Cates Family Farm

Cates Family Farm

Cates Family Farm

Dick and Kim Cates, Cates Family Farm, Spring Green, Wisconsin. Credit: Dick Cates.

If the grass is getting shorter and it is not raining, the worst thing you can do is keep grazing. If you take the grass down too short in our part of the country, the soil will get hot and that grass will stop growing. You’ve got to get off it, so the ground doesn’t get hot. Last summer (2012) was the worst. I had to ship cattle off to pasture and I’ve never had to do that before.

Dick & Kim Cates

Cates Family Farm

Midwest Region | Spring Green, WI

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 930 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Restoration of oak savanna with intensive grazing, reduce herd size and increase rotation speed to leave more residual, add irrigation, expand slightly, increase stream crossings.

This story is based on a 2013 interview.

Dick and Kim Cates operate Cates Family Farm, a grass-fed beef farm near Spring Green in the Driftless Area of southern Wisconsin, about an hour northwest of Madison. The farm has produced pasture-based beef for more than a century and has been in the Cates family for over forty years. It includes 700 acres of managed grazing land and 200 acres of managed forest.

Dick learned the business of livestock production at the Cates farm, but left home after college to gain experience ranching in Montana and managing livestock overseas in Saudi Arabia. He returned home in 1987 and took over management of the farm’s beef cattle herd and with Kim’s help, made changes to improve farm profitability including adopting rotational grazing practices, restoring a native oak savannah on their land, and using intensive grazing to restore a trout stream that runs through the farm. Since 1990, the Cates have raised stocker cattle to maturity on their farm. The grazing season usually runs from early April to the end of November. The rest of the year the cattle that are overwintered on the farm are fed hay purchased locally. The Cates direct market their pasture-raised steers as “grass-finished” to grocery stores, restaurants, cafeterias and households around southern Wisconsin and in the Chicago area.

More variability and extremes in weather over the last ten to fifteen years have created some new management challenges at Cates Family Farm. “In my mind, we have had more high temperatures, more dry periods, more excessive rain, wet periods, so yes, more fluctuations,” explains Dick. “Moisture extremes and temperature extremes, I mean big winter extremes, minus twenty, minus thirty. More snow in the winter. Back when I was a boy we had quite a bit of snow in the winter, but then there were a lot of decades after that we didn’t have very much.”

Dick has noticed a change in weather variability since about 2000. “Well, there seems to be more frequent and longer dry periods as well as more floods,” he says. “We have a trout stream running through the property and occasionally it floods. Back in 2000, we had excessive rain that caused flooding. And then we had the excessive rains that caused the flooding in 2007 and 2008. Fortunately we haven’t had another big flood since then, but we’ve had more droughts. I have kept rainfall data on my farm since 1987. I’ve seen more intense rainfall events and then longer dry periods. And along with those dry periods, it has been really hot. In 2004 there was record high heat here.”

More snow in winter, plus rising hay prices, have sharply increased overwintering costs. Dick explains, “It is getting more difficult in the winter, because hay is more expensive than it was and we have more snow, so we have to feed longer in the winter. I used to open the gate in January and February and they could find grass. That was in the ’80s and ’90s, but not so now. It started about four or five years ago, I can’t remember exactly. We got well over a hundred inches that winter and since then there’s been enough snow in winter to keep the grass from showing.”

More variable weather has also increased the complexity of managing spring grazing at Cates Family Farm. “In the spring of 2012 there was record heat and I was in my shorts moving fence on March 15. I have a picture of it. Then in April of 2013, we got record cold. It was awful, it was still winter, it never got warm! That was the biggest challenge on our livestock. Normally, by April 1 it is starting to change and by April 10 you have cold rain and green grass. In 2013, we couldn’t graze them until the end of April and then they were still mucking around in the mud. The cattle were very stressed during that period. The hot wears them down, but that cold weather in April when their hair is wet and they are mucking through the mud and they are not getting good forage quality, boy it was really tough on them.”

Dick has made some changes to management to reduce risks from more variable weather and extremes. He has reduced his stocking rates over time to be sure that the farm can produce sufficient forage for their cattle during more frequent dry periods and droughts. He has also thought some about how to reduce hay costs, perhaps by purchasing hay from a number of different suppliers in summer or renting some land and growing his own.

