Harmony Valley Farm

Harmony Valley Farm

by | Dec 15, 2021

Harmony Valley Farm

Harmony Valley Farm co-owners Raphael Morales Peralta, Richard de Wilde and Andrea Yoder. Credit: Harmony Valley Farm.

“

In August of 2007 we got hit really hard with some really weird flooding caused by 18 inches of rain in a less than a 24-hour period. A lot of crops were peaking just then, like tomatoes. We had pretty big losses because a lot of our farm land is along the Bad Ax River. They called that a thousand year event. And then we had another one nine months later. That was when I said, ‘There’s no such thing as normal anymore’.

Richard DeWilde

Harmony Valley Farm

Website: https://www.harmonyvalleyfarm.com

Midwest Region | Viroqua, WI

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 200 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Social recovery reserves, add cooling, low growing cover crops, shift from compost/cover crops to fertilizer w/crop testing, retreat from floodplains.

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Harmony Valley Farm Facebook 

Organic produce likes healthy soil 

This story is based on a 2013 interview, updated in 2020.

Harmony Valley Farm is a diversified farm that spreads out over 200 acres of cropland, pastures and forest near Viroqua in southern Wisconsin, about two hours northwest of Madison. Richard de Wilde and Andrea Yoder, the co-owners manage the production of about 100 acres of organic vegetables and berries at the farm and on some leased land nearby.

Richard is a cofounder and master grower at Harmony Valley Farm, established in 1985, and applies his forty-plus years of farming experience to the integrated management of a healthy natural growing environment on the farm. Richard has always made managing for soil health a priority, believing it to be a key contributor to the success of the farm. Over the years, he has developed a system of cover cropping with green manures, applying natural rock powders and incorporating compost to maintain healthy soils. He controls pest by managing perennial habitat and nesting sites for beneficial wildlife including raptors, songbirds, bats, wasps and insects. Harmony Valley Farm is best known for its season-long, high-quality salad mix, sauté greens and spinach, as well as root crops harvested in the fall and distributed throughout the winter. The farm also produces grass-finished beef using intensive grazing practices.

Harmony Valley Farm sells organic produce, berries and beef through direct and wholesale markets, including a 1500-member CSA that runs from May through January with deliveries locally and to Madison, WI, and Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. The farm also sells at the weekly Dane County Farmers Market, and to retail grocers and wholesale distributors throughout a large area from the Twin Cities to Madison. It employs a large team that varies from fifteen to sixty members, depending on the time of year, to produce and market its products.

Starting about seven or eight years ago, changing weather began to require some changes in production practices at the farm. More frequent heavy rains and stronger winds, more variable springs, warmer summers and longer falls have complicated vegetable production, according to Richard. “River bottom land is the best kind of land for growing vegetables in our area. And it’s great in dry periods, because we can irrigate out of the river.”

But the farm’s million dollars in losses in 2007 and 2008 as a result of unprecedented flooding really got Richard’s attention. “Not many people understand that vegetable farmers have little to no insurance against weather. We can participate in the USDA’s NAP program and we do. N-A-P is the abbreviation for Noninsured Agricultural Production. Noninsured meaning it’s not corn, soybeans, cotton, wheat. It’s not a commodity. NAP is a poor program. It is. It’s totally inadequate and we really don’t have much else. After the flood in 2007, USDA did not help us out. But if you’re a corn farmer, you can buy government-supported, 90-percent-guaranteed income on the corn crop. It’s gross. We should care more about feeding people than raising corn for export and ethanol and corn syrup.”

Richard remembers when weather used to move pretty predictably from west to east. During the 2007 flooding, he noticed for the first time a weather pattern that he associates with severe weather. “Something that I had never seen before the 2007 flood is a pattern of southerly flow bringing moisture up the Mississippi River Valley. The moisture turned in a circle before it hit the Great Lakes and then it just looped back on us and didn’t stop. It just didn’t move off and that’s why we got eighteen inches of rain. Now we have these weird looping events. I’ve seen it several times since and now it just scares me when I see that loop.”

Other than the extreme flooding events, most of the changes in weather Richard has observed are more severe expressions of familiar seasonal patterns. For example, extreme swings in the timing of spring are more common these days. For many years, spring planting at Harmony Valley Farm began reliably in the first week in April, but in the last decade it has begun to vary by almost a month, which increasingly complicates spring planning and transplant production. Falls generally are longer but more variable, so Richard has extended the fall production season “knowing that we are going to get burned sometimes.”

Richard also has noticed that winds seem to have become more frequent and intense. “Strong winds have definitely become more of a factor in the last few years. We have more wind and stronger wind. We lose row covers more often now. We’ve had more problems with row covers — even if they’d stayed on, there were so much wind that the movement of the cover abraded the leaves and so we have crop damage even under the cover, even if the cover stays on. In the winter, it used to be that the winds died down at night. This winter we’ve had an amazing amount of night winds and that brings more risk of wind chill.”

