Corinne Hansch and Matthew Leon
Amsterdam, New York
Mixed vegetables and cut flowers
Occultation and applied organic mulches
ON THE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST 10, 2017, I PULLED up a long, steep driveway to Lovin’ Mama Farm. Having spent the morning visiting Four Winds Farm in Gardiner, New York, and the afternoon on the two-hour drive up to Amsterdam, I was looking forward to stretching my legs and visiting this farm. It was going to be a day of contrasts; one of the most established no-till farms I could find followed by one of the newest.
All the way at the top of the hill I found the farmers out in their field, half an acre of newly, neatly laid out intensively planted beds of vegetables and flowers. There was a packing shed, a greenhouse, and a house under construction just across the driveway. We headed into the shed to get out of the afternoon sun.
Corinne Hansch had contacted me after we ran a few stories about no-till in Growing for Market magazine. Corinne is from California; her partner Matthew Leon grew up in Manhattan. His family has owned the land they are farming since he was a kid. After farming in Mendocino County, California, close to where Corinne grew up, and losing the lease on the farm there, the couple moved back to New York to restart their farm on Matthew’s family land.
“We are using exclusively no-till on our new, intensive vegetable and flower farm here. We ran our own farm for five years in northern California using tillage and lost control of weeds, which in some areas got worse every year. However, we also had a lot of successful trials on many common no-till methods, including sheet mulching, intensive spacings, heavy compost addition, and cover cropping/interplanting. When we made the big move back to family land here in upstate New York, we took a year off to set up infrastructure and process the big transition,” said Corinne.
“Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser from Singing Frogs Farm (see interview p. 275), so close to our old farm in Mendocino County, sealed the deal during their wonderful keynote presentation at the NOFA-Massachusetts conference in 2017. I had already been doing lots of research and watched some of their talks on YouTube. And after doing their all-day intensive workshop, Matthew was convinced. We are also doing microgreens in the greenhouse, and they are basically floating the farm income while we get our no-till permanent beds up and running.”
A diverse array of crops are grown in the no-till system at Lovin’ Mama Farm.
Credit: Lovin’ Mama Farm
“So far, this is the best method we have found,” said Corinne. “One, do a soil test at the proper time of year. Then choose soil amendments according to the recommendation on the soil test, while you use a silage tarp to black out [occultate] a mowed area, for about four weeks. Two, mark out beds and broadfork. Three, sprinkle amendments, absolutely essential on new ground to deal with nutrient deficiencies. We are using organic fertilizer for the first time ever, partly because our climate is so mild and the only compost we have access to isn’t very high in nitrogen. In such a cool climate there is little heat to kick-start the microbial activity in the soil, so a little fertilizer is crucial for microbial activity. Five, top-dress with four or more inches of compost.
“The compost element has been very challenging, since we aren’t making enough of our own yet. In California, we used organic cow manure mixed with rice hull bedding. We paid top dollar to get it trucked in from an hour away, and it completely transformed our farm. Come to find out, here in the middle of dairy country, there is no cow manure to be found. All the dairy farmers use it on their own cornfields, plus it is all liquid. Instead, we are using our local municipality’s yard waste compost. It is wood chip based, which is great for mycorrhizal support, but just not doing it for [fertility] our first year on this ground. We are trying lots of different blends, mixing it with peat moss about fifty/ fifty, which seems nice so far, especially since our soil is clay loam.”
“We are using our small Kubota to [apply compost] down the rows. We’re not into wheelbarrowing a half acre plus of compost (we are hoping to grow to three acres eventually). So the tractor straddles the bed and one of us shovels out the compost from the bucket while the other drives down the pathways. We have used some straw in the pathways, but had some weed germination from seed in the straw, so we’re always on the hunt for good weed-free straw,” said Corinne.
Dense plantings shade out weeds.
Credit: Lovin’ Mama Farm
“So, how is it working out? There are goods and bads. Goods being that we could get in the field as soon as the thaw came in mid-April. It’s been such a wet spring that we would probably have been twiddling our thumbs waiting for the soil to dry out enough to till. We’ve found that when we add proper fertilizer and necessary amendments (after a soil test) and a thick enough layer of compost, there are no weeds and great growth,” said Corinne.
“We’ve already flipped the first few beds, and love having transplants at the ready to go right in. Direct-seeded lettuces, beets, cilantro, dill, carrots, radish have all germinated okay. Also, the crops grown on top of silage tarp occultation areas seem to be doing much better, and the weed pressure is less.
“When we didn’t amend with fertilizer, it was not so good. When we didn’t add a thick enough layer of compost (so some native soil showing), there were lots of weeds. We are starting super small our first year so we can stay on top of the weeds and keep our fingers crossed for weed-free beds from here on out. Using weed-free compost and pathway mulch are important lessons, too.”
We’ve evolved our growing methods to address the degradation of the planet due to poor agricultural practices.
—MATTHEW LEON
“We did five years in California, with tillage-based farming. Tillage is amazing from a work perspective, because all of a sudden you’ve got a third of an acre prepped, and you go in and plant it all. You have to pay the consequences for that instant soil prep, though. The weeds come in like crazy and the soil loses tilth and gains compaction. And especially over time, we noticed the weed pressure getting worse and worse and worse, and we were eventually losing whole crops to pigweed. One of our main drives for doing no-till is weed suppression. The economic drive is also huge. Seeing what other no-till farmers are doing economically is pretty exciting,” said Corinne.
We walked over to the first-year market garden, which consisted of forty-five 100-foot beds.
“I’m okay with having just this many beds. It’s been a little hard to scale back after growing four acres at our old farm. Starting from scratch here, we really want to pace ourselves and do it right from the start,” said Corinne.
“It’s a learning experience, too. We took that really seriously, because we care about the Earth so much. We were tilling because that’s what we could do with four acres. The two of us farming, we felt we needed to till to maintain that much space,” said Matthew.
“We had a newborn baby when we started our farm in California, and two other kids. Our third baby was born our first year into farming full-time,” said Corinne.
“But now we switched to no-till for many reasons. Mainly, we want to grow food in ways that regenerate a healthy planet. I want to do this for the Earth, to help heal the Earth, and it works so well! We’ve evolved our growing methods to address the degradation of the planet due to poor agricultural practices,” said Matthew.
“It’s definitely a big experiment this year,” said Corinne. “For years, we’ve been trying to do research about no-till. But we were finding it very hard to find any information about it, and how to do it. We were in Mendocino County, which is just one county north of Sonoma, where Singing Frogs Farm is. I had been trying so hard to get to see them, but never was able to make it to their farm. It’s funny that we didn’t get to see them until we moved east. We saw them at the NOFA conference in Massachusetts last winter.
On the summer day I visited Lovin’ Mama Farm.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“And the Armours [of Four Winds Farm, see interview p. 145], they were one of the only farms who had any information online. They had this little video on YouTube that we watched over and over again. So, we’re actually copying their method. We drive over the beds with our tractor. We’re in our late thirties, and not really into wheelbarrowing compost around that much anymore. Been there, done that. So we’re using the tractor with the bucket. We have one person unloading from the bucket, and another person driving. Or he can do it solo, too. Just park the tractor, unload, drive it up a bit more, unload. Way less backbreaking. We’re happily using the tractor for that.”
“I also know there are some drop spreaders that could increase the efficiency for mulching with bulky material like compost,” I said (see Resources section).
“Kind of like a manure spreader, but it just drops it,” said Matthew.
“That would be nice because you could drive over and it would just drop it right in the row. We’ve been dreaming of designing a spreader like that,’” said Corinne.
“I have dreams, ‘Oh, maybe someday I’ll have a roller-crimper, and I’ll be able to do a corn patch.’ Or a big patch of whatever,” said Matthew.
“We started using this method years ago, before we were even farming. We were just gardening. It came naturally to us. After I graduated from college in 2001, we moved back to my parents’ place, which has a large garden. I grew up doing farmers market with them. It’s super small scale in a tiny little town in northern California,” said Corinne.
“And we grew a farmers market garden,” said Matthew.
“At the end of the season, we bought all this horse manure, and we just top-dressed a thick layer onto the beds. Then we moved to our next adventure. The next year, I remember my mom saying, ‘This is the best garden we’ve ever had. There are no weeds. We don’t need to till.’ A few years later, we were working on another guy’s farm in northern California, same thing. We just top-dressed and planted right into it. They said, ‘What are you doing? You’re not tilling? This is so weird.’ We said, ‘Trust us. It’s going to work,’” said Corinne.
“It’s really hard to listen to those instincts at times, to follow your gut feeling when no one else is doing it, you haven’t seen proof of it happening. So I’m really grateful to Elizabeth and Paul Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm for getting word out there and creating a movement. They’re not the only ones. There are lots of others doing it,” said Corinne.
“Where did you get the idea for the methods that you’re using now?” I asked.
“I remember being up in Olympia at the Evergreen State College. I worked on the organic farm there. One year we planted garlic, and I top-dressed it. I remember when I pulled the garlic out, the roots had gone up into the top-dressing. They were these massive roots. That made an impression, and top-dressing just seemed like a big part of that,” said Matthew.
“For me it was watching some of Singing Frogs’ YouTube videos. They have all these ideas about how no-till relates to climate change. Then they get into the nitty-gritty of how they do it. That’s the kind of information I am just voracious for. Learning from other farmers and seeing how they’re doing things. Gleaning the things that make sense and work for us,” said Corinne. “From the Armours, we got the idea of just driving the tractor over the beds to put down compost.” said Corinne.
“When we were in California, I took a workshop up at Bountiful Gardens, through Ecology Action, with John Jeavons and that whole community up there. We were walking around their garden, and I noticed that what they do to clear their beds is they just pull out the crop, put it in the compost pile, they hula hoe it, and then they plant again. They were like, ‘Why do you want to till when you can just hula hoe it?’” said Matthew.
“And when you’re hula hoeing it, you’re getting out the last weeds and cutting up that stuff. It disturbs the soil a little bit. Then you can plant into it. I think they would amend [after that]. That was a little green flag for me.”
Smoothing out the compost on top after flipping a bed from a previous crop.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“Also in California at our old farm we did a little bit of no-till with some of our strawberries and raspberries. We stopped tilling and just top-dressed. It seems counterintuitive. I think that’s why a lot of people are so skeptical. They think, ‘Oh, the soil is going to be hard and impossible without a rototiller or harrow.’ But it’s actually softer and fluffier. You have to really see it to believe it. When we were hand weeding in our no-till strawberry patch, the weeds were just coming right out. It was so different from the onion patch that had been tilled, and it was rock hard, impossible to weed, even though we’d amended it with compost,” said Corinne.
“It is a leap of faith going to no-till. I have talked to so many farmers that say, ‘If I can’t bring my tractor in and just till it, then I’m screwed.’ In response, well, yes, you will not be able to clear weeds, blend in compost, and be left with a soft top layer of soil with the tractor. That’s what I think a lot of farmers really want to see and why they have trouble adapting to no-till. They want to see what they put down on the soil worked in. And they want to have a really soft soil that they can just push transplants into,” said Matthew.
“Yeah, there’ve definitely been times this year when we’ve been tempted to till,” said Corinne.
“The tillage and other deep soil tractor work like that, it’s superhuman and should be used sparingly, for instance when breaking ground the first time only,” said Matthew. “Sure, machines can do deep work, and we need to be careful about how deep and when we do this work.”
Just beyond the current field, a new section of field is prepared by occultation with a silage tarp.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“You can do it with roller-crimpers on the large scale, and that can be a pretty great way to do it, that doesn’t till and break up the soil and then have it wash away. There are ways to do it on the large scale. However, if you want to pump out a lot of food in a small space, it seems like what we’re doing is what a lot of farmers have turned to, about a thirty-inch-wide bed that has a bunch of plants in it, that shade out the competition of weeds.”
“We also have the microgreens business, that is floating us right now. So we didn’t feel this pressure to pump out a ton of food right away. We felt like we can experiment with some no-till techniques. We just kind of went for it. It’s been going really well, and we actually are pumping out a lot of food!”
“My father owns this land. As a kid, we came up here a lot of weekends in the summer, and for weeks at a time. So I grew up coming up here a lot. I’ve got a deep connection with the place. It’s wonderful to see my kids running around here, and experiencing the same kinds of things that I experienced when I was a kid. Now to be making a business and a new home here, it’s pretty awesome. We’re really excited to sink our roots down and not have to uproot them again,” said Matthew.
“This is our first year here, so there’s still so much to learn. We’ve already, in just flipping one round, we learned so much. I know that so much more learning is going to be coming.
Like spacing, for instance. You can really pack things in so much more in an intensive no-till system. I used to always do peppers in a foot-and-a-half or two-foot spacing. I experimented a few places with one-foot spacing and realized I can get great production with my peppers, okra, tomatoes, even broccolini and cabbage too,” said Corinne.
“It seems like if you have enough fertility, you can probably pack things in more densely than the conventional wisdom would allow,” I said.
“Yeah, and then they shade out the weeds, and they create this whole canopy of support for each other,” said Corinne.
Tomatoes planted on landscape cloth.
Credit: Lovin’ Mama Farm
“Something that we’re still working on is the direct seeding in this system. I think part of the challenge is that we don’t have an irrigation system yet. It’s been a great year for not having an irrigation system, with all this spring and summer rain,” said Corinne. “We’re still adjusting to rain in the summer after five years of farming in dry California. So with a new growing climate and a new growing system, we haven’t quite figured out the seedbed thing.”
“We have a Johnny’s six-row precision seeder. If your bed isn’t the perfect consistency, as far as tilth goes, then it binds up. If we just put down compost and rake it, and you try to roll that thing over it, it just binds up with the soft compost. Suddenly you’re not seeding well, and it doesn’t really work. So, we’re trying to figure out how to make that happen,” said Matthew.
“Meanwhile, we just switched over to the Salanova lettuce [which is for salad mix but transplanted], and we’re transplanting everything. We even transplanted beets. First time we’ve ever done that,” said Corinne.
“We do a lot of transplanting. The thing is that you can get the plants exactly where you want them,” said Matthew.
“You get the density that you want. We do the Salanova every six inches down the bed, four across. So you’ve got eight plants to cut out every foot versus a million with the precision seeder. Then when you’re cutting the crop out it’s a lot easier to flip the beds that way,” said Corinne.
Compost is applied to the top and straw is applied to the pathways when remaking beds for a new crop.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“We’re following the Singing Frogs Farm method. When we flip our beds, we go in with knives. We cut the previous crop out right below the soil, each plant. We put the past crop in the compost pile, weed the bed real quick if necessary, amend and top dress with compost/peat, and replant.” said Matthew.
“I think perennial weeds are another fear that people have around no-till. Definitely, as I was reaching out this winter to different university researchers, saying, ‘What do you know? Where can I find more info about no-till?’ Most of them responded with concerns about invasive, perennial grass weeds. Which so far, we haven’t seen any,” said Corinne.
“I think one of the big things about the no-till system for us is that, we’re used to tilling up a sixth of an acre and seeding one of those every month. Then sometimes it’s May or June and you’ve got to plant a half an acre, because all the tomatoes are going in. With no-till we realized that we really need to keep down the amount of space that we’re trying to cultivate at once. At least at the start here. Because everything is by hand at this point,” said Matthew.
“You can see where we laid down this hay, there was some seed in the hay, and suddenly there are weeds growing in the pathways out of the hay. Then, we have to weed that. And our beds are pretty weed free, but still we’re constantly trying to go out there and make more beds. It gets overwhelming. Suddenly you’re like, ‘Wow. I only have so many hours in my day.’
“And as much as we want to expand more, I feel like we shouldn’t, because the worst thing that could happen would be that you let weeds grow up in your patch, and they go to seed. Then you’re laying down this compost, and then they’re going to seed on it.”
“We have forty-five rows out there, 100-foot rows, so about a half acre, and we’ve got our propagation greenhouse. We started marketing at the very end of February with our microgreens. It’s looking like if we can continue the average we’ve had over the year, we’ll be grossing around $70,000 this year. And it’s just the two of us,” said Corinne.
An update after the end of the season showed Lovin’ Mama did even better than projected over the summer, grossing $90,000 off of their half acre of no-tilled flowers, vegetables, and microgreens.
“That’s a great first year,” I said.
“Yeah, we’re doing back flips. That’s amazing. It took us four years to get to that point in California,” said Matthew.
“But we were in a very rural area. There are just so many more eaters here,” said Corinne.
“We’re right next to Albany and Troy,” said Matthew.
“The marketing potential here is just light-years beyond what it was in Mendocino, thanks to the population,” said Corinne.
We left the barn to look at the field. Neatly laid out 100-foot beds had straw-mulched pathways. A border of straw bale flakes surrounded the field, as a form of long-term occultation to try and keep grass from encroaching into the field.
“The other thing that I think about as we’re standing here, is that we’ve found ourselves in a unique position. Having five years of farming experience, and then landing on this new site, we took the time to create an intentional plan around field layout and infrastructure development. We spent the first year (2016) starting a small microgreens business,” said Corinne.
“We plowed the field,” said Matthew.
“Yeah, we did plow to break ground. There were some really thick grapevines, and raspberries,” said Corinne.
“Goldenrod everywhere,” said Matthew.
“So we mowed it, and then we got a plow, and we plowed the whole thing. Then we planted rye,” said Corinne, gesturing to the rest of the field outside of their straw-bale border.
“We put a lot of intention and thought behind the layout. We’ve got four zones in a three-acre field, all with 100-foot beds. This is going to be our 100-foot greenhouse, which fits perfectly in zone two. It’s also right next to the packing shed so it was more cost efficient to get power, gas, and water out, and it’s easy to run the harvest in,” said Corinne.
“We’re still in the stage of farm development here. So, just taking your time with the things that you can take your time with. What can we not take our time with? We need to make money. We need to get the greenhouse up. We need to get the packing shed up, so we can wash things. And we need to start farming the field,” said Matthew. “The infrastructure comes little by little as we have time and money to invest.”
“An intensive no-till system helps make all of that possible, because you’re getting so much production with so little space. You can slowly build up your farm to a point where it’s producing what you want it to be producing, and to get all those systems in place. It takes time. We know that from our experience in California,” said Corinne. “We definitely knew we wanted to grow smarter, not bigger.”
“And we’ve got plenty of space in this field, but it’ll be there. We don’t have to be expanding so quickly that suddenly it’s out of control. And saying, ‘Oh, we don’t have a crew to weed it all, so we’re in trouble,’” said Matthew.
“So the pathways have been a really interesting evolution,” said Corinne.
“Yeah, right here, you see where we put down hay,” said Matthew, gesturing at the pathways between beds. “We had to weed it, because it was growing grass. I got pretty upset about that. It’s one of those things, I thought, ‘I put it down to keep the weeds back, and it’s growing weeds.’ Germinating oats or whatever it is in the hay. So now, we’re spending the money on straw, which is harvested by a combine. It doesn’t have many weed seeds in it. We’ll see how that goes,” said Matthew.
“I’m hoping that eventually the straw will break down and suppress weeds, and we’ll get to the point where we don’t have to keep laying it down,” said Corinne.
“So you have weed seeds that blow in, but hopefully you take care of those. If you can stay on top of that, and keep any more plants from going to seed in the beds then your weed pressure should go down over time,” I said.
This interplanting of brassicas and lettuce shows how very few weeds have sprouted since the crop was planted. The lettuce will be harvested before the brassicas shade it too much.
Credit: Lovin’ Mama Farm
“Exactly. These onions were our first round. This is an example of some beds that we did not put down enough compost on. It was our very first experiment, and you can see the weed pressure there. We even weeded them once by hand. But then these beds over here have been flipped at least once,” said Corinne, pointing to several weed-free rows.
