by Paula Manalo
* * *
It was eight o’clock in the evening and I was doing my rounds in the brooder, caring for the baby chicks, while Nate was doing his rounds with the older broilers outside. I could hear the wind picking up and remember saying to the little chicks, “Be glad you’re safe and cozy in here, little ones. It sounds wicked out there.”
Just then, Nate came blowing into the brooder building. “It’s crazy out there!” he said. “We’re going to lose the covers on the broiler pens if we don’t do something.” So we ran out to see what we could do.
I had never experienced weather like that before. An eerie darkness had taken over the farm, painting everything a deep purple. Our broiler pens were made of two cattle panels, bowed over to make a hoop structure and covered with recycled billboard vinyl. The ends of the vinyl were loose so that we could roll up the sides during the day and roll them down at night. The wind was blowing so hard that the ends were flapping, threatening to pull off the vinyl and make it fly away. Every time the wind blew, the chickens, terrified of the flapping noise, would cower in the corner and pile on top of each other. We knew we had to do something fast or they would smother each other to death.
Nate acted quicker that I’ve ever seen him move before. He punched holes in the ends of the vinyl sides and tied them to the pens so they couldn’t move. We had four pens of broilers, so we had to do everything quickly. The wind howled and roared while Nate worked and I tried to weight down the sides with cinder blocks. Running out of blocks, I threw my body across the last one and waited for him to finish. The wind blew so hard that it even moved me.
* * *
Tears streamed down my face and I couldn’t breathe. This was a huge blow.
* * *
We were in a pasture flanked by woods on two sides, and the trees were blowing around so fiercely that they were bending and creaking. I started imagining the worst, and I closed my eyes and said a prayer while Nate worked frantically. He finally finished, and the broilers seemed stable. It was well after ten o’clock when we accepted that we had done all we could and there was nothing to do but wait it out.
I didn’t want to leave our animals — that was our livelihood sitting out in that field — but it was starting to become dangerous for us. Branches and debris were flying everywhere. We barely slept that night, waking with every howl of the wind. It broke my heart to think of the animals being so scared. We didn’t know it yet, but we were being hit by hurricane Ike.
Morning came and we were afraid to walk outside.
This was our first year farming, and the learning curve was steeper than you can imagine. It was demanding, stressful, frustrating, exhausting, dirty, and beautiful all at the same time. When we took the leap into farming, overnight we became responsible for several hundred tiny little lives, and the weight of that responsibility was heavy. No matter what, our days were filled with hard work, and now the thought of anything being damaged and requiring more work was overwhelming. We couldn’t afford a setback at this point in the game.
We hopped on the four-wheeler and drove over to the animals. Our first stop was the layers. We had recently moved our first batch of hens into the Eggmobile that Nate had finished building only a month before. We weren’t prepared for what we were about to see.
In all the chaos of the night before, trying to save the broiler pens, neither of us thought to secure the Eggmobile. Ninety-mile-per-hour winds had lifted it up off the trailer it was on, rolled it 360 degrees, and crashed it down, right-side up, with all hundred of our girls inside. Hours and hours of Nate’s work, smashed.
I thought he would lose it right then and there. Still on the four-wheeler, he turned to look at me, his face white. Tears streamed down my face and I couldn’t breathe. This was a huge blow. We jumped off to check on the girls, hoping they were okay. Amazingly, every one of them had survived.
Once we knew they were all right, anger overcame Nate as he began to realize how much work lay ahead. And it wasn’t like the work could wait. Those hens needed their home to be fixed so they could sleep in it that night.
We moved on to the broilers, to find that they too had survived the night, with minimal damage to the pens: a gift, a small bit of mercy, from the hurricane.
Nate and I looked at each other, looked over our battered farm, and breathed deep. There was nothing to do but rebuild.
We gathered our tools and began again.
CHAPTER SIX
NUTS & BOLTS (& DUCT TAPE & BALING TWINE)
Growing food usually requires a lot of stuff. Besides our bodies, land, and water, raising crops and animals involves tools and infrastructure: hand tools, power tools, heavy equipment, vehicles, barns, fences, greenhouses, irrigation systems, coolers. No wonder farming requires so much capital when we don’t start off with all these things. What are we to do when we can’t afford these useful items brand-new?
We make it work! We use our hands and noggins to retrofit what’s available, keep on the lookout for used equipment, and create functional tools and fix-its with reusable sturdy things such as wooden pallets, cinder blocks, five-gallon buckets, and baling twine.
As for me, I feel most comfortable with the simple tools. I don’t shy away from hand tools, and power tools are fun, but I’m still getting comfortable with our tractors. When my partner and I bought our first one and were thinking about getting another, a friend asked if we really needed two. We actually have three now. But talking to our mentor farmers, whose diverse farms are thriving, we think we’re on the right track. The general idea is to use specific equipment for particular jobs that we can’t do by hand.