Looking back on the years since 2013, Richard recalls that 2014, 2015 and 2016 were “pretty good years” at Harmony Valley Farm and he was able to “save money for a rainy day.” And it was good that he did, because over the next four years, Richard says the weather took a turn for the worst.  “We’ve had four extremely cold, wet springs in row,” he explains, “and every single one set a record for the latest first day in the field. But then, not very long after that, it turned so hot that it was unbelievable.”

Three of these four years, flooding repeatedly damaged creek banks and low-lying fields, including one storm in 2018 that washed away five acres of top soil from one of Richard’s best fields. This combination of cold, wet conditions and extreme temperature shifts in the spring, plus heavier rains late into the fall created a number of disruptions in crop nutrition, crop pollination and harvest operations.

Richard has managed the crop nutrition challenges by making a shift from providing nutrients to his crops with fall-applied compost and winter cover crops to applying fertilizers during the spring and summer growing seasons based on regular crop testing. “We were seeing nutrient deficiencies that just did not make sense. We had problems that we’ve never seen before, fertility problems that shouldn’t have been there because there was plenty of nutrients in the soil. We were able to correct it pretty easily by applying fertilizers through our drip (irrigation) tape, but we have almost twice the fertilizer bill in these really heavy wet years as what we normally would.”

Generally wetter conditions through much of the growing season got Richard and his management team thinking about how to protect the soil from erosion during heavy rains and at the same time improve conditions for fieldwork. “We are developing a whole new system of low growing ground cover for the area in between our beds,” Richard explains. “Our beds are raised a little, and that’s a good thing because the water runs off the bed right away, but we were losing so much soil off of almost level fields with all the heavy rain. We went to this system of planting a mix of the shortest white Dutch clover we could find and the shortest grass that we know – creeping red fescue – in between the beds.” Richard says that they still have a few challenges with this new system to figure out, but it has reduced soil erosion, plus “for harvest, it’s really pleasant. You’re not walking in mud, you’re walking on the lawn.”

Damaging flooding has required more attention to cleaning up the creeks and dry washes that run through the farm to reduce the chances of water building up behind floating debris and overflowing into adjacent farm fields during heavy rains. Richard has abandoned several fields that have repeatedly flooded over the last five years and converted one flood-prone field from annual vegetable production to permanent pasture which is leased to a neighboring dairy farmer for custom grazing. “We said no more, three strikes and you’re out,” Richard explains. We are just not going to farm it anymore if it floods.”

Richard has always viewed good management as the most important part of cultivating climate resilience at Harmony Valley Farm. He appreciates the energy and enthusiasm for figuring out how to manage new weather challenges that the younger farmers on his management team bring to their work. “They’re not set in their ways,” Richard says. “They don’t have a preconceived notion about how it’s going to be. They are just learning and they are willing to try anything. I’m not sure I’d keep doing it if it wasn’t for them.”

One of these younger farmers, Raphael Morales, recently became the newest partner in Harmony Valley Farm.  After working 10 years on the farm as an H-2A temporary worker, Richard sponsored Raphael for a permanent visa. “Now he can be here year-around,” Richard explains, “which is what you need to be able  run a farm.”

Richard de Wilde has received national recognition for his long record of success as an organic grower and as a CSA marketer with a Sustie Award from the Ecological Farming Association and a Farmer of the Year award from the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service, both in 2003.  Harmony Valley Farm was profiled as one of sixty model U.S. sustainable farms and ranches in the USDA-SARE publication, The New American Farmer: Profiles of Agricultural Innovation.

CS Ranch

CS Ranch

by | Dec 15, 2021

CS Ranch

Julia Davis Stafford, CS Ranch, Cimarron, New Mexico. Credit: Julia Stafford.

“

We have several rivers that run through the ranch and during all of my childhood and young adolescence the rivers were always flowing. You could count on them as a source of water for livestock. That has definitely changed over the last few years. The rivers now routinely dry up in stretches and that has been devastating in terms of pasture use. So we have had to really scramble to address our water system where always before the rivers ran through most of the pastures.

Julia Davis Stafford

CS Ranch

Website: http://www.cscattle.com

Southwest Region | Cimarron, NM

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 138,000 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Holistic management, dynamic stocking, shift to no-till and to multi-use perennial forage species in irrigated pastures, add local foods café in nearby town.

Story featured in Resilient Agriculture (1st Edition)

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21st Century Ranching Requires Diversification–CS Cattle Company 

Julia Davis Stafford, CS Ranch, Watershed Management 

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Trailer for Rethinking Beaver: old nuisance or new partner?

The Working Wilderness 

This story is based on a 2013 interview.

The CS Ranch is located on 130,000 acres of upland shortgrass prairie at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northeastern New Mexico. Cattle and quarter horses have been the focus of production since the ranch was established by Frank Springer in 1873. Today, Julia Davis Stafford and her five siblings, Springer’s great-grandchildren, work together to manage cattle production and marketing, farming, hunting and quarter horse production.

Julia was raised on the ranch and has actively worked with her family to manage the cow/calf and stocker enterprises for more than thirty years. She takes the lead on strategic planning and water resource management for the ranch, and manages cattle production on the headquarters division near Cimarron. Julia uses planned grazing practices to raise cattle on native grasslands and improved hayfields, which are irrigated from the Cimarron River.