“We added more compost. And we realized that we needed to add amendments as well. A lot of the things we planted in the first round were not growing very well at all, and it looked like a nutrient issue. So we said, ‘Okay. Time to go get some bagged fertilizer from North Country Organics.’ After that we cut out that last crop, amended with the fertilizer, and top-dressed with a thick layer of the compost/peat mix. The next round of crops grew well,” said Matthew.
We walk by flowers, Brussels sprouts, okra, and a wide mix of other vegetables.
“It’s probably a good idea to just have one crop in a 100-foot bed. That way when it’s all done, you get to cut it all and pull it out and flip the bed. And you don’t have this,” said Matthew, gesturing to a partial row of eggplant.
“We have a few beds over here with a little bit of eggplant, because we were just desperate in the spring, to squeeze everything in. I had started way more things than we could ever fit. It’s hard to transition from four acres of production to a half acre!” said Corinne.
The silage tarp shortly after it was applied.
Credit: Lovin’ Mama Farm
“It was amazing, because the spring was so wet, even into July the field was probably too wet for tillage. We don’t have any drainage tiles or anything like that in here. So if we had been waiting to till to get in, I don’t think we would’ve gotten planted. That’s why the pathways got away from us. We were planning on hoeing, but it was so wet. You would hoe and they would just come back,” said Corinne.
“And getting those early cucumbers and zucchinis and tomatoes is important. That’s when people are crazed for them. Then you hit the August glut. Not sure yet if that happens here, but definitely in California, everyone in Mendocino has a backyard garden with cucumbers and zucchinis and tomatoes. And then they don’t want to buy any,” said Corinne.
We walk over to a tarped patch of ground.
“This whole section was tarped with a 50' × 100' silage tarp. We left it on for four weeks,” Corinne said, gesturing to a dozen beds directly adjacent to the tarp.
“And weeds aren’t growing there,” said Matthew.
“The earthworms go crazy under the tarp,” said Corinne.
“You had it tarped for four weeks during what part of the year?” I asked.
“Mid-May to mid-June,” said Corinne.
“Are you happy with the amount of weed suppression? Can you even tell? So you pulled the tarp off and immediately built beds here? It looks like there are not a lot of weeds coming up through,” I said.
“Yeah, I think honestly, the amount of weeds that came up after we pulled the tarp off, it was mainly just Virginia creeper and some other really deep-rooted weeds that had some life down there still,” said Matthew.
“Let me just make sure I’m getting this straight. Your method is to do occultation. And then build a bed with your various compost materials. Is there a depth that you’re shooting for? Are you just eyeballing a few inches?” I asked.
“I’d say four to six inches. Maybe less. Probably more like four,” said Corinne.
“We make a pile down the middle, and then we rake it out. The pile is probably six inches deep,” said Matthew.
“We did broadfork, too. Which, I don’t know that we’ll continue doing. Maybe once a year, every now and then on beds that seem like they need it,” said Corinne.
“Adding all this straw, is this something you’re doing in the first few years to try to kill the stragglers? This isn’t a long-term strategy, is it?” I asked.
“We don’t know. We’re experimenting. My hope is that it’s not long-term. If we can really stay on top of keeping all the access rows mowed, and all the edges mowed. We also have a really cool sheet mulch project that we did down there with our lilacs and peonies,” said Corinne.
“And we’re starting another patch right here. We’re going to lay down the cardboard and put wood chips on top of it,” said Matthew.
“And just let it sit. It’s going to be a lot of shrubby perennials, I think,” said Corinne.
“When we do plant that area, we’ll just decide where we want our plants, push aside the wood chips, cut a hole in the cardboard if it’s still present, and just amend that one spot and put in a plant right there,” said Matthew.
“The monarchs are just everywhere, there are so many butterflies right now,” said Corinne.
“Yeah. That’s the other big reason to have flowers in the fields, all the beneficials,” said Matthew.
The field at Lovin’ Mama Farm with the new house behind it.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“That’s another great thing about no-till that the Kaisers are so big on is creating habitat for those burrowing beneficials. One of the other workshops I went to at the NOFA-Mass [2017] conference was on native pollinators. I’m really interested in that. There are a lot of native pollinators that are ground burrowing. When you till, you’re destroying their habitat. We want all pollinators,” said Corinne.
We stand back and look over the tidy rows of flowers and vegetables.
“Our little tiny farm. It’s pretty awesome. We’re going to have our house right there,” said Corinne, pointing to the house-in-progress right by the field.
“Yeah, that’ll be nice. I like your commute,” I said.
“Yeah. A few steps. We’re really blessed,” said Corinne. “We’re excited for all the potential things we can do to revitalize our little community here. Our little economic input. There are just so many great things about no-till. It’s environmental, economic. We want to invite college groups out. We definitely have a drive to spread the word. And grow good food for our community,” said Corinne.
“That’s one of the things that excites me about this. It lowers the bar a little bit, as far as people not necessarily having to buy a tractor. You can start smaller,” I said.
“We’re definitely holding on to our implements for now, until we figure everything out,” said Corinne.
“That might be a message there for people: Try it, and hang onto your tractor. Hang onto all your equipment. Try it out, and you can always go back to tilling if necessary,” I said.
“Yeah. No need to abandon your equipment,” said Corinne.
“You’re in the process of starting this. Any tips? Is there anything else that you would want to say to someone who’s thinking about giving it a shot?” I asked.
“I feel like the collective wisdom of people who do no-till is that once you get it set up, it’s great, because there’s not much weeding, and you get high production. You can make a good amount of money on a small amount of space. We’re finding that true in our first year, which is when the work is the most. The weed pressure is still there. We decided to take that jump, that leap of faith, and we’re already finding the benefits of a no-till system. We’re weeding less than we ever have. The weeds aren’t overtaking us. We feel like we’re keeping it maintained,” said Matthew.
“I was going to echo what you said about just trying it. Because we have the microgreens, we knew we were making a certain income from them, so that made it a lot easier to try it. If you know your tillage system will give you this much money, maybe maintain that so it’s floating you while you’re experimenting with no-till. Don’t be afraid to experiment. For me, that’s the joy of farming. Always trying something new and experimenting, and building off that knowledge every year. But if you can have that economic security with a system you already have in place, that’s already paying the bills, it gives you freedom to experiment,” said Corinne.
“One thing I’ve thought a lot about too out here is that I can build a bed, cover it with weed cloth, tarp, or sheet mulch, and just let it sit for a while. Then when I’m ready to plant it, pull it off and plant it, or plant straight into the sheet mulch for perennials. There are so many ideas out there. There’s so much room for variation in this system. I think that the more you keep the weed pressure back, using mulch of some sort and occultation, that you could really come into a system that’s highly productive and not as much work. The main things you’re doing in this system are bed prep, planting, and harvesting,” said Matthew.
“Isn’t that a lean farming principle, too? Spending more energy doing the things that make you money. Weeding doesn’t really bring you any income, but harvesting does,” said Corinne.
And with that, I left them to their farm chores for the afternoon, and took a few more pictures on the way out, feeling very inspired about the success that Lovin’ Mama Farm is having.
Mikey Densham and Keren Tsaushu
Main Ridge, Victoria, Australia
Mixed vegetables
Occultation and compost mulch
WHEN I WAS VISITING WITH ELIZABETH AND PAUL Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm in California (see their interview p. 275), they suggested other no-till farms that I could talk to. They mentioned a couple that worked on their farm and had taken their methods back to Australia. Unfortunately, a trip to Australia was not in the budget. However, as the writing progressed, I found myself more and more curious about how no-till practices from California were translating to Australia.
That’s how I found myself Skyping at 3:30 one morning with Mikey and Keren of Mossy Willow Farm. With a fifteen-hour time difference, the only waking times we had that overlapped were the very beginnings and ends of days. Good thing I’m an early riser. I groggily sipped my coffee and marveled about how I could be looking face-to-face and talking in real time with two people on the other side of the world.
To be more exact, Mikey and Keren’s farm is on the large Morning-ton Peninsula, a little over an hour’s drive south of Melbourne. I was excited to hear how starting a farm with no-till methods was going for them.
“So how did you get from Australia to working on Singing Frogs Farm in California?” I asked.
“Through an article we saw online called ‘The Drought Fighters’,” said Keren. “Mikey and I were looking for places to get a good internship and mentorship, and suddenly this place popped up with a similar climate to ours, a Mediterranean climate similar to Israel and parts of Australia.
“And for me personally, understanding the benefits of no-till came from talking to Paul and Elizabeth. I had no idea of the connection between tillage and the release of greenhouse gases. That was huge for me.”
“It was Singing Frogs that kind of threw us into the deep end of no-till. But I remember a mate of mine in my early farming days who gave me the Fukuoka book. So I read One-Straw Revolution. That was where our roots of farming came from. Fukuoka was talking about trees and orchards, and I was thinking, ‘How can I farm in a natural way with vegetables?’ I read the book back to front a few times. He talks about some form of tillage that he does for growing vegetables. I was thinking, how do I do this? So I asked around, and most of my farming mentors looked at me in a weird way and said, ‘I don’t know if you can really farm without tillage,’” said Mikey.
“We both started farming in Israel, which is a bit of a tricky place to do farming in a nonconventional way because there’s very little information about anything that is not commercial, large scale, and usually for export. So the initial seed for no-till farming was in us, but the practical knowledge and facts came from Paul and Elizabeth, and reading a lot after because we got so passionate and excited about what they were doing,” said Keren.
“So you guys went to California specifically to work with them?” I asked.
“Yes,” they replied in unison.
“And you worked on their farm for a while?”
“For three and a half months, full on. We lived with them on the property, so we were living and breathing it for three months,” said Mikey.
“We would have stayed for longer, but I didn’t have the visa to do so,” said Keren.
“And now you’ve started your own farm in Australia using their methods?” I asked.
“We’re on the start of our journey. We have been on our own property for a year, last summer we were just getting started. It was a tiny CSA, and this season was really the first season of full production,” said Keren.
“I’m really interested to talk to people at your stage, because one of the reasons I’m so excited about no-till is because it helps people to be efficient on a small piece of land. I think that’s one of the great potentials of no-till is to get more people to try farming if they don’t have to get so much land and don’t have to get so much equipment,” I said. “One of my questions is about how the getting started process is going. So you worked with Singing Frogs for a few months, and then did you more or less absorb their method and say, ‘Let’s go do it?’”
“We absorbed their method. As Keren said before, we were young farmers. I had previously worked at Brooklyn Grange farm in New York City. It’s an incredible rooftop farm. So I had a market gardening foundation, and then Keren and I also worked together on a farm before we went to Singing Frogs. And we ran a small CSA,” said Mikey.
“We had just started hearing of Neversink Farm (see interview p. 247) doing no-till, from Growing for Market. We thought, ‘Whoa. This guy’s calling it no-till but is doing it a completely different way.’ So we thought, ‘All right, there is some nuance to this no-till thing.’ But we felt comfortable enough, at that stage, to go ahead and start our own venture.’”
An aerial view of Mossy Willow Farm.
Credit: Mossy Willow Farm
“So you got your piece of land, and how did you start with the no-till system?” I asked.
“When we first got the piece of land, there were about ten oddly shaped home garden beds that were already there. So I had something to kind of play around with while we began thinking about how to create the proper farm plots. The first striking thing was that we were on quite a heavy clay, and I thought, ‘How do I do this?’ You know Singing Frogs are on much more of a loamy soil, and I remember working in their clay patch at the bottom of the farm, and that was hard work. That was a different ballgame,” said Mikey.
“So I was thinking, ‘Really, how are we going to manage doing this no-till method on a completely different soil profile than what Singing Frogs are doing?’ We had a rototiller on the farm that a mate of mine had just bought, which I got him to sell. I said to him, ‘I don’t want it on the property because it’s going to tempt all of us to use it. He’s said, ‘Are you sure? We just bought it.’ I said, ‘Man get it outta here otherwise it will surely be used by someone.’ In the end, however, I came to the conclusion that it was going to be rough going trying to work the soil without some sort of tillage. The soil was hard and compacted and covered in turf.”
“Also, we didn’t have time to put tarps down for a year and wait for the grass to die. So we decided to do an initial till to get the ground opened up,” said Keren.
Beans coming up in the field.
Credit: Mossy Willow Farm
“We called a guy up the road who has a tractor service, marked out an initial plot, and he tilled it up. I remember him saying, ‘How many passes should I do?’ And I said, ‘Let’s stick it out with maybe just doing the single pass, and come back once more.’ And he said, ‘But it’s not going to be a fine dust.’ I said, ‘Let’s relax mate, a single pass will do.’ Because he was an old-time farmer he thought I was crazy. He was laughing his head off,” said Mikey.
“So that was a single pass with a moldboard plow? Or a disc, or what?” I asked.
“Just a big rototiller. That was the only thing he had. No bed former on the back, he just went in there and tilled up the area that we marked out,” said Mikey.
“What did you do next?”
“For the first two plots we were a bit stressed on time because we got the opportunity on this land late in the season. So we went in straightaway. We spent lots of energy raking the big chunks of grass out, which was a workout, and then formed the beds. The next two plots we did a bit a later, they were tarped for about a month and then formed. With more time on our hands we could invest in a longer and more efficient bed-forming method than in the first plot,” said Keren.
“Yes, initially we were forming the beds, and including a lot of compost. Everyone advised us to invest in compost and take the opportunity that we tilled in order to deeply incorporate the compost before we started layering it on top, so we did that,” said Mikey.
“So you tilled the compost in, or just put it on top of where he roto-tilled?” I asked.
“We put it on top and forked it in manually,” said Mikey.
“Did you have raised beds at that point?” I asked.
“Yes, at first. And the original decision to do so reflected our context of having pretty wet winters. But after a while we understood they were a bit too high for us. In the next few plots we stopped digging the path and just put the compost on top of the beds, and then they weren’t raised very much at all,” said Keren.
“Initially we were digging pathways and putting that soil on the bed. And that was much more of a reflection on how we’d farmed before and also at Singing Frogs. Currently however our bed forming practice is with absolutely no raising apart from just compost application, and the broadforking, which helps to shape the bed. So no digging out paths, and not really raising the bed up any more than we need to,” said Mikey.
“I’m just trying to picture how big your beds were. How much compost did you put on: four inches, six inches?” I asked.
“Let’s say a wheelbarrow is 60 liters (15 gallons). We were doing up to ten wheelbarrows for a 100-foot bed. So that’s, let’s say, around 600 liters (150 gallons, or 30 five-gallon buckets) of compost for a 100-foot bed. Do you guys work by liters like that?” said Mikey.
“No. We use gallons, but everybody else in the world uses liters, so I’m used to doing the conversion,” I said.
“When you put on all that compost, did it settle down over time? Now are you pretty much growing on the flat?” I asked.
“No, it’s still mounded a little bit. Also, because we use wheel hoeing in the paths, the hoeing naturally gives delineation to the beds. I would say maybe like five centimeters (two inches). It’s not completely flat, you can definitely see the beds but shoulders are kept to a minimum height. It’s just not mounded high enough to create wasted shoulder space,” said Keren.
“The old plots that were raised, we transitioned out of that. The shoulders were drying out. And in the initial year we realized quickly that we didn’t have the time to manage the weed pressure colonizing the exposed edges of the bed. We understood that by lowering the beds down and reducing the surface area of the shoulders there would be fewer weeds, and so that’s why we moved into the new bed shape. When we began the farm, the initial reason for raising the beds was because we were on slope in a rainy area, so we were thinking raised beds would be good for drainage and would prevent erosion. But considering we’re in clay soil, which holds together well, and we’re on a slant, drainage and erosion haven’t been a problem, so sinking our beds down to near flat has been a great decision,” said Mikey.
“On the topic of weeds, and I will make note again that we haven’t been farming this property for long, but I can see a dramatic change even in our oldest plot, versus the new plot that we tilled about a month ago,” said Keren.
“Now that we have the time, we tarp the area beforehand to kill the grass off, and then do the initial till. This reduces the chances of grass taking root again after the tillage or the need to rake out large chunks of grass afterwards,” said Mikey.
“The amount of weed pressure that I have to deal with in the new plot is something that we haven’t gotten used to managing. The older beds, which are now at least a year old and have settled into our no-till management, have far less weed pressure. You know there are always weeds. But they’re something you can hoe once or twice in a crop cycle and you’re pretty much good to go. But in the new plots that we just tilled, it’s insane. There are continuous waves of new weeds germinating until they eventually settle under our management. It’s a good reminder of why we do what we do. Because if we had that weed pressure continuously on the whole farm we would never get anything done,” said Keren.
“It’s management of weeds, as opposed to a war on weeds,” said Mikey.
“It sounds like you’re going to stick with that way of breaking in beds? You said that even the bed that you tarped you got rototilled?” I asked.
“It was just rock hard. We’re on heavy clay and the property was pasture for years, and with just the both of us, there’s no way that we could have, just time-wise, opened it up,’ said Keren.
“That insight is valuable, because I didn’t realize how compacted that was,” I said.
“We knew our farm is going to be a certain size, and that once we open a plot, it’s just one time of doing that. Then the decision was easier to make, to till it, put the effort in, create the beds manually, add lots of compost, which is a lot of labor, and then know that the plot is pretty much done; no need to re-till or reform each plot every season, the hard work is done at the beginning” said Keren.
Harvesting spinach.
Credit: Mossy Willow Farm
“Yeah, we say to people that we’re founding a plot. We’re establishing it, we’re investing in a long-term process of soil creation. So like Keren is saying, when you open a plot, you’re going to deal with that heavy war on weeds and the bed-forming work in the first six months. But it’s nice knowing that I’m founding this plot in a no-till way and our primary goal is to nurture and create soil fertility. In the long term it eases up and the system finds its balance and becomes easier and more productive. That’s a justification that can help you get over making the decision to make the initial till and the ensuing battle against the weeds,” said Mikey.
“So tell me, how do you make the transition from the end of one crop to a new crop?” I asked.
“We take a knife, cut [everything] three centimeters [one inch] under the surface, put on the compost and then we broadfork everything. We used to put just chicken manure down, but now we use an organic fertilizer, which is a mix of manure, seaweed and more. We then put a thin layer of compost on top, depending on the crop that comes after. So if it’s a heavy feeder, compost will go on, and if it’s a light feeder then we leave it with just the amendments. Then we rake and shape the beds. Over the past year, however, as our context has evolved, we have begun to slightly change the final steps,” said Keren.
“Context is everything. Here at Mossy Willow we rely much more on direct-seeded crops, mesclun mixes, radishes, mustard mixes, carrots, etc, than where we learned no-till farming. We realized our context was very different. For starters, we are a smaller operation with less nursery and general field space. We struggled initially to access quality compost and high-grade potting mix so had difficulty basing our system on large transplants. And finally we began using specific tools, for example the paper pot transplanter, to help cut labor time because our operation is based upon less people. So while we had a toolbelt of incredible skills from our mentors, we needed to adapt to our conditions.
“The biggest challenge came from our experience with our clay soil, which after a long crop and the use of drip irrigation became quite crusted and hard. The hardened surface made it more difficult to transplant. Transplanting takes way longer when the soil is harder. So with our big crops (broccoli, cauliflower, etc), we still cut the crop out, broadfork first, compost, then plant. However, since we began using the Jang seeder and the paper pot transplanter, we had a bit of a problem with our turn-over process and bed preparation. The tools didn’t work nearly as well because the soil was too rough.”
“Initially, we would apply compost after every crop. That was something Paul gave us advice on. He said, ‘When working no-till on a clay soil, farm above the clay.’ So we really took that to heart and it was incredible advice that I would pass on. In my mind I’m always working towards growing our organic matter in the upper layers and letting biology work the lower layers of clay into something more friable,” said Mikey.
“I think the difficulty with that long-term compost application is the cost. You have a growing input cost when you’re applying compost every single time. Not to mention the physical time it takes to apply it.”
