by Paula Manalo
We followed that rule for the second meeting, with a nice couple who had a beautiful, sprawling property that was just begging for an animal operation . . . but not a vegetable farm. Alas. At least we knew where we stood as we sat down for that conversation.
We quickly learned to get an address and a good description of the lay of the property before scheduling a meeting. After consulting online soil maps and satellite imagery, you can do a drive-by and, if warranted, walk the place yourself. Then, you meet.
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Meeting landowners and seeing their land is like being set up on a blind date with someone’s unemployed, somewhat homely son.
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We were amazed by how reluctant people are, though, to share this information. Many won’t give you a solid answer about which way the property runs, so even if you know the address, you can’t tell if it’s that beautiful bottomland south of the road or that nasty wooded ridge that runs north. They wanted to preserve some level of privacy until they met us, but it sure wasted a lot of time. There were even a few people over the years who refused to give us an address until the night before our meeting, at which time they gave us turn-by-turn driving directions. Two of three properties could have been dismissed out of hand by doing research online, if we’d only known what parcel we were talking about.
The most difficult land-search experiences, though, were the ones that were almost right. Cara and I have by now spent an incredible amount of time whittling down our goal, cutting off the fat and sinew until it’s a lean little sprite of a dream. We know exactly what we want. Despite that, there were times that tested us: We met a woman with six acres of good soil, a heated (if aging) greenhouse, a small tractor, a big barn, miscellaneous implements, and a grandfathered-in retail space in prime lower Hudson Valley territory. We knew we’d outgrow it in two years, but we could rock that place from day one if we said yes. Another property had a cute little house; huge, well-kept, concrete-floored equipment barns; a mechanic’s garage with a pit (!); but only a few lonely acres of good ground. A tiny trickle of a creek as the only irrigation source sealed the fate on that one, but Cara and I were tempted.
Maybe worst of all was a call we got through the amorphous social network of connections we’d been cultivating. It sounded like a bust, at first — another person who wouldn’t give us a description of the land or even an address — but it was so close to home that we went to meet him anyway. The landowner turned out to be a smart, outgoing film professional with a hundred-plus-acre farm. He was turning an old Dutch barn into the nicest house I’ve ever been in and was looking for an ambitious couple to manage the land. The property had miles of new electric fence and another attractive house that would be available to whoever moved in. But it was all rolling pasture, with only an acre or two of good veggie ground. We really considered changing direction entirely for that one, just buying some lambs and going for it, or doing greenhouses of high-end micro greens. It could have been a good life. But we held firm.
As year three sank into the prolonged ache that is midsummer on a vegetable farm, I began to revisit my old friend the Multiple Listing Service. Since we’d left the city, the economy had collapsed, taking real-estate values with it, and the boundary marking Too Far was gradually creeping farther out. One day in late June, we did a drive-by of three properties from the MLS. Two of the properties were discards and the third was the classic ambiguity: an address where one side of the street was beautiful prime bottomland and the other was mostly hilly and wooded. When we arrived, it was clear that the house and barns sat on the “wrong” side. The “right” side was so good, though, that I went ahead and e-mailed the real-estate agent representing the property. She e-mailed back several pdfs of the property lines. With delight, we realized these forty-eight acres held the house, barn, two sheds, forty tillable acres, and fifteen hundred feet of river frontage. The family selling the property had owned it since 1774, which could make us the first new family to own and farm the property since before the Revolutionary War.
As I write this, it’s been six months since Cara and I first visited that farm. We’ve choreographed a delicate dance among ourselves, two nonprofits, and the family selling the property. One organization bought the property from the sellers, a second is buying the development rights from the first, and we’ll end up owning the farm with an agriculture-friendly restriction against future development.
Working with nonprofits has made it a lengthy process, but it’s going well, and with some luck we ought to close in time to move in and be planting this spring. If I could have thought of a single other occupation I’d find this challenging and satisfying, I might have walked away from farming long ago. Instead, with secure, long-term access to quality farmland, we’re one step closer to achieving our dream. It’s been a long time coming, but make no mistake: Quincy Farm is winning.
Time on the Farm
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BY BEN JAMES
With his wife, Oona Coy, Ben James runs Town Farm in Northampton, Massachusetts. This year he is obsessed with compost-turning pigs, greenhouses on wheels, and doubling the value of food stamps at farmers’ markets.
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I didn’t notice the marks on the John Deere until I’d had the tractor for maybe a month. A couple of spots of brown, corroded metal etched into the green enamel on the top surface of the right fender. No big deal — a decades-old tractor should have all sorts of dents and dings if it’s been used for anything worthwhile — but the placement of these marks was interesting. Again and again, the times I noticed the marks was when I turned around to see the row behind me and placed my hand exactly upon them, the base of my palm on the larger spot, the tips of my fingers on the smaller. I can’t remember the moment now, but at some point while driving the length of one or another three-hundred-foot row I finally got it: The marks were made by the hand of the previous owner. Every time he’d turned around to check his depth or adjust his steering or see the work he’d accomplished, he’d placed his palm on this same section of fender — an unconscious action that he must have repeated several hundred thousand times — and gradually his sweat had eaten through the paint and begun to corrode the metal.