For many years, the cowherd numbered between 2,500 and 3,000 head, but fifteen years of continued drought have forced Julia to destock the ranch, and today the herd is down to about 850 head. CS Ranch sells cattle mostly into wholesale markets with some direct sales locally.

Over the years, long-term weather challenges on the ranch have included variability in precipitation, dry periods and drought. Because grassland production depends entirely on precipitation, either as rain or snow, dry periods and drought are challenging because the grasslands are so responsive to variations in precipitation. Wind also creates some challenges, because it tends to both dry out grassland through evaporative loss and cause soil erosion. Variability in winter snow is particularly challenging because the snowpack that builds up over winter in the mountains is the main source of river water on the ranch.

“New Mexico is very arid to begin with and cyclical drought is very common here, so what I think of as our average annual precipitation is about fourteen to sixteen inches of rainfall,” Julia explains. “That’s what we hope for. Most of our ranch is upland shortgrass prairie, and we have a little bit of irrigated ground along the rivers that we mostly use to graze and raise hay for winter feed. Keeping the hayfields alive in times of drought is really tough. So that’s led to us selecting varieties that are drought tolerant and trying to minimize tillage so that we can increase soil organic matter and develop better soil health to make the most of what moisture we do get.”

The hayfields used to be flood irrigated, but over the years water-efficient, center-pivot irrigation has been installed in most of them. The water supply on the ranch is almost entirely from surface waters fed by meltwater from the winter snowpack in the nearby mountains. “The winter snowpack has been slim to none over the past ten years,” said Julia. “Over the last decade of drought, the flood-irrigated areas have received water only sporadically. So a lot of the improved grass species, the bromes and orchard grass and those sorts of species, have disappeared, because we simply run out of water and can’t irrigate enough to keep them alive.”

Julia has noticed many other changes in weather in the past decade or so, particularly more variable precipitation and more extreme drought, warmer winters, and more wind. “Over time we tend to go in about ten-year cycles,” she explains. “But I think this drought has been longer than the last recorded cycle.” Julia has also noticed that winters have gotten warmer since she was a kid. “I couldn’t tell you exactly how much warmer in terms of degrees or anything, but it does seem that the winter temperatures have gotten warmer and we have less snow. Summer temperature is possibly warmer too, but that hasn’t struck me as being as noticeable as the wintertime temperature changes.” Winds, always a part of life in northern New Mexico, are different these days as well, according to Julia. “It seems like when I was a kid that wind blew mostly in the spring and the month of March was always very windy, but now it seems like the real strong windy times have increased and are more common throughout the year.”

These changes in weather have caused Julia to make some adjustments in production, most notably the reduction in herd size, but also in the management of the irrigated hayfields. “We’ve shifted very much over to a no-till type of approach under the center pivots,” said Julia. “Before, when we would plow up an alfalfa field, we would plant wheat and graze it periodically before planting a hayfield again, but we are going now to less and less planting or plowing, just less soil disturbance overall. We have shifted more to no-till and we are using perennial varieties that are good for both grazing and for making hay. The more that I’ve learned about soil health, the more obvious it has become that the less disturbance, the better. Having a permanent crop is better for the soil, better for the water, just better all the way around.”

Julia says that other ranchers in her community perceive many of the same changes in weather. Talking about the drought is “the first and automatic topic of conversation,” she says. “Everybody is bemoaning the drought. I would say that besides the drought being of tremendous concern, other ranchers also agree that that we just don’t have winters and the snowpack like we used to. And everyone is complaining about the wind. There is a very definite feeling of anxiety among other farmers and ranchers and townspeople around here about the lack of water, because many of the towns are facing water rationing and dwindling supplies and that sort of thing. People are leaving towns in this area and moving to metropolitan areas. I’m sure that weather is a factor in this because as agriculture decreases, business and prosperity in the area decline. There is definitely the perception that this is the worst drought that anybody has ever experienced.”

Julia says that the continuing drought has created some concern about the future at the CS Ranch. “I’d say there is anxiety over wondering, ‘Is this the new normal?’ There is just a real awareness that if you continue to destock, at a certain point, how can the ranch keep going with fewer and fewer cattle? We are also concerned about the impact on our livelihoods and on our employees. We haven’t really done any thinking ahead ten years and asking the question, ‘What are we going to do if things keep going this way?’

Thinking about the future, Julia feels fairly confident in the management practices she uses to reduce the risks of weather variability and extremes, particularly planned grazing, soil health, water conservation and the use of drought-tolerant forage varieties and cattle that are well adapted to the region. Julia says that if climate change continues to intensify, she’ll likely just continue to destock the ranch, figure out how to cut back on the need for irrigation and how to supply water to the remaining stock if surface waters were to fail.

Julia also plans to keep learning how to improve existing management practices and about new practices through participation in groups like the Quivira Coalition. “What is always tremendously encouraging to me is just the networking at these various agricultural gatherings, talking to people, and going to listen to them speak,” Julia explains. “Sometimes, particularly just after I get home from a Quivira Coalition conference, I feel we’ll be able to sort through this and go on just fine. And sometimes I feel really anxious about how we will keep going on if these same patterns — the drops in moisture and increasing temperatures — continue. If they continue to play out on those same paths, it’s going to be very tough in not very long.”

