We have  several different waste streams, and some have been trickier  to solve than others. There is the organic waste that is generated by the farmstand and greenhouses,  everything from  plant and flower trimmings to  vegetable spoilage.  This particular  waste stream has always  been pretty easy to deal with,  because most of it is composted here and  broadcast  back  onto the fields as soil amendment. That waste stream has traditionally had value to us and we capture all of it.

Trash: The Necessary Evil?

The next problem we saw was the use of  season  extending  agricultural plastics. The black plastic mulch  that traditionally is used in the field for soil mulch is a petrochemically based product that had to be landfilled or incinerated. We were generating  enough volume so that we were filling  our  dumpster  multiple times during the fall with just this product  alone. So when the Canadians started  importing the corn starch based plastic mulch from  Italy eight years ago, we made a journey north to get some to trial.    It turned  out to be as good as they claimed it to be. Every year since we have used this  black cornstarch  mulch and  it holds up  for about 70 days before its starts to decompose. More farmers have come on board over the years so that I might  guess that  30-35% of the  farms in the northeast use it in their fields.  Oddly enough, the product is not certified by the feds for use by USDA  Certified organic farmers, a position that  I think is   counter intuitive and perhaps political and therefore inexcusable. But we use it   and  find that the high up- front cost of the biodegradable mulch  (about 3 times that of  non biodegradable type) is offset by the reduction of  labor at the  end of season collection from the field. We just harrow it up or wait until spring to work the remains of it into the soil.  Conventional oil based plastic has to be pulled up and land filled.  Within a year of application there is no remaining shred of  biodegradeable  mulch  in the soil.  The same can rarely be said abut the oil  based plastics, you find shreds of it for years in the fields after its use. Biodegradable mulch was  a gamble we took  in behalf of the environment that  actually worked out well all the way around.

The next hurdle confronting us was the waste stream of pots, plastics and cardboard that is generated  by greenhouse production. The  plastic  pots and  baskets all come in carboard boxes.  Seeds, hardgoods, tools as well…..much comes in cardboard boxes. We   break these boxes down to reduce volume but we still had truck loads of  random sized cardboard to deal with. Two years ago we bought an old trash compactor and baled our cardboard. That helped,  but it still left us to move 250 lb  bales of compressed cardboard. The plastic  pots are recycleable,  but not  easily reusable. This is  because they have to be washed and  sterilized and it is not cost effective to do so. We have switched some of our pots to fiber so that they are  biodegradable, but they are not all that user friendly for the customers.

In 2011 (in between the spring floods and Hurricane Irene) our town switched to Zero Sort trash collection and recycling.  I cant begin  to tell you how handy zero sort recycling is.  The town of Plainfield had a  recycling program before that recycled  glass,  some different grades of  plastic and  paper and cans, but it all had to be pre- sorted in separate bins with some types of plastic not allowed. With Zero sort all types of plastic, all types of glass and all types of paper  and cardboard can be mixed all  together in one container. Suddenly we were able to effortlessly participate in community wide recycling that reduced and diverted  an additional 30  percent of  of recycleable materials away from the landfill.  It  just became so much easier and  it felt good for the environment. All that recycled plastic meant less fossil fuels to be used in plastic production. Just think, all those dierty plastic pots and bottles could be turned into another useful  product.

In 2012 another environmentally sound product became available to us. As we have started up a commercial kitchen as an adjunct to our farm stand, we were in need of  packaging  . We were able to source food grade biodegradable containers to  put our soups, salsas and  pestos in. Another product diverted from the landfill.

We still have some farm waste products that we have to figure out.  The greenhouse  plastic film coverings are not being  recycled at this time, but I have to follow up  on a lead or two  that may change that.  The plastic clamshells that we  package our  cherry and  grape tomatoes and  our blueberries for wholesale accounts  can be recycled, but I would feel much better if there was a biodegradable  solution for packaging  those  as well, and will be  keeping my eyes open for those this summer.

So if you are passionately  pro/anti- incineration  or pro/anti- landfilling of  garbage,  zero sort recycling is just a wonderful  addition to the  tools that  deal with community waste streams. All in all, 2011 was a pretty good  year for garbage at Edgewater Farm. You can be sure that we will continue working on it.

care of us.