“And also we didn’t want to have any [nutrient] leaching or anything like that,” said Keren.
“So we were thinking, how do we need to alter the system slightly, to use these tools and continue to obtain high germination and successful crops?” said Mikey.
Produce sales at the farm.
Credit: Mossy Willow Farm
“Which led us to getting the Tilther,” said Keren. “From the first moment I couldn’t do it. I felt like it’s cheating. I didn’t want to do any kind of tillage and I didn’t know what the biological and physical consequences were going to be on the soil. On the other hand, our other option would be to break it up manually with a rake, which, I guess if you think about it mechanically, is a pretty similar process, only with the rake you’re doing it by hand, So at the moment we are selectively using the Tilther for beds that will be paper potted or direct seeded.”
So while in our first year we applied a thin top-dressing of compost every time to ensure good germination in the clay soil and to suppress weeds, a year down the track and we have radically reduced our need for compost as a soil conditioner and weed suppressor.
—MIKEY DENSHAM
“I’m surprised that after putting that much compost on top it hardens up that much,” I said.
“Also, we’re using drip. I was farming in Israel in the Arava desert. I was living there for four years, after the army my first job was farming in a massive pepper farm. We were exporting to Russia and Europe. So my introduction to farming came from the reality of desert farming. The whole thought of water conservation and drip, instead of overhead spinklers, was so strong that when we started here we decided to use drip. The only original area with sprinklers was the salad plot,” said Keren.
“We have a designated area where we grow our greens, turnips, baby kale, basically the direct-seeded crops,” said Mikey.
“And this has been a really interesting thing for us to witness; how the soil profile in the two different areas of our farm, the beds under drip and the beds under overhead, have evolved. We have been challenged with seeing how under the summer sun, the soil cakes and large clay clods form. As a result we really began to ask ourselves, how can we manage the transition from crop to crop? How can we efficiently transplant into hardened soil? How do we effectively use the Jang and the paper pot transplanter in this tough soil?”
“The salad plot, with the overhead, has been very interesting to witness under no-till. We’re seeing there a very different soil tilth and profile evolving. In the overhead area we’re seeing far less caking, far fewer clumps, and an increasingly loamy soil developing. In this plot, every single time we take out a crop, we fertilize, quickly tilth if necessary, and then seed again in a matter of hours or in the worst case a day or two.
“So while in our first year we applied a thin top-dressing of compost every time to ensure good germination in the clay soil and to suppress weeds, a year down the track and we have radically reduced our need for compost as a soil conditioner and weed suppressor. And we have almost no weed pressure at all, which has been really crazy for us. By following Paul and Elizabeth’s basic principles, no-till in this altered context is still working magic for us. Don’t get me wrong, the soil in the other areas is improving as well. Over the whole farm we are seeing the soil strata change, increased worm activity, etc,” said Mikey. “However there’s been a far more dramatic change in soil workability in the areas with the overheads.”
“Some people think, ‘Oh, my farm is on drip,’ or ‘My farm is on overhead.’ I like to think in terms of how these tools are changing and working with our soil, and how they are influencing our crops’ growth. Overhead and drip can give you very different results. It can actually help develop soil in different ways. Now I think we’re going to be using overhead as a way to improve our soil’s structure and its overall tilth. In the areas of harder clay we are going to use it to transition the soil faster into a more workable structure,” said Mikey.
“We’re in the beginning of everything, and for us it’s such a great thing to have no-till as a methodology and guide. I feel like I have such a backbone behind what we do, and pushing through with it and not giving up when it’s really hard is the biggest thing for me. Maybe in a few years we’ll have better tips! But now for me the biggest thing is having that foundation, which we really believe in, and drives our decisions,” said Keren.
“The more people that are moving away from relying on tillage — even if they’re tilling once a year at the beginning of the season, and they’re not tilling between every single crop — is a good thing. That’s already going to build their soil, and hopefully make it more productive, which is a hundred percent what it seems both Conor and Paul were saying: that there’s an economic backbone to being no-till, not just the ecological side,” said Mikey.
“That’s a massive advantage we have. I feel like it pushes you for production, because the minute we cut the crop out, we immediately want to put something in [to keep the soil covered], so there’s a constant rotation of crops, and there’s no need for stale seedbedding. It just pushes production in an amazing way,” said Keren.
“We’re in a wet area, and you cannot even drive a tractor up our hill in the winter. We’re getting crops in and out of the ground in early, early spring because our beds are formed and they’re ready to rock and roll early in the season. So that’s been a massive one for us, and I think that’d be a tip to share with people as well. You can get ahead in the market by using methods like this. You can get your crops far earlier than other people because you’re not relying on heavy machinery,” said Mikey.
“The first season we were growing on thirty beds, and the amount of food that came out of there was [very large],” said Keren.
Mikey at a farmers market.
Credit: Mossy Willow Farm
“We went from zero to a hundred in two and a half months,” said Mikey.
“And how much land are you farming on now?” I asked.
“Three quarters of an acre,” said Keren.
“Is that how much land you’re trying to do, or are you still making new beds and expanding them?” I asked.
“We’re still going to expand a little bit more. I think we’re going to try to hit right about an acre and hold at an acre. I think that seems to be pretty good in terms managing the labor and it’s also about crunching the numbers to make sure we can produce as much as we need from it to make a living for ourselves and the farm workers. I reckon an acre’s going to be the sweet spot for us,” said Mikey.
“Is there anything that I might not have asked you, or that I should have asked you? Or any final thoughts?” I asked.
“I love how when you talk about no-till with some [people], so much of it has to do with practical technique, money, [quick bed] turnover. And then you speak to some [people] and most of what they’re talking about is ecology. It reaches and touches so many elements of farming, not just the practicalities of not tilling. It’s an ecological backbone, a philosophical backbone, an economical backbone. It’s something that has a philosophy. I think no-till comes with a vast package that expands well beyond just not tilling,” said Mikey.
“Yes, that’s really why I’m so excited about no-till. The exciting thing for me is that they’re both there — the ecological and economic sustainability,” I said.
“But I do think it will take a bit of time. For us, for example, there is an economical advantage because the turnover is really quick, and we get a lot out of the ground, but at the moment our soil profile is very challenging. It does make certain tasks on the farm take way longer. Because we’re on such hard clay,” said Keren.
“In Australia, the market gardening scene is still small and tillage is a mainstream practice,” said Mikey. “Where we are there are not many veggie growers. Because of the way we farm we are able to farm where most people simply wouldn’t grow veggies. Because of the ‘lightness’ of our farming practices upon the landscape we’ve managed to be very successful in this untraditional location. And we have vineyards and high-class restaurants all around us. We’re cherry-picking all the fine-dining restaurants to sell to, where I think if you had a tractor, no one would even think about doing veggies where we are. They’d be running up and down the hill in a tractor, slipping and sliding. They just wouldn’t do it. So, definitely a part of our success has been choosing the spot we’re in and practicing how we’re farming because, yep, you just wouldn’t do it otherwise,” said Mikey.
“I do think there’s potential for people to use the fact that they’re not tilling as part of their marketing. I don’t know if it’s something that will gain momentum over time, because I think right now, if you said ‘no-till,’ a lot of people wouldn’t know what you mean. People are so disconnected from agriculture, most people don’t think about the mechanics,” I said.
“I agree that on the sign, it’s not a buzzword that people recognize or understand. And I think that is ridiculous. Even for me, when we came to Singing Frogs after having farmed on our own and hearing that tillage releases nitrogen and carbon from the soil, that turns into carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, which are two potent greenhouse gases. That was alarming, scary, and yet exciting, and emotional. People don’t know that tillage is such a massive environmental hazard. Even people that are in this game [of agriculture]. That really drives me forward, trying to share that. It just feels insane that it’s not a known piece of information,” said Keren.
Casey Townsend and Dan Morris
Natick, Massachusetts
Mixed vegetables and flowers
Solarization, compost and leaf mulch
ON MY WAY TO NATICK COMMUNITY FARM, I thought perhaps I had gotten lost. Driving in from the west, gradually there was less and less open space and more suburbia. It didn’t look like farm country. But then I hung a right and there was a beautiful little farm in the middle of it all.
Historically the farm, which is just off the Charles River in Natick, Massachusetts, grew flowers for sale at the Boston Public Market about twenty miles away. Now the town of Natick owns the farm, which is run as a nonprofit organization for both production and education. Being at the edge of the Boston metropolitan area, the farm offers a variety of programs for young people. The farm sells their seedlings, vegetables, and flowers through an on-farm store, CSA, and wholesale.
I met with assistant director Casey Townsend and vegetable grower Dan Morris, who showed me around on a hot summer day following a cool spring.
One of the most interesting things about doing these interviews was how much growers referenced each other. In this case, Casey got the idea to try no-till from Connecticut grower Bryan O’Hara (see interview p. 305). Casey saw one of Bryan’s presentations and decided to try it. Having just interviewed Bryan a few days prior to my visit with Casey, it was interesting to see how Bryan’s system translated to another farm.
“The first summer, three years ago, we did a hundred feet of no-till beets next to a hundred feet of beets that we tilled. And the no-till beets turned out a lot better, for several reasons: one, those beets demonstrated higher brix values; two, we have seen better coverage across the beds, so we are using the entire bed space and are therefore seeing higher profits from those beds; and three, they had fewer pest issues. So the next year, we did one 100' by 75' quadrant of no-till. Just from the results we saw that first year, we thought, ‘this makes sense.’ So we piloted it that first year and from that, we’ve just been expanding every single year,” said Casey.
What Casey noticed about those beets and subsequent direct-seeded crops is that “the seeds were less concentrated in rows and therefore did not require any type of thinning. Also, we sowed the seeds at a rate so the entire bed was covered with beets (in comparison to single rows). This creates a more productive bed financially, and in the sense that the beet leaves tend to shade out germinating weeds. So it helps us harvest more from the same space while also putting less labor cost into each bed. Covering the entire bed also helps manage the microbial life in the soil as well, as there tends to be less ‘static’ soil with no plant life feeding it.”
The seed-starting greenhouse on Natick Community Farm.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
At Natick Community Farm, they use Bryan O’Hara’s solarization-based system. “We don’t usually rely on occultation because it is such a long process (4–6 weeks). So our normal process is: 1, mowing any weeds and remaining crops down; 2, solarization; 3, spreading compost; 4, planting seeds; and 5, covering with a mulch barrier (usually leaves). We use occultation for the sides of our beds to keep quackgrass out but only when needed,” said Casey.
Between crops, they use solarization for a few days to kill any remaining weeds from the previous crop. Then they put down a layer of compost, and seed into that. They have found that pulling a leaf rake upside down over the seeds makes enough seed-to-soil contact to get good germination.
To transition from a cover crop, “We mow it, then we solarize. We always add a little bit of compost. If it’s a new field, we add an inch to two. If it’s an existing no-till field, we try to add half an inch. Then we broadcast our seeds into the bed,” says Casey. They’re playing with whether they have to add a mulch layer on top of the seeds or not.
Whereas Bryan O’Hara adds a layer of straw, wood chip, and leaf mulch to the top of the soil, “What we do is, because leaves are free, we top-dress with leaves. We have a leaf chipper, but it is super labor intensive. So usually I have my summer crew just make a pile of chipped leaves,” said Casey.
“I did use his drag chain for awhile. And I found that I didn’t like it. We stopped using the drag chain because we felt it was moving the seeds too far down the bed. With the rakes we are able to better control the movement of seeds. So we just use the backside of a leaf rake and pull it over the bed. Then we apply that little bit of leaf mulch on top, and water it in. Then we usually have to weed one time. So basically Bryan’s system is what we’re doing and we’re trying to figure out if we can get away without the moisture barrier [of leaves on top].
“Even better we apply the compost, add the seeds, put the mulch on and it rains. That’s the ideal situation for us. Because all that stuff is living matter as it comes out of the compost, you’ve got all these microbes that are working in there. So if you expose them to the sun, as Bryan [O’Hara] says, you’re going to kill them,” said Casey.
“With the back of the rake you’re really not moving much around. You’re letting the seeds just [settle] into the mulch. Our leaf chipper stopped working and it was so wet that we stopped making leaf chips,” Casey said. “So we started just raking a little bit more to see if that was as effective, and it’s seeming like it is as effective. So we might modify that part, [and just leave off the mulch].”
We walk over to a block of salad mix beds to look at the system in action. “We took a big gamble here. We didn’t have time for [the leaf mulch], and the leaves were too wet. That’s another leaf problem. When the leaves are too wet to go through the chipper. So we just broadcast [seeds] and skipped [the mulch],” said Casey.
“You know what’s interesting, now that I think about it? The spinach seeds are about the size of a beet seed, right? And those worked,” said Dan.
“I think it’s going to come down to figuring out what seed size needs to be covered and what doesn’t,” said Casey. “The cool thing about it is you can seed with your hand. It’s just like tilled soil all the time. And the best thing is when you start digging down here, you’ll see all these fungal mycelia. And in the hoophouse, it’s even more evident. You see fungus [in the soil] all over.
This temporary strip of landscape fabric is knocking the grass back from the border of the field.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“One of the downsides of using a leaf mulch is that I never had problems with squirrels or chipmunks before. But you’ll get acorns in the compost, and you’ll be walking through going, what is that hole? And the chipmunks will go in and try to find the acorns, and they pull them out and make little holes in everything. That’s one of the weird things about using leaves,” said Casey.
“In 2015 we added the second no-till block. We just keep adding blocks as we make more compost. Roots are over there now, alliums are here, and then this is going to be our lettuce block next, and we just keep rotating things around as per our certifier,” said Casey.
“We rotate the garlic area every year. So the mulch from last year, instead of tilling that in, when we pull the garlic, we leave the holes, plant our kale into it, and then we’ll use that for next year’s mulch. I call the guy down the street, and say, ‘Give me the gnarliest hay you’ve got.’ And he gives it to me at a really cheap price. And he always looks at me crazily, like, ‘What you want that stuff for?’” said Casey.
“No animal should be eating it,” said Dan.
And that gnarly hay makes great garlic mulch.
A winter shot of greens in the no-till hoophouse.
Credit: Natick Community Farm
Since one of the underpinnings of Bryan O’Hara’s system is high-quality compost, Casey started making compost specifically for use in the no-till system. To explain their system, Casey and Dan take me over to their compost-making area. They have a large pad with three sections where they can pile and mix ingredients with a tractor bucket.
“I was never really great at making compost to begin with. And I heard Bryan talk, and our system is pretty much based on his. He talked about making this carbon-rich, leafy stuff. We’ve gotten a lot better at it. This is where our whole system begins,” says Casey as he takes a handful of dark-brown compost. “So this is a 25-to-1 [carbon to nitrogen ratio compost].”
“We only use stuff that’s free. Because we’re in the [Boston] metropolitan area, everybody wants to get leaves off their lawns every single year. So I have to turn away landscapers bringing leaves to the farm,” said Casey.
“Our system is ten parts leaves, six parts wood chips, and one part manure. The wood chips come from [a landscaping] company, or we get them from the town of Natick. The manure comes from our farm.
“So those are the main components of our compost, because they’re free. Leaves, wood chips, and manure. That’s what we base everything around. It took me a year before I figured out that I need stuff on site all the time.
“Because we’re organic, for our certification, we have to prove this gets up to 130 degrees F for four days. That’s not a problem. Usually it’s up around 160. Bryan wants it lower so you don’t kill the microbes. So it’s a fine balancing act to try to keep it closer to 130 than 160 degrees,” said Casey. “But this is the real labor-intensive part of no-till. Everything else is basically harvesting after this.”
Though they have a few tractors, the no-till is mostly done by hand. They have a tractor with a bucket used to turn the compost, a Farmall Cub to cultivate the tilled part of the farm, and a BCS walk-behind, which does the rototilling. As far as the labor-intensive part, unfortunately, their compost-making area is on the other side of the farm from the fields. So, when no-till beds are prepped, they spend a lot of time moving and spreading compost.
One of the benefits of the no-tilled part of the farm is that they no longer have to prepare as many transplants, on such a rigorous greenhouse schedule, because they can replant successions so quickly. With solarization, they can have a crop removed and re-seeded within one to two days.
Casey Townsend with a handful of the compost he makes.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“One thing I took from Singing Frogs [Farm in California], is they always have tons of transplants on hand. We always want to have something ready to go into the ground. So we just have these,” said Casey, showing me a bench full of transplants. “We do lots of greens and lettuce mix. The lettuce mix area I want to show you is really amazing. No-till has changed the way we do salad greens.”
“We grow extra trays just in case space opens up, so we have something to throw in the ground. Usually lettuce is that extra thing,” said Dan.
“We have a standing order with the school for lettuce mix, which around here is pretty pricey stuff, $9 to $10 a pound. So we’re just cutting [lettuce] all the time,” said Casey.
There are some aspects of this particular no-till system that are a departure from the way most people grow vegetables. Broadcasting seeds on the bed vs. using a seeder, for example. This no-till system is one of the only ones I can think of that uses broadcast seeding for vegetables like carrots. Most vegetable growers are used to using a seeder when direct seeding most crops.
“Bryan talks about how it’s always easier to teach people to use no-till who’ve never driven a tractor before. And I find that’s the case. People who know how to use tractors, they’re just like, ‘What are you doing there?’” said Casey.
“It’s an unlearning first before relearning,” said Dan.
“Yeah, broadcasting is always hard. We’ve narrowed it down to only a few people who are allowed to do it, and then we just have to irrigate,” said Casey.
The no-till hoophouse in summer.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
In the past, they were moving around multiple pieces of clear plastic to solarize a large block. But they just recovered a greenhouse, so they kept the old plastic and can now cover an entire 100' by 75' block, or an entire greenhouse, with one piece of plastic.
“Even though we solarized, we’re still dealing with stubborn perennial weeds,” said Casey. “Bindweed is in this field, and in [the greenhouse]. We closed the greenhouse down and covered the soil with clear plastic to solarize. But you still have to deal with perennial stuff all the time.”
“In the field, we solarize for two days usually. It gets really, really hot underneath the plastic, and then we pull it off. And it’s always a fun team building activity to try to move the big tarp. It’s a beast.”
As far as solarizing in the hoophouse, they can do it later in the year than they can in the field, because the hoophouse is so much warmer than in the field. “During the summer we grow tomatoes [in the hoophouse], and we push everything as hard as we can. And then we solarize in November.” The late fall solarization wipes the slate clean before planting winter crops.
“One of the other problems we are finding with no-till is, because you’re not tilling, you get this edge effect every single year of the grass creeping in. So we just move this [black tarp], for occultation. Jean-Martin Fortier talks about it a lot. So we just move this around, depending on where we want to make new fields,” said Casey. “And we just moved this one out after four to six weeks. So what we’ll do is we’ll probably apply compost into this, now that it’s been tarped [to smother the weeds].”
The summer no-till hoophouse. Tomatoes to the left and right are interplanted with basil and carrots, which will be harvested by the time the tomatoes are yielding.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“In terms of weeding, we front load the work. We put all that compost into it, and then that’s our workload,” explains Casey, gesturing towards a bed of recently cut salad mix. “I walked ahead of whomever cut [the salad mix] for maybe two minutes and weeded it, and that’s all the weeding we will do for this entire block before we harvest it. It’s amazing.”
Dan explains how they really notice it in August, when it’s all they can do to keep up with the harvest. Not having to weed helps keep the busiest time of year manageable, instead of having to harvest and weed at the same time.
“So is that accurate to say you’re going to put two minutes of weeding into this 100-foot bed?” I ask.
“Let’s say three minutes. Just to be on the safe side,” Casey laughs.
“One thing we always do is, we’re still trying to play with the numbers. So we put a stake in each bed with the day, we write what was planted, and we write the number or the ounces that were seeded there. So that way, if a bed doesn’t work, [we can try and figure out] what happened,” said Casey.
