Vermont Compost: Founded by organic crop growing professionals committed to meeting the need for high-quality composts and compost-based, living soil mixes for certified organic plant production.

BCS America: BCS two-wheel tractors are versatile, maneuverable in tight spaces, light-weight for less compaction, and easy to maintain and repair on farm. Gear-driven and built to last for decades of dependable service on your farm or market garden.

It’s a matter of doing what you can.

[To make change, don’t] spend too much time trying to fight or change something, just show something that’s different.

In normal farming, we’re constantly harvesting and extracting nutrients form the soil, so we have to get those back there. But there’s a lot of material that’s coming off the land that could go back on the land.

[referring to food scraps] that’s not waste, that’s residue, that just needs to be recycled.

A compost pile is really exciting to me, but it’s not exciting to other people. When you add the worms, it’s sexier, it’s got more flash to it.

Michigan State University’s Student Organic Farm and organic farmer training program

North Farm, Michigan State University’s farm on the Upper Peninsula.

John Biernbaum’s horticulture department page has an extensive collection of resources on high tunnel production, transplant production, worm compost, and more.

John was recently elected board chair for the Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance (MOFFA), where he is working with others to organize the Michigan Organic Intensives on March 10 on the MSU campus.

John will be at the Missouri Organic Association Conference on Thursday February 4 to do an all-day high tunnel session.

And he’ll be at the Northern Michigan Small Farms Conference on January 30 doing a session on High Tunnel Crop Selection and Scheduling and a session on Soil Management for High tunnels.

I talked about using a beneficial insect blend from Hydro Gardens == to inoculate our transplant house against aphids and other problem insects.

John says that what he would do better as a beginning farmer is to wear better ear protection. I’ll make a plug for these noise-isolating ear buds for hearing protection and the ability to listen to the podcast at the same time.

Vermont Compost: Founded by organic crop growing professionals committed to meeting the need for high-quality composts and compost-based, living soil mixes for certified organic plant production.
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Farmers Web: Providing small business software for farmers. By allowing you to streamline wholesale ordering and operations, FarmersWeb makes it easier to work with your buyers, reducing costs and increasing your business capacity.

We’re seeing the value of having more people stay with our farm longer. As people start staying longer, we’re going to have to explore what it might mean for them to become co-op members.

[Running a cooperative farm] is one big challenge, but running any business is one big challenge.

You discover people in a different way when you start running a business with them.

Most people don’t know how to be a team player… in the first years of running our farm the biggest challenge was learning how to work well together. It took us three to five years to start working well as a team.

Had we started independently, we would have been three farms. We would have had three tractors… three washing stations, three cold rooms. By being together we were able to just have one of each of those things.

Since each farmer has a chance of doing [weekly and daily planning work] their own month, it’s easy to accept and respect the authority of the planner.

By the time we’ve been organizing and planning for three or four weeks, we’re usually tired of the job and very happy to hand it on to someone else, and very happy to have someone else make the tough calls.

In our early years, we tried to self-apply some of the Holistic Management stuff.

Prior to taking the Holistic Management course, we were focused on having a profitable farm… but we hadn’t totally realized that quality of life was what was profitable, and that the money was just part of that.

The goal isn’t to increase productivity in tomatoes or to have a better seed yield of something; it’s that we’re looking for a farm that makes us happy.

[I realized that] the quality of life that we had was much greater because we were farming with other people than if we were just farming on our own.

The system isn’t as important as how the system works.

We put a lot of emphasis on people being able to get away from the farm and do something different in the summer or early fall, which is traditional summer vacation time when it’s nice to do something other than work hard.

Employees start to get burnt out by the end of August, early September. Really keeping to a schedule and trying to find ways to reduce the hours a little bit has actually helped out. In August, when the work actually starts to get heavier, we take off on Fridays at 4pm instead of 5pm, in order to give the employees a little more time for their weekend.

Any enterprise that you have on your farm should be planned out.

After a seed crop, we don’t till the ground immediately, because if we bury all of those seeds, we’re going to see them popping up for years. Instead, we’ll leave the ground undisturbed until fall, and we’ll let the mice and beetles predate on the seeds… and we’ll almost always follow a seed crop with a cover year.

Plant selection for maintaining and improving varieties.

The value of looking at what seed will be producing your next seed.

Tourne-Sol has an online seed store.

Dan’s book, Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable Growers, is a great resource for really digging in and fleshing out your crop plan. Very straightforward and practical, it is, as Dan said, the book I wish I had had when I started farming.

