Bishop’s Orchards

Bishop’s Orchards

by | Dec 15, 2021

Bishop’s Orchards

Jonathan Bishop, Bishop’s Orchards, Guilford CT. Credit: Jonathan Bishop.

“

We always talk in the course of a year, about how the weather seems one way or another, how it’s different from normal. I think it also gets to the point over time, of not really knowing what normal is. I can remember unusually warm spells and cold spells from when I was a kid. I think what may color my responses somewhat is that Guilford is a shoreline community. Our orchards, many of our orchards, are within a few miles of the coast. So we get a very moderating influence from Long Island Sound.

Jonathan Bishop

Bishop’s Orchards

Website: https://bishopsorchards.com

Northeast Region | Guilford, CT

Main Product: Fruits & Nuts

Scale: 320 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Increase field equipment, diversify perennial crops, add annual crops, shift to direct markets, add agrotourism and on-farm retail store, add on-farm processing (winery).

Story featured in Resilient Agriculture (1st Edition)

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Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Bishop’s Orchards Farm Market

Bishop’s Orchards marks 150+1 anniversary with day-long celebration 

 

This story is based on a 2014 interview.

Effective adaptation to changing market conditions has been a hallmark of Bishop’s Orchards, a 140-year-old farm located near Guilford, Connecticut. Through six generations, the Bishop farm has evolved from a small general farm peddling ice, milk, fruits and vegetables door to door in the local community, to a wholesale grower of fruits and vegetables supplying regional markets, to a thriving retail market offering a diverse line of fresh and processed products, many produced on the farm.

Jonathan and Keith Bishop are cousins, fifth-generation co-owners and managers of Bishop’s Orchards and related businesses. Jonathan is responsible for production, harvesting and warehousing of all crops on the farm, including disease and insect control, integrated pest management (IPM) and the management of farm equipment. Keith is responsible for retail marketing, sales and management of the family business, and is also Bishop’s winemaker.

While apples are a focus of production on the 320-acre farm, Jonathan also manages a diverse mix of vegetable, berry and flower crops for direct sales through an on-farm, full-service retail market and bakery, a winery, a pick-your-own operation and a CSA. Bishop’s was an early innovator of IPM methods for fruit production in Connecticut. Jonathan has reduced the use of pesticides on the farm by up to eighty percent through a program featuring scouting, fumigant cover crops, trap crops, agroforestry and other practices that serve to increase biodiversity and reduce pest pressures. The farm and associated packing/cider operation at Bishop’s Orchards employs a full-time staff of fifteen and adds as many as thirty seasonal employees during the growing season, while the retail side of the business employs about fifty-five people year-round with an additional sixty seasonal staff.

When Jonathan thinks back over the thirty-five years he has been managing production at Bishop’s Orchards, several long-term production challenges come to mind. Changes in pesticides, novel pests, insects and disease management and wildlife — particularly deer and voles — have been continually challenging. “Most of the complication on the insect and disease side,” Jonathan explains, “is changing chemistries, the phasing out of the organophosphates and some of the longer residual fungicides, the pest-specific nature of the replacements, and some introduced species.

The spotted wing drosophila [fruit fly] has become a huge pest for small fruit growers and the brown marmorated stink bug is another one that, knock on wood, we haven’t had to deal with yet. It’s another one that’s out there. These recent pest introductions have happened, I think, as a result of global trade, the nature of trade these days. We’ve maybe let down the guard a little bit over the years and the focus has shifted towards trying to find terrorists and bombers and not concentrating so much on some of these other imports that can have major impacts on agriculture.”

Weather is always a challenge in fruit and vegetable production and that has also been true at Bishop’s. Like many fruit growers, Jonathan has continuing challenges with variable spring weather, summer drought and periods of moisture that encourage plant diseases. He thinks that dry periods might be the biggest challenge because of all the extra work involved in watering. “On a lot of our small fruit crops, we have trickle irrigation in place,” he says. “With the tree fruits and some of the vegetable crops, you get involved in moving pipe around and getting water to the pipes. The dry periods are difficult to deal with in that regard.”