“And [the variables] could be one, irrigation, it could be two, who was the broadcaster, or it could be three, the compost. And I’ll show you some of the crappy compost I made that I jumped the gun on. I was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna work,’ and then it didn’t work at all. So, you get better at making compost. You get really, really good at it.”
Looking at the no-till beds, there are some weeds poking through the crops. “As you can see, yellow dock is out there. Buckhorn plantain. You still get these perennial weeds. Bryan says to cut them out, so that’s why we always have these knives on us. But I found with some of the stuff, you just gotta pull the roots out,” said Casey.
These greens were planted by scattering the seed by hand.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
Standing in the hoophouse, Casey tells me that ground that is not tilled stays cooler for longer in the spring than tilled ground. Which is especially noticeable in a cool spring like this one.
“The other drawback of no-till is that, in the field, it’s always a month behind, because you’re not tilling it and getting it warm. But then last year, for example, we were pulling stuff out of no-till until November. It’s always behind. It’s just slower to heat up. So our plan is to do more overwintered stuff in the no-till this year, to see how that works.”
“Yes, leeks and parsnips survive the winter here pretty well,” said Dan.
Solarizing a bed on Natick Community Farm.
Credit: Natick Community Farm
Conor Crickmore
Claryville, New York
Mixed vegetables
Occultation
I MISSED THE TURN INTO NEVERSINK FARM A COUPLE of times. Though it’s only 120 miles north of New York City, the Catskill Mountain terrain is steep and it’s surrounded by state parks, nature preserves, and national forests. It feels about as far removed from the city as possible, like Rip Van Winkle could still be napping around here somewhere.
The farm is tucked in between the road and the Neversink River. Looking back on our interview, I realize one of the things that makes Conor’s farm unique is that he has cut everything out of his operations that doesn’t need to be there, and reduced farming down to only what it absolutely needs to be.
There are three things I really like about Conor’s approach: he’s cutting down to the essential; he’s not afraid to talk about money; and he embraces very small farm footprint. Conor realized he was wasting a lot of time and effort on tillage, and that it could be cut out, and so he did, which is one of the things that leads him to make the statement on his website, “Our farming practices may be radical but they have resulted in our farm being one of the highest production farms per square foot in the country.”
As for money, it’s really helpful when farmers talk about how much they make as a benchmark for other growers. We are not going to have a thriving small-farm economy without small farms making money. We won’t get more of the world’s food coming from local sources until we have successful small farms staying in business.
As the editor of Growing for Market, I know that Conor raised some eyebrows when he said in an article that, after five years, he was “able to come very close to our early goal of 400K on just 1.5 acres. I now feel that for us, 1.5 acres is the comfortable limit if we wish to maintain a healthy production-to-profit ratio while also having a limited staff and working reasonable hours.”
Before running that story, I double-checked the number with Conor to make sure it wasn’t a typo, because it’s so much higher than many people expect. Having been to his farm, I don’t doubt him. Walking around his small, intensely planted farm reminded me of a greenhouse. Even in the field, the way plants are crammed in as tightly as possible, with all growing space always producing, is the greenhouse mentality writ large. When I talked to him, Conor revealed that one of the inspirations for his system was taking greenhouse techniques into the field, and everything really started to make sense.
The greenhouse is a high input/high output system. Greenhouse growers typically put much more labor and energy into, say, a tomato plant than do field growers, and are rewarded with much higher yields. This is the mentality that Conor has put into his growing outside as well as inside.
People would have been less skeptical of Conor’s numbers if they had known how many people he has working for him: four (or more), to help him maintain that acre and a half. And a significant portion of that acre and a half is in greenhouse production.
A summer field on Neversink Farm.
Credit: Neversink Farm
Yet another important point to make in understanding Conor’s numbers is that he sells much of his produce at farmers markets — so he’s getting the full retail price, minus the investment of labor in travel to and staffing the stand. Conor’s gross is still significantly higher than average, which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to him. And that makes sense. Neversink Farm has chosen intensive production over extensive production.
A way to break it down is to compare Neversink to another farm I visited — Singing Frogs in California. For example, Paul and Elizabeth told me that their system required 1.5 people per acre for them to make $100K per acre off three acres. Conor has doubled the ratio of labor to land, and the corresponding output from that land. Instead of having 1.5 people per acre, he has close to 1.5 people per half acre. And by doubling his investment in labor/area, he grosses about twice as much as Singing Frogs does by area. It’s the old distinction of growing intensively vs. growing extensively.
Another big difference in the farms is climatic. Neversink is in the Northeast, so they need to make more extensive use of greenhouses and protected space to meet their goals. Singing Frogs, in California, make use of their relatively temperate climate by using a little more space to grow more extensively outdoors. The farms are using slightly different no-till methods to achieve the same goal, of being really productive of both food and income.
Neversink is striving for sustainability on a number of different levels. On his website, Conor says, “We are redefining what sustainability means to our farm all the time. We started with the premise that the farm must sustain our family financially. Within that framework we try to employ more sustainable practices as our farm evolves and grows. Some practices we think add to our sustainability presently: [being] certified organic, small size … with high production per square foot, no tractors, no plastic mulch, no wax based produce boxes, no hydroponic growing, pay[ing] our staff a reasonable wage.”
Conor wholeheartedly embraces a small farm footprint. His farm is a manifestation of the goals he set for himself starting out. As he put it in a Growing for Market article, “We wanted to stay very small, but we also wanted to live well. We were not young and since we had no retirement money, we concluded, however naively, that to live well, have kids, and be able to retire at some point, we should try to make at least $400K gross within a few years, and we would expand to whatever amount of acreage that demanded. We were obviously not yet schooled in small scale farming financials, because if we were, we might never have left the city with that kind of goal.”
When farms need more income, the first thought of many growers is to get bigger. What Neversink did instead was to become more intensive. This is really important, because small farms will not be able to compete with big farms on economy of scale; they need to find an edge to be competitive with industrial food, by competing on intensivity of production, not extensivity.
With a one-and-a-half-acre farm footprint, Conor is actually shrinking his farm as it becomes more productive. A lot of people with excess production would go looking for new markets, but Conor realized that he didn’t want to take on more markets. Learning when you’ve reached the “right size,” and then stopping, is an important lesson.
Many small growers, even latently, think they are somehow less important than bigger growers. Many of the growers I talked to said, “We just have a couple acres,” or “I just want you to know we’re just a small farm before you come all the way out here.” I think this is a hangover from the Earl Butz, “Get big or get out” approach to agriculture. I think that we would be much better off with tens of thousands of few-acre farms, instead of a few big farms. As long as you’re staying in business, supporting yourself and feeding other people, it doesn’t matter what size your farm is. Thanks to Conor’s acre and a half, he and four other people have jobs, and he’s feeding a lot of people.
Inside Neversink Farm’s no-till greenhouse.
Credit: Neversink Farm
Farming more traditionally with a rototiller caused Conor to think of a lot of ways he could streamline things, which has led to a farming style that is different from most vegetable growers. He has completely stopped rototilling. His thought process has led from, why till if I don’t have to, to, why take the irrigation out of the field if I don’t have to, to, why be any bigger than I have to? See Conor’s website, neversinkfarm. com, and the Resources section for more details.
“You’ve figured out how to be very productive,” I said to Conor. “Is that your primary motivation?”
“Initially it was about being more efficient. I would never start doing something and be like, oh, it’s going to be more work. That would be ridiculous. I have no interest in making more work. If it’s heavier, I don’t want to deal with it. If it takes more time, if it’s harder to get a worker to do it, I don’t want to do it. And, it’s a lot easier to show someone how to use a broadfork than it is show them how to use a [roto-tiller]. Right? I mean, any monkey can use a broadfork. But a [rototiller] is a lot harder,” said Conor.
“There are just better ways to spend the money [than on machinery]. It’s more efficient, and you do get a slight reduction in weeds. I think the reduction people talk about is maybe a bit overblown, because most of your weeds are probably going to be blown in over time. You need a weed control system. No-till is not going to help you much if you have a lot of weeds. But, if you have a weed reduction system by cultivating and everything else, it’s going to probably add in a little bit. At least at the beginning when you’re trying to reduce the weed seed bank, you’re not bringing them up all the time from down below.
“You can have permanent beds, which is incredibly nice. You can have stakes there, which now you can run a string whenever you plant, and that’s going to be a more efficient bed usage, which is really important on small scale. Raised beds are a complete waste of space. You have to maintain more area, and no significant production increase. You know, you need about 30 percent more area for a raised bed.
“But when you do [flat beds, you can have a string to mark the beds]. The irrigation can be permanent, left there all winter. It never moves. So, in the spring I just need to turn it on. And that’s a whole other thing you have to drag in and out when you’re tilling.
“Also, you’re going to use a little less fertilizer. Which is probably a bigger reason to do no-till than weeds. Because every time you till, it’s just like turning a compost pile. Because in organic [systems] you’re trying to break down material for fertility. And every time you churn it up, it’s burning it up. So we just have a very thin layer at the top, where everything’s breaking down, and so you need to add less. And for me, that’s good, because it’s very sandy soil, so my fertility goes away very quickly.
“And, as I build my soil, I don’t keep pushing it down farther, so I don’t have to water as much. Because as you go deeper, you’ll find the soil changes and gets sandier. So, it’s going to hold a little bit more water than if I keep bringing the sandy stuff back up.”
“Right, because you’re just Tilthing the top, and then adding your fertilizer and compost or whatever and just working the top little bit of soil,” I said.
“It’s like three quarters of an inch. That’s it, I just come over the top, to protect the amendments from going somewhere, because that stuff is expensive and it just speeds it up a bit. Because it’s going to take three months for that stuff to break down. Why add a couple of months [to the breakdown] when you can just put it on the top?
“But in the houses, that’s not true. We have a better-protected environment, you can just throw it on top and the worms will come and get it. And you don’t need to rake it in or Tilth it in.”
“So, you just apply your amendments on top in the hoophouses and don’t scratch them in or anything?” I asked.
Transplants along with direct-seeded crops.
Credit: Neversink Farm
“Not all the time, no. And I would never scratch it in. You know, I may Tilth if I need a nice seedbed. But, if we’re just transplanting, it’s not going to make any difference. There’s no reason to Tilth it. If you can see inside the house, you’ll see where the amendments are laid down, and then you’ll see all the worm castings. Because at night, if you come out there, there are worms in there that are just eating it. It’s just feeding them. And they’ll pull it down [into the soil] and you don’t need to do anything. Because I find that once you stop inverting the layers of soil, then they just get filled with worms. Especially inside of the house,” said Conor.
“When you were starting out, where did you get the inspiration for your system from?” I asked.
“I don’t know if it was inspiration. It was more like little steps,” said Conor. “We already had a broadfork. It was more what we were doing inside the houses. You can’t bring the rototiller in the houses. Especially in the winter. And so, we would just fork it and then Tilth it. So I thought, if it works in there, why can’t I just do it out here? What’s the difference?
“It was just what we were doing inside. Because I found that inside the soil is better, you can take care of it better. So, I thought, why don’t we try to do that out here? We were staking it in there, first, because it’s even worse if you need to redo your rows inside of a house. It was just a waste of time. So, we’d stake it out, because you know how many rows there are going to be. And I thought, why don’t we just stake it outside too? Because it’s such a big problem. As the paths get bigger, people are stepping on the germinated carrots on the edge of the bed. At least if you have some stakes it’ll help stop that,” said Conor.
“We’re putting up a new house this fall, just for tomatoes. And we’re going to go to five rows in a thirty-foot-wide house. It may not be the most efficient when you go to greens, but you know what? I’m so lazy that I’d rather grow greens in fewer rows, because I’m not struggling to make money like I was. At the beginning, we were like, ‘Oh maybe I should even seed the paths.’ I’m not going to deal with it, I just set it up once and am done with it.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot to be said for just keeping things simple. So, once you’ve established these beds, do you send crew through on any kind of a regular basis to look for weeds that have, like you said, blown in?” I asked.
“They’re always blowing in, so you have to cultivate all spring. And that’s when we hit it really, really hard is in the spring. It would start as soon as the snow melts. We’re probably cultivating once a week until July. Then, you’re just harvesting. So you don’t get to do as much cultivating anymore, but that’s okay, as long as you got it in a good state. You’re not going to get ahead of it, and then we rely on turning over the beds. And once you turn it over, you’re taking out any weeds that did get in there,” said Conor.
“The most important thing is nothing is going to seed. That’s going to be worse than what blows in. If you have a big weed plant with thousands of seeds, it’s going to be bad. But we’re trying to move more and more indoors, just because it’s so much cheaper to grow indoors.
“You know, it’s anywhere from three to ten times more productive and the maintenance is almost zero. Our houses, most of them we don’t cultivate at all. There are really no weeds, where are they going to come in from? If you can get rid of weeds, now you’re just printing money. Right? That’s where all the money gets chewed up. Either you’re going to cultivate them out, which is less money but it’s still money. Or they’re going to interfere with everything you’re doing, which is even more costly.”
“So, what are your markets? It feels like you’re out here in the middle of nowhere, but I realize you’re not really that far away from New York City,” I said.
Winter greens harvesting.
Credit: Neversink Farm
“Well, we only started selling in New York City this year [2017]. We sold to restaurants in New York City for a few years, but that’s not the best money, farmers markets are better,” said Conor.
“We started with farmers markets locally, and then we’ve gone farther out as the production went up. So, for the past few years, we’ve been doing farmers markets in Westchester, where I grew up. That’s why we picked Westchester, because I know it really well. Also, the population density’s good enough that you can get some pretty good markets. If you get into the better markets, you can earn enough to make it worthwhile,” said Conor.
“It’s a five-hour round trip for us, but it makes sense. Locally, we kind of grew out of it. We would have needed ten markets, or more. And if you want to take time off, that’s not going to work.”
“So how much space are you growing on here?” I asked.
“This year, it’s a little less than one and a half acres, because we’ve been shutting it down, [taking ground out of production] by putting plastic on. And this isn’t like the [Jean-Martin Fortier method] where you’re doing weed suppression. We put it out of commission. But we don’t want to let it turn into weeds, just in case we need it again. You never want to be like, ‘Well, we’re just going to let it go.’ It’s there if we need it. The more greenhouses we put up, the more plastic we put down,” said Conor.
“We’ll just do blueberries or something. But, as of now, we’re getting smaller. We’re going to look at getting down to 1.3 acres or less next year. We find there’s just no reason for it. With the amount we’re producing now, we need another farmers market, and we don’t want another farmers market,” said Conor.
“What are you using for amendments between bed flips?” I asked.
“It all depends on what our soil tests have been saying, it depends on the time of year, what was before it. So we have pretty much everything on standby in the amendment room. Anything from feather meal to chicken manure to alfalfa meal, soybean meal, you name it. Because they’re all different, and this way we can make a mix if we need to, that covers what we need,” said Conor.
“And we need different things for outside than we use in the house. We don’t use any of the animal stuff in the house, we just keep it veg. We also have seaweed. I like to stockpile lots of stuff. It doesn’t go bad, and it’s there when you need it. And if we have something weird going on, then we have what we need on hand to fix it. That feels good, compared to the early years, when we were like, ‘Maybe we should just get a 25-pound bag.’ Now that we have the money, we just get all of it. If there’s a sale, I just get a pallet. It’s a big barn. I don’t need any room for tractors.”
“How many people do you have helping you maintain the 1.5, or 1.3, acres, whatever you have going on here?” I asked.
“We have two people in production, and then two in fulfillment. I don’t like more than three in production, it’s too many. We may have four in October, just because I have two really good people coming back who were here before. Having a lot of people in the fall is a great thing. It just helps your spring, because I like to have every bed ready to go in the spring. It’s very nice. Not a single weed in the field, ready to go. We do our soil tests now [in the summer], and then we’ll fix it in the fall and then [in the spring], there might be a little bit of forking and Tilthing, and we’re ready to plant. Which sometimes is a bad thing, because you get itchy fingers, especially with no frost,” said Conor.
“One or two nice days, and you want to plant everything,” I said.
“Yes, that’s what happened with the parsley. Such a cold spring, it all bolted,” said Conor.
“With no-till you can just get right on the beds when you decide it’s time, whether or not the weather has made its mind up,” I said.
“It’s really about efficiency; it’s really about making the farm easier,” said Conor.
“What do you think about the scaling-up of these systems?” I asked.
“We started [the farm with] $30 K, and about eight grand of that was our tiller. We would have been better off with a paper pot transplanter, and a Tilther, but we didn’t know,” said Conor.
“If you’re not making a profit, you’re not going to stay in it for the long run. If you’re killing yourself to barely make any money, you’re going to lose your health. People say, well it’s not about the money. Well, it’s not, but you have to be making it to stay in business,” I said.
“It’s absolutely about the money. Everybody’s got to pay for their health, everybody’s got to live under a roof, we’re talking about the basics of life,” said Conor. “Money has to come, or there is no farm. There is no farm without some profit.”
“Yeah, well that’s why Growing for Market is a farming magazine, it’s not a gardening magazine. It’s about people trying to make a livelihood. I’m trying to help small farmers by helping them be profitable. One of the changes I want to see in the world is to have more food coming from local and small farms. So, to make that change, local farmers have to be making a profit. That’s the appeal. That’s why I like your writing and what you’re sharing with people, because you’re sharing good ideas to help people be more successful,” I said.
“It’s not just about doing it my way, but about how to figure out what’s making money, and what’s not, and getting rid of it,” said Conor.
Broadforking and prepping permanent beds.
Credit: Neversink Farm
“Because that’s one of the reasons we’re successful. It’s not because we have a method that’s successful, it’s because we were very quick to get rid of things that didn’t work. You know, we mulched. But immediately, we thought, ‘This is not the way to get rid of weeds.’ Weed seeds don’t disappear because you put mulch on them. And I’ve got to put down the mulch, I’ve got to take up the mulch, I’ve got to be able to seed. So, we went through a lot of different things to cut out the things that didn’t make money. If there’s something that’s not making money, it comes out. We don’t shed a tear over it,” said Conor.
“But even more important than how to is why. There’s so much information. Like, I don’t wanna pick on the raised beds. But I probably got 700 feet of rows with raised beds, until I was like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? Let me think about this.
“It’s just that things have to be done very differently on a scale like this. I don’t think you can transfer this to a large-scale farm. You couldn’t do this on ten acres, not without a huge capital infusion. It’s cheap on this scale. But once you start getting to a larger scale, not so much.
“It depends on your definition of what those things are, right? Everybody’s definition of small and big is different. Because to me, anything four acres or more is a big farm. And once you get up to ten acres, I think of it as a huge farm. And once you get to fifty, I think of it as a mega farm. And when you start getting into hundreds, that is a gigantic farm,” said Conor.
Broadforking permanent beds.
Credit: Neversink Farm
“Well, this is a more human scale. I mean, obviously farming started out smaller, and really the only way you get farms of that size is having machinery or chemicals doing some of the work. So, I guess to scale this up, you would have to have people you could really rely on to make the right decisions. Because, yeah, I get what you’re saying. You couldn’t be out there seeing every bed every day at a certain size anymore,” I said.
“Certain aspects definitely, anything can be scaled up. Anybody can come up with something. They could come up with a tractor broadforker that will broadfork each bed. It’s just the style of farming that I do, which is something very personal, I couldn’t scale up. It’s kind of like saying, ‘Can you take this restaurant, that makes these wonderful burgers, the way they do it, and then let’s do a thousand of them across the country?’ You can’t. There’s something that’s going to be lost. It’s like, well, why not? Because you can’t duplicate certain things, you just can’t. You can try, but you’re ending up with a completely different product,” said Conor.
“Yes, because everybody knows, it’s a chain once you got a thousand of them. It’s a chain restaurant. It’s not your little burger joint anymore,” I said.