Julia has been actively involved in community-based governance of regional water issues for many years. She has served on the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, as a board member of the Cimarron Watershed Alliance and as a member of the Western Landowners Alliance. She is an active member of the Quivira Coalition.

 

Full Belly Farm

Full Belly Farm

by | Dec 14, 2021

Full Belly Farm

Judith Redmond, Andrew Brait, Dru Rivers, and Paul Muller, Full Belly Farm, Guinda, California. Credit: Paolo Vescia.

“

A lot of our practices are focused on conserving water. How do we capture the water that does fall on the ground, so it doesn’t run off, so that it goes into the soil? How do we make the water that we have go further? Water is the critical piece here in California.

Paul Muller

Full Belly Farm

Website: https://fullbellyfarm.com

Southwest Region | Guinda, CA

Main Product: Vegetables, Flowers

Scale: 400 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Diversification, water conservation,  drought-resistant cover crops, farming seasonal edges, riparian restoration.

Story featured in Resilient Agriculture (1st Edition)

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CAFF Podcast: Full Belly Farm  11/21

Daily Democrat: Full Belly Farm Owner Talks Challenges 8/21

California State University, Chico: Paul Muller, Full Belly Farm 2020

Environmental Defense Fund: Full Belly Farm: The model for innovation during drought 2015

This story is based on a 2014 interview, with a 2022 update.

Full Belly Farm, in the Capay Valley of Northern California, is a 400-acre diversified organic farm raising more than eighty different crops, including vegetables, herbs, nuts, flowers, fruits, grains and livestock. The farm landscape is home to a diverse interweaving of perennial orchards, annual crops and pastures, plus hedgerows and riparian areas managed as habitat for beneficial insects, native pollinators and wildlife. First established by Paul Muller and Dru Rivers in 1984, Full Belly Farm has involved an active partnership since 1989 among four owners who live in three households on or close to the farm: Paul Muller, his wife Dru Rivers, Judith Redmond and Andrew Brait.

Full Belly Farm was designed to be ecologically diverse to foster sustainability on all levels, from healthy soil to content consumers, a stable, fairly compensated workforce, year-round cash flow and an engaging workplace that renews and inspires everyone working on the farm. The productivity of the diversified organic system is based on the use of cover crops and the integration of sheep and poultry to capture and cycle crop nutrients and water, maintain soil health and prevent losses from pests and disease. Virtually all of the production on the farm is irrigated, mostly with water from Cache Creek, which runs along one side of the property.

The farm sells to a diverse mix of direct and wholesale markets in the San Francisco Bay area that includes restaurants, grocers, farmers’ markets and a 1,500-member CSA . Full Belly also supports a number of outreach programs to help create awareness of the importance of farms to all communities.

According to Paul Mueller, three years of extreme drought coupled with dryer and warmer winters, longer and more variable spring and fall seasons and greater weather extremes have created both opportunity and challenge on Full Belly Farm. “The last couple of years we have had the driest January and February on record. That’s the time of year we normally get the moisture that goes deep in the ground, the moisture that serves as the reservoir for our crops that come in the spring. They get their roots down deep and draw on that water. The last couple of years, it just hasn’t been there.”

Declining water supplies have made growing the cover crops so crucial to building soil quality and providing nutrients for crops more challenging. Increased weather variability has made planning and conducting fieldwork more difficult by reducing the periods when work can be done without damaging soils and crops. Paul explains, “Normally we can’t prepare ground for planting in February, but it is so dry now that we can. The challenge is that you’ve got to get your groundwork done as early as possible and when the time is right. We used to get light rains in fall that moistened things up and made large windows to prepare ground, but now variability has narrowed windows and made them less predictable.”

The longer, more variable springs and falls have complicated crop management, but also created opportunities by increasing the length of time the farm can produce valuable spring and fall crops. “The way I look at it is, we are gambling more on the edges. Summer temperatures have been relatively stable, so we can hit our main summer season, but now our main season shifts a couple of weeks forward or backward but those summer crops — melons, tomatoes, beans, peppers — remain the same. If spring weather is unseasonably hot, our spring will end sooner than we thought. If our summer is unseasonably long, then tomatoes will go longer, but the fall crops won’t do quite so well because we did not get them planted early enough. And maybe in mid-winter, the January, February crop mix, if it’s unseasonably warm, we’ll harvest more crops in those months than we normally do. Our crop mix is not changing a lot, but we’re more conscious of how we plan for the edges.” Paul goes on to say that increased weather variability means the edges can have “bigger bounces” and more extreme swings, but that the farmers can push the edges, and sometimes they do really well.