Jonathan can’t say that he has seen any kind of changing trends in weather. There have always been extreme events through the years and he doesn’t think these have increased in frequency or intensity during his lifetime. He can recall some extreme weather events throughout the years. “For instance, we just went through a pretty cold spell with the Polar vortex [in 2014]. Yet I can remember in 1981 we lost our peaches from three days of minus 12 temperatures. We haven’t had that kind of cold since then. We had a really warm February in 1976, the apple buds actually started to swell, and then it dropped back to normal winter temperatures, and some varieties were 100-percent loss that year. The earliest season I can ever remember was in 2012. We started five weeks earlier than normal, but it was followed by last year [2013], which was a fairly late season for us. Of course, there was the Halloween snowstorm in 2010. It’s hard to say that there is a trend even in the variations because there’s been some pretty big swings going back thirty-some years. Like I said, I’ve seen extremes but I haven’t seen an increase in the extremes.”

Jonathan thinks that the farm’s location on the coast of Long Island Sound may have provided some buffer against weather extremes. “The sound may be moderating the absolute cold temperatures in the winter and the hot temperatures in summer. Growers inland often face much bigger issues with spring cold temperatures or frost than we do. That maybe part of why our experience may be a little different from what other people might have noticed.” Over the years, Jonathan has learned to be prepared for whatever the weather might bring. “Every season we plan for the quote-unquote normal situation,” he says. “We’re prepared for reacting to unusual events. If we had an unusually heavy rain and we needed to reapply a protectant to a crop or something, we just figure out what we’re going to need to do in terms of having the systems ready to go when we need them. I guess we just try to be prepared for anything.”

Although the last thirty years have brought a lot of changes to Bishop’s, most have been driven by marketing considerations, not changes in weather, Jonathan explains. “There are so many factors other than weather that are driving crop choices. We’ve been moving very steadily away from apples, which used to be our biggest crop by far. Apples tied us to wholesaling. Since then, over time we’ve been using alternative marketing methods that are pick-your-own, through our own retail or the CSA. We have been trying to adjust our mix of crops to match our production to our retail needs. We have been expanding into other crops like peaches, small fruits and a number of vegetable crops. If one thing doesn’t work out one year, it’s better the next. We’ve always looked at our diversity as our insurance.”

Jonathan appreciates the benefits to risk management provided by diversity, even within just one crop. “It’s always interesting — even within a single crop like apples, there will be a year when one particular variety is just outstanding and the quality of another one is just not what you’d hope it would be. We’re always looking at our diversification and adding different things to the mix, trying them out, sort of move it around and doing a little bit of our own research and development in-house to find stuff that hits a niche that we want to try to hit.”

A number of severe storm events over the last few years confirmed the benefits of scale, experience and crop diversity. Jonathan explains, “Because we’re a fairly good size farm for our area and we’re pretty diversified, when we do get a bad weather condition, something that might drive another farmer to have a bad crop, typically has less of an effect on us.” One example is with the CSA. “There are quite a few CSA’s starting up in our area. There’s a small farm not too far from us who suffered pretty badly a year or two ago. And that’s okay, their CSA members understood that it was a bad year. But the following year when they’re looking to be in a CSA, and they have a choice between a CSA that’s supplied people with something all season long or a CSA that basically gave up in July… We have a lot of people that have previously been with somebody else who signed up with us because we have more capacity to make sure people get their value. It’s a scenario where both the scale and the diversification mattered.”

Jonathan is upbeat about the future of Bishop’s Orchards. He believes that the diversity of their crop production and marketing practices will help the business remain successful even if weather becomes a more important risk factor as climate change intensifies through mid-century.

Jonathan Bishop has been active in local and state civic and agricultural organizations for many years. He has served as a member of the USDA Farm Service Agency State Committee and is currently on the board of New Haven Farms, a nonprofit organization that promotes health and community development through urban agriculture in New Haven, CT. In 2001, Bishop’s Orchards was named the Mass Mutual National Family Business of the Year. Bishop’s Orchards was one of sixty American farms and ranches selected for the USDA-SARE publication The New American Farmer: Profiles of Agricultural Innovation.