Repetition is what we do here at the farm — animal chores morning and evening, picking the squash every day and a half, the beans and tomatoes every three days, the market and CSA pickups each week, spraying the foliar fertilizer every two weeks, the big cleanout of the goat barn and the garlic harvest once a year, the three- and four-year rotations of the various families of crops — all these different time signatures in sync and then crashing against one another. There’s no way to do all that’s scheduled in a single day.
The tasks are completed in order, one after the other as time allows, but meanwhile there are all the ways that time on the farm overlaps and twines around itself.
We keep a log of all the things we intend to do differently next year (plant the first sweet corn a week earlier, don’t follow winter squash with carrots because of the weeds, don’t use biodegradable plastic under cantaloupe because the melons will rot). At the same time, wherever we are on the farm, we’re reminded of what was in the ground last year (volunteer cherry tomatoes, leftover potatoes, a weedy patch where the lamb’s quarters got out of control).
There’s a very real sense, then, that we’re farming three years at once, tracking where we’ve been and calculating where we’re headed, even as we try to figure out — at this exact moment — what in the world to do with the eight hundred pounds of eggplant ripening in the field. (And this doesn’t take into account the perennials — the strawberries and asparagus and fruit trees — whose time signatures add an even greater level of complexity to the score).
We push and pull at time. Time pushes and pulls at us. We encourage the arugula to mature more quickly by laying down row cover, and then we load the freshly harvested broccoli into the cooler to make it last as long as it can. The bean pick we thought would take an hour ends up taking t
hree but yields half the crop it did a few days before. The turkey that fit in the palm of my hand six weeks ago now can hardly be held in my arms. I try to squeeze a nickel out of a minute with each pint of cherry tomatoes I sell, but here’s what will ultimately last: the flavor of those tomatoes in my sons’ memories, so that even as grown men no other food will ever taste as good.
Time on the farm is not static, it’s not a given. It’s not like a ladder with all the rungs evenly spaced. Rather it’s a substance, a material we try to manipulate just as much as we do the tilth and the fertility of the soil. How many tomatoes can we harvest before the lightning storm arrives? How many can we sell before they rot? How can we get everybody out weeding the carrots this afternoon even though there are all those watermelons to pick? And how can I get November to come more quickly, so that Oona and Wiley and I can take a nap together and the killing frost will give me some hours alone to read?
It’s the end of August. We’re no longer shaping the rhythm of the season. We merely step into the morning and let the rhythm of the harvest shuffle us along. The products of this rhythm — the song, let’s say — are almost unbearably fleeting. The tomatoes get sold, the goat barn gets dirty again, the turkeys eat and eat and eat until they themselves are eaten. The products of an entire season’s labor are devoured by shareholders and crew and customers and neighbors and friends, and the residue is harrowed back into the ground.
This is why I like the marks on the John Deere. They’re a reminder, a register of all the countless repetitions we perform. The other farmer (a potato grower, I’ve heard, who recently passed away) and I sitting in the same seat, looking back as we travel forward, resting our palms on the fender to stabilize our bodies, putting sweat to metal, making food for people’s bellies — sure — but here’s what’s left: a small, corroded imprint of our hands.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bugs
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BY MK WYLE
After three years of “practice” farming and seasonal nomadism, Mary Kathryn Wyle and her husband, Andrew, are excited to be signing their first lease in 2011. They’re starting a vegetable and pastured livestock farm near Frederick, Maryland, and even though they’re leasing, Mary Kathryn looks forward to planting perennials.
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The year 2010 marked a milestone: I had apprenticed for two years, in Georgia and in New England, and had begun to feel ready for farming on my own. Still not prepared for the full commitment (“buying the farm” conveys finality, whether in life or in death), I settled on an organic, grass-based dairy and meat farm in central Massachusetts. The owners were interested in adding vegetables to their offerings, though they lacked the time to tend row crops themselves.
They proposed a deal to my partner and me: his labor with their livestock as barter for my use of their land, equipment, and good name. It seemed an excellent deal, and any doubts I had harbored were quickly erased when I received the results from a soil test. After a childhood of red Georgia clay, the rich, well-drained loam of a Massachusetts dairy farm looked like paradise.
I was growing on “new land,” fields that had been pasture for as far back as anyone could remember. I had always envisioned my first year on new land as a sort of horticultural sneak attack, a freebie year in which unsuspecting vegetable pests would miss my fields, like plagues passing by the Israelites. Growing on new land had become, in my mind, talismanic, all but guaranteeing pest-free, low-weed crops. Don’t blame the farmers who mentored me for this error — in retrospect, I can only conclude that my delusion sprang forth fully formed from my own overactive imagination.