Another change might involve adding irrigation to some pastures that suffer more during dry periods. “I have friends who are looking at a K-Line irrigation system, the kind that you can drag around the pasture behind an ATV. That would be something that I may have to look at. Several friends have already done that.”

Although Dick plans to retire in the near future, he feels confident that grass-based livestock producers in Wisconsin have the resources needed to successfully manage the increased variability and extremes in weather. Dick explains, “I’ve been blessed by my connections to the Wisconsin grazing networks and our Wisconsin producer groups, as well as the Farm Bureau Federation, the Wisconsin Farmer’s Union and Wisconsin Grass Works. Our extension agents are really good.” At the same time, Dick wonders about farmers just entering the business. “When I was starting out,” he says, “the biggest issue was marketing and now, honestly, for new farmers I think it will be the uncertainty of the weather.”

Dick and Kim Cates have been recognized for their stewardship of the natural resources at Cates Family Farm with the 1998 Wisconsin Conservation Achievement Award and the 1999 Iowa County Water Quality Leadership Award. In 2013, Dick and Kim were recognized by the Sand County Foundation with the Leopold Conservation Award.

 

New Forest Farm

New Forest Farm

New Forest Farm

Mark Shepard, New Forest Farm. Credit: Restoration Agriculture Design

Since we’ve been here our longest drought was two calendar years where we had snow in winter time, but almost zero measurable rain in the summer. Then in 2018 and 2019, we had twice the annual amounts of rainfall. Seventy-five inches of rain one year to zero inches of rain the next year. That’s a challenge.

Mark Shepard

New Forest Farm

Midwest Region | Viroqua, WI

Main Product: Fruits & Nuts

Scale: 106 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to perennial polyculture, integrate annuals and livestock.

When Mark Shepard and his family first visited the land that would become New Forest Farm almost 30 years ago, they looked out over a Midwest landscape of degraded croplands typical of late twentieth century industrial agriculture. Gazing across the treeless property covered in empty corn and hayfields, the Shepard’s could see a different future for the land, one that would heal the land with a special kind of agriculture modeled on nature’s patterns. They could imagine how the landscape could evolve into something that was not a farm or a forest. Something completely new, yet rooted in the ancient wisdom of the place.

Drawing inspiration from native ecological patterns common in the region prior to European colonization, the Shepard family began to carefully place trees, shrubs, vines, canes, grasses, forbs and fungi throughout the 106-acre farm to create healthy plant communities designed to produce food, fuel, medicines, and beauty. Because they needed to produce income while waiting for the perennials to produce marketable products, the farm design also included areas of annual crops like vegetables, hay, small grains and pastured livestock. “We got started by selecting perennial plants that mimicked the oak savanna plant community that we could sell, feed to an animal or eat ourselves,” Mark recalls. “As things have matured through the years, we can afford to do less and less annual cropping. The products that we actually sell haven’t changed much over the years, but the proportions of each have changed through time.”

Today, New Forest Farm is a nationally recognized model for the successful transformation of an industrial grain operation into a commercial-scale, locally-adapted, perennial agriculture system. Hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, apples and elderberries are the primary woody crops on the farm. In the alleys between a diverse mix of trees and shrubs, livestock — cows, pigs, turkeys, sheep, pigs or chickens — graze pastures of mixed fescues, clovers and wild plants grown in rotation with annual vegetables. The farm’s principal products supply regional and national wholesale markets through the Organic Valley cooperative and the American Hazelnut Company. Small volumes of a diverse line of fresh and locally processed fruit, nut and livestock products are sold in local direct markets. The farm has been certified organic since 1995, is entirely solar and wind-powered, and farm equipment can be powered with locally-produced biofuels.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

Settlage & Settlage Farm

Settlage & Settlage Farm

Settlage & Settlage Farms

Jordan Settlage, Settlage and Settlage Farm. Credit: Settlage and Settlage Farm

Holy moly! In 2012, we had major drought which led us to buying irrigation equipment, because we had two million gallons of water stored in our lagoon that we could just stare at while our crops shriveled up and dried. And then 2015, same thing, super dry. Then we get a year like 2018/19, where we got rain from August of 2018 all the way until June of 2019. That’s like ten months of just endless rain. And it was a disaster.

Jordan Settlage

Settlage & Settlage Farms

Midwest Region | St. Mary’s, OH

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 500 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to intensive grazing grass-based dairy production.