Although water conservation has always been a management focus at Full Belly Farm, heavier rainfall, longer dry periods and continuing drought have encouraged even more thinking about sustainable water management. Paul says that the management team is considering changing up their crop mix to include more drought-tolerant cover crops and is exploring potential cover crops that do better on less water or produce more with the same amount of water than their current cover crops. They are also looking at ways to use cover crop mulches to conserve soil moisture and are weighing the costs and benefits of more water-efficient irrigation systems such as drip and microsprinklers; these involve significant initial investment and add management challenges because they require filtered water, which the farm does not need now.

The managers are also working on landscape-scale improvements in water management. The main water source, Cache Creek, drains a large watershed above the farm. The low fields near the creek are kept in winter cover crops to reduce soil loss in the event of a flood, which would be most likely to occur during heavy winter rains. The farm also actively manages riparian zones along the creek so that when it overflows its banks, flood waters will move over the lower parts of the farm without damaging production areas.

Looking to the future, Paul expressed a number of concerns about the lack of coordinated planning for agricultural adaptation to climate change in his region and elsewhere. He also believes that the recent spike in farmland prices in Northern California is related to climate change. “Investors and growers are moving into more water-secure areas if they can. Other growers are trying to secure water access in other ways. For example, many are investing in deeper wells, even though that reduces water available to other farmers. There is a collision of interests that farmers are starting to pay attention to.”

He suggests that Northern California could reap huge dividends from an investment in a coherent rangeland management strategy designed to improve the health of the regional water cycle.

According to Paul, the new FDA food safety rule conflicts with current water recycling programs and could further restrict water availability in his region. “A lot of the FDA food safety rules are predicated on the assumption of an abundant resource, a stable water supply and a stable climate.” Paul would like to see more programs with NRCS to look at climate threats and develop strategies to create a balance of ecological health and farm protection. “There was a study from Stanford a number of years ago that said that agriculture is being overlooked as a sector that, one, has the largest impact on land use in the country, but two, doesn’t have a coherent strategy as to how they address rising CO2 levels. So maybe under that corn in the Midwest, there could be clover growing, so that as that corn’s done, the clover’s there. And it’s sequestering carbon all fall, and into the spring it starts again. And maybe we invest in other equipment that will allow that to happen, rather than just using herbicides. Let’s take a serious look at polycultural systems and other multilayered systems that provide greater ecological services in terms of sequestering carbon and enhancing climate resilience, and let’s pay farmers for using those practices.”

In the years since this 2014 interview,  Full Belly’s focus on food and farming designed to promote the health of land, people and community has served the farm well through a series of unprecedented disturbances and shocks: continuing drought, wildfires and a global pandemic.   Judith Redmond stepped down from active management of the farm and Paul and Dru’s children, Amon and Jenna Muller, have joined the partnership team.  Paul has continued to explore soil management practices that sequester carbon and enhance climate resilience, most recently as a recipient of a USDA Conservation Innovation Grant to explore no-till management options for the farm. 

In a January 17, 2022 News from the Farm blog post on Full Belly Farm’s website, Paul shares some of the questions ahead in the new growing season. “This week on the farm,” Paul writes, “talk is turning to planning as we begin our annual cycle once again.  We will meet for collective crystal ball gazing and we will go over each crop for a thumbs-up or down, mapping a strategy for this year’s production. Plans are also being mulled over for cover crops, soil improvements, new biological fertility amendments and strategies to enhance our farm’s resilience. This week we try to hone quantities to plant, project market changes that include CSA numbers, and determine the balance between sales to wholesalers, restaurant and local stores and direct to customers.” 

“We must balance that prognostication,” Paul continues, “with the anticipation of crew size. We realize that our 80 or so core workers are all are a year older with changing capacities to be physically able to plant, tend, harvest and pack. There are new labor laws increasing minimum wage and rules changing overtime for farm workers that need to fit into both plans and budgets. These laws are just and past due, but they certainly complicate the budgeting for a farm where labor is near 40 % of our annual expenses. We always add workers returning here in the busier summer months, yet there are fewer farm workers to do the jobs of harvest and stewarding California’s fields, making competition for field workers a critical unknown.”

The farm’s co-owners have collected numerous awards over the years for their success in creating an exemplary model of sustainable agriculture. In 1999, Paul and Dru were named Outstanding Farmers of the Year by the University of California Small Farm Program. Full Belly Farm has been recognized for their leadership in sustainable and organic farming with a 2005 Steward of Sustainable Agriculture or “Sustie” award from the Ecological Farming Association, the 2006 USDA Patrick Madden Award , a Growing Green Award from the NRCD in 2009, and the Leopold Conservation Award in 2014.

Nash’s Organic Produce

Nash’s Organic Produce

by | Dec 14, 2021

Nash’s Organic Produce

Nash Huber and Patty McManus-Huber, Nash’s Organic Produce, Sequim, Washington. Credit: Patty McManus-Huber.

“

Winters are warmer, falls are wetter, and summers are more unpredictable. The challenge is just the instability of not being able to know where we are headed.

Nash Huber

Nash’s Organic Produce

Website: http://nashsorganicproduce.com

Northwest Region | Sequim, WA

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 1000 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Add equipment, double scale, shift to food and feed grains, drop fresh produce and close on-farm grocery.