 

Zenner Family Farms

Zenner Family Farms

by | Dec 15, 2021

Zenner Family Farms

Russ and Cathy Zenner, Zenner Family Farms, Genesee, Idaho. Credit: Russ Zenner.

“

Springs are getting wetter, while the late summer, fall and winter have become drier. We had some very wet springs in ‘11 and ‘12. The spring of 2011 was by far the wettest I’ve ever experienced in my career. The seeding season was so wet that we were on soils when we shouldn’t have been. There were a few guys who waited clear until June to plant, which is very late for our county, and the soils were still too wet.

Russ & Kathy Zenner

Zenner Family Farms

Northwest Region | Genesee, ID

Main Product: Grains

Scale: 2800 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Increase crop diversity, add dynamic rotation, integrate livestock and intensive grazing of cover crops.

Story featured in Resilient Agriculture (1st Edition)

Get Downloadable Story PDF

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

2022 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Agriculture, Environmental Stewardship: Russ Zenner

The Problem with Wetter Springs 

Adapting No-Till In the Palouse With Russ Zenner (podcast)

Ag Media Summit: 2 farmers find ways to thrive in tough terrain 

Tales from the Farm: Zenner Family Farm | Genesee, Idaho 

 

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

Russ and Kathy Zenner have been farming in the Palouse Region of Idaho near the Washington–Idaho border in Genesee for more than forty years. Located about a hundred miles south of Spokane, WA, Zenner Family Farms includes ground that was first farmed by Russ’ grandfather in 1935. Kathy and Russ joined the family business in 1970 and took over management of the farm fourteen years later. In 2012, Russ’s cousin Clint Zenner and his wife Alicia took on some management responsibilities, becoming the fourth generation to carry on the farming tradition of the Zenner Family in Idaho.

The Palouse is a unique region of steep rolling hills in eastern Washington and western Idaho. The rich soils and winter rains produce some of the highest dryland wheat yields in the nation. But the topography, winter rains and intensive tillage typical of past wheat production also produced some of the worst soil erosion in the nation — as much as 100 tons annual topsoil loss per acre on the steepest slopes. In the 1970s, Russ became concerned about the level of erosion at Zenner Farms because of the negative impacts on soil quality and the off-farm impacts to water quality. An early innovator of reduced tillage grain production in the region, he completed a transition to a direct-seeded, no-till cropping system that greatly reduced soil erosion on the farm by 2000.

Today, Russ manages 2,800 acres of dryland direct-seeded crops in a three-year rotation of winter wheat, spring grains and spring broadleaf crops. Winter wheat, spring wheat, spring barley, garbanzos, lentils, peas, oilseeds and grass seed are the farm’s main cash crops. Within each year of the rotation, Russ has a variety of crop types to choose from. Winter crops include soft white, club and hard red winter wheat varieties for grain or certified seed production; among the spring grain options are durum, soft white, hard white and hard red wheat varieties, malting and feed barleys and corn. Broadleaf crops include Austrian winter peas, yellow and green peas, garbanzos, lentils and oilseeds. Many considerations go into choosing a specific crop for each phase, but the overall goal is to increase the yield potential of the following crop. Over the years, the crop rotation has shifted to an emphasis on spring-seeded crops in an effort to prevent both weed and disease problems in the winter wheat crop. Other important factors in crop selection include soil type, potential markets, seasonal workloads and weather.

Russ markets about eighty percent of his crops through the Pacific Northwest Farmers’ Cooperative, an important U.S. marketer of value-added grains and dry pulses to national and international markets. Most of the remaining crops are marketed through Shepherd’s Grain, a farmers’ marketing alliance that sells specialty grains and flours to regional markets in the Pacific Northwest. All the growers that supply Shepherd’s Grain are sustainable producers certified by the Food Alliance.