There is, of course, a kernel of truth in my fantasy — pest pressure is probably lower in your first year, than, say, your tenth. What I neglected to account for in my optimism, however, was that although the bugs didn’t know to expect me, I didn’t know to expect the bugs.
I knew I had abundant earthworms, sure. I knew I had preying mantises, and beetles, and a local turkey population apparently unharmed by hunting season. But I didn’t know — and this was critical — what pests were inherent to my soil. The trick of this is that the first (and decidedly most effective) line of defense on an organic farm lies in prevention, and it’s a tricky business to prevent something you don’t know is coming.
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I felt as though the entire insect world was marshaling its forces against me, competing for every bite I could produce.
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One weekend in early May, I ran into a friend who runs a vegetable farm in eastern Massachusetts. She described to me her efforts to save her onion crop, which had recently been beset by onion maggots. She explained to me how the maggots attack alliums by burrowing inside their bulbs and neck. My friend described the tell-tale wilt of her transplants and her horror, upon digging one up and investigating further, to find a sickly white maggot feasting within. The maggots move from plant to plant down a row, she said, and the only sure solution is prevention: covering a bed with row cover fabric immediately after planting.
The next Monday, at my farm, I inspected the onions closely. I noticed some wilt. Digging up a plant, I found an empty husk at the base. I dug up three more. Finally, I found the writhing white assassin within, in flagrante delicto. I went on a rampage. I crawled my way down the rows, digging up every onion showing the slightest sign of wilt. I squished more maggots than I care to think about. The remnants of my surplus transplants and the few remaining onion sets I planted in a fifty-foot emergency bed at the far end of the field. I hurriedly swaddled it in a row cover, looking over my shoulder as though I might catch sight of more maggots mustering.
In June I walked smugly among the potatoes. They were vividly green, lush, and unblemished by potato beetles or leafhoppers. In July we began to dig our potatoes. They seemed fine at first, albeit small from drought. Gradually, however, I began to notice the pockmarks and tunnels that scarred their surfaces. Some seemed almost eaten away, and occasionally an orange, segmented worm ducked into its hole when I held up a potato for scrutiny.
Ah yes, my cofarmers declared, we had wireworms, a common problem when pasture is transitioned into crops.
I, of course, having never before worked on fresh ground, had neither seen nor heard of wireworms. Not that it would have mattered much, my friends informed me, as only time and continued cultivation would alleviate the problem. We dug and sorted our small, wormy potatoes by hand, cursing the wireworms all the way.
June, July, and August all poured on the heat. The tomatoes flourished and the squash and melons grew like magical beanstalks. My fall brassicas — broccoli, cabbage, and kale — bore the brunt of the brutal temperatures. Hidden as they were beneath row cover, I irrigated them less often than I ought to have. To make matters worse, I didn’t secure the row covers tight against the ground. On blustery days I noticed the occasional hole in the fabric, edges that ballooned in a wind, and delicate white moths that surfed the breeze. Caught up in the weight of summer’s harvest, I ignored these warnings.
In August, I noticed fluttering beneath the fabric at the end of a row. When I pulled back the cover, a swarm of cabbage moths wafted toward the sun. Hundreds of dead moths lay on the ground beneath the brassicas, having beaten themselves to death against the fabric. And my plants? Holey, and wholly infested with the caterpillar predecessors to the moths. They nibbled the broccoli and crawled into the heads; they tunneled through the outer cabbage leaves; they nestled in the creases of the curly kale. After vigorous dunking to shake off interlopers and intense examination of each floret and leaf, I deemed some of the crop passable.
In midsummer, flipping through books on pest identification, prevention, and cure, I despaired. I felt as though the entire insect world was marshaling its forces against me, competing for every bite I could produce. I had nightmares of crop failures, disease, clouds of locusts blotting out the sun. Amid my tribulations, real and imagined, the miracle of that season was the miracle of every year on every farm: plan
ts wanting to grow.
The onion maggots? Gone as quickly as they had come (squished to death, I like to think). The remaining onions filled out round and plump and cured up nicely. With the advent of the cool fall weather and rain, the brassicas returned as if from the grave. They gave me crop after crop of bug-free broccoli, mountains of crisp kale, and enough cabbages to stink up a root cellar far larger than ours. The potatoes, alas, were a sorry crop: small or damaged or both. But we had planted such an inordinately large quantity of them that even after screening out the damaged tubers, we were never short on (small) potatoes.
I concluded the season in a far more stable state of mind than I began it. I try to remember that I can’t agonize over any single day of disaster, or a week of disasters, or even a bad year. I’m not a sorceress, responsible alone for the ripening of fruits and the swelling of roots. I’m feeding the soil of my farm — not the plants or the pests. I’m one player among many. In the long run, there are no free lunches on my land — not for bugs, not for crops, and certainly not for me.