Story featured in Resilient Agriculture (1st Edition)

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A Taste Of The Land: Nash’s Organic Produce Grows In Fertile Dungeness Soil

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Sequim’s Resident Idealist

This story is based on a 2013 interview with a 2021 update.

Nash Huber has been farming in the north of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula for more than forty years. Over that time, Nash has assembled a productive and profitable organic farm that produces an incredible diversity of foods marketed year-round from the farm and to wholesale and direct markets in the Seattle region. Together with a permanent crew of twenty-five that grows to forty during the peak of the growing season, Nash produces organic vegetables and fruits, food and feed grains, pork and poultry and a variety of vegetable and cover crop seeds on 450 acres of prime farmland, much of it leased and most of it protected by conservation easements.

Nash uses diverse rotations, cover crops, insectary plantings and farm-made compost to create the biodiversity and soil quality needed to provide nutrients, conserve water and reduce pest pressures and keep the farm productive and profitable. The farm receives an annual average of seventeen inches of rain and all its production is irrigated with surface waters replenished each year by snowmelt from the mountains to the south.

Nash Huber first started noticing changes in the weather in the early 1990s. The growing season seemed to lengthen as winters grew warmer, spring temperatures and precipitation grew more variable and fall grain and seed harvests were increasingly disturbed by more frequent fall moisture. “It seems like our springs have gotten longer, cooler and wetter. We always used to get nice warm weather in late April and May. We haven’t gotten anything like that in years. Quite often, spring will start sometime between the middle of January and the middle of March and it’s really variable. It can have too much swing and that really puts the squeeze on us.”

Wetter springs complicate the management of spring crops for a number of reasons. Wide swings in the timing of the spring warm-up make it difficult to plan a spring planting schedule, and wet conditions increase the difficulty of killing cover crops and preparing soils for spring planting in a timely manner as well as complicating weed management. “The weeds love to come on in spring time. If you can’t get into the field and cultivate in a timely manner, you got increased weed pressure.” Cool, wet conditions also increase disease pressures in spring crops, slow crop growth and lengthen time to harvest.

Highly variable summers and increased moisture in the fall have a big impact on the farm’s most valuable products — grains and seeds. September weather used to be predictable, Nash explains: “You could count on thirty days of clear, sunny weather, but it is no longer that way. It used to be that our marine fog didn’t start to show itself until the middle of August. It would come in a little bit in the morning and now, we begin to see that in the middle of July. Now we begin to get showers in late August and September and that has really impacted the harvest season since we grow so much seed and grain. It’s become difficult to get those crops dried down so that we can harvest them.” Much of the “produce” on Nash’s farm comes in the form of seeds — livestock feed, food grains, cover crop and vegetable seeds grown on contract for commercial seed companies. “Our seed crops have become very difficult because of the instability in September. We lost a beet seed crop last year, a very valuable seed crop, because of the rain in September.”

More variable weather has not caused a change in the crop mix on Nash’s farm, but has forced him to buy more tractors, tools, processing equipment and combines to take advantage of increasingly narrow windows of time when conditions are right for planting, cultivating for weeds, applying compost or harvesting crops. “We switch out crops depending on how the weather is affecting our ability to do fieldwork. For example, if we can’t get into the field early enough in the fall, we put in barley instead of wheat. It’s very, very quick decision-making. We have a generalized pattern and then we switch up the crops depending upon what fields we can get into, when we can get into them and how much of each grain that we need.”

Like most growers in the Fruitful Rim, Nash irrigates all of his crops. “We have a very sophisticated irrigation system here on the north peninsula. The mountains store the snow and then in the spring and the summertime we use that water for irrigation. Last year [2013] my farm got five and a half inches of rain the whole year. Our normal is around twice that. We get good spring snow in the mountains, which allows us to irrigate crops all summer long. If we don’t get that snow then we’re in the same problem that they have in California now.”

Thinking about the future, Nash wonders how warmer winters and competition for water might affect his farm and others in his region. “If we don’t get the snowpack, we don’t have water. Change in water access is one thing that could really impact the farm — it is the 900-pound gorilla in the room that nobody is talking about.”

In the years since 2013, changing market conditions, difficulties finding experienced labor, and an opportunity to expand the farm’s land base have driven major change at Nash Organic Produce. Because of declining profits in retail sales of fresh organic produce, Nash reduced his produce acreage by 70% and shifted the remaining vegetable acres to a limited number of vegetable crops that could be fully mechanized.

Weather patterns have not changed much over the last decade, except that they seem to Nash to have become a bit more stable in recent years – more like weather was during his first 25 years farming. The extreme weather creating challenges in the Northwest since 2015 has not created any new challenges on his farm. He appreciates the resilience benefits to his operations of the buffering effect of the Pacific – which surrounds his farm on three sides – plus 30 years of local private-public cooperation to secure sustainable water supplies for agriculture.

Nash currently has about 1000 acres in production, including about 700 acres in food and feed grains such as triticale, perennial rye, wheat, barley and oats, 30 acres in root crops like carrots, rutabagas, turnips, and parsnips, and the remaining acres in vegetable seed crops, hay, pasture, wildlife habitat and buffers. He produces and direct markets certified organic food grains, vegetable seeds, fresh vegetables, and pasture-based eggs and pork.