Over his lifetime on the farm, Russ has noticed some changes in weather variability and extremes. “I don’t think we’re seeing the temperature extremes that we saw earlier in my career, which is a benefit in a lot of regards,” he says. “Twice in my lifetime we’ve had lows of 50 below [degrees Fahrenheit] in the Genesee Flats, once when I was just a child in the winter of 1950, and then again in the winter of 1968–69. I don’t know if we’ve seen 20 below since then. It used to be in some of the summers, during late July and early August, we would see quite a few days of over 100 degrees. It just seems like temperatures have moderated some. This has not caused any change in our management, it’s just an observation.”

More challenging have been changes in seasonal rainfall patterns. More rainfall in the spring and drier conditions in late summer and fall have complicated crop management at Zenner Family Farms, particularly because of the emphasis on spring-seeded crops. During the record-breaking wet spring of 2011, Russ created some soil compaction problems by planting on soils that were extremely wet, and he has been struggling to restore those soils ever since. The compacted soils may be promoting increased soil-borne disease.

Russ says that wetter springs have increased the incidence of leaf diseases in the region. “This inland Pacific Northwest region has always had pretty significant rust pressure on small grains,” he explains. “Three years ago [2011] was the most significant year for rust, but to some extent, there has been a fair amount of disease pressure through the last couple of years. Whether that’s weather-related or not, I don’t know, but the amount of fungicide used in this region has, I would say, risen dramatically in the last few years.”

Disease management has always been a challenge in direct-seeded grains in the Palouse region. As Russ transitioned the farm to direct seeding, he remembers that increased disease was a continuing issue: “In most of the things we tried, we ran into disease problems. Early on, it was because we did not have enough rotation diversity, and this still may be a big part of it. We’re doing a pretty good job with our no-till system, improving organic matter, but we’re not experiencing an improvement in nutrient cycling, which was one of my major goals.” Russ had hoped that through improved nutrient cycling would reduce production costs by reducing his reliance on purchased fertilizers.

“Longer term, no-till is not providing the results that we initially thought we might see,” Russ explains. “We’re still trying to identify what’s holding us back. Part of it is disease. The other part of it may be the amount of manmade chemistry we’re using in these systems. Many of us doing long-term no-till have wondered about this. I’ve questioned glyphosate, even though it is an integral tool in our no-till systems. We’ve got soils now that had twenty to twenty-five years of repeated glyphosate applications. There’s no work being done on long-term implications of glyphosate on soil biology, and how it may possibly impact root diseases, so we just don’t know. There are a lot of interactions of this manmade chemistry in the soil that we just don’t understand.”

Concerns about overall performance of the no-till system, plus changes in seasonal rainfall patterns, have got Russ thinking about redesigning the crop rotation to increase crop diversity and increase the proportion of fall-seeded broadleaf crops. “Years ago, we adjusted our rotations to reduce peak disease pressure in these no-till cropping systems,” Russ explains. “We’re planting less winter wheat than we did twenty years ago. Where it used to be 50 percent of our seeded acreage was winter wheat, we’re now down to about a third. That means two-thirds of the farm is seeded in the spring, and that’s a problem if it’s too wet.”

But this plan carries some uncertainties as well, because the drier conditions in late summer and fall could complicate fall planting. According to Russ, “The late summer and early fall have been drier than during the first half of my career. That’s made it somewhat challenging to get good crop establishment on fall-seeded crops. “

As weather challenges increase, Russ appreciates the flexibility created by the diverse crop rotation he has developed for the farm. “Say for instance a wet spring has delayed planting, we will maybe cut back on the garbanzo acres and plant more peas or lentils instead,” Russ says. “Garbanzos are the longest-maturing summer crop we have in our mix, so we can run into harvest risks in September if the crop is planted too late. Peas and lentils mature more quickly. Same way with spring grain; spring barley matures much more quickly than spring wheat. So if we need to, we can plant barley instead of wheat. And we can select from different maturity dates within the barley to fit the time available for production of the crop.”

Russ is also interested to see if there are diversity benefits to the reintegration of livestock on the farm. The newest members of the management team, Clint and Alicia Zenner, have introduced a beef cattle herd that is being managed with intensive grazing of cover crops. Russ sees a lot of potential soil quality benefits associated with grazing cover crops, both from the additional crop diversity and the addition of manure to croplands. Although the cattle have only been on the farm one year, soil structure under the grazed cover crops has improved noticeably. Russ is looking forward to finding out how the grazed cover crops affect the yield and quality of subsequent grain crops.