As I was staring out the window I thought about Thanksgiving  and  about how that  particular holiday is  about assessing the good things in lives.  For me, thanksgiving represents a huge meal with friends and family and marks the  transition to winter “mode” here on the farm with the first uncomfortably cold weather, some small messy snowstorms and the darker,shorter days. It is  Christmas, for me, that I reflect  on the passage of time, remarkable events past and present and  condition of friends  and family,  present and absent.

Anne and I went to Belize in Novemeber, a surprise gift ,courtesy of  our children. A reward for  mutually reaching our sixth decade alive, intact and still married. While we were there we experienced many different things but nothing as rewarding as making a connection (albeit fleeting)  with some native locals. Most of them were connections through our guide, himself a Guatemalan mayan. All these people were poor as dirt by any american standards. Belize is a poor third world country. They had the equivalence of a 4th grade education. Yet they all were extremely knowledgeable about local history, botany or marine zoology, agriculture and were self taught  and spoke english clearly. (Our guide had all the american phrases in his lexicon:  ”Back in the day….” “Totally!” and “We’re good to go…”" )  Yet most grew up riding  mules and  horses as the main mode of transportation (other than walking) and most spent their childhood in mudhuts with braided palm leaf roofs. All learned and still use a machete fluently as no one owns a  lawnmower or weedwacker.  And  yet they were all wonderful company, had great senses of humour, were intelligent and highly motivated individuals with the same aspirations as most of us;  a better education for the kids, accssess to  plenty of food, security from fear and maybe one day a motorcycle or used car.  Anne  and I  both came away humbled by the fact that they are capable and hardworking and  so intelligent. A couple of the subsistance farmers I talked to were easily capable of walking onto Edgewater Farm and within 2 years time being totally uup to speed and capable of running it.

So this morning  I am reflecting on the fact that we, (myself  in particular) are-as my Dad used to say-”shot in the ass with luck”.  We, as Americans, really do have all the toys. We  who live here on the river, are lucky to have our families  working close by to us. We are lucky to have good medical care, security from fear and harm and more food than we possibly need to eat.(Although I will desperately try my best today….)  So with that in mind,  may you and your family go forth today counting your  blessings as well and have yourselves a Merry Little Christmas

We hosted our fall gleaning   with Willing Hands volunteers yesterday afternoon. The organization provides an invaluable link to food kitchens ,senior centers, and  community groups in  need of food. Willing Hands volunteers own and maintain a high cube van and they pick up donations  from many sources in the upper valley, but they particularly provide a service to upper valley farms like ours in that they make the connections and distribution of  extra produce to those in need for us. Yesterday they  came  down to the farm with volunteers and gleaned and washed about a ton of  carrots, like wise  potatoes and rutabaga. There were about 20  individuals and it was well organized, the day was pleasant and they got the 4  pickup trucks filled up with  our produce  and apples from the neighboring Riverview Farm in about two hours. It made us feel good to donate the produce, but it felt good to  be associated with an volunteer orgnaization that runs on a  ”duct tape and baling twine” budget, donates so many man hours by a small number of individuals  and still manages to make a tremendous impact in the community on such a basic level.

Immediately upon finishing up with Willing Hands I honored a small committment to Sam Lincoln, a fellow farmer from Randolph,Vt who recognized how devastated some of the  Vermont agricultural community had become as a result of Hurricane Irene. Rather than breathing a sigh of relief that his family had been spared, he embarked upon a plan to try to raise some money in some small way to give to those fellow farmers less fortunate. He and his brother (Buster Olney, who turns out to be a well recognized baseball commentator) thought they might be able to charge a couple of bucks  to get some folks to to a roundtable discussion about the state of  professional baseball in the 21st  century while raffling off  a few pieces of baseball memorabilia.  I contacted him early on and asked if he wanted  any free entertainement and we agreed that a little quiet coustic music would be nice.  So I  gathered three of my musical bummy friends who thought it might be a hoot to play some bluegrass music  for free on a Saturday night.  Turned out Sam and Buster’s idea turned out to be a small stroke of  genius. The raffle turned out to be a huge silent auction on the internet, the roundtable brought high profile general managers from the Red Sox and New York Yankees among others.  The audience sang along with a ramped up bluegrass version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”. The audience also got a chance to see the World Series Trophy up close and personal. The audience, by the way, was enough to sell out the VTC basketball gymnasium.  One of my bandmates agreed with me that maybe Sam ought to give up  farming and get into promoting bands and producing concerts,as it was a seamless,well organized event.  The final tally is not in as of this morning, butthey were well on the way to raising  $200,000 for Vermont farmers.

