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!

Beginnings

hello and hi!

I wanted to start this blog at the beginning of the season (but I didn't), so I am about a month behind, but better late than never they say!

A little introduction first:
I'm a twenty-three year old graduate from a liberal arts college, with a degree in sociology and anthropology, but I want to be a farmer (I think).  For my senior thesis, I studied young, new farmers in Portland, Oregon and I simultaneously got hooked on farming.  All the farmers loved their lives as farmers, and I had already had a fabulous farming experience; I WWOOFed in Italy for five weeks in 2009 (For those of you who don't know what WWOOF is, look it up!).  I think I want to be a farmer because all the hard work gives me a reason to eat copious amount of eggs and bacon.....er, I mean I want to be a farmer because I love being outside, working my body, being my own boss, growing food, and learning a variety of different tasks!  Truly, all the aforementioned aspects about farming make me want to farm (the bacon and eggs are an added perk).

It is trendy these days, wanting to become a farmer, it seems like all my super trendy friends and acquaintances want to break ground, myself included.  I really do think I want to be a farmer, so instead of dreaming about farm fresh eggs and bacon (which I do often) I spent the entirety of January and February, and even some of March, trying to find a job on a farm for this season, to test it out.

I finally did!  And seeing as there are a lot of folk like myself out there, young, well-educated, hard-working, and maybe even a little starry-eyed, I thought it would be beneficial to us all to document what I learn this season, my first step to becoming a real farmer.

I've been working on a small farm outside of Proctor, Minnesota (outside of Duluth) for a little over a month now, and I have already learned a lot.  To avoid cramming it all in to one post, I think I will start with the most essential things that I have learned thus far!

1) Farming is HARD WORK
No really, it's really hard work.  I've always been a flexible person, but after a day of bending over and planting thousands of onions, I couldn't touch my toes for the first time in my life, SERIOUS NEWS! After a week of pruning an acre of raspberries single-handedly, I could barely make a fist and in the morning, barely spread out my fingers.  Farming is seriously hard on your body.  So take 'er easy!  Stretching seems all the more important to me now, as well as taking walks or bike rides to stretch out my limbs.  To me this is probably one of the most important things I've learned so far, if I am sore after a week, I better take care of my body so I can keep it up for the next 30+ years! And so should you!  This leads me to my next important lesson:

2) Farm with Friends
The aforementioned thousands of onions and acre of raspberries done ALONE, was, well, lonely.  The farmers I work with have hired me as a farm hand, not an intern, so even though I get paid (MUCH) better than an intern, they are not there holding my hand the whole day.  They show me what needs to be done and get on with other tasks.  This doesn't mean I am not learning anything, absolutely not! It just means that I am by my lonesome most of the day.  I don't get bored or really even that lonely (no tears are shed), mostly just overwhelmed by the HUGE task I have to do with only my two hands and maybe a Rototiller if I'm lucky.  And you can only listen to so many episodes of Radiolab before your brain is over saturated.  So when I have a farm, I will definitely not being doing it alone.  Many hands make light work!

I think I will stop there and move on to what I did today:

Got super dirty! Notice my finger hairs, I think they look like little fungi growing.

My hands looked awesome, but felt not so awesome.

The culprit of my filthy mitts

I said I like to get dirty, and today I got real dirty (my hands at least).  I started the day out planting Christmas trees, another venture of the farm I work for, which was fun because it was something I have never done before and because I didn't have to BEND OVER, something I have quickly come to appreciate.  Rain canceled that task before it was done, so I moved into the high tunnel to prune tomatoes.  The rain on the plastic roof sounds great, also accompanied with the best radio show I've heard thus far, KUMD's Blues Alley.  Pruning tomatoes is relatively simple and also fast, which makes it a nice task for a rainy afternoon. But you do have to bend over/squat/kneel/occasionally plot your bum on the ground.  I was able to sit on a bucket for most of this, which was a nice relief for my back (jeez, I already sound like I'm an old geezer!).

Sometimes I think (I know) I am still a five year old, because I always want to know WHY.  Why do the tomato plants turn my fingers black?!?  I am assuming it is some sort of resin from the tomato plant.  Whatever it is, I CANNOT get this resin off!  Also, when I washed my hands for the fourth time, my suds were NEON GREEN, COOL!!  Anyone know what this resin is and/or why it is so sticky?

Have you pruned tomatoes?  How do you do it? What kinds of tomatoes do you or the farm you work on grow? What is your favorite thing to eat with tomatoes? Mine is bruschetta with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, olive oil, on crispy bread! Mmmmm!