Jordan Settlage has wanted to milk cows for as long as he can remember. Although dairying is part of his family’s legacy, Jordan’s grandfather got out of the dairy business in the early 1990s, one of many thousands of dairy farms forced out of business as the U.S. dairy sector industrialized.4 Jordan’s dad was happy to leave the demands of dairying behind to raise hogs and beef cattle instead. “I would tell my dad, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a dairy farmer,’” Jordan recalls, “and he’s like, ‘That’s hilarious. I grew up on a dairy farm, we’re not milking cows.’” In the fifth grade, I wrote the report about how when I grow up, I will be a grass-based dairy farmer. I still have that report.”

With his father’s blessing, Jordan worked at a neighboring dairy farm throughout his teen years. After graduating from high school, Jordan served for almost four years in the Army. He returned home in 2009 a combat veteran, ready to continue his education. “I graduated college in 2014,” Jordan recalls, “and I was like, ‘Hey dad, I still want to be a dairy farmer. I’ve been doing this for most of my life already. I want to milk cows.’ And so in the fall of ’14, we started buying some equipment for cows and we started milking again.” February 2021 marked Jordan’s six-year anniversary milking cows.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

Almar Orchards & Cidery

Almar Orchards & Cidery

Almar Orchards & Cidery

Jim Koan, pictured with daughter Monique Lapinski and son Zachary. Monique and Zachary represent the fifth-generation of Almar Orchards. Credit: Monique Lapinski

Two years ago, the whole state of Michigan had a ten percent crop of apples. Worst freeze since nineteen forty-five, I believe. Then this last year, again the same thing occurred, and we had another significant freeze. Two years in a row of those extreme freezes have never been seen before in my lifetime or even by fruit growers who started growing in the thirties and forties. Spring frost is getting to be a bigger and bigger problem.

Jim Koan

Almar Orchards & Cidery

Midwest Region | Flushing, MI

Main Product: Fruits & Nuts

Scale: 300 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to organic, integrate livestock, add on-farm processing and retail store.

This story is based on a 2013 interview, with 2019 update.

Jim Koan has been growing apples at Almar Farm and Orchards in eastern Michigan near Flushing for more than forty years. Although the soils in eastern Michigan are heavier and the climate more variable than the ideal fruit-growing conditions found in western Michigan, Almar is Jim’s home and he wanted to continue the Koan tradition of growing apples there. When he took over the family business in the mid-eighties, Jim grew apples using industrial methods like his father before him. But after a decade managing the farm he became interested in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) as a way to cut costs and reduce environmental impacts. Early success with IPM encouraged him to make the transition into certified organic production.

Today Jim, his wife Karen and three of their five children work together on Almar’s 500 acres, producing thirty varieties of organic apples in a 150-acre orchard as well as pumpkins, corn, soybeans, wheat, barley and pasture. About 30 acres of apples are intensively managed for fresh market sales, while the rest are processed on-farm into hard cider and other apple products. About 150 pasture-raised hogs are farrowed and finished each year on the farm. Jim uses a Swedish sandwich system to reduce soil erosion and enhance soil quality in his orchards and manages native wildflower planting to encourage beneficial insects, reduce pests and improve apple pollination.

Jim has been recognized over the years for a number of innovative practices on his farm, but most recently he has received a lot of attention for the successful integration of livestock — pigs and poultry — into his apple production system. Jim pastures heritage-breed pigs in the apple orchards to clean up fallen apples that harbor the plum curculio, a weevil that is one of the most destructive pests of organic apples. The pigs also help to build soil quality and manage weeds. Jim feeds them on apple pomace, the paste left over from pressing apples for cider. Jim direct markets his finished hogs as pasture-raised, apple-finished pork and sells a number of other value-added products from the apples he grows on the farm, including apple cider, apple cider vinegar and an award-winning hard cider that has been made on the farm since the 1850s. The hard ciders are distributed nationally, while fresh apples and the other processed products are sold directly through an on-farm store.

Over the last decade, Jim has noticed a number of weather changes that have increasingly complicated his farm management. Weather extremes are getting more extreme and disease and insects seem to be getting harder to control. “With the changing weather that we have now,” Jim says, “every year the extremes seem to be getting more extreme. If we’re going to get rain, we’re going to get a lot more rain than usual. We’ll get deluges, not the three or four inches of the past, but we’ll get five or six inches. Or we’ll get snowstorms, or extreme heat, or droughts, and so forth. Those are very disruptive to the natural balance of nature, of insects and disease.