It felt good to be associated with giving something back, even in a small way. I sometimes feel guilty about  getting myopic while I go about the day to day activities. Whether it is the harvesting a crop, obsessing about the weather and wondering what to do about the arrival of a new plant pathogen on the farm, I easily forget there is a bigger world out there, and  people with bigger miseries and concerns. It felt good to be part of a slice of humanity that actually takes the time to address those problems that are not their own.

When all was said and done we lost  about  $25K in product and additional clean up labor from Hurricane Irene. But it pales  somewhat in comparison to  what has  been going on with some of my immediate  farming friends. The continuing wet warm weather has brought on diseases to the remaining crops and made it difficult to harvest.   Alex Maclennan of  MacLennan Farm in Windsor,Vt. lost  the remainder of his sweet corn crop, due to floodwater contamination of the ears of corn on the stalk.  What he didnt count as initial damage from the hurricane came later  when his wholesale  pumpkin crop  turned up with a disease that came in on the floodwaters  that saturated his pumpkin fields. Fifteen acres of pumpkin mush. Bob and Barb  Chappelle of Chappelle Farm in Williamstown, Vt. grow 50 acres of  certified seed potatoes (we get our potato seed from him) as well  as table stock.  His fields are  so saturated form the hurricane and the  continuing inundation   since that he has lost his entire  Yukon Gold crop to water born rots. His fields remain so sodden that he is in jeopardy of not being able to harvest  the remaining  varieties  this year because his fields may well not dry out enough to get the digging  machinery on  them.  My brothers in law  at McNamara Dairy had 25% of their field corn crop flooded.  They were informed that it would be too great a risk to chop it and use it for cattle feed because there was enough of a risk that  particular pathogen it might contain that was born in  by the floodwaters will kill cows.   The same problem for David Ainsworth in Sharon Vt, and other dairy farms in the Connecticut River Valley as well.  Then there is the odd financial twist that Tim and Janet Taylor of Crossroads Farm in Fairlee,Vt face ( I am sure other farmers in New England, as well).  They came through the hurricane with some soggy fields but were  relatively unscathed.  But two of their two biggest accounts  were shut down for the year when their buildings  suffered flood damage,so Crossroads has product,but is struggling to find ways to move it.  The worst scenario of my immediate farming  friends remains the disaster that Geo Honigford faces at Hurricane  Flats in Royalton where he not only had total crop loss but will spend countless thousands in machine and hand labor to straighten out the debris and muck in his fields that the  White River left in its wake.

Our town manager wrote a report in a local paper that  Plainfield suffered no loss of property and it makes me wince to think about  our $25K  going down river.  It aint chump change, and it makes me want to maybe correct him,if it wasn’t just a pride thing. But when I look around at my  farming counterparts I am thinking I should be  thankful  that is all we lost, and at the year’s end this will be a waning memory  and that we can look forward to the new growing season. That will be a harder trick for some.

We prepared for the wind,we feared for damage to the greenhouses. So  we moved things to higher ground and buttoned up buildings  in preparation. But in fact we got no wind to speak of and relatively no rain. However,10 miles to the west they were picking up 12 inches of rain. Whatever hits the eastern slopes of the Green Mountains of Vermont  ends up in the Connecticut River, and when enough of it got there, it ended up in our lower meadow.

We suffered very little damage to infrastructure. We lost an electrical service panel and four propane furnaces,but the current was not strong enough to worry the greenhouses structurally. The water level  engulfed and ruined  the remaining greenhouse tomato crop there and ruined 2 acres of fall crops in the field by depositing anywhere from a half to  six inches of a light Cream of Wheat-like gooey mud. Our losses were significant,but not crippling.

There were homes lost. There were farmers who lost  their crops to inundation for a second time this season. It underscores the point   the fate of the farmer’s success  is out of his hands. You have to accept the forces of nature  all the while  optimistically hoping they will work in your behalf, hopefully to your advantage. It also entails accepting them when they don not.

Harry Truman said “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen”    We all know that the forces of nature will eventually turn a heavy hand to us. Its part of  the deal.  We just hope that our turn doesn’t come around again for a good,long  while.

  Floodwaters  receding 8/29 Monday morning.