Nash has received regional and national recognition for his work to conserve natural resources while growing abundant high-quality food. He is a recipient of the 2008 Steward of the Land award from the American Farmland Trust and a Steward of Sustainable Agriculture or “Sustie” award from the Ecological Farming Association in 2011. He was the first active farmer to receive a Pioneer award from the Natural Products Association Northwest in 2014.

Happy Cow Creamery

Happy Cow Creamery

by | Dec 12, 2021

Happy Cow Creamery

Tom Trantham, Happy Cow Creamery, Pelzer, South Carolina. Credit: Cooking Up a Story.

“

Really, we see some drought and hot temperatures every year.  This year (2013) is the first year that we haven’t really had a drought.   This year it has been really wet.  We had the rain, but we also didn’t have the sun, so we had two big problems.   I’m 72 years old and I’ve never seen as much rain in a year in my life, anywhere.  It really affected my crops.  Our hay was 9 percent protein. It would normally have been 18 or 20.  Like I say, never in my life have I endured that much rain.

Tom Trantham

Happy Cow Creamery

Website: https://www.happycowcreamery.com

Southeast Region | Pelzer, South Carolina

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 90 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to intensive grazing pasture-cropping “12 Aprils” production system, on-farm processing, on-farm store and local wholesale.

Story featured in Resilient Agriculture (1st Edition)

Get Downloadable Story PDF

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Gov. presents Tom Trantham with Order of the Palmetto

What Can Farmers Do About Climate Change? Dynamic Cropping Systems: Tom Trantham’s Story

Meet Tom Trantham, Farmer of the Year 

Happy Cow Creamery: The Milk Process 

12 Aprils Year Around Grazing 

30 Days: Tom Trantham, 12 Aprils Farm

This story is based on a 2014 interview.

When Tom Trantham got into the dairy business in 1978, there were more than five hundred dairies in South Carolina; in Greenville County, where Tom’s farm is located in the upstate region near Pelzer, there were thirty. Today, there are just sixty dairies in all of South Carolina and Tom’s Happy Cow Creamery is the only one left in his county. What made Tom Trantham different? Why is he still producing milk on a small family dairy farm when so many others failed?

Like many American farmers feeling the pain of consolidation in the agricultural sector the 1980s, Tom was producing a lot of milk but barely turning a profit. “I went through some really rough times in those days, we all did,” he recalls. “I know there were more suicides and broken homes and divorces and bankruptcies in the ‘80s, because our parity was taken away from us in 1981. After that, corporate America priced our product and whatever they said it was worth is what we got paid. You never knew what you were going to be paid or how the price was set. You didn’t have any control of your product. So it went from a wonderful family life to an almost impossible life.”

Although Tom had long been among the top industrial milk producers in South Carolina, rising feed and farm chemical costs and falling prices left him with few options when he was refused an operating loan in 1987. Tom could see no way to continue in the dairy business. One sunny April morning that year, his cows broke through a fence to graze a mix of rye grass, clover and fescue that Tom had left standing because he couldn’t afford the seed and fertilizer to plant a corn crop. That evening’s milking yielded a two-pound increase of milk per cow and Tom thought, ‘Why not give my cows twelve Aprils a year?’ After some research into annual forage crops and intensive grazing practices, he successfully guided the transition of his ninety-cow dairy from a feed-based to a pasture-based production system, dramatically lowering his costs while increasing both herd health and milk quality.

The heart of Tom’s “Twelve Aprils” system is the successive planting of short-lived, seasonally adapted annual crops on about 60 acres to provide his cows with high-quality forage every month of the year. The forages he uses include grazing maize, sudangrass, millet, small grains, alfalfa and clover. Variables such as weather, forage needs and field-specific conditions mean that no two years are exactly alike, but on average Tom makes five to seven no-till plantings a year. Cows graze a planting once or twice and then the forage is cut for hay or bushhogged to prepare for the following crop. Tom’s Holsteins consistently top a 23000-pound herd average and many of them are still producing well at ten to fourteen years of age.

With the opening of the Happy Cow Creamery in 2002, Tom’s transformation from commodity dairyman to specialty milk retailer was complete. Tom built the creamery in a Harvestore silo he no longer needed for storing feed. The milk travels directly from the milking parlor to the processing plant, where it is low-temperature pasteurized and whole milk is bottled. Chocolate milk and buttermilk are also made and bottled on the farm. The milk is sold into direct wholesale markets in the upstate region of South Carolina and at an on-farm store that also retails a diverse line of mostly locally-sourced fresh and processed products including produce, fruits, butter, cheeses and meats.