Producing high-quality crops is an important goal at Zenner Family Farms. “I’m one of the Shepherd’s Grain growers,” says Russ. “If we can improve soil health, organic matter and nutrient cycling, we’re going to be able to improve the nutrient density of our grains. I’m certain there will be a premium in the marketplace if we can prove our products are healthier. And to me, that would be a significant motivator to help change cropping systems management in this country.” Russ is frustrated with the way that federal agricultural programs have discouraged sustainable food production. “The major portion of income transfer from the taxpayer to the producer has gone traditionally to a handful of crops. It does not encourage production diversity or reward sustainable resource management.”

Russ feels strongly that government programs should encourage more nutrient output per acre. “We need to be trying to strive to improve the inherent nutritional value of the crops that come off of our ground,” he says. “There is very little work, or even talk, about that. I think we lack the leadership on a national scale to recognize the incredible resource this country has had in the topsoil, in the water. That’s the whole function of agriculture: to sustain humans. Why are we not more focused on maximizing the nutritional output of these cropping systems? Why aren’t we using agriculture to improve human health and cut down the incredible medical costs associated with poor diet and poor nutrition, rather than relying on additives? I think there are more efficient ways to do it. I think if the taxpayer would demand their investment go in these areas, we’d be much better off.”

Thinking about future challenges, Russ is unsure about the availability of new knowledge and technologies to effectively manage climate risk. He knows from experience that crop diversity and no-till soil management buffer yield variability from precipitation extremes. And he thinks that federally subsidized production insurance programs have been and will continue to be an important agricultural risk management tool, particularly for the transition to the next generation of farmers who have assumed high debt loads. But Russ is concerned about the lack of research and development efforts focused on agricultural adaptation. “I think the U.S. is behind many other countries in the world. We’ve been to Australia several times. The first time I went there, in 2005, we visited a research station in Horsham, Victoria. There were several publications there already on climate change implications for production agriculture. I think we’re trying to catch up now. I think we’re behind some other countries, and that’s a little bit frustrating. There just hasn’t been the push to do it, I guess. I would say that would probably be one of the things that I see as maybe a limitation.”

Despite these concerns, Russ and Kathy have continued to welcome the next generation into family business.  Their daughter-in-law, Janine, sources garbanzos from Zenner Family Farms for Zucca Hummus, a business that she founded in 2012.  Today, Zucca Hummus has grown into a line of food products available in over 150 stores in the Northwest region. 

In 2015, Russ and Kathy completed transitioning farm operations to his cousin Clint and his wife, Alicia.  Russ and Clint continue to work together to explore the potential to graze cover crops, use companion planting, and add more perennials and more fall-seeded crops to increase crop diversity on the farm with the goal of increasing the number of days of the year with living roots in the ground. In 2019, Zenner Family Farms joined the University of Idaho’s Landscapes in Transition project which explores how crop diversification can enhance the resilience of dryland farming systems.

Russ has not noticed much of a change in weather patterns over the last decade. Crop production reached historic highs in the region in 2020, but yields on the farm are running well below average in the record-breaking 2021 drought. 

Russ has long been recognized as an innovative leader in sustainable dryland agriculture in the Pacific Northwest. A 1990 winner of the Latah Soil and Water Conservation District’s Conservation Stewardship Award, Russ has been actively involved in sustainable agriculture research and education over the years through collaborations with universities and the USDA Agricultural Research Service. He is a founding member of the Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Association, which promotes the development of direct seed-cropping systems. Zenner Farms was profiled as a model U.S. sustainable farm in the National Academy of Sciences publication, Toward Sustainable Agriculture Systems for the 21st Century.  In 2022, Russ’ life-long commitment to innovating sustainable agriculture practices in Idaho was recognized with a Governor’s Award for Excellence in Agriculture: Environmental Stewardship.

 

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)

Get Downloadable Story PDF

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

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)

Get Downloadable Story PDF

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

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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

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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.