What has made this  batch of dryness doubly hard is the intense heat that has accompanied it. Not only do the plants suffer, it is tough on everybody in the field, greenhouses and farmstand. Its  enough of a chore  just trying to stay hydrated,much less  work in 100 degree heat.  I myself got a little woozy Saturday as I wasn’t paying attention to my hydration and I got a little cooked. Except from an  annoyingly chipper young lady on the field crew who is from Georgia and loves the heat, the rest of us  loathe the extreme temps of the last 10 days. I try to remind myself how cold I was back in the winter  sitting  on the skidsteer loader  pushing snow away from the greenhouses.

But its not just the dramatic storm events that wear down farmers. The 2011 growing season hasnt even gotten underway for some farmers yet. Up in the Champlain Valley and Addison Countys of Vermont dairy farmers are still mired in the fields trying to plant corn and not being able to cut hay. Steady rains coupled with  snow melt have created flooding and  tied them up for well over a month.  Farmers in the   seacoast areas of  NH and southern Maine at the same time are getting their crops shredded by hail. Meanwhile, we are  irrigating crops because its dry. As the guys in the field  would say  ”We’re eating dust and burning   diesel”,   trying to  keep the  young transplants alive.  With all the storms, flooding and tornadoes  that tore up Cabot and Barnet Vermont and dumped 8″ of rain,we got all of .3 of an inch of rain and we are less than 60 miles away. Pretty fickle weather.

The important point to recognize is  this; we as farmers are not in control. People call up asking when the berries will be ready.They wonder why this farm has good squash and another doesnt.  Its all about the weather.  I can only make sure that I plant the seed, provide fertility,keep ‘em somewhat pest free. Beyond that is luck and forces that are  out of our control.

It  grated on me at the time, for it is not the first time I, my family or employees have experienced that kind of response.  For the sake of  making it easy for Americans to  make certain decisions about their food choices, the USDA has come up with the Organic Certification Program  and a little green sticker that differentiates products from USDA certified organic   farms from everything else.  So all food choices  become, at the point of purchase, either Organic (a good thing) or non-organic or  conventional ( a bad thing, or at the very least, a not as good a thing as organic). This  rubs me wrong. The label  and certification grants  people  (like the sanctimonious Madame Greene) the ability to actually dismiss any further  discussion of  food production  by over simplfiying the discussion and reducing farming practices to “good” and  ”bad” as determined by a little green sticker.

The last thing I would hope to convey to anyone is that  because I  may  use a conventional chemical in my management practices (as exemplified by our spraying the tomatoes with  ”conventional”  fungicides which incidently saved us from about a $35,000 crop loss  during the late blight outbreak of 2009) is the impression that I am  against organic farming.( That aforementioned $35,000 crop loss would have been pretty much assured if I were certified organic, because some of the materials I use on the tomatoes are EPA registered for tomatoes  but  are not OMRI listed.)  I certainly am not in any way  against organic practices, and I  am as familiar with  JI Rodale, Arden Anderson and Louis Broomfield at Malabar Farm as anyone.  I admire any farmer who is good to his land can make  an honest farming without outside income, be they conventional,  organic,or any shade between the two. We have farmed trying to utilize organic practices when and where applicable  on this farm  since long before it was  trendy and long before the USDA got into the certification business.   I  find it  irritating  when people just simply buy into the fallacy that  the little green USDA “Certified Organic” sticker  just automatically  signals  to them 1) no sprays have been used, 2) there is less carbon footprint because its organic  and  3) its completely “sustainable”.

Going  back Madame Greene, I would have welcomed from her a response of   “Oh, Edgewater Farm is not organic? Why wouldn’t you want to be?”  Then maybe I could of told  her why we  don’t  qualify for certification. Then we could have had a discussion about  the declining profitability of  offering PYO Strawberries and how we feel   the use conventional chemical  fungicides plays a part in allowing  us to continue offering Pick Your Own.  Or, that in fact, we  frequesntly choose  use the same  biological OMRI certified  insecticides and fungicides that are available to   certified organic  farmers .  And how land base, green manuring and crop rotation at our farm works. Or how  our IPM  program of  pest management in our greenhouses precludes the use of prophylactic spraying by using beneficial insect  releases. Or maybe that buying my lettuce in season makes more sense than buying organic lettuce  with a huge carbon imprint from California. Maybe I could  of persuade her to  consider   all the organic  practices we do undertake and why.  Then after our discussion she might well have determined to buy organically certified product, and I would have respected that decision. How farmers arrive at how they manage their farms is a complex, thought provoking discussion that we farmers constantly talk about   amongst ourselves and at meetings. It is a complex discussion with no simplistic  ”correct way” or  ”incorrect way”  answers.  At least she wouldn’t have  bought into the  media hype surrounding the little green organic sticker  without having  the  discussion and going to the effort of putting some real thought into it. And  maybe she could have reserved her  glare for a real pedophile.