My partner and I have chosen to farm full time, and being in California, with so many bigger organic farms to compete with, we’ve had to scale up vegetable production and start growing our own animal feed to stay financially viable. I hope we’re staying true to the spirit of sustainability — creating fertility on the farm, preserving biodiversity, selling locally, and exploring the possibility of growing and making biodiesel for our tractors. Mechanization is not all about efficiency and the bottom line; we see it as keeping good farming and good food affordable and accessible.
For us, practicality came first in developing the physical basis of the farm. We couldn’t afford a new tractor, so we settled on the Ford 5600 built in 1981: It had the right horsepower and we got a great deal. Farming in an ecologically responsible way involves good timing, and when we need to get something done, we git ’er done! Having good organization and the right tools, we’re halfway there. That small window between rainstorms to cultivate a four-acre field would rapidly close if all we had was a rototiller.
With infrastructure planning, we can design for efficiency while making the farm beautiful. (Farmers are also artists.) In this chapter, the farmers illustrate their creativity and skill in making their tools work well to accomplish the job. There’s a mix of luck and disaster in trialing a new farm-made tool or using new equipment, but safety and staying focused on the task pay off. After all the experimentation, going the DIY route can be fun as we evolve or adapt systems, buildings, and equipment with the aim of improvement — and profit.
Not everyone is a confident carpenter, mechanic, electrician, or welder, but our peers, mentors, and local resources can impart solid advice and teach new skills, and will sometimes even do it for us. If you look closely, there’s a wonderful reflection of the farmer in the physical framework that he or she creates and uses to steward the land.
— Paula Manalo
On the Rise
* * *
BY SARAH HUCKA
With her brother, Joel, and the help of their parents, Sarah Hucka has been making a go of the true family farm in a quiet western Oregon valley for three years. They sell at three local farmers’ markets and through an ultra-local CSA, where many members walk or bike to pick up their produce.
* * *
The solar-energy expert at the desk of the alternative-energy store didn’t smile, and his eyes wer
e half closed as he spoke.
“I can schedule you for a consultation next week. Then, standard procedure is to draw a design and give you a cost estimate,” he said.
At least he was gracious enough to speak to my brother and me. When I first disrupted his stolid gaze, I feared he would be silent until coins were fed into a slot on the top of his head. This was the kind of alternative-energy store where you could compare bamboo to slate flooring while you have a solar hot-water system custom-designed. Never before had I had a reason to pass through its elegant doors.
“How much is the consultation?” I asked. Many of the pumps, panels, and inverters on display were worth more than my car. My brother’s motto around the farm was “Cheap is good, free is better.” Joel and I tried to do things ourselves, creating what we needed out of whatever the farm budget could afford. Occasionally we would spring for something complicated, high tech, or otherwise baffling. We were at the alternative-energy store to find out if our project was in or out of the “do-it-ourselves” category.
“My time is billed at forty-five dollars an hour,” the energy expert said. At least it was less than I had feared. We could afford to hire him for a day or two if we absolutely had to.
“What’s this over here?” My brother started walking toward the shelf where I’d seen a small pump. The expert didn’t follow, so Joel picked up the display pump and walked back to the desk.
“That’s an in-line pump. Eight-volt, DC.”
“How much does it cost?” Our question signaled what the expert already knew: We weren’t going to be big spenders.
“Two-hundred and twenty-nine dollars, and then you’ll need the four square-foot solar panel that goes with it, and a deep cell battery.”
Joel and I had researched how to heat our propagation greenhouse for better spring seed germination, and we thought we could use a pump to move warm water through hoses under the tables where the seedlings sit. Heating the bottoms of the trays is more efficient than heating the air, and cycling warm water seemed like a good way to distribute heat. Our farm is off the electric grid: thus my first visit to the alternative-energy store.
“Do you think this pump would move water through five hundred feet of hose?” I asked.
“I could sit down with you next week and figure out the numbers,” the expert said.
I wasn’t getting anything for free here. I gave a quick squinty smile and headed for the door.
“We’ll call if we decide to go that route,” I said, and walked outside.
Because that was the only alternative-energy store in the metropolis where we “go to town,” the next natural stop was the thrift store. I have the good fortune to be the sister and farming partner of an experienced thrift-store shopper — my brother can identify the function of tools in the bottom of the deepest bins, where store employees have hidden things after being asked too many times, “What’s this?” Sometimes Joel can’t resist buying these gizmos, so we have a box in the barn with antique cherry-pitters, apple-peelers, and lever-action can-crushers. The hand-crank ice-shaver is a nice novelty, though I’m not sure about the clothes iron that’s designed to contain an actual fire. Most of the farm tools and supplies in our shed are wonderfully useful and still bear their little red, yellow, or blue price tags for nostalgia.
We knew better than to rely on thrift stores for what we needed, but that day we needed a look around. Joel had already been at three of the four local thrift stores within the week, so we went to the one he’d missed. There weren’t any batteries out back, no electrical wire on the shelves. No half-price solar-powered pumps or any other miracles. Empty handed, we sat in his truck in the parking lot watching gray December raindrops smear the windshield.