In almost forty years of farming in upstate South Carolina, Tom can only remember one serious drought, in 1986, but he says that some drought and high temperatures are to be expected every year. The biggest change in weather that Tom has noticed is in the number and quality of summer thunderstorms. “When I started farming in ’78,” he says, “I remember night rains and thunderstorms in summer, and the lightning would just light up the whole sky, and we had rains, adequate rains. For the last ten or fifteen years, the thunderstorms don’t seem to be the same. They are more frequent, but yet we could still have a shortage of rain during July and August. I’ve also seen a difference in the storms. When we first moved here, we would be out on our porch looking at these thunderstorms, and they were very beautiful. It wasn’t like now, they’re so harsh. I’ve noticed a change in the harshness of the thunderstorms, I think. I can’t understand it or really put a word to it, but I know they are different.”

Tom appreciates the flexibility the Twelve Aprils system gives him to adjust to changing weather patterns through the year. “I prepare for what I think the situation’s going to be,” Tom says, “and then if it doesn’t work, I just bushhog it and plant something else. That’s the great thing about my system.” The ability to recover quickly from mistakes or the unexpected has been particularly helpful over the years. Using no-till also provides a lot of flexibility, plus it saves time and money in fuel and equipment costs. “There’s always a challenge in farming,” he says, “but if you make a mistake … or maybe it isn’t a mistake, maybe it rained too much or it was too dry, with my system you’re not set back too much. Just the number of days it takes for you to get back out there and replant. But when you’ve got a hundred acres of corn silage, and you lose it, you don’t have another shot until next year, so you’re done for. You’ve got to buy feed and all, and that’ll break you in a heartbeat, to have to purchase feed.”

Twenty-three years of diverse no-till cropping and management intensive grazing have produced very high-quality soils throughout the farm. “The organic matter in my soil is just unreal,” says Tom. “Now the way that I do that is by managing my forages so that I graze below the knee, mow below the waist (for hay) and bushhog above the waist [to control weeds and prepare the paddock for the next planting]. Now farmers think I am crazy. I just bushhogged all that feed. But this is what gives me high-quality forage and it does great things for my soil too. When a raindrop hits my ground, it’s just like a sponge. Hardpan is not a problem on my farm. When you walk on my fields, it’s like you’re walking on cushion.”

High soil quality and diverse cropping have also maintained soil fertility and reduced pests on the farm. With the exception one year when he applied fertilizer to plots being used by researchers on his farm, Tom has not used any chemicals or fertilizers in twenty-seven years. “The one thing that I really believe in, as much as anything I’m doing, is no use of chemicals or fertilizers,” Tom explains. “You can see many of my fields have less weeds than a field that’s been sprayed with every kind of thing you can think of. I really like to be able to do that.”

Tom is upbeat about his farm’s ability to remain productive if weather variability and extremes increase as projected for his region. He views the combination of high soil quality, no-till planting, diverse, short-season annuals and management intensive grazing as a very resilient production system. “I guess it depends on the degree of weather extremes that we are talking about,” says Tom, “but with my system, I am able to adjust. If one crop goes, another one’s put right in. I can respond rapidly to a situation that maybe others couldn’t.”

But Tom remains concerned about the continued growth of industrial dairy production and the continuing decline of family dairy farms in the United States. He heard recently about a dairy farm in Indiana that is milking thirty thousand cows. “How about having thirty thousand cows in South Carolina, but in three hundred, one-hundred-cow dairies?,” he asks. “Every community would benefit. I spend a lot of money in my community here. Everybody that touches an agricultural product after it leaves the farmer’s hands makes money, everybody, and a lot of it.”

Tom thinks back to the days when he was selling his milk to Dean Foods. “In the 1980s, the CEO of Dean Foods made a hundred-and-fifty-something million dollars in eight or ten years and then retired. That was my milk money. That’s why I was bankrupt. When there is that kind of money on the top end of the product and the guy that produced it couldn’t even get enough to pay his bills, that’s where this country has really messed up. It’s going in the wrong direction as far as agriculture. We’ve lost 90 percent of our dairy farms in this country since 1970. That’s just not how it ought to be.”

Today, the few remaining small-scale family dairy farms continue to struggle with rising costs of production and low milk prices. Tom understands how hard it can be to think about making radical changes when under the stress of managing an industrial dairy farm.  “I know if somebody would have walked down my driveway,” Tom explains, “and said, ‘Hey, Tom, I want to talk to you about this Twelve Aprils dairy system,’ I would have probably told them to leave. Dairy farmers just like me won’t accept that because they can’t take the chance. They are thinking, ‘What if it doesn’t work? I’ve got this big loan to pay and this feed bill to pay, and what if it doesn’t work?’ The thing about it is, it works so quick. It works so quick! It’s almost an instant thing. There are so many things that are so different here that it’s hard to see that it is actually easier than what they are doing now. They look at it as harder, which it just isn’t. It’s smooth as silk. The Good Lord woke me up back in 1987 and said, ‘Tom, you’ve had enough. Now follow your cows. They’ll show you how to be a dairy farmer.’”

Over the years, Tom has shared his experiences with countless dairy producers, researchers and policy makers throughout the country and abroad and he has provided leadership to many agriculture organizations over the years. In 2002, Tom’s innovative production system was recognized nationally when he was honored by the USDA’s Sustainable Agriculture, Research and Education Program with the Patrick Madden Award for Sustainable Agriculture from the . Tom received the 2014 Career Achievement Award from the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association.