Its tough to suffer a paradigm shift so early in the morning-especially before  coffee, but it frequently happens in farming. By the time people arrived for work I had managed to rearrange the day for the employees. Although getting  the tomatoes in the lower greenhouses was the number  one priority in my day, there were a bunch of things that immediately got moved from the back burners.

Frequently these  quick “change of plans” occur because weather is uncooperative. If you are putting up bird netting on the blueberries and a nasty storm comes up you may find yourself sitting in a barn with 6 employees watching it rain while they are on the clock. Sometimes sitting out  the storm is the appropriate thing to do, but if its early in the afternoon and you sense that the  weather is going to  remain threatening or inclement for the rest of the afternoon, maybe you  should  redirect  the folks to cleaning out a greenhouse or some other  job that exists  on the ever changing list of things to do.

Weather can work against you in more subtle ways. It isnt always bad weather that can be  vexing.  Suppose you consult your weather services and you are assured that  a soaking rainy system  is going to  deluge everyone on both  sides of the Connecticut River in the Upper Valley. Ok, now you decide to transplant lettuce and cole crops in the late afternoon so they can get soaked in at night. Everybody works an hour late and  gets all the transplants in the ground. Sweet.  How about when you wake up to cloudless skies the next morning and there is not a drop of moisture in the rain guage? After some cussing and  some more coffee you have to rustle around and make sure that the irrigation pipe gets  set up  in yesterdays transplants  immediately after morning harvest,  lest the mid day sun burns them all up.

A friend of mine maintains that having ADHD  is a prerequisite for a career in farming. Probably so. You start out with a daily plan, with a long list of back ups. You constantly are looking at your paper and rearranging  it to accommodate  employee sickness, machinery breakdown, changes in weather and a myriad of other surprises. Rarely does a day come by that Anne  or  I  are  actually  able to check off more than half of the things  that initially were penciled in on our daily lists.

So I am making tomorrow’s list. I really want to get those tomatoes planted, but  I doubt I will be able to do it,with the river being so high.  But then again, I might be surprised when I go out to get the paper.

So its a big deal,its expensive and complicated. It is an art as much as a science. But we have been trying to do it this way for fifteen years. We have now developed a annual plan of prophylactic releases  based upon when we open greenhouses,what plants go in them, the crops, and the historical problems that have cropped up and when that has occurred.   All this  knowing that at some point in the spring aphids,white flys and thrips  (the horticultural equivalent of President Bush”s “Axis of Evil”)  will show up. Hand in hand with the prophylactic  release of beneficial  insects there comes  a monitoring or “scouting” plan that weekly makes you systematically assess insect and disease problems  by observing trends in insect populations. For example, you are  never going to be totally”pest free” so by observing and counting pests weekly on a yellow sticky car that attracts the pests and understanding the swell and ebb of populations,you can make a pest control strategy. Sometime things run like a top,sometimes they go to hell in a hand bag. You can always tell when the latter happens because you can read the lines of frustration in Anne and Pooh’s faces. But when its working right,there are enough predators to keep the  populations of bad guys surpressed  but enough bad guys to support a healthy population of predators and beneficials. Its a balancing act. See? I told you it was tricky.

We didnt come up with this kind of control on our own. We weren’t that smart. Some forward thinking individuals from the  extension services of our land grant universities in Maine,Vermont and New Hampshire got together  about 15 years ago  and said “There has got to be a better way than hammering  away at an insect pest problem with chemicals until the bug develops reisistance and we have to find another chemical…besides I hear that  Pooh Sprague hates spraying his greenhouses weekly…”  Well, maybe not the last part,but they were savvy enough to realize there might be away of mimicing the way the natural insect populations are kept in check in an outdoor environment and  adapt that to  a greenhouse environment.

So  when you come to the greenhouses this year you will see little yellow cards again and you will know that we are monitoring pest populations with them. UVM is doing some experiments here and you will be told that certain plants  cant be sold. And you will know that the tiny parasitic wasps we released at dusk on Tuesday are going about their business as you go  about yours. And you can hopefully appreciate the fact that we are trying to reduce our biologic footprint in our own corner of the world.