“Well, I guess we could buy that pump,” he said. “But we’d need a lot more than one little solar panel and one battery in order to run it all night, especially as we need the thing on winter days when the sun doesn’t always shine,” Joel thought out loud. “We could try to run it off the big panels we already have, but they’re three hundred feet from where we need the pump.”
* * *
My brother’s motto around the farm was “Cheap is good, free is better.”
* * *
We already run our well pump with solar power. Those panels probably had power to share, especially for a small, eight-volt pump. But we hadn’t wired that system and didn’t know the slightest thing about getting power from the panels all the way to the greenhouse. I knew from researching the option of connecting the farm to the grid that electricity dissipates along the length of any given wire. Three hundred feet was a challenging distance, never mind a lot of wire priced by the foot.
Where to go now? We didn’t want to pay the consultation fee at the “green-means-dollars” store. That meant we’d have to turn this into a do-it-ourselves project and jump into the realm of the unknown. So, as much in search of inspiration as of information, we headed for the recycled-building-materials store.
The propane hot water heaters caught our attention on the open-air shelves. We’d crossed paths with steam radiators, but their world of elevated pressure and reinforced hose fittings was unfamiliar. Water seemed simpler. Now we just needed a way to circulate it through hoses under the seeding benches.
Joel stopped and turned to me. “Hot air rises, right?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything, not sure where the idea was going.
“And so does hot water. So what if the force of that heated water moving to a high point would be enough to generate circulation through our hoses?”
Physics was the only class I’d gotten less than a B in throughout my college career. And I didn’t get a C. It was a full-blown D.
I tried to give him an encouraging look. “Whatever you say.”
I was the one who would sow the seeds, after Joel solved our heating problem. Neither of us could run a farm without the other — I was the green thumb, he was the greasy one. He built tools and fixed machines; I kept the books and went to market. This project was obviously under Joel’s leadership.
“I think maybe if we get a short hot-water heater and slant our bench, this might work,” he said. “But the concept is so simple, it’s almost too good to be true.”
One thing I can do is research. After we priced some parts at the recycled-building-materials store, I went straight to the Internet. I discovered the fancy name for the simple idea: thermo-siphoning. We learned that thermo-siphoning is a functional tool for heating things such as the floors of a home. But the detailed designs that I found relied on a cold-water source, such as a well or spring to feed the system. This source should have some force behind it, like a pressure tank feeding a water heater. We wanted our system to run by itself, with the same water cycling through the hoses on its own. I referenced this idea as a possibility, but I couldn’t find any plans to follow that would ensure that our system would work. Joel would have to trust his belief that “hot water rises” and his love for tinkering to guide him through this project.
He started by laying out the hoses on the bench. Now, something warm needed to pass through them. He bought a length of copper tubing, coiled it into a funnel shape, and tried setting the wide end down on a propane burner. He hoped water inside it would be heated and rise through the coils, feeding a hose attached to the top. I don’t know why it didn’t work. I was a bystander, like the many neighbors who walk by our farm every day. We were all entertained by the clanging and muttering coming from the greenhouse, but we didn’t ask questions. All I know is that the copper coil was soon sitting in the rain outside the propagation greenhouse while Joel tinkered with various tanks of water inside.
“I have no idea if this will work,” he said one day, “but come help me straighten the hoses so we can try it.”
On the ground below the propagation bench, he had a propane two-gallon water heater from an old RV. Various hose fittings came off the tank and fed five different hundred-foot garden hoses circling the surface of the bench.
All the hoses eventually fed into a barrel of cold water, which, via a short hose connection, was the inlet back to the hot-water heater. We turned on the water heater and waited. After fifteen minutes, its thermostat clicked off the flame. The water inside had heated, but it wasn’t moving through the hoses.
“Maybe we need to prime the system — make sure there’s no air blocking the flow, and get it moving initially,” Joel said. “Then it should propel itself. So, when I say so, turn on the spigot.”
I opened the valve and waited. At Joel’s yell, I turned if off again and rejoined him at the bench. Then we waited. The self-sufficient flow of hot water through the hoses was very slow. To know if the water was moving on its own, we had to wait a few hours and then check the temperature along the length of the hoses.
For the next five days, we monitored and experimented constantly, even checking the hoses a few times each night. We found that air bubbles in the hoses would stop the flow of hot water. We started a daily routine of flushing out air that accumulated, even during normal operation. We played with hose layout and length to achieve the least amount of resistance for the water. We adjusted the outlets from the hot-water tank, so that each hose had an equal opportunity for hot water to rise into it. And eventually, we were satisfied with the result.
We arranged the hoses one last time and covered them with perlite. We covered that with a piece of black plastic to keep the perlite dry. Finally I started seeding into trays. We achieved consistent soil temperatures of 65 to 70°F in the trays and air temperatures in the greenhouse of 50 to 55°F at night.
We’re experts at it now. I’m thinking of billing other farmers when I explain the whole system to them. About forty-five dollars an hour sounds good.