“And it just makes more sense. Because there’s a lot more people who want to own a farm than want to work on a farm. So it’s better to have a lot of small farms,” said Conor.
“Yeah. Well, I think that’s part of the problem. When I was in high school, my guidance counselor didn’t say, ‘Oh, maybe you’d be a really great organic farmer.’ Almost everything they were suggesting resulted in me being in a cubicle. And that’s not for everyone,” I said.
“That’s why we’re putting up another greenhouse, and shutting down part of the field. Because that’s just so much easier, every square foot becomes easier. Just make it easier and easier. Why not? I don’t want to add and add and add. It’s enough money for us, so we’re perfectly happy with it. But we just want to continue to make it easier. You know, production at some point just starts coming, as you start fixing things. After a while, it’s not like you’re fixing everything anymore, like you were at the beginning. So you can just work on making it easier,” Conor said.
Here are two articles by Conor that were originally published in Growing for Market.
From the March 2017 issue of Growing for Market
Welcome to the
No-Till Revolution
By Conor Crickmore
I began Neversink Farm six years ago. Building the farm that first year was incredibly hard work, but it was that early experience of struggle that shaped the foundations of how I would farm going forward. My wife and I managed to pull together $30K. With that, a dream, a lot of enthusiasm and not much else, we said goodbye to city life.
We leased a beautiful piece of land just a few hundred yards up the river from a cabin I had purchased years ago. The land had more rocks than dirt, no water, a barn and loads of quackgrass. Our initial purchases for the farm that first year were a small propagation house to start seedlings, a small simple hoophouse in which to grow tomatoes, and a two-wheel tractor to till and plow the fields. We had a great desire to farm but lacked experience and knowledge in the craft.
We wanted to stay very small, but we also wanted to live well. We were not young and since we had no retirement money, we concluded, however naively, that to live well, have kids, and be able to retire at some point, we should try to make at least $400K gross within a few years, and we would expand to whatever amount of acreage that demanded. We were obviously not yet schooled in small scale farming financials, because if we were, we might never have left the city with that kind of goal.
We began our farm adventure with a lot of tilling. Turning a field of grass and weeds into a productive farm can seem like an impossible task. It can be the hardest part, physically, of starting a new farm with or without a tractor. This is where putting the hard work in at the beginning really pays off more than anywhere else on the farm, especially if you choose not to till.
I looked out over our field after we signed our first lease and imagined neat rows of perfect and identical vegetables, where every row is straight and true interrupted only by even more perfect grass paths where handcarts would be rolling around overflowing with produce. In my mental image there wasn’t a weed, diseased plant or pest anywhere, but I had no idea how to get there. I concluded that tilling everything in with a walk behind tractor was the obvious choice. I didn’t consider any other course of action.
Much of our startup capital was spent on that BCS walk behind, and it was that horsepower that gave me confidence. From sunup to well past sundown, I would till and plow, the tractor bouncing wildly over the river stones. My wife Kate would run alongside to grab the rocks and put them in a cart that we would haul together hundreds of yards to the woods. We made hundreds of trips.
This went on for week after grueling week, tilling sections over and over to try and break up the mounds of grass but they wouldn’t disappear. These clods of perennial grass roots would get in the way of everything we did, making us curse as we tried to lay out my imagined straight rows. Planting was torture, as I would hit clumps of grass with the trowel. Forget about using a seeder under these conditions.
In desperation I used plastic mulch in some of the worst areas to try and tame the grass that was emerging at a really scary rate after spring rains. One could not tell where the grass paths ended and our production beds began. There is no way to earn money this way, we thought. What are we doing? We felt Neversink may be sunk. But if either of us seriously felt like giving in, the other would feign confidence that we would figure this out and be successful. We lifted each other up and focused on getting any vegetables we could out of the weed jungle and getting them sold. From that tiny first field of weeds we did earn a small profit, but only because of our free labor. I felt like a failure at farming but we wouldn’t give up.
Well that was it. There would be no more weeds at Never-sink Farm. That next season, we decided to get on our knees and pull out every weed, inch by inch, foot by root, row by back breaking row until all, and I mean all, the perennial weeds and their roots were gone. Our fingers would bleed, but we were not going through the horror of last season. We were going to put the hard work in up front to make farming easier going forward and this would become a cornerstone of how we farm.
On a daily basis I seek ways of making farming easier. If we could make a huge sacrifice for our future selves and for our farm then we would. Whether it was really hard work or purchasing a piece of equipment that we could not afford, if it resulted in simplicity and efficiency, we would do it, because that will ultimately lead to easy, enjoyable farming and profitability. In farming, simplicity can be achieved by stripping away complexity but can also come from investment either financially or through hard work. The hard work of removing all the weeds made everything simpler and easier for years to come.
Permanently staked beds.
Credit: Neversink Farm
We had only tamed one small field of perhaps a half an acre and we knew that we needed to grow, but creating new fields by tilling was not going to happen. Pulling a new pasture out by hand would have sent us back to the city, screaming. This time we looked for a simpler and cheaper method. Solarization was where we turned. This is usually done with clear plastic to heat soils up to reduce pests and disease, as well as kill weeds.
Our farm is in zone 5a, so when we used clear plastic, it acted more like a greenhouse in early spring and while some weeds were killed others thrived. We abandoned clear plastic and used black. Solarization is time and temperature dependent. You can have a lower temperature under black plastic, but it will need to remain in place longer. A weed seed will cook when flame weeded at scorching high temperatures and be killed in seconds. Lower temperatures for a prolonged period of time will do the trick as well, but that time must be increased drastically. A few seconds turn into months. Since we had the time, this method was perfect.
That spring, I spread a large piece of black plastic on top of a new section of virgin field. The plastic was removed the next spring and underneath was bare soil with no weeds or viable roots. It was amazing. I continued to reuse that piece of plastic, which is the same size as one of our field sections, by sliding it from a finished section over to a new section each season to open up new ground. We were ecstatic at how well it worked. We laid out rows, forked and began planting. The perennial weeds never came back and for a no-till system to be highly productive, it must be free of all perennial weeds. It was that hard work in the first season that solidified my policy of seeking easy solutions wherever possible.
Tilling is generally done at least once a season over the entire farm and then after every turnover of crops. Before tilling, irrigation and anything else in the field must be removed. After tilling, the beds then need to be laid out again and the irrigation brought back in. To be ultra-efficient those beds need to be measured precisely, and made straight so that no space is wasted. The footpaths also must be marked out in some way so they are clearly visible. After all of this hard work, you then need to do it all over again next season. On top of that, weed seeds are being brought to the surface and the soil is getting overworked. Thus tilling also has the side effect of increasing the amount of required cultivation and soil amending. Never tilling again was an easy choice, so I just stopped. I never wanted to be in the weeds again.
Neversink was suddenly a no-till farm. The tiller and the two-wheel tractor, I came to realize, were unnecessary, really hard work, time consuming, and added too much complexity to our systems. There would be no tilling done from here on out and the time-consuming task of laying out rows would be done once. All of our beds are now permanent. The beds are staked and the rows never change size, and they are ready as soon as the snow melts. The bed stakes are there waiting for us to attach guide string for our seeding and planting. The irrigation can be left in place, avoiding the task of dragging it out from the barn each spring.
Each permanent bed has been assigned a unique ID and I created easy to read maps that I use to assign tasks to specific highlighted beds. What could be a more permanent and simple solution on the small-scale farm? One of the biggest misconceptions of no-till farming is that we must be breaking our backs. I think people picture me strapping plows to my workers like draft horses. I stopped tilling or using the two-wheel tractor because it is much easier, more efficient, simpler and more profitable for us. It has made farming at Neversink very enjoyable. It was the best efficiency improvement we made.
Once we were on the road to efficiency, I wanted to maximize it. Thus my goal is to have every square inch of our 1.5 acres producing to its potential and producing all the time. To achieve this, any bed that is harvested in the morning, I want replanted by the afternoon. This is done across the farm. Because we don’t have to clear large areas to get a tractor into, we have the luxury of being able to replant or re-seed any sized area.
The permanent beds are prepared or turned over with four easy steps. First, vegetable matter is removed though roots of some crops remain. Depending on the crop this initial step can be done a few different ways and I have put much thought into efficiency improvements for this step. Second, the bed is deeply broadforked. In a field of rocks this can be really hard, but we already put the work in and cleared out any rocks so that forking is a very pleasant activity. Third, the bed is amended and conditioned depending on that bed’s needs. Last, I use a Tilther.
The Tilther is my power tool of choice. It is light, simple, and does the job. It disturbs only the top inch of soil and works in the amendments and smooths the bed. I can throw the Tilther over my shoulder and carry it around the farm. It is great in winter since it produces no exhaust to poison me while using it in the greenhouse. My four-year-old can walk alongside me while I use it. They are cheap, so I can have them at easy-to-grab locations around the farm. The Tilther is the elegant simple solution for “Neversink No-Till” farming.
Scallions harvested in the morning and replanted the same day.
Credit: Neversink Farm
After a couple of seasons of dialing in what we now call “Neversink No-Till” systems, the field started to look as neat and productive as I had imagined it that first year. There were straight rows, no weeds, and healthy uniform vegetables. I no longer felt like I failed at farming but that I had found a way I could be very successful through simple solutions. I don’t want to work harder than necessary. That is why I spend a lot of my time looking for the easy and simple solutions. Farming is my dream job and building it is a joy, but the work I love most is the work that results in less work. Farming can be and is extremely complicated. Thus, I enjoy watching my farm move towards successful simplicity.
Using no-till practices that were developed at Never-sink along with the important lessons learned early on, we quickly grew the farm over the following years. The farm grew mostly in production but not in size. These important lessons were to never add more work but rather to reduce it. Use permanent solutions and keep things simple while investing in infrastructure and new systems. Field sprinklers are a great example of the results of these lessons. They are a large infrastructure investment. In a no-till system they can be left there permanently and unlike drip, sprinklers irrigate beds evenly and quickly which increases the germination rate of seeds and the survival of seedlings. Drip can be time consuming to manage while our sprinkler system is almost no maintenance. Also sprinklers are not in the way when cultivating as drip can be. When I want water, I only need to lift the handle of the hydrant.
Simple tools used on Neversink Farm.
Credit: Neversink Farm
When deciding on an improvement to the farm, I not only ask, “will this improve production?” but I also want to know if it will increase work. A good example of where we implemented the lesson of not adding work is in high tunnel design. At the beginning we used caterpillar tunnels since they were cheap. While they do increase production slightly, they also brought with them a lot of problems, and a lot of work. They need a lot of attention and only made sense when we wanted to grow our production regardless of the resulting work. We quickly abandoned caterpillar tunnels and moved towards more high-tech, better-built structures that require almost no attention. These structures increase production dramatically. I’d rather have one great no-maintenance tunnel than ten cheap ones. It is better to have beautiful healthy production on one bed than not-so-great production on many. With a better tunnel, I can do more with less. This philosophy is also why we do not use row cover and low tunnels in the field. Their promise of increased production comes with a lot of work as well.
I also found that field plastic adds work and problems. While we did use plastic to open up new fields, we really try to avoid using it or landscape fabric on production beds or next to hoophouses. Voles and mice love it. Instead I put the work in up front to reduce the need for plastic by removing weeds, and building permanent gravel trenches alongside tunnels.
Stripping down our record keeping to the bare essentials was a huge time saver. I started with very complex spreadsheets for everything around the farm and now have what I call “cheat sheets” that give me all the information on one page. My entire year’s planting schedule is on one small laminated card. I have simple task tickets to direct employees in their work. I do not keep elaborate records of everything harvested, planted, and sold.
Rather I use an easy “check-in” process to see if a crop or method is profitable. I randomly take a look at a whole system, like the lifecycle of a box of carrots from planting to market to see if carrots are earning money and how much. By doing this intermittently or after an improvement, I can see if we are earning a profit, or if a system is getting worse or improving. I do not need to check every box of carrots but only one or two boxes every couple months. If I am duplicating a profitable process, then I know every box of carrots is profitable. Cheat sheets and check-ins are so easy, so simple and a lot less work.
After reading books on soil, I was just getting more confused, so simplifying it was the only way for me to make sense of it. Soil fertility can be an extremely complicated subject and while I wouldn’t claim that the vast knowledge in that field is unnecessary, I do feel that for me I needed to break it down. I simplified my soil building program to three simple steps. The first being pH and calcium balancing which is only done every two years and I keep careful records on this. The second step is soil conditioning which is based only on the feel of the soil. The last, which is done regularly, is fertilizing and is based on soil tests and crop needs.
All of these changes had the cumulative effect of leaving me vastly more time, which I spent managing rather than working the farm; the more time I spent managing the systems the better the farm did. Our numbers started climbing rapidly and as a result I could invest in more small and large improvements. I could monitor our systems for bottlenecks — places where production is squeezed and thus slowed down. I could also slowly organize and systematize many areas of the farm that I had ignored previously. We thought we would need at least four or five acres in production to reach our early revenue goals but our production climbed much faster than our need to expand acreage. By year five, we were able to come very close to our early goal of 400K on just 1.5 acres. I now feel that for us 1.5 acres is the comfortable limit if we wish to maintain a healthy production to profit ratio while also having a limited staff and working reasonable hours.
Our farming start was extremely hard, much harder than it needed to be. But it was through that experience that I was able to develop our no-till systems, our simple solutions and our emphasis on reduced work. We suffered due to our inexperience, but we learned fast and we continued to master our own stripped down and efficient system of farming. It was the suffering that taught us to change and not to be stuck to any one way of doing things and to design every process with simplicity and elegance. I learned to avoid adding more work for small production gains. That early hard work also taught me to put the work in up front if it resulted in less work going forward. We were able to turn failure into an incredibly productive and successful farm.
The number of small farms is rapidly rising. This is a great thing. There is a small farm revolution happening and I now have time to help other farms hopefully avoid the mistakes we made. I exchange information with other farmers through our social media, during our on farm courses, and my consulting work. I know we can do better together and sharing knowledge is the best way for us all to get to easy, enjoyable, profitable farming.
From the May 2017 issue of Growing for Market
Preparing and Turning Over
No-Till Permanent Beds
By Conor Crickmore
Sometimes when turning over beds, I would try to rush through it and not do a very good job. This would cause a whole mess of problems: uneven growth, weeds, beds that are too narrow, too much of the last crop poking through, and an all around reduction in production. Now when I show others how to perform the turnover, I stress the importance of thoroughness. Making sure that the beds are laid out exactly and that turnovers are complete has increased my success rate dramatically and made all bed tasks easier as a result.
In my previous article, I discussed the importance of starting with a planting bed free of both perennial and annual weeds. I also covered how to achieve this in both the short and long term. Once beds are weed free, the next step is to lay out the grid and make them permanent. The permanency of the beds is in itself a system of efficiency. Beds don’t shrink from foot traffic and irrigation can remain in place. The layout of the farm stays the same from season to season. Beds are ready to grow when the snow melts, and farm maps can be produced with each bed assigned a unique ID.
I use the standard 30” bed. Most tools are designed to fit a 30” bed, so that size makes the most sense for me, since I would rather buy my tools off the shelf than have them made custom. There is more freedom when it comes to path size. I chose 14” because it works well with a 12” wheel hoe blade, which is the widest that is made. Our harvest totes are 13” wide, so to save space, I felt 14” was the tightest I could go while still having paths that are comfortable to work in. A path of that size is easy to stand in and place a bucket on the ground, even for someone with big feet like myself.
The tilther doesn’t create any fumes and can be used anytime, anywhere even with a four-year-old.
Credit: Neversink Farm
All the beds at Neversink Farm are staked at the corners. This helps with their permanency. Without this, it is the path that gets wider over time, reducing the production area. This results in the edges of the beds getting trampled, ruining a large percentage of crops. Thus staking them in some way pays for itself very quickly.
I keep the following tools on hand for staking beds accurately: a hammer, two metal spikes, a bed template made of wood for the placement of stakes, a template for depth of stakes, and a spool of string. I use one-inch square hardwood stakes that are placed at the four corners of every bed. The spool of string does double duty as it is also used as a straight edge between the stakes when planting or seeding.
Laying out a section of field begins by placing the metal spikes at each corner of the field. I then run a string between them at about ten inches off the ground. This serves as the guide for the bed stakes, so that all bed stakes are placed in a straight line. Then using the bed template, I work from one side to the other hammering in the stakes to the desired depth. Depth is checked with the depth template. I use a push spreader on the field, so my desired depth is one that gives the spreader a slight clearance.
The bed stakes are placed in the bed rather than in the path. Thus the 30” is measured from the outside of one stake to the far side of the next bed stake. This enables clearance for the wheel hoe and people’s feet. Bed stakes need to be replaced over time, so I keep the templates, a hammer, and stakes in a kit on our tool racks and I make stake replacement a required step during the task of turning over beds.
Now that all the beds are staked, we can move on to prepping or turning them over. Preparing a bed is the same as turning over a bed minus the first step of removing vegetable matter. Bed turnover takes place between the harvest of one crop and planting the next. The following tools are used when the permanent beds are prepared or turned over: a weed hook (like the CobraHead), stirrup hoe, buckets, broadfork, bed stake replacement kit (if necessary), and a tilther. There are four easy steps we always follow.
Step one
All vegetable matter is removed. Root crops like beets, carrots and radishes are the easiest crops to remove since most of the plants should have been removed during harvest. Depending on how they were harvested, there may only be tops to rake up. Larger crops like chard, kale, cukes, and zucchini are pulled by hand. There are usually no more than a plant every foot so I consider these crops almost as easy. Head lettuce, bok choy or Napa cabbage is cut at, or just below ground level during harvest, so the only green matter removed from these beds during a turnover is usually stray weeds. The roots of these crops are left in place.
Baby greens are the most challenging. I have new field hands practice turnovers on baby greens. It takes skill that is acquired over a few weeks to learn the quickest method for the different conditions one could face. Overgrown greens almost always need to be pulled out by hand, which is something to be avoided. Young greens should be cut as low as possible with the greens harvester first. Even if the bed was already harvested, it is good to go at it again and give it a close buzz cut. While doing this, I tilt the harvester back slightly to keep the blade away from the soil. For many greens, like baby kale or arugula for example, this will kill most of the plants since the cut will be well below the growing tip.
After a quick haircut with the harvester, the greens are then cut at ground level with a sharp stirrup hoe, leaving the roots behind. We keep a couple of short-handled 6” stirrup hoes on hand for this purpose. This is done carefully, row by row, so that all plants are killed. The bulk of the leafy matter is taken away while some of the dead leaves and all the roots are left. This technique takes a bit of practice to be able to do quickly. One’s technique is important. It is best to remove baby greens immediately after harvest. Younger greens are removed more readily so I recommend not harvesting more than a couple of times prior to turnover.
When I say to remove vegetable matter, I am including weeds, thus the need for the weed hook. It is important to start with a completely clean bed. One should never plant or seed into weeds. If you wish to use the stale seedbed technique after turnover, you will be much more successful if you finish the turnover with no weeds.
Step two
The second step is broadforking. This is done deeply until the fork’s crossbar hits the soil. The length of the tines determines how far apart to fork. Thus broadforks with ten-inch tines are used every ten inches along the bed. Removing any rocks that the fork hits is very important. I forbid walking on planting beds and I add amendments that will keep the soil loose, because non-compacted rock-free beds are very pleasant to fork and each time rocks are removed it makes the next turnover easier.
Step three
The bed is amended and conditioned depending on that bed’s needs. In an upcoming article, I will discuss our fertility in detail but during every turnover something is added for either fertility or soil condition or both. At this point any bed stake that is rotten or missing would be replaced.