Dan Kaplan’s spreadsheets helped Dan Brisebois wrap his head around crop planning. Dan’s system, as described in his book, goes further, but these are a great starting point.

Dan’s blog about seeds, Going to Seed, has lots of information about seed production and the seed business.

We talked at length about Holistic Management, which is a great book, if a little long. You can also find information about Holistic Management at Holistic Management International.

Dan suggested Susan Ashworth’s Seed to Seed as a great starting resource for seed growing.

Vermont Compost: Founded by organic crop growing professionals committed to meeting the need for high-quality composts and compost-based, living soil mixes for certified organic plant production.

BCS America: BCS two-wheel tractors are versatile, maneuverable in tight spaces, light-weight for less compaction, and easy to maintain and repair on farm. Gear-driven and built to last for decades of dependable service on your farm or market garden.

All this food miles stuff that people whine about, that’s just a fact. Our food is industrially produced. It’s usually planted mechanically, maintained mechanically, processed mechanically, transported mechanically, at a huge scale.

That’s the magic of what Organic Valley has done: it allows us small-time farmers to band together, and we get our economies of scale at the aggregation, processing, and distribution side of things.
[By selling to a distributor] I’m not making the same price per pound selling my asparagus as you might with a CSA or a farmer’s market, but I don’t have any more hassle with marketing… It’s someone else’s job to decide where to sell my produce, and I like it that way.

Our goal was to figure out how to create a fully three-dimensional oak savannah based agriculture on this site.

There are huge challenges in the world, and they need some huge answers.

We used produce as the stepping stone and as the cash cow to start a successional process where we started to plant these longer-lived species.

Creditors can’t eat you.

In the investment community, borrowing is called leverage. View buying as leverage, and leverage what you’re doing forward into the future.

The first step is learning about your local biome… learning about the local species represented near you.

The second part is managing your water resource. It doesn’t matter where you live, there is no plant that we know of that can survive without water.

Then you start planting the trees and shrubs in rows following the pattern that your water management system laid out for you.

My wife, Jen, has insisted that I change [the term STUN – Shear, Total, and Utter Neglect]. It’s more like Strategic, Total, and Utter Neglect. In the establishment years… it’s in your best interest to take care of them. Get a little bit of water on them; get a little bit of weed control.

If you do anything on the farm, it’s your time or your money… it’s work-work-work-work-work… for what marginal rate of return? I’ve seen young idealistic growers out here come and go, and I buy their equipment cheap, because they come in and they do everything by the book they do it very well they do it professionally, and it doesn’t pay the bills.

If you were to come out here to southwest Wisconsin – four-and-a-half hours from Chicago or the Twin Cities, and set up on a little three acre piece of property and operated under the illusion that you’re going to set up an Eliot Coleman-style market garden and sell everything direct to the consumer and make $50,000 a year, you’re hallucinating.

If you are a market farm scale, you can still use the perennial polyculture techniques; you’re just going to manage it differently than I do.

Don’t hurry.  Hurry is an inner state.  Fast is a rate of work.

Mark is the author of Restoration Agriculture: Real World Permaculture for Farmers.

Mark sells his produce to the CROPP Produce Pool, which was the origin of the Organic Valley Cooperative.

Mark mentioned having been inspired by J. Russell Smith’s Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture.

We talked about the MOSES Organic Farming Conference – which used to be the Upper Midwest Organic Farming Conference, back in the day.

Mark suggested having a look at the ongoing work by the Woody Perennial Polyculture Research Site at the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign.

Vermont Compost: Founded by organic crop growing professionals committed to meeting the need for high-quality composts and compost-based, living soil mixes for certified organic plant production.

BCS America: BCS two-wheel tractors are versatile, maneuverable in tight spaces, light-weight for less compaction, and easy to maintain and repair on farm. Gear-driven and built to last for decades of dependable service on your farm or market garden.

We don’t deliver to restaurants because we’re in a city, and the traffic’s horrible, and we can’t afford – nor do we want – to drive around in traffic all day doing deliveries.

We feel really strongly that city people do need to know how to grow something.

We couldn’t take people’s money up front [for a CSA] because a good hail storm could come in and that would be the end of it.

You don’t put eight dollars a pound on salad mix. You put fifty cents an ounce.

Maybe that’s why we’re going to be married forty years this year, because he’s on his farm and I’m on my farm.

We lose a lot of crops here, and you’re prices have to pay for the times people didn’t come to the farmstand, or the crop fails, or whatever.

In Texas, if you don’t have tomatoes in the summer, you ain’t a farmer.

Coyote Creek Organic Feed Mill, the first commercial organic feed mill in the state of Texas.