, we’d then plow that out and we’d go back into rye or rye vetch and then back into vegetables once again. So at the end of that time literally that ground is super-charged, it’s ready to go.

Hay is a significant part of our rotation, we grow both timothy and orchardgrass on the place, I prefer orchardgrass cause it’s a little more drought tolerant. One of the advantages that I see, it’s good not putting a plow on the ground for three years, you can really enhance your soil structure through the rooting action of that hay crop. You’ll never get rich growing hay, but there is a significant horse population in the area now, these are pleasure horses and there’s a waiting market for good high quality hay, which we can provide. It’s a source of income for you when that ground’s being rotated out.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6039

This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6vQp-_NYto

Lockwood 'Pooh' Sprague, Edgewater Farm. Plainfield, NH.

What we have here is a crop of Japanese millet on a piece of fairly heavy ground, that we’re not using this year, so we’re using a longer season cover crop here to build organic matter in the soil. The ground was well prepared when we got on to this, we broadcast about 3 bushels to the acre which is very heavy as you can see, but we figure if you’re going to grow a crop and the fertility is there you might as well put it on heavy especially with cover crops.

I like the Japanese millet over the Sudan because it’s a little easier to incorporate. If the Sudan and Sudex get ahead of you, which they some times can when you’re picking vegetable late in the summer, it can get quite woody and it’s very hard to incorporate in the fall.

It’s now about the 15th of August, hopefully another week we’ll get someone down here with a heavy set of harrows and we’ll harrow this up, probably once over we’ll chop it up and expose a little of the dirt and we’ll come in and broadcast either peas and oats on top of that or hairy vetch and winter rye and disc it in lightly and that’ll give us a winter cover crop.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

eOrganic 6038

This is a Vegetable Farmers and their Innovative Cover Cropping Techniques video clip.

Watch video clip at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PueBYl53WQ

Lockwood 'Pooh' Sprague, Edgewater Farm. Plainfield, NH.

We use a summer smother when we have finished up a short term crop like peas, in particular when we’re not going back with something immediately; we’ll use a summer smother to suppress weeds and add some organic matter. Buckwheat is probably the simplest summer smother for us to manage. It’s very quick, we seed it anywhere, I think the recommended rate is a bushel per acre but I’m sure we glom on pretty close to two or even more sometimes. It’s very quick, it’s very easy to work down, we have a set of fairly heavy harrows, and we can go in right now on short order and incorporate this with a set of harrows as well as put on a winter cover crop at the same time so it’s very easy to manage in terms of the machinery that we own.

This video project was funded in part by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (USDA).

This is an eOrganic article and was reviewed for compliance with National Organic Program regulations by members of the eOrganic community. Always check with your organic certification agency before adopting new practices or using new materials. For more information, refer to eOrganic's articles on organic certification.

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