Final step
Lastly, I use the tilther. The tilther is my power tool of choice. It is light, simple, and has just enough power to do the job. A bed must be free of rocks, most vegetable matter and be forked for the tilther to work well. It disturbs only the top inch of soil and works in the amendments and smooths the bed. Organic amendments will not do much if left on the surface. To see their benefit this season, they must be worked into the soil so that they can begin to break down. That one-inch deep tilthing is all that is needed. Lettuce head roots pop out of the soil with a slight tug back on the tilther. I keep a tilther along with all the other tools mentioned on every tool rack around the farm.
No till production, for me, is quick and easy. Turning over beds rapidly is key to high production. This no-till bed turnover really helps in having every square foot of ground producing, since it can also be done inside greenhouses in winter when you don’t want to bring in heavy equipment.
Neversink Farm’s No-Till Definition:
We all have heard the adage, “there are as many ways to farm as there are farmers.” No-till methods are no different in that there are many types of no-till systems. At Neversink we do not use a tiller, nor do we employ a two-wheel tractor. I have defined tilling at my farm as any inversion of the soil that would change its natural layering, or the regular use of heavy machinery. This is my personal definition and not intended as a label that I use beyond my farm. Outside of my farm I accept far broader definitions of no-till systems as perfectly valid.
Elizabeth and Paul Kaiser
Sebastopol, California
Vegetables
Applied organic mulch (compost), occultation
I VISITED WITH ELIZABETH AND PAUL KAISER OF Singing Frogs Farm in Sebastopol, California, on October 10, 2017. Historically bad wildfires were burning land, homes, and some of Sonoma County’s famous vineyards just miles away. The fires were so close it was hazy when I arrived from the smoke. It was an unusually quiet day on the farm, with the Kaisers sending their crew home due to the poor air quality.
I could see how on another day this place would be a hive of activity. On the highest edge of the property are the house and greenhouses with intensively planted vegetables and hedgerows sloping down to a low point in the field. Though the first few frosts had just zapped the tender crops, the farm was still a mix of summer crops that were hanging on, established fall crops, and new plantings for the winter.
Having just transcribed the interview with the Four Winds Farmers, who started no-tilling over twenty years ago, and then hearing about how Paul and Elizabeth came up with their no-till system on their own a decade before made me think, this is why I’m writing this book. I don’t want another grower to have to develop their own system from scratch, when the knowledge and techniques exist. I want to show that there is a way to run a commercial farm that doesn’t involve tilling, and I want to make it more likely they will try one of these methods, by showing how others have done it.
Since developing a no-till method through their experimentation, the Kaisers have become some of the most outspoken and articulate proponents of no-till in vegetable production. They have traveled and spoken to growers internationally in addition to holding seminars on their own farm. A quick web search will turn up videos of the Kaisers talking about their system.
Paul and Elizabeth met me by their house, and then showed me around the fields. I asked Elizabeth how they came to be doing no-till.
“[In the beginning], we weren’t even going for no-till. For us, we came at it a very different way, because we didn’t have the background as farmers, we hadn’t apprenticed on farms, so we didn’t have that mind-set of how things should work,” said Elizabeth.
“Paul and I met in the Peace Corps in West Africa. He was doing agroforestry; I was doing public health, so I was working with women on nutrition, and doing gardening and things like that. After the Peace Corps, we decided to go to Costa Rica where Paul did his masters studies in natural resource management and ecology, and I focused my studies in public health. In fact, I worked as a nurse for the first seven years of starting this farm as a way of making supplementary income as we got going.
“When we started farming here at Singing Frogs Farm, we started with tillage. We hadn’t had any direct farming experience. For the people who were here prior to us, farming was a retirement. It was a hobby farm for them but they wanted it to continue on as an organic farm, so they made it possible for us to take it over. They were ex-engineers. He loved his tractors. So he didn’t have any perennials because it would impede him turning around his tractors.
“We started with planting hedgerows in the upper fields. I was five months pregnant when we moved onto the property, so our first year we had a single tilled field. The next year we increased to two fields under conventional tillage practices. But the tillage wasn’t working, and we hated it. We hated the tractors, we felt like we were killing things. The soil was degrading before our eyes, and we had huge pest problems.
Elizabeth and Paul Kaiser.
Credit: Singing Frogs Farm
“In our third year we made a change to permanent, hand labor beds. We’d learned John Jeavons’ methods in West Africa because that was applicable to teaching somewhere without tractors but with intensive hand labor. We thought, ‘We know how to do that.’ Also, we had a fantastic employee; he was working on his PhD down at UC Santa Cruz, but working from up here and living on our property starting a chicken business. We thought, ‘If we don’t have work for Marty over the winter, and we do cover crops like we’ve done the last two years, we’re going to lose him and not have him again in March.’ And so we thought, ‘Well, it’s Sonoma County, we can grow vegetables all year ’round.’ So we extricated the tractor, and said, ‘Let’s make permanent beds, let’s do this intensively John Jeavons style.”
“You mean with double digging?” I asked.
“We actually didn’t double dig. We have two beds that were half double dug by an intern. She and her boyfriend took two months to get two beds halfway done with double digging, then they gave up and just threw compost on the top of the rest, and they planted tomatoes in both of them. Well you know what? There was no difference. We’d done some double digging in West Africa but I don’t know anybody that does double digging commercially. We switched to a rototiller. After some time, we started using a little tiller that was more like a Tilther and incorporating a broadfork,” said Elizabeth.
“What we noticed was that we were not having earthworms in those beds [that were rototilled]. We had an ‘aha’ moment. For Deborah Koons Garcia’s film, The Symphony of Soil, they came to us at the end of filming. They needed all sorts of B-roll: a picture of compost, and a picture of sheep poop because they had some Irish sheep farmer that was talking about her sheep returning nutrients to the soil, and shots of earthworms in a bed where food was actively growing.
So our transition away from a tractor and then away from a walk-behind rototiller towards a no-till soil management system was just really looking at the biology, looking at the soil’s structure, wanting to increase production and keep year-round employment, that led us into the idea that ‘tillage is bad.’
—ELIZABETH KAISER
“We did an active dig through six beds looking for the perfect veg and earthworm combination, and it was really interesting because it made us say, ‘Lots of earthworms. No earthworms. Some earthworms. Lots of earthworms.’ And then after they left, we thought, ‘So, what’s the difference? Oh, that bed that has a lot of earthworms hasn’t seen the tiller in a year. That bed with no earthworms was tilled six months ago.’ So that was the end of [the rototiller], and then we transitioned into using a broadfork. So our transition away from a tractor and then away from a walk-behind rototiller towards a no-till soil management system was just really looking at the biology, looking at the soil’s structure, wanting to increase production and keep year-round employment, that led us into the idea that ‘tillage is bad.’
“There is a video on YouTube by Pesticide Action Network that’s about six years old, of Paul in one of these beds here talking about what we’re doing, and he doesn’t even have the terminology ‘no-till.’ He’s saying, ‘We do this non-mechanized, intensive vegetable production in permanent beds.’
“Soon after that video was released, Paul went to an international conference at UC Davis on climate change and agriculture. What they were saying [about reducing tillage] made sense with what we were experiencing here. The science supported our practices and observations, and then that just sort of led us further down that road, and led us to sharing what we do, and that’s what ignited a lot of interest. That has been, in a nutshell, our path.
“There were four things that really pushed us to abandoning tillage. One thing was life. So noticing the lack of earthworms when we were doing tillage. I can remember a specific time when I was holding my baby Lucas, who is now ten, waiting to talk to Paul, and he was using the tractor doing a spring till. And I was standing there waiting for him to finish his pass observing life: the birds over here, and the dog sitting a little ways down from me. He turned off the engine, and it was just this immediate pounce by dog, cat, and a bunch of birds into the field. I realized, ‘Oh look, we’re tilling up life, and they all love it.’
Tomatoes and lettuce intercropped later on in the season.
Credit: Singing Frogs Farm
“Here we are putting up hedgerows and trying to increase ecology because that’s our background. We planted our very first hedgerow on the day we moved onto the farm. So ironically, while we were still using the tractor, we were trying to build up life on one side, and then we were killing it on another side with tillage.
“The other aspects that pushed us away from tillage were our climate, the soil quality, the pests, and just the challenges of owning a tractor. Our climate is such that very few people produce in the winter because our rains start in October and go through springtime. In spring you can’t have tractors in the field because they’ll get stuck in the mud.
“We thought, ‘If we want to grow in the winter, we want to feed our community year-round, we have to get this tractor out of here.’ We had two tractors and a big truck, and there were several times when tractor A was stuck, tractor B got stuck trying to pull out tractor A, and then, ‘Oh bring the truck down in the field and let’s hope to not get it stuck also.
“Finally, as I mentioned before, we wanted to keep our employee in place. That was tied into wanting to grow food year-round and have income year-round. The price of living in Sonoma County is pretty high, and our property taxes are about eighteen grand a year.”
“Wow. That’s a lot! Especially comparing to central Maine,” I said.
“So those are the triggers that led us down the road [to no-till],” Elizabeth said. “We stopped using our rototiller nine years ago and finally gave it away last year.”
“That’s a very good overview of the reasons. I wanted to make sure I understood the actual evolution of your farm. Because no-till wasn’t really a thing, when you started, you didn’t say, ‘Darn it, we’re going no-till.’ You just stopped tilling and found another way,” I said.
Over half of Singing Frogs Farm’s compost is created on-site and near their fields from crop residue. When almost mature, it is mixed with purchased municipal compost and composted manure from their county.
Credit: Singing Frogs Farm
“If I started now it would be, ‘I want to farm because it’s the right thing to do. I want to feed my community, and I want to help save the world, and do the right thing for agriculture and for the land,’ and so forth. We didn’t understand that aspect eleven years ago. I mean, yes, we understood the aspect of helping build up the ecology, but the whole carbon in the soil issue, we were not aware of at that time, and most people were not,” said Elizabeth.
“Paul and I had long debates on whether we wanted to share what our revenue was on the farm. We finally decided to do it because we felt like people weren’t taking us seriously. There are three parts of this farm: one is the ecology, one is the soil and the lack of tillage, and the third is the intensification. And all three of them, to me, are really important to work together. Because if you’re not intensive, you’re not actively managing that soil all the time, and therefore you get too many weeds, or no green photosynthesizing plants in the ground, and then you lose that soil, and it loses its quality. It’s the intensification, doing three to eight crops per year, many of which are multi-species, that feeds the soil and pays the bills. If you can have something super intensive, you don’t need so much land,” said Elizabeth.
“Our competitors, in the local markets, they need 20 or 25 acres to produce the same amount of food we’re producing on 2.5 acres. That’s the point; you don’t need 25 acres to be a farm. Most organic consultants in the state of California believe you need 20 acres or more to be successful. They don’t consider anything under 20 acres a viable farm. Yet we’re making as much, or more, food than larger farms. So if you can get yourself a half-acre of land, and bring in eighty thousand in revenue in a year, bingo, go for it. And you don’t need to have these huge acreages and mechanization,” said Paul.
“Now I also know that there are some people who are much more focused on the economics, and there are some farms that are minimum-tillage, that are bringing in much more than we are. And I’ve had some of them out here going, ‘Why are you growing winter squash?’ And we say, well, ‘We have a CSA, I know I lose money on it, but I need something heavy in my CSA boxes mid-winter.’ And I’m an idealist. I need something to carry me through. Yeah, if we did a lot more cut-and-come-again greens, and mini romaines, and herbs, things like that, we could be even more [profitable], but that’s not the farm that I want to manage and live on,” said Elizabeth.
“I like it when growers talk about their numbers, it helps people who are considering going into farming. I want to see people be able to make a good living at it, not just scrape by,” I said.
“Absolutely,” said Elizabeth. “We need to have the conversation, and I need to be able to tell people, ‘Yeah, this is what we’re making, but please don’t focus only on this. If you want to you can make more money, look at [other growers. Others can make] double or triple what we’re doing, per acre, and this is where I fit in the spectrum.’ I think we need people to see the spectrum.”
“I know you said you were making about a hundred thousand dollars an acre — can I say that?” I asked.
“You can quote that. For example, we do outreach as part of the farm also. People ask us, ‘You do teaching and consulting and things like that, is that subsidizing things here?’ And the answer is, last year we brought in about $335,000, about $32,000 came from the workshops. So it’s still definitely a hundred thousand an acre from vegetable production. And we have three acres of production, but that includes the nursery and the greenhouse, and all of that sort of stuff. So if you actually look at the field space, it’s two-and-a-half acres, but you need to include farm infrastructure, so that’s why we say three acres,” said Elizabeth.
“The farm is still paying the bills,” I said.
Singing Frogs uses hoophouses over the winter for greens, in March (this is March 15, 2018) they transition to early cucumber and summer squash crops.
Credit: Singing Frogs Farm
“Of course, an intensive farm this size takes a lot of labor, so most of the revenue goes to people. We have about five full-time equivalents on a farm this size,” Elizabeth said.
“Everybody I’ve visited on these trips is so inspiring. What I want to see is a larger percentage of the food coming from a local healthy source. This is a model that new farmers and people who want to do better, on the triple bottom line, of economic, ecological, and social sustainability, can look to,” I said.
“I was just recently at the Regeneration International General Assembly down in Mexico. There is a lot of talk about the carbon sequestration and so forth. And when I talk about three acres of vegetables, people look at me and they’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s talk about Gabe Brown. He’s got five thousand acres. You’ve got three.’ And I say, ‘I hear you, and I will absolutely respect the fact that large-scale really positive operations are going to be able to sink more carbon, and that’s great. I personally can’t have much effect on that, but I also know that we eat vegetables,’ said Elizabeth.
“And I also know that we need livelihoods for farmers, and if you look at the food worldwide that is being produced, what we’re doing is actually much more similar to what people do outside the United States. It’s not a coincidence that we brought in things that we knew from West Africa to farm in Northern California. Seventy percent of the global food is grown by small farmers, on small farms, and it needs to continue that way.”
“In our workshops, we keep coming back to ‘focus on your soil.’ Depending on who you talk to, you can say there are three, four, five soil principles. To us they are: Disturb your soil as little as possible. Keep your green living plants in the ground as often as possible. Have a diversity of plants. Keep your soil covered. And then the fifth one is to incorporate animals. And we’re not directly incorporating animals because we’ve got these permanent, really high-intensity beds,” said Elizabeth.
“So my way of incorporating animals is working with a neighbor who has twenty-four horses that they board using all organic [bedding], and getting the manure. We also occasionally get sheep and chicken manure. I wish there were a better way, but that’s how we’re doing it. I think you should incorporate them in terms of nutrient cycling. But, anyway, that’s what I tell people. It’s a little messy here and there. We’re not perfect, we’re a farm, right?” said Elizabeth.
“Yeah. I have a farm, I understand. There’s a reason working farms aren’t in Better Homes & Gardens. I get it,” I said.
“This is true,” said Elizabeth.
“I think this is beautiful. Your crops look good,” I said.
“There are some weeds back there, there are some flowers that just died with the frost out front, but yeah. It works. We really, really, really try and focus on the production, like trying to get as many of our hours in the production and not in the management. And then we save the management for winter, like putting in hedgerows. We decided to rebuild the hoophouses late because we wanted to spend all our time getting our winter crops in the ground first. And then rebuild the hoophouses once we have time,” said Elizabeth.
We walked down to the lowest part of the farm, a bowl at the bottom of the property. “These are our seasonal ponds down here. So this is the low point, in that all the water that comes onto the property will eventually end up down in here. And so these have been wonderful for us in learning about and checking our system,” said Elizabeth.
Leeks and lettuce intercropped.
Credit: Singing Frogs Farm
“For the prior owner, these were probably just marshy areas. He created [the ponds] by noticing that his erosion silts were coming down here. Before the rains he would take his tractor down here, scoop it up, and put it back on the fields. Which is what he instructed us to do. And we did that our first two years. Then we were like, ‘This doesn’t make sense. We just want to keep [the soil] up there in the fields in the first place.’ As we established the hedgerows and transitioned to permanent no-till beds, that [erosion] just disappeared.
“And then it’s been really interesting because in our first few years we’d have one large rain event, say in November, of eight or twelve inches of rain. And boom, these puppies would be full. Now this past winter, it was almost twenty inches of rain before these filled up. That’s awesome; that means the rain is staying up there on the fields in the soil.
“And then lastly, we had an article written about us called ‘The Drought Fighter’ two or three years ago now, by a journalist that really dug in deep. He came and interviewed us and interviewed us, and then he brought an organic consultant out here, and then he took soil samples and sent them to labs. The organic consultants said, ‘You know they’re using too much compost, they’re going to be polluting their water sources.’ And Paul and my reaction was, ‘Wait, we’re using too much compost if you’re looking at an organic output system, but not necessarily if you’re looking at a biological no-till system. And also a system where maybe you’re going to grow one or two crops a year. Not a system where you’re going to grow three to eight crops a year [like we do],” said Elizabeth.
Tomatoes and lettuce with hoops for frost blankets.
Credit: Singing Frogs Farm
“So he said, ‘You’re going to have runoff, test your water. You’re going to have [those nutrients] in there. Test your nitrogen, and your phosphorus down [in the pond water].’ And we said, okay. So every year since then, during and after large rain events, we’ll test the water running in. We also test the water and runoff at our compost piles, the water at our ponds down there, and then our water here. And what we’ve found is that phosphorus basically is the same throughout, including our well water. Nitrogen will have a little bit running onto the property, but still safe, within normal drinking quality amounts, and then down here in our seasonal ponds that catch all the runoff for the fields, the nitrates and nitrites will be undetectable. So [we realized], ‘No, actually we’re not leaching, we’re doing the opposite,’” said Elizabeth.
“Your farm is sponging it up,” I said.
“Our high soil organic matter is sponging up all the nutrients and we’re holding it with all of the soil biology that’s there. So, having these ponds has been a really wonderful resource for us in just making sure that our system is working,” said Elizabeth.
I asked Elizabeth about the nuts and bolts of how their system works. She gestured at a nearby bed.
“There’s an almost mature Romanesco cauliflower crop. You can see there’s some red butterhead lettuce underneath. It’s mostly harvested out at this point. So first of all, when we put that crop in, we’ll put in two crops, because the cauliflower is a huge plant with spacing two lines, at 24” apart. We want to use that empty space so we multi-crop with a full line of lettuces down the middle [between the rows of cauliflower], and then one lettuce between each [cauliflower] plant. [So you end up with two rows of cauliflower 24” apart, with a row of lettuce between them, and a lettuce plant in the space between each cauliflower plant in the cauliflower rows.] So you’re getting about 1.6 crops out of there,” said Elizabeth.
“At this point let’s assume we’ve harvested the cauliflower and are ready to transition the bed over to the next crop. When we’re done harvesting the cauliflower, we’ll chop it off at the ground level or slightly below. I’m going to take some loppers [for very thick-stemmed crops like brassicas]. If I can, I’ll use a harvest knife, but it depends on the crop. I’m going to stick them in the ground and chop just underneath the soil surface.
All of that green matter [the bulk of the plant that is left after harvest], then is going to go to the compost, because we’re going to retain far more of the nutrients by composting it in a hot compost pile, than by anything else. But we’re going to leave all that root mass and rhizo-sphere in the ground, for obvious reasons: A) not turning up the soil, and B) not getting rid of the most biologically active area.
“And then we’re going to assess if we’re going to do fertilizers and composts. We don’t use a lot of fertilizers. The main fertilizer we’ll use is for nitrogen, because we are conscious that you can have too much compost. And we don’t want to do that, and it’s also a cost for us, for sure. So if you were to put enough compost on to get our nitrogen needs met, [it might be too much]. And yes, we are having three to eight crops in a year so we do need a little bit of extra nitrogen, we’ve found. We would have far too much potassium and phosphorus [if we tried to meet all the nitrogen needs with just compost]. So we do a pelleted feather meal, and calcium if necessary.