Variable spring weather has always been a significant factor in tree fruit production in Michigan and elsewhere, but as Jim explains, the risks have grown. “Recently, the biggest challenge has been the warmer weather in March. Normally we’ll get several days in the 60s and then we’ll drop down again to some 30-, 40-degree days, while the nights drop to freezing or below freezing. Now, instead of getting a few days of 60, 65, it will be 75, 80 degrees. Well, it doesn’t take many days of those kind of temperatures to accelerate our trees waking up and then we end up with earlier bloom even though we still usually have a few significant freezes in the later half of April or early May. Two years ago [2012], the whole state of Michigan had a 10-percent crop of apples. Worst freeze since nineteen forty-five, I believe.”

Jim wonders if part of the trouble has to do with the Great Lakes not freezing over in winter like they used to. “Michigan has always been a great fruit growing area for cherries and apples and peaches and what not, your perennial crops,” Jim explains. “Because the Great Lakes, that ice was a huge cold sink. So in March, when we did get these little warming trends that might wake the trees up, we had that ice all around us to help buffer that. The Great Lakes haven’t been freezing over like they have in the past and therefore we have lost that buffering.”

Heavy rainfall and storms are becoming increasingly destructive, according to Jim. “Two years ago [2012], in August, we had the most rain in a hundred years,” says Jim. “Broke the hundred-year record, okay? In one night we got six inches of rain — unheard of. The orchards and everything was all flooded over. The water overflooded the banks for the first time that I can remember and ripped out a bunch of trees and fences. The animals were all running around the farm. It seems like we are getting one snowstorm after another now, followed by extreme temperatures and windchills, and then warming trends. It’s not just one event every ten years anymore. It’s just going from one extreme to the other and those changes are extreme within the weather cycle.”

In an effort to reduce the risks associated with more variable weather, Jim has made several adjustments in production and marketing. He has added more drainage to his orchard, transitioned to more disease-resistant varieties and diversified his product mix. Jim began installing tile drainage in his orchard about fifteen or twenty years ago. Initially he laid tile drains every fifty feet: “In any new orchards before that, nobody tiled orchards. Now on my new orchards, I tile every twenty-eight feet. It’s not just that I’m tiling, but that I’m actually having to get them closer together to get the excess water out of the soil more quickly.” Jim is quick to point out that not all growers in his region have had to add additional drainage. His orchards are on heavy soils with poor drainage to begin with, but more extreme rainfall events have made drainage even more important.

Jim says that other fruit growers in eastern Michigan have adapted to more variable spring weather by adding wind machines for frost protection, and many are abandoning high-risk areas. Jim explains, “Almost all the apple growers in Michigan that can afford it have bought wind machines to protect against frost. If they had two wind machines, they bought two more for other sites where they weren’t needed before. They’re also looking at replacing fruit crops with grain crops in the poorer sites and only using the very best sites for fruit crops because the input costs for fruit production are so high today that you can’t afford not to get a full crop.”

Jim used to grow sixteen different kinds of fruits, but today he grows only apples. Increases in production costs, weather-related risks and changing consumer preferences have all played a part in his decision to reduce the diversity of fruit types at Almar Farm and Orchards. “When I first started growing thirty years ago,” Jim explains, “it was nothing to sell two hundred bushels of peaches in a couple of days from the farm store. A housewife would come out and buy a bushel or two of peaches and then take them home and ripen them and can them and then two or three days later come back and get another batch, and come back a third time maybe three weeks after that and still get another half bushel to eat out of hand and maybe make some peach pies and cobblers and whatnot. But now, people can go to the store and buy fresh peaches to eat on the table, put in their fruit bowl and eat almost year round. Those peaches are going to be from Chile or whatever, but at least they can buy them. So they don’t can them anymore. People quit canning pears, same thing with peaches. So I don’t grow peaches and I don’t grow pears. Now I don’t sell two hundred bushel of fresh fruit in the whole season, you know?”

