winter break

After, ehem, a bit of hiatus, I am back.  I guess it's harder to find time to write when it is peak harvest season than I thought!  I do enjoy writing, especially about farming, so I promise I won't let you down for months at a time this go 'round!

To pick up where I left off, you really didn't miss much.  There is only one word to describe my July and August: TOMATOES.  Red, juicy, molding, pungent, sticky little bastards.  Seriously.  I couldn't eat tomatoes for the entire month of September.  Why you ask?  Because that became my sole task on the farm, picking the three high tunnels clean of the tomato harvest:

largest harvest of the season, 8.3.12, over 20 bushels

devil tomatoes!!!!

I wrote my college senior thesis on farming, and one of the things I focused on was how farming as a career can lead to a satisfying, meaningful life.  One of the reason was because of the multiplicity of tasks that are performed each day.  Well, this was the opposite of that.  The only other thing I regularly picked was cucumbers, but they were in the same high tunnels as the tomatoes.  And scratched your arms like no ones business if you didn't wear elbow high gloves:

It didn't matter how early in the day I started, because it took a good six to nine hours to pick all the greenhouses, depending on the day.  All day in a hot, sweaty, buggy high tunnel picking only two crops.  It starts to get to you after a few weeks!  Luckily, starting in August, also the peak of the tomatoes, I got some help with the task, otherwise by my lonesome it would have taken me literally twelve hours a day to finish all the picking.

So the end of my farming season wasn't particularly enjoyable.  I still helped out at the farmers market which I always loved.  However, I did learn a lot about farming and am thankful for the relationship I created with the farmers I worked for.  It was an invaluable experience. 

drinking fountain soda after a particularly hot day, hair looking particularly awesome

I have also attended two sustainable farming workshops, one that was a waste of my day and I won't even bother telling you about, maybe another day, but the other was extremely educational.  It was no wonder though, it was taught by Atina Diffley.  If you are from the Midwest and are in the sustainable farming loop at all, you have probably heard of her.  If not, you should check her and her husband, Martin, out.  They farmed for years in Farmington, Minnesota and their experiences are invaluable to beginning farmers. 

The workshop was called Wholesale Farming for Success and was put on by the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture.  The workshop focused on growing vegetables for wholesale and also on food safety practices for farmers.  As someone who has worked in numerous restaurants and also a food co-op, I could really understand the importance of food safety. 

This ties in really well to my tomato harvesting experience.  I learned that the farm I worked for was doing a lot wrong in terms of food safety.  That said, it was less of an issue for them because they were not selling wholesale, so their products did not have to keep as well.  However, it is still important to make sure your product is getting to the consumer clean and safe.  I wouldn't want to be responsible for someone getting sick! 

Atina talked about many different food safety issues, but there are a few that I unknowingly documented:

This photo looks like a romantic pastoral vision of tomatoes, but there are so many blunders exposed in it.  First off, those green crates never got cleaned.  Second, they should not have been sitting on the ground.  Thirdly, we let the tomatoes sit out in the sun until we were completely done with the harvest.  Also, that black bucket you see was also never washed out.  All of these mistakes are easily remedied.  The only one that would require a significant amount of work would be keeping the tomatoes out of the sun.  The farmers would have to build/buy some sort of shade provided tent or cart as there was no out-of-the-sun spot near the high tunnels.

This is another photo of food safety disaster.  DIRTY crates sitting ON THE GROUND and not protected from SUNLIGHT.  These tomatoes would not be suitable for wholesale.  Which didn't matter for these farmers because they were selling at a farmers market.  However, for me personally, again, I would never want to be responsible for making someone sick because I was careless with the food I was growing. 

I know that food safety can get dry and meticulous to talk about, and sometimes you feel like NOTHING IS EVER SAFE!!!!!!!  Obviously, if that was true people would be dying all the time form foodborne illnesses.  That said, it is something that, as farmers, it is our responsibility to provide the cleanest product humanly possible.  When I start farming, I want my customers to trust the food that I grow for them so that they keep coming back to buy more! 

That leads me to my last point for the overdue, over-lengthy post!  Potentially the most important thing I learned from my farming experience this summer is that I most definitely absolutely no questions about it without a doubt, want to be an ORGANIC farmer.

The tomatoes that I spent too many hours a week with suffered from an attack from the evil cutworms early on in the season. 

all curled up

cutworm nibbles, mold to follow

gross

Cutworms are truly a nightmare, and if you don't already have organic systems in place it is almost impossible to get rid of them.  Tomatoes were the best seller at the market and income provider during the summer that the farmers had invested thousands of dollars in.  No way were they losing the crop.  They were propelled to spray a pesticide called Sevin on the tomatoes.  Before they sprayed we were losing over two thirds of the crop to cutworms, and afterward over 80% of the crop was cutworm free.

cutworm free!

great harvest

But Sevin is a nasty chemical that isn't the greatest for humans or animals.  It isn't the worst pesticide out there, but you still have to be careful when handling it.  I wasn't too happy to be picking tomatoes that were covered in it....  I also wasn't very excited about eating them.  This non-organic way worked for the farmers, but it isn't how I will run my farm.  It is definitely easier to fix a problem by spraying or adding a fertilizer, but I know that these methods aren't sustainable for the future and aren't chemicals that I want to be putting in my body, my customers' bodies, my animals' bodies, or the earth. 

Well this should satisfy us all for a while.  I'll keep you updated on things I learn and the exciting things that I am planning for this upcoming season!  Until then, hope for snow and happy holidays!