“Then about once every twelve months, maybe eighteen months, we’ll do some sort of rock dust, just for micronutrients. Then we’ll cover it with compost. When we started out, we were doing a half inch to a full inch of compost on every bed. These days it’s as little as it can be, which turns out to be about a quarter to a half inch. We try to just cover the fertilizer so you can’t see it. If you have the calcium there it’s really easy, because it’s bright white. Then we’ll transplant in the next crop right away to get our next photosynthesizing plants in the ground. There’s no break in feeding the soil, we transition directly from one healthy photosynthesizing crop to the next in minimal time.
“Two questions I often get asked on that whole process: One, don’t you have regrowth? And the answer to that is, we really don’t if you cut at an angle, under the soil surface. There are a couple crops that will regrow, like radicchio and fennel. And then we’ll just manage that, it’s no big deal.
“And the second question I get asked is, ‘Oh, don’t you run into the roots when you’re transplanting the subsequent crop? Don’t the roots just stay there?’ Especially a big, huge root like that cauliflower there, or a Brussels sprout? When we hit [the roots of the previous crop] we’ll just move over a little bit, and by the time that next crop is done, and you’re into the second succession, [the roots are] gone. I know a lot of people are concerned about it, but they’re gone. You can’t find them if you want to.”
“They’re probably also dealing with less biologically active soils, where plant matter doesn’t break down as quickly,” I said.
“Right, that is definitely true. When we were starting, our soil organic matter was 2.4 percent, and these days depending upon the field, it’s 8 to 11 percent. And I think that range is a really great place to be. We have gotten up to 14 percent before, and we let it back off by just planting some very long crops there without adding any compost. What we’ve found is, at 13–14 percent, the soil was way too fluffy and light, and the plants were just falling over,” said Elizabeth.
“I think there’s some balance in that area where you’ve just got really good biology. We haven’t done a ton of biology tests, but what we have done shows good predator-to-prey ratios, good fungal-to-bacteria ratios. It’s hard to really know what’s in there unless you do a genomic test, which is really expensive. Even the testing we have done on our soils, often-times scientists are just like, ‘Yeah, we just don’t know enough about the biology of the soil.’”
“I think that’s an area people are still learning a lot about,” I said.
Some examples of no-till intercropping on Singing Frogs Farm: broccoli with direct seeded fava bean in April, and in the background red butter lettuce and brassicas, right tomatoes and lettuce.
Credit: Singing Frogs Farm
“We are learning a lot about it. For me, it’s just: feed the soil, have plants in it, green living plants, get the soil organic matter up there to 6–10 percent, and it works itself out. That’s my take,” said Elizabeth.
“I stopped right here because I wanted this hedgerow to remind me to talk about the ecology. Like I said before, I really, really believe in having perennials, and having some natives. If I were to redo our hedgerows, I might put in more fruit trees and other productive plants. The hedgerows are crucial for the beneficial insects they bring in. I had an entomologist out here, and she was looking through the hedgerows and she was so excited. She said ‘Do you realize this beetle, he’ll go two hundred feet out into your field and feed on pests, and then come back here to home?’” Elizabeth said.
“And then snakes love [the hedgerows. One of our employees] was petrified of snakes when he came here. We have gopher snakes, we have garter snakes, and we have some sliders. They love the hedgerows because they have protection from hawks, they can then come out and hunt, and they can make their burrows under there.
This is April 5th when they started harvesting the same bed as in the photo on p. 281.
Credit: Singing Frogs Farm
“But he has gotten to the point, he will actually move them if he finds them in an area where they’re not needed. There were a lot of beets down at the very bottom of the field, and I chatted with him as those were going in. I said, ‘Miguel, we’ll have gopher and field mice problems, because they’ll chew on the tops of the beets down there. Do you think you could do a little extra trapping down there?’
“Miguel said to me, ‘Elizabeth, my friends have been helping me down there. I don’t need to set too many traps because of them.’ For the last two months, every snake he’d seen on the property he’d put down there. And he was right, we have very few rodent issues in that crop.
“So to us, the hedgerows are not a pretty little thing along the outside; they’re an absolutely integral part of the farm. When you have your beneficials, you don’t have to spray. Isn’t that a good thing? Because then those sprays aren’t getting washed down in the soil, and killing your microbiology in the soil. And you don’t have to eat them too, right? Win, win, win. So, I so strongly love them.
“We are really super cold down here on this property, but hedgerows offer a huge benefit by stabilizing air masses in our fields. For example, up here, we had five rows of summer squash. One year we had our first fall frost come in, and the two bottom-most beds of summer squash were burned to the ground. The third one was rimmed around the edges, and then [the two next to the hedgerow] had no damage at all and continued to produce.
“So hedgrows just sort of protect the area around them, keeping it a little warmer on those super cold nights and a little cooler on those super hot afternoons. Hedgerows also act as wind breakers, reducing wind stress and moisture loss for our crop plant and the soil. So it’s an important part of the intensification and not using sprays, and everything to us. They are a really important part of our system.”
“Can I ask you about weeding? Because you’re building these beds, and you’re not going to cultivate them. People are going to want to know how you deal with weeds,” I said.
“When we talked about bed transition, one thing I left out is, when we cut out the crop, that is the time when we will pull the weeds,” said Elizabeth.
“Some of the things that we will do for weeds — we’ll pull them when we take out the crop, and that is our main weeding time. And then when the next crop goes in, we’re putting on fertilizer and compost. I didn’t say this, but [we only add amendments on] 80 percent of our crop transfers. If it’s a short crop, and then another short crop, and everything’s great, I’m not going to do [the full bed prep with fertilizer and compost]. But as most of our crops are heavy feeders, and are in there for a long while, we will add some light compost and organic fertilizers.
“When we’re doing that, we’re putting on a thin layer of compost, just enough to cover the previous soil, maybe half an inch at most, and then most of the time we’re putting a transplant in, so this is out-competing those weed seeds down there tremendously. This process lowers our weed pressure, and as you continue to practice no-till, you’re reducing your weed seed bank by not tilling to bring up new seeds,” Elizabeth said.
“So is that something that you’ve noticed as you’ve gotten away from tilling, is that you’re not churning weed seeds up?” I asked.
“This year was so wet, this year was really odd. But in general I would say yes. Our weed pressure has gone down a lot, and we notice that some of our worst weed pressures are in the fields where we did the most tillage in the beginning years,” said Elizabeth.
“If something gets too weedy, and we are not able to stay on top of it and get that crop out when it’s no longer photosynthesizing at its optimum, i.e., it’s older and it’s growing more weeds and so forth, then we will do occultation. We do occultation with landscape fabric. I know most people use silage tarps, but we trialed silage tarp and don’t see much of a difference. Landscape fabric works really well for us and they’re more breathable,” said Elizabeth.
As we walked back up toward the house, Paul rejoined us. “They’re actually permeable to both moisture and gas exchanges, they’re lightweight and portable, and they last a really long time,” said Paul.
“So in some of our lower fields there were a couple beds down there that were covered. That was because we’d let those go too far because of labor issues that we were having. It has been a hard year labor-wise for us. In the winter we do far more covering, because often we’re not able to get another crop in the ground during November or December due to limited daylight for photosynthesis. Therefore we cover the beds to keep the soil healthy and protected from the elements,” said Elizabeth.
“To be able to say that you just weed when you’re taking the crop out, that’s a huge improvement right there,” I said.
“It’s not even weeding, it’s just transitioning the bed,” said Elizabeth.
“It’s just clearing the bed, which means you pull out a few stray weeds here and there, and you cut the crop out, done,” said Paul.
There is a time-lapse video of the bed turnover process on Singing Frogs Farm, which is well worth seeking out online.
Elizabeth giving a farm tour.
Credit: Singing Frogs Farm
Referring to the video Paul says, “We said in the video, it’s a 45 minute time lapse, and it’s three people, four 85 foot long beds. So for 340 feet of bed, it took three people 45 minutes to go from the standing crop they harvested that morning, to transplanting the next crop. So very fast, easy, and such a smooth process with no disturbance of soil, and no loss of food going into the soil, referring to the root exudates that come from a living plant and feed the soil life. You have photosynthesis [from the old crop] in the morning, and you have photosynthesis [from the new crop] in the afternoon, and this constant ongoing process with no disturbance and no break in the health of the soil and continuity. That’s the idea,” said Paul.
“My thought is, even if people don’t care about all the soil life and sequestering carbon and all that stuff, no-till methods have value because they’re a simplification of the farming process. I don’t know if you’ve read Ben Hartman’s book, The Lean Farm, but he’s always talking about eliminating extra work. He calls it ‘muda,’ it’s a Japanese term for any kind of drag, any inefficiencies, and so I’m thinking about no-till and I’m reading this book and I’m thinking, tillage is just muda,” I said.
“Weeding is muda,” said Elizabeth.
“It’s anything that’s not directly contributing to making a profit, to the success of the farm. I think the problem is that tillage is a paradigm. Right? Most people can’t imagine farming without the tillage aspect, and that’s what I want this book to do is say, ‘Here are the people doing it, here are the examples. It can be done. And if you can get rid of it, it will streamline things to do so,’” I said.
“Absolutely. I said it in different words when we were down there, but I said we really try and keep all our labor on production and not on maintenance,” said Elizabeth. “And then some of the larger projects, like rebuilding the hoophouse over there, that’s going to happen in the winter. To keep people employed, because some of those things do need to happen.”
The radish harvest — Singing Frogs does more direct-seeded crops in the spring including radishes, mustards, and salad turnips. Over winter they direct seed lettuce mixes and spinach. Throughout the year they direct seed carrots.
Credit: Singing Frogs Farm
“But by late January, they’re already planting and harvesting, and planting and harvesting all week long, and so by late January our winter’s over. We have to have winter projects done by mid-January otherwise we’ll never get them done. We’re already up and running in terms of production. We never stop production. We hit the ground running hard in late January and February, when other farmers in the neighborhood are still waiting two more months to even consider doing tillage,” said Paul.
“One thing we always point out is, a while ago I was on the board of the Santa Rosa Farmers Market. It’s the biggest market in the county, it’s year-round, and in mid-May, there are on average fourteen or fifteen farms selling produce. By June 15 there are forty-eight. So the number of farms from mid-May to mid-June triples, that’s when all of the farms that are tillage-based come online. What happened to January through June for eating food?” said Paul.
“In January I counted, there were four. And two of those, half of their booths were sprouts,” said Elizabeth.
“And it’s even more of an advantage to not have to do that tillage in a place like Maine. We have a wet winter, we get a lot of snow. And then it melts and there’ve been so many times where we have put off our planting plans because we couldn’t get on the field to till. We have a very short season, so if you miss two weeks at the beginning, you’ve missed a lot of the most important part of your season,” I said.
“But if you can whip a blanket off the bed, when there’s still a little bit of snow on the blanket, and get in there on your feet without a machine, put down some compost, transplant, you got crops there. Put a frost blanket back over them. And harvest in a few weeks. Much nicer,” said Paul.
“Yes. Absolutely. So we find, a huge profit center for us is March, April, and May,” said Elizabeth.
“Plus, I imagine if you’re there at the beginning of the season, there are probably a lot of people who are going to like your stuff at the beginning and stick with you for the rest of the season,” I said.
“Exactly. Keeping year-round CSA and year-round market space, you don’t have to re-find [your customers] all the time,” said Paul.
“Yeah, we do a weekly CSA from May through Thanksgiving, and then we do every other week over the winter. Because we do have a little bit less coming out of here. People also like their winter veggies a little bit less than they like their summer and autumn veggies. Which works as a win-win, because then we can take more to market, and our customers, they’re used to coming to us. And restaurants. You want to get into a market that’s challenging to get into? You show up to the market manager in February, ‘Hey, guess what I got?’ And boom, you’re in. Or a restaurant. ‘Hey, I’ve got...blank blank blank,’ you’re in, and then they keep you. So it’s a huge marketing tactic,” said Elizabeth.
“Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Your no-till method is another way to extend the beginning of the season, almost like growing in a greenhouse, but without all the infrastructure,” I said. “I just wanted to ask, do you have any advice for aspiring no-tillers, people who want to get started with this system?” I asked.
“Absolutely — start small. And don’t let things get out of control,” said Elizabeth.
“You don’t want to start ten acres of this. You’ll grow far more vegetables off a half-acre then you will on ten acres if you’re intensive and do it well,” said Paul. “So start with a half-acre. Start with one acre. Because it’s really one and a half people per acre to manage and produce. And go from there, that gives you a lot more free acreage for chickens, ducks, cattle, sheep, whatever you want. But really focus your vegetables on being intensive and do it well, so it isn’t a failure and so that all the beds are constantly being produced from. Because that actually feeds the soil by being constantly productive, and then as you get really good at it, keep adding more beds or more fields and expanding outwards and more crew members maybe.”
“Another thing I would say is that the nursery is really super important. And having really resilient, large, healthy transplants that go in the ground is of key importance. We also really stress with new farmers: figure out how to get really good healthy transplants out there. That is another thing that is super important to us,” said Elizabeth.
Jonathan and Megan Leiss
Hurdle Mills, North Carolina
Cut flowers
Occultation with silage tarps and permanent beds
BEFORE I EVEN ARRIVED AT SPRING FORTH FARM IN Hurdle Mills, North Carolina, I got an idea why they might need to build some soil. On the way in to visit on a warm day in early May, I passed a tobacco transplanting crew. The farm was surrounded by acres of freshly planted tobacco, which from a distance looks like cabbage seedlings; little green flags waving in a sea of red.
I immediately recognized the brick-red clay soil from where I grew up in Virginia. Jonathan and Megan Leiss run the farm, and they were kind enough to accommodate me in one of the busiest weeks of their year — on the Monday before Mother’s Day. I arrived at an exciting time. Megan and Jonathan were putting the finishing touches on the beautiful passive solar house they had built themselves and recently moved into. For the previous three years they had been living in a small trailer on the property while they built the house.
Megan was two weeks away from quitting her teaching job in order to farm full-time. The Leisses grow flowers which they sell wholesale to local florists, operate a flower CSA, and grow food for themselves and a local food pantry mixed in with the flowers.
Indeed Megan confirmed the soil on their farm was pretty much the way it looked on the drive in — more like clay than soil, with an organic matter content of 2 percent when they bought it.
“This land has been cultivated in tobacco for over a hundred years. And when we bought this land it was in tobacco. So it has just been run into the ground. If we didn’t have some sort of mulch cover, we would till a bed and then within an hour on an August day you could walk on it like it was concrete. It became so hard, instantly. So we had to figure out something else that would help us at our scale and size to build and take care of our soil. We decided that no-till farming was the way to quickly build organic matter and soil biology,” said Megan.
They use silage tarps to smother weeds and break down biomass left over from previous crops and cover crops. To show me what they’re dealing with, Megan pulled back a tarp, scraped away the decaying cover crop residue on top of the soil and dug out a handful of soil. Her fingers left smear marks in the earth. She handed me the lump of clay, and I squeezed it in my hand. You could have made a pot out of it.
The previous day, Megan was transplanting. Finding a worm was a joyous occasion. The good news is that clay soils hold a lot of nutrients, if they can be enriched with enough organic matter.
The extremely low amount of organic matter complicates almost every task, making it difficult to draw soil up around the roots when transplanting. Percolation is very slow, so rain and irrigation tend to pool and run off instead of soaking in.
No-till is how the Leisses are dealing with these soil challenges without the use of a tractor or other heavy equipment. When I visited, they were cultivating one acre without any type of motorized farm equipment. Since then, they have purchased a BCS two-wheel tractor from their neighbors. They use it to flail mow cover crops, which helps them break down faster during occultation. They also got a power harrow for the BCS, which they plan on using on a very shallow setting (“less than 1”) to help get their cover crops to germinate.
Unlike rototillers that have tines mounted on a horizontal axis, mixing soil layers, a power harrow has tines mounted on a vertical axis, mixing soil without inverting the layers. Power harrows are also less likely to create a plow pan, since there are no tines dragging horizontally through the soil.
“The power harrow does not invert the soil, it ‘stirs’ the soil like an egg beater leaving the soil structure intact,” said Jonathan.
Megan and Jonathan with some of their flowers.
Credit: Spring Forth Farm
When they really need a tractor, neighbors collectively have eight tractors that can be hired to push around a particularly large pile of organic matter or help with any other job that goes beyond the human scale.
Looking at their land with them, two advantages of no-till came to mind. First, a tractor would be too big. Their one-acre farm doesn’t justify or demand that much horsepower. So they skip the tillage and prepare the soil for planting by hand. This is particularly useful in wet weather. “When other farms are not able to work the soil yet because it is too wet, we can prep beds, no matter the weather,” said Megan.
“Farmers who cultivated our land previously spread around some of our most noxious perennial weeds with their heavy equipment. We are trying to break that cycle and stop spreading weeds,” said Jonathan.
Another advantage of going tractorless is that traditional tillage might well make their soil worse. While a plow or rototiller could serve to mix some organic matter into their clay, it would also beat the soil structure up further, potentially making the soil even tighter and creating a plow pan at the bottom of the tillage zone.
The year I visited, 2017, was the fourth season of production for Spring Forth Farm. They used minimal tillage at first and then moved to 100 percent no-till farming in 2015. Though soil organic matter has increased over three years, lingering challenges include the fact that the soil is still low in organic matter, and certain weeds persist through the occultation process, most notably nutsedge and dock.
Credit: Spring Forth Farm
Credit: Spring Forth Farm
A cover cropped field before occultation (above) and the same field after occultation (below).
“When we started, we hired our neighbors with their tractors to break new ground for us and build our beds with their bed former. We currently maintain them as permanent raised beds, adding organic matter through cover cropping and composting,” said Jonathan.
“If we could start all over again, we would have dumped huge amounts of organic matter in each section, disked it in and then laid out beds,” said Megan. “We did this in our 96' × 30' hoophouse we just built. We added four-and-a-half yards of leaf mold and one yard of compost per bed.”
“One thing that we had hoped for that hasn’t worked out the way we wanted is the seed bank is not being depleted under the tarps,” said Jonathan. “The fescue seed is being depleted, but that was our fault because we planted fescue and let it go to seed while we were building the house! But a lot of the weeds that we have trouble with, the tarps don’t cause them to germinate [and die]. The biggest ones are smartweed, chickweed, purple henbit, bindweed, and a little bit of crabgrass.”
(When I checked back in with them almost a year later, Jonathan said, “This has actually gotten much better since last year. Perhaps occultation just takes time to burn through the seed bank?”)
In the meantime, they are putting landscape fabric down over the beds and planting through holes into it, to suppress weeds during the growing season.
Beds with landscape fabric are ready for planting after occultation on the left, and beds still under occultation on the right. In the middle is part of a bed with the tarp peeled back to show what it looks like under the tarp.
Credit: Spring Forth Farm
“One thing that has been really interesting for us is how many different no-till systems there are. We’ve been trying to pull from as many different ones as we can,” Jonathan said. “After hearing the interview with Patrice Gros on the Farmer to Farmer Podcast we started using a lot of straw.”
Jonathan gestures to the neighboring land surrounding the farm. “All of this over here is wheat, in a tobacco/wheat rotation. So wheat straw is a good local resource and they will deliver it for $2.50 a bale and stack it. We can have as much wheat straw as we want, but it has its own problems. Now we’ve been having issues with slugs because of it. You know, if it’s not one thing it’s another.”
“However, since we stopped tilling, our soil life is exploding, including a healthy population of ground beetles and signs of earthworms. If we break open a clod there will be tunnels from earthworms, which we’ve never seen before,” said Megan. “The ground beetles that we are now finding in the soil eat slug larva. This is a great example of how no-till farming helps us to return to a more natural and biological way of farming. Our aim is to work with nature, not against her. Nature already has perfect systems in place to create healthy environments for plants. We want to mimic these systems so that we can manage our farm in a more natural way.”
