2010 Schedule

This opening meeting will begin with a hands-on tractor safety training at 2 o'clock, followed by an informal pot luck meal where everyone can mingle and get to know each other. We will conduct a tour of our farm and farm systems directly following the 'training' (4ish) while dinner is being heated/set up.

If a girl from the suburbs of Philadelphia with a degree in Art History can start a farm from scratch with no infrastructure, no tools, and very little know-how, you can, too! Farm Girl Farm is a 2-acre vegetable CSA going into its third season. I have 60 members and also sell direct to about 20 local restaurants. I am mostly unmechanized and although expanding just a bit, am planning to stay very small scale. We’ll tour the farm and I’ll explain how each bit came to be what it is and where I hope to go. I will answer any and all of your questions frankly about how to get started on a shoe-string and where I found answers to my questions along the way.

Simple Gifts Farm is a small, diverse market and CSA farm in the process of a substantial ramping up of our capacity. We have been farming since 1999. In 2006, we moved the farm operation to a new site, started a 100-member CSA (now 350+), doubled our acreage in crops, and took on a bunch of infrastructure projects. The new farm is owned by a community land trust, with whom we have a long-term lease. The tour will cover the practical realities of taking on a major farm change, including land tenure, financing and business planning, both what we did at initial startup in 1999, and what we are doing now.

We will tour the pastures and explain our rotational grazing system for our dairy herd. The basic life cycles of a cow will be described, and we will form a picture of what it is like to work with animals on a larger scale. We will tour our compost piles, all made with materials from our farm. We will discuss some basics of a Biodynamic farm. We will tour our dairy processing plant, where we make yogurt and cheese from our milk. We will tour our kraut cellar, where we make raw, lacto-fermented vegetable products. We will discuss why it is important for this farm that we add value to our farm products.

We do appreciate CRAFT members arriving on time, (9am), to our visit. We will meet at the parking lot in front of the big red barn.

What is soil? What defines the quality of soil? How do you determine the quality of your soil? During the visit to Caretaker Farm we will discuss the importance of soil health for the sustainability of your farm. We will also tour the land and observe how our soil health fits into the environmental sustainability of the farm.

Our presentation will focus on season extension with heated and unheated hoop houses. We will also touch on our direct marketing techniques and briefly discuss our unique land tenure model.

This presentation will cover the techniques that can be used by vegetable growers to extend the harvest season in both the spring and fall. Methods covered will include plastic mulch, row covers, field tunnels and heated greenhouses. A power point presentation will be used to illustrate these methods and to provide detailed information about these systems. A tour of some of the Red Fire Farm fields and greenhouses where these methods are in use will conclude the presentation. Other relevant topics to Red Fire Farm's growing and marketing systems will also be touched on during this presentation.

Please meet in the loft of the west wing of the barn (over the wood shop area)

We will tour strawberry, blueberry, raspberry and apple plantings and give a walking presentation of our cultivation, organic disease and insect controls, and PYO and CSA sales of our fruit. The presentation will include precision cultivating tools that are part of our planting system and have some applicability to vegetable production. Time will be left for questions and discussion. If the strawberries are ripe and we are open for PYO, June 7 can be early in a cool year, participants are welcome to pick (and pay). We will meet in a field on the north side of the road through the farm, signs will indicate where to park.

We will discuss our use of four workhorses as the exclusive source of draft power on our farm. We will cover equipment and techniques for everything from primary tillage to bed forming, transplanting, cultivating, foliar feeding, mowing, crop harvesting, and more in the vegetable operation. We'll also touch on our process of harvesting loose hay to fuel the working herd. This visit will feature demonstrations of horse power on two to four different implements in the field. We will also discuss the use of cover crops to target a variety of goals such as improving soil structure, maintaining organic matter, controlling weeds, and creating beneficial habitat as well as our approach to managing soil fertility and plant health. Technical considerations will be shared in the context of the philosophy which shapes and guides our approach to steward the farm ecosystem.

I will discuss our use of horses as the exclusive source of draft power on our diversified farm for everything from primary tillage to bed forming, transplanting, cultivating, mowing, manure spreading, and more. This visit will feature demonstrations of horse-power on at least two different implements in the field. Technical considerations will be shared in the context of the philosophy that shapes and guides our approach to stewarding the farm ecosystem. Innovative and extensive cover-cropping as applied to the integrated market garden and livestock operation will also be a focus of our afternoon.

How do you grow 30 acres of organic vegetables and make money? Don't spend much on labor. And that means don't spend much on hand-weeding (which is most of your labor). And that means use mechanical means to cultivate your crops. And that means you need to understand a few basic principles to create your own mechanical cultivation system. We will go over the basic principles of mechanical cultivation (stale bedding, primary & secondary cultivation) and the tools and techniques that we have settled on to create our own system.

When I started this farm for the Sisters of Charity 10 years ago I farmed one acre with a walk behind rototiller and one part time helper. We had 40 CSA members and grew 20,000 pounds of vegetables. For many years now we have held steady at about 200 members, growing around 65,000 pounds of veggies on 6 acres (two in cover crops). These days I farm with two full season interns.

Regardless of our size, I have kept a careful eye on the importance of developing scale appropriate systems. As we tour the farm I will show you the various tools and equipment that have allowed us to efficiently work our land, while keeping it productive and relatively weed free.

At the early, low tech, end of the spectrum, I will show you the hand pushed rolling row markers I built the first year (one of which I still use today, mounted under a cub) and our various wheel hoes. I will also point out our more recent tool choices, including our 4 tractors, our brand new transplanter, our potato hillers, our sweeps and our Budding Basket Weeder.

Along the way I will try to stress the importance of developing a good plan for the farm and its systems so that the farm serves your life, and not the other way around.

What are the benefits and downsides to diversification? Our goal has been to create a balanced farming system that utilizes our land base to build healthy soil, healthy animals, healthy customers, and a healthy home based economy. We now raise vegetables for CSA, farmer's markets, and a farmstand, seedlings for our own production and sale, herbs, flowers, fruit, berries, sheep for meat and wool, cattle for beef, dairy, and draft power, chickens for eggs, hay and grain. We will look at ways to integrate livestock with crop production for fertility cycling, soil building, and weed control, niches for different types of livestock on a mixed farm, alternative forage and fodder crops for livestock (we're growing row crops anyway...), marketing a diversity of products, time management, and grain production. We have been involved in trialling heritage wheat varieties for the past several years, and will have around three dozen varieties of wheat, oats, and barley in our trials this year. Our goal is to develop appropriate, workable methods of harvesting and processing grains on a small commercial scale.