Newsletter: How Do We Farm? By Hand

Fresh from the soil, these delicious carrots are sweet treat. — Fresh from the soil, these organic carrots are a sweet treat!

"You don't own a tractor!?"

We get that question a lot, usually with some mix of surprise and incredulousness. How can we grow at this scale, without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, with a small staff, and NOT use heavy machinery? The answer, of course, is much more complex than a few buzz-words or one essay could explain, but I'll do my best. Suffice it to say that human power, lean production, hard work, and a little help from our friends make Foxtail run.

We call our style of farming "human powered". Whether it's weeding, seeding, harvesting, washing, or any of the other quadrillion processes involved in growing produce, we do as much as possible by hand or with hand tools. The only gas powered equipment we use is our BCS (a walk-behind rototiller on steroids), our farm truck (to shuttle the harvest from the field to the wash shed and root cellar), and two greenhouse furnaces for our early spring veggie starts. Once we hit early to mid-April, those furnaces go off and don't turn back on the rest of the year.

Not only do we greatly reduce our fossil fuel consumption by farming this way, we're also forced to be much more in tune with our crops. It's much easier to detect mole hills, flea beetles and leaf mold when you're weeding on your hands and knees. There's also the soil health benefits of no/minimal till, but that's a larger topic for another time.

By "Lean production", I simply mean that we only grow what we can sell. That's a slight exaggeration ("one for the blackbird, one for the crow" and all that), but minimizing food waste is just as important to us as growing organically is. It does come with some risk (every butternut squash is that much more precious when you only have a few dozen extra), but the benefit is that our compost pile hasn't become a daily reminder of how much time, labor, soil inputs and money went into it.

The other plus when it comes to lean farming is that we don't need a lot of land to grow. While Foxtail is just over 62 acres with almost 40 acres of field and pasture, we only use about three acres for vegetable production. That means less plastic for field tarps, landscape fabric and irrigation lines (not to mention water use), and also means we don't need to burn as much fuel overseeing a vast acreage. It also means that we have over 35 acres of farmland that we don't need for our operation, which brings me to my final point.

By "A little help from my friends", in this instance I am referring to our neighbors to the north, Community Homestead. They are a multi-faceted non-profit farm that houses and works with adults with developmental disabilities. In addition to running both a MOSA-certified organic vegetable and dairy operation, they also bake bread, pies, and cookies out of their commercial kitchen, and make crafts that they sell at the Osceola Farmers Market, among others.

Nadine and Adrian from Community Homestead have been partnering with Foxtail long before Emmalyn and I took over, and we're happy to continue this mutually beneficial relationship. In short, they lease most of our fields to both rotationally graze a small herd of beef cattle as well as grow hay for them. It's a handshake agreement, and money has yet to change hands. The benefits for us are many: by managing the fields surrounding our vegetable plots, the weed pressure is drastically reduced. Same goes for our pasture lands (cows make great lawnmowers). Last year when we needed to break new ground in our fields, Adrian and Nadine drove their tractors down the two miles to us to plow our three acre plots. Another perk is that sometimes we'll get a call that they have a bumper crop, and we'll hurry over and harvest what they have too much of. We have them to thank for the gorgeous cauliflower and leeks in this box.

By no means do I mean to imply that we've got it all figured out. Any farmer that tells you that probably just plays one on TV. The main points I listed are more or less the hows and the whys of our operation, and we will constantly be figuring out more efficient and less wasteful ways to achieve them. That said, between Emmalyn and my 15 or so years combined farming experience as well as the considerable groundwork previous owners Chris & Paul laid out, I would like to think we're off to a good start.

-Cody

P.S. Astute readers will note that I didn't touch on "hard work". I figured that was implied ;)

Newsletter: How Do We Farm? By Hand

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