“So now we have a slug population, and a ground beetle population. We’re starting to get all these other insects and wildlife. When we first planted in March we lost some plantings to slugs almost completely. Now the ground beetle population is eating more of the slugs. They’re catching up and we’re not really having an issue now,” explained Megan.
Mulching with wheat straw.
Credit: Spring Forth Farm
Megan was in the middle of preparing beds for late spring planting so she showed me what she had been doing. “In the spring, the tarps are removed, the beds are forked, we add a quarter to a half-inch inch of compost and fertilizer, drip lines and landscape fabric are put down in preparation for planting. We use Harmony fertilizer and also regularly inject fish emulsion through our drip lines throughout the season. We add minerals and micronutrients based on recommendations from our soil tests.”
After pulling back the tarp that had been on over the winter, she forked the beds to loosen the soil. I was surprised when she showed me that she had been using a garden/potato fork instead of a broadfork.
Megan explains, “We had been using a broadfork, but I found that it was just so heavy and cumbersome that I just like a little potato fork better.”
“The other thing about the potato fork is that with the broadfork, you have to step on the bed, because you’re walking backwards down the center of the bed. But with the potato fork you can do it from the sides,” said Jonathan.
“I started trying out the garden fork because it was a lot lighter for me to use and I felt that I could actually get it deeper into the soil than the broadfork, even though the tines aren’t as big. I’m also spacing the forking closer together because it goes so much faster. I think it’s twelve here a dozen there. It’s getting aerated either way,” said Megan.
“I uncovered these three beds today. I was able to fork all three, with just a little potato-digging fork in an hour. Also, I don’t have to bend at all. I’m just shoving it in and cracking it, shoving it in and cracking it. I go down one side and back and I can do three 30” × 80' beds in an hour,” said Megan. “So that’s a really quick thing we can do in any soil conditions. It just dumped rain last weekend and if we were working with a tractor we definitely couldn’t be getting into our beds at all. But now we can fork, fertilize, put down Sluggo, put down landscape fabric and drip tape. Then it’s ready to go and it can sit here for a couple of weeks before we actually plant it if we need to.”
Jonathan in a block of peonies.
Credit: Spring Forth Farm
“At our size we do a lot of half-bed plantings, and plant the other half later to something else. It’s nice, I know a lot of farmers prep the beds in the fall and then plant in the spring. And this is one of the ways we can try to get ahead, to uncover a bunch of beds at once and just fork them before planting.”
At the end of a crop or season, they pull the irrigation lines off the beds and flail mow the remains of the crop. “We take up the irrigation lines because our mower just tears them up,” said Megan. “We then immediately pull the lines back onto the bed and either put out occultation tarps or seed cover crops. If we are cover cropping, we mow everything down, portion out in buckets per bed the cover crop seed we’re planting. Sprinkle it on the beds, add one bale of straw per bed, and let it rain.”
“We recommend one bale per bed because two bales per bed is really too thick. With two bales, some of the transplants don’t even come up above the level of the straw. It’s a really great environment for the slugs. They like that,” said Megan.
“So we put the seed on the surface like planting grass, then put straw on top of it, and we don’t work it into the soil at all. We’ve had good luck with that with tillage radishes, oats, and clover, but it doesn’t work so well for getting buckwheat and other summer cover crops to germinate,” said Jonathan.
One thing about no-till is that it takes longer to make changes to the soil. “This is one of the challenges,” said Jonathan. “Some amendments you can just spread on top of the bed or rake it in and they’re fine. Some stuff isn’t going to work the way you want it to without having a more mechanical way of working it in.”
Jonathan showing how some perennial weeds like this dock with a lot of energy stored continue trying to grow under the tarp.
Credit: Spring Forth Farm
“The straw is our solution for getting cover crops to germinate, because we can’t till the seed in, and we have just invested in a power harrow for our BCS so we are hoping this will help our summer cover crops establish better. What we’ve currently been doing is, we broadcast the seed on the surface and then spread one bale of straw.”
“And of course the wheat straw we get is also germinating. So it’s adding some cover crop,” Megan adds.
“That’s the system that works pretty well for establishing winter cover crops,” said Jonathan.
“There’s been a lot of interest in high-dollar, high-intensity vegetable production systems which rely on baby salad mix,” said Jonathan. “Well, a lot of these systems use the same basic principle which is a short turnaround crop. If you can get it in and out in 20 days and plant something else the same day, that’s the basis for making money in that system. This doesn’t work with flowers. You could turn flowers around quickly, but there’s no 20-day flower crop,” said Megan.
“Sunflowers are as close as you’re going to get. They’re 45 or 50 days for us. We haven’t even tried to double crop one right after another because we try to get a cover crop in there between flower crops.
“No-till makes it possible to start a farm with virtually no debt. We are very much nodebt people. What took us so long to build our house is that we built it debt free. And we built the cooler and the germinating room out of the profits from last year. We’re just reinvesting everything back into the farm.
Sunflowers and other crops planted through landscape fabric.
Credit: Spring Forth Farm
“But if we had to go out and get a tractor, even one that wasn’t expensive it wouldn’t be possible to run debt-free. We are also able to eliminate the time and money we would spend maintaining and fixing a tractor. Investing in a tractor would make us have to scale the business up. No-till farming allows you to have a viable small-scale business without a lot of payments. One of the nice things about no-till is that you can try it on for size, without the commitment of buying a tractor or even a two-wheel tractor. It is a perfect way to get into farming if you aren’t certain you want to make it a career.
“We don’t have any intention, at least right now, of hiring people. We want to keep the farm the size it is so Jonathan can keep working at the fire department with me here full-time.
One of Spring Forth’s flower fields.
Credit: Spring Forth Farm
“Our systems we have set in place make it possible to return to that family size, family-run farm. I’ve worked for a bunch of different farmers, on much larger operations than ours; they needed six or seven people to effectively run their farms. Labor was unreliable, people would quit in the middle of the season leaving the farms shorthanded. After working for other farmers I realized that I was not interested in that size farm for myself. No-till farming was the key for us [to be able to operate on this scale],” said Megan.
“So we’re not making gobs and gobs of money but we also don’t have a lot of overhead and we are choosing to reinvest our profits in our business right now.”
When I ask where they got their ideas for no-till systems from, Megan says, “We’ve been pulling from a lot of different systems. We tend to use Jean-Martin Fortier’s cover crop ratio recommendations. We got the idea about using straw for cover cropping from Patrice Gros. We’re using occultation to terminate cash crops and cover crops by smothering like Tony and Denise [Gaetz, of Bare Mountain Farm in Oregon (see interview p. 123)]. We have experienced a lot of trial and error to come up with the systems we use. We are always looking for new information and resources that can be transferred to our farm.”
“After reading the Neversink Farm article [“Welcome to the No-Till Revolution” in the March 2017 Growing for Market magazine, page 260 of this book] we’re really interested in getting more topsoil in and figuring out a way to effectively get more organic matter on the tops of the beds. I really think what we’re going to end up developing for Spring Forth Farm, is a hybrid of all of these systems,” said Megan.
One of Spring Forth Farm’s CSA bouquets.
Credit: Spring Forth Farm
Bryan O’Hara
Lebanon, Connecticut
Mixed vegetables
Solarization and compost mulch
I MET BRYAN O’HARA ON HIS TOBACCO ROAD FARM in Lebanon, Connecticut, on a hot day in June. Little did I know it but in two days I would see his system more or less replicated on Natick Community Farm. The audio of this interview was not recorded, so there is less of Bryan’s voice than in some of the other interviews, but the gist of the visit was preserved through my notes.
Bryan was kind enough to show me around at a very busy time of the year. According to the calendar it was still spring on June 12, 2017. But according to the thermometer it was summer. It was unseasonably hot and I’m sure Bryan had a lot of other things to do besides show me around. Nonetheless he took me out to a field by his house in an unhurried and friendly manner.
Tobacco Road Farm grows vegetables on about three acres, with half in year-round production, and the other half cover cropped over the winter. Bryan pointed out that he has made his living from the farm for more than twenty years, and that the field we were looking at has been cropped year-round for that entire time.
Bryan has developed a farming style that involves no-till methods, on-farm composting, and preparations from Korean Natural Farming. He has carefully refined his methods over the years. However, for the purposes of this book we are going to ignore most of the other interesting stuff and focus on his no-till system.
Bryan’s basic system involves solarizing a previous vegetable or cover crop, applying compost (and maybe Korean Natural Farming farming preparations at the same time — go look those up if you’re interested), direct seeding or transplanting into the compost, and covering the compost with mulch to protect the biota from getting fried in the sun.
“Now, the earthworms eat a lot of the mulch,” says Bryan, echoing a refrain I’ve heard from other no-tillers. As soil life has proliferated, there are more mouths consuming the organic matter going onto the soil.
“We use more mulch (made of chopped straw, leaves, and wood chips) and less compost than previously. Under tillage, compost usage was probably 60–80 tons/acre per year. The tonnage of mulch now used is probably about equal to the compost — roughly 30 tons/acre of each. It’s very useful to feed the field biology,” said Bryan.
For better or worse, some of those mouths are slugs. One of the challenges to methods that leave more organic matter residue on the surface is that they tend to generate more slugs, which come for the decomposing organic matter but stay for the crops.
One thing I’ve heard from no-tillers is that the populations of ground beetles and other slug predators tend to catch up with the slug population as the soil is disturbed less. In the meantime, slugs may take a heavy toll on crops. One short-term solution is Sluggo, an OMRI-listed slug and snail bait/killer whose active ingredient is iron phosphate.
Bryan suggests managing slugs by leaving mulches off during particularly moist parts of the year (when they would be less important anyway), using solarization to kill the slugs between crops, and avoiding the lush growth slugs and other pests are attracted to from having too much nitrogen.
Bryan developed his no-till system because over time, many things on his farm were getting worse. Yields were going down and his soil was holding less water and drying out quickly in the summertime. Tillage was reducing fungal activity, and along with the mechanical action of crushing soil structure this was contributing to poor soil aggregation. Weeds were becoming more numerous and pest and disease pressure was increasing. He tied all these effects back to the worsening soil.
His current no-till method is the result of lots of experimentation over many years. His aim throughout has been to build the soil up instead of burning up the biology and organic matter through tillage.
Rows of peppers and other crops planted through mulch inside and out of a hoophouse on Tobacco Road Farm.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
“Tillage is a nutrient flush from all the death you just wrought on the soil. Over time, the soil runs out of steam,” Bryan explained. You are sacrificing some of the organic matter and life in the soil to the growth of the year’s crop. Without replenishing it, you eventually run out of organic matter, soil biota, and fertility. This can be seen when diligent cover cropping and compost use fails to increase organic matter percentages significantly year-over-year, because tillage is burning up as much or more organic matter than is being added to the soil. “Tillage doesn’t give you nutrient balance, it gives you nutrient release,” said Bryan.
He developed this system by gradually reducing tillage over time, transitioning entirely to no-till in 2012. The first step was to stop deep tillage, and then to implement a permanent bed system with shallow tillage. Next, Bryan went from a rototiller to a field cultivator. Finally, he just stopped tilling altogether. “Now, no tractor goes in this field,” he says.
One of the foundations of Bryan’s system is his high-carbon compost, which he makes on the farm and applies at a rate of roughly 30 tons/acre/year. The main ingredients are cow manure, vegetable scraps, wood chips, leaves, and straw. He also adds silica and calcium as needed, and a wide variety of other materials to make custom blends to meet the fertility needs of specific crops.
“Our fields are nitrogen-rich from biological fixation and previous organic matter application. Carbon helps balance this. It also helps feed fungus, and a high percentage of woodchips, roughly 40 percent, greatly aid in passive aeration of compost piles,” said Bryan.
A row of transplanted celeriac.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
Another important part of the system is the straw, leaf, and wood-chip mulch Bryan uses to put down over the compost, to maximize the amount of microorganisms that survive in the compost after application. He tries to apply the mulch quickly after applying the compost to keep it from drying out.
Bryan uses a bale shredder to chop straw into smaller pieces to make it easier to apply to the beds. To deal with weed seeds or leftover grain in the straw, he lets it get rained on and allows the seeds to sprout after chopping. When the chopped straw is gathered later with pitchforks, the sprouted seeds die.
The benefits of sticking with a system like this are visible when Bryan shows me a bed that has been planted four times over the last three months, and hardly a weed has germinated. Using transplants do speed bed turnover, but his quickest crops are usually direct-seeded salad greens.
“Most of the home fields are in year-round vegetables and some of it grows four or more crops a year. A rotation that fast is not common but certainly does happen,” said Bryan. “Four times would require three harvests in three months, so that would probably be a salad green like arugula, to pea shoots, to lettuce, to a fall crop like spinach.”
We look at a bed of cilantro that has never been weeded. There’s an occasional weed, but nothing that would cause the cilantro any problems. The minimal weed pressure in this unweeded bed would be excellent for a bed that had been weeded mechanically. To have it in a bed that has never been weeded is almost unheard of.
Solarization on Tobacco Road Farm. This can work in just 24 hours under warm conditions.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
Seeding the cilantro we were looking at was simplified by the fact that it was planted directly after another crop. Being able to go from one crop to another without having to go through the whole process of tilling and remaking beds is a huge advantage of no-till. Because weed pressure is so low, and because the soil remains light, the cilantro could be planted as soon as the previous crop was removed.
For example, the cilantro we were looking at was planted with an Earthway seeder, though any other single-row seeder would do. After removing the previous crop, Bryan used a hoe to create six furrows in the top of the bed. Then he ran the seeder in the furrows and covered with a thin layer of compost and straw.
Bryan often sows by hand. For scatter seeding in beds that were cover cropped, he mows the cover crop down using a rotary mower on a walk-behind tractor. Then the beds are solarized to kill the cover crop, after which he applies a thin layer of compost (about a half inch, little enough so that you can still see soil through the compost) over the top of the bed to both fertilize and provide a loose surface to plant into. Finally, he scatters seeds onto the top of the bed by hand.
To get enough soil contact for the seeds to germinate, Bryan designed his own implement to cover them. I know from experience that seeds sown on top of the soil and left to sprout don’t typically germinate very well. To solve the problem of how to direct seed into a bed without tilling or drilling it in, Bryan made a hand-held ring drag that duplicates the soil-covering action of the rings on the back of seed drills. To do this he attached the rings for a seed drill (available as “grain drill drag chains” inexpensively from Agri Supply, among other places) to a long tool handle. The resulting tool is like a rake with drag chains instead of tines.
To cover hand-scattered seed that has just been planted in compost, Bryan pulls the ring drag down the length of a bed and back. That is usually enough to settle small seeds into the soil to germinate. Another option for covering larger seeds is to use a Garden Weasel, a hand-held cultivator with rotating tines, to churn seeds into the soil, and then run the ring drag over as well.
Sometimes furrows are ripped through the high-residue surface, then a seeder is run down the furrow, or seed is placed by hand and soil pulled back over the furrow. Yet another option for covering seeds with compost is to straighten out the tines of a leaf rake, or use a tool like the Groundskeeper 2 rake instead of the ring drag. But Bryan has had the best results with the ring drag.
Then he covers the compost and seeds with a thin layer of chopped straw, leaf, and wood-chip mulch — not enough to smother the seedlings when they germinate, but to mostly shade the compost. Bryan points out that the advantage to hand-sowing some seeds is that planting densities on crops like carrots and scallions that don’t have a big canopy can be much higher than when planted as usual in rows.
These crops can be planted densely over the entire bed, not just in the rows, if bed space doesn’t need to be sacrificed for unplanted areas for cultivators to go (i.e., the space between rows). This gives Bryan’s hand-seeded beds a much different look from most vegetable farms. We walked by many beds with tiny seedlings growing evenly across the top of beds — not in straight rows — from below a layer of mulch. Transplanting follows more or less the same procedure, by planting into a layer of compost, followed by mulching.
After years of layering the beds, there are so few weeds that there is usually little weeding necessary between planting and harvest. As in other no-till systems, this allows growers to focus on production (planting and harvesting) rather than waste time on tilling and weeding.
“With no weeds, cover crops can be broadcast into vegetable crops at any time, which is very versatile, and makes cover crops much easier to work with. For example, crimson clover in August at 50 pounds/acre, followed by winter rye in September at 250 pounds/acre right over fall crops. When the fall crops are harvested they leave behind a beautiful cover crop,” said Bryan.
A maturing bed of direct seeded red lettuce.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
He times his plantings so there is almost constant vegetative cover and maximization of yield — as some things grow in, others are harvested out. For example, Bryan’s young plantings of cucumbers and melons are bordered by spring peas. Once the peas are harvested, they will be mowed, solarized, and mulched by the time the cucurbits vine into the pea beds, getting a pea crop off of the area that otherwise would just be sprawl space for the vines.
Bryan tells me that he has been able to exceed the yields from traditional cultivation on every crop except potatoes, but he’s still working on it. There are other benefits that he has noticed since going no-till. He used to have 5-percent stem rot in garlic over the winter; now, he has hardly any. The water-holding capacity of his soil has been greatly increased, to the point where he got rid of his drip irrigation system.
“Irrigation labor and equipment savings have been significant the last few dry years, and extremely productive, with sun all the time, and the roots hydrated by well-structured soil and mulch,” said Bryan.
Another foundation for Bryan’s system is solarization to quickly terminate cover crops without tillage or herbicides. “A big breakthrough was quick 24-hour turnaround solarization,” said Bryan. He can do solarization this quickly roughly from April to October in his climate, on sunny days when it’s at least 70 degrees. In borderline conditions — when the weather isn’t warm enough or the day isn’t completely sunny — he has to leave the plastic on for longer.
This is where readers will have to adapt practices to their own conditions. In times of the year that are not warm enough for solarization, vegetation may be hoed or simply mulched over with a layer of compost to smother it. Though solarization does a good job of killing mown cover crops and annual weeds, it will not kill deeply rooted perennial weeds; these have to be pulled.
Bryan wondered about the effect of solarization on the life in the soil, since the whole idea is to disturb it as little as possible. So he poked a thermometer probe through the plastic during solarization to see what the soil temperature was. He found a 50-degree difference between the air temperature and the temperature under the plastic (from 75 in the air to 125 under the plastic) and about a ten-degree temperature gain at one-inch soil depth, and little temperature increase below that. The soil temperature was very high at the surface but quickly cooled off as he pushed the probe in deeper, leading him to believe that the effect is mostly confined to the cover crop on top of the soil, including the slugs.
Bryan has found that Tobacco Road Farm is more profitable under the no-till system. The harvest efficiency is much higher, with more bounteous crops and almost no weeds. And if anyone should doubt the level of productivity, profitability is excellent — along the lines of other no-till growers I have talked to.
In addition to improving the bottom line, there is greater diversity of life visible in the soil, including more earthworms and more fungal mycelium. Water holding capacity has increased, and there is better drainage and quicker infiltration. Erosion has been decreased because the soil is almost always covered, and never churned up.
For growers wishing to get started with no-till, Bryan advises to “experiment with the system so you know the ropes, so when it’s successful you can launch into it.” If they have been using tillage, he suggests using it one last time to try and clear as many of the perennial weeds as possible, since these will likely not be killed by 24-hour solarization.
I hope that Bryan derives a great deal of satisfaction from the fact that there are others out there doing no-till because of his work to promote it, such as Casey at Natick Community Farm, who cites Bryan as the impetus behind his methods. And as I noted in the beginning, seeing Bryan speak at a NOFA-VT conference was one of the events that showed me there was a critical mass of these farmer-developed no-till methods.
There is a great deal of complexity that has been refined over many years in the farming system at Tobacco Road Farm. Explaining his no-till system is just scratching the surface of what Bryan is doing. I was very happy to hear that he is working on a book about his farming methods, including all the good stuff we didn’t have space for here. Keep an eye out for it in the near future.