While he still maintains a diverse mix of apple varieties in the orchard, Jim says it can be difficult selling them in a market defined by year-round availability of a limited variety of apples. Like Steve Ela, Jim finds direct marketing gives him some flexibility to select apple varieties that are well adapted to the changing climate conditions on his farm. As the weather has become more variable, Jim has transitioned to more disease- and insect-resistant varieties, which sometimes require some consumer education. Jim explains: “I’m planting varieties that are more disease- or insect-resistant, but consumers don’t want them because they’ve been programmed by advertisements to think that Gala is a wonderful apple or Red Delicious or Golden Delicious, Braeburn, Fuji or whatever. More than two thousand commercial apple varieties have been grown in the United States in the past. We’re down to just a few varieties now because consumers have been brainwashed that these are what tastes best.”

Jim tells the story of how he successfully sold his customers on an apple variety that he is particularly fond of growing, called Gold Rush. “It is a fantastic eating apple, but it is ugly,” he says. “It has these big pores in the skin called lentils and people didn’t think it looked good. If I took a Gold Rush apple and put that in a grocery store, the grocery store couldn’t sell them because consumers don’t know what a Gold Rush is. They know what a McIntosh is, so the Gold Rush is not going to get sold sitting next to a McIntosh. But that’s a big problem, because it is extremely difficult to grow an organic McIntosh. We grow four, five thousand bushels a year, but they’re extremely difficult to grow. But the Gold Rush is a more sustainable apple. So I put up a sign in our farm store one year, a really big sign that said, ‘Gold Rush, the ugliest, best-tasting apple in the world.’ That aroused customer curiosity. People went and bought them and they came back and bought more. Now we’ve got a really strong Gold Rush consumer demand in our area. I introduce the people to these other varieties and they love them and they come back and buy them for eating fresh out of hand. But it’s an education. I’m educating a consumer in order to sell these apples. You can’t do that for thousands of bushels of fresh apples. You don’t have the time to do that, you know?”

Jim has increasingly focused on marketing processed products in an effort to build a sustainable business model. He has sought out products that allow him to avoid competing in international and national commodity markets, as well as allowing him to continue to use sustainable practices like the integration of livestock into his orchard production system. Jim saw the federal food safety regulations like GAP and the FSP as a real threat to his freedom to farm sustainably. So he began thinking about how to transition from fresh products to processed products that would allow him to meet new regulations without having to change production practices. Jim explains, “We raise pigs because they’re part of the system. I use them for insect and disease control and I can sell their meat as a protein source. Almost all of our apples are processed on the farm and made into juice. Fifty percent of that bushel is still food. Even though the juice is taken out and fed to humans you’ve got all this other good nutrition left in the pomace. That goes to feed our pigs and then we use their manure for fertility in the orchard. We work as a team. It looks like with the GAP and new food safety regulations I won’t be able to raise livestock on my farm anymore. For a sustainable farm you have to have an integration of livestock and crops. It’s not like CAFO operations where somebody’s got a thousand head of swine locked up in the barn and they’re pumping corn through them for six months and then selling them.”

Jim wanted to find a way to keep the pigs in the production system under the new food safety regulations. He started thinking about processing apples into an alcoholic beverage that would eliminate any food safety concerns. In 2009, just a few years ahead of the boom, Jim developed a line of hard ciders under the JK Scrumpy’s label. The new product allowed him to keep pigs in his apple orchard and provided other unexpected benefits as well, like expanding his customer base. “Now I sell interstate all over the United States,” Jim says. “I have distributors for my product. It’s shelf-stable so I don’t have to worry about having to sell it right now.”

Jim also learned that a shelf-stable addition to his product mix provided a buffer to weather variability and extremes. “In 2012, as an example,” he explains, “we had only had 10-percent crop of apples. I had half a million dollars invested in those apples. That was not as big an issue for me as it would have been if we hadn’t had JK Scrumpy’s, because the year before that I had had a huge crop. I had fermented a whole bunch of those apples and they were just sitting there on the farm, in the bank, so to speak. I still had a non-perishable profit from the year before, so 2012 didn’t disrupt my cash flow too much. I can walk away comfortably saying that I actually made a profit in 2012, not only because of the surplus I had stockpiled from 2011, but also because I was forced to think out of the box and do things differently. I really came out ahead of the game.”

Jim appreciates the opportunities that recent weather challenges have created for his business. He says they have forced him to think out of the box, anticipate what could go wrong, and plan for the worst-case scenario. He has focused a lot of attention on developing a business that is robust to what he views as both political as well as climate risks. Thinking about the future, Jim is confident he can handle the biological challenges, but he is concerned about political and regulatory challenges to sustainable agriculture and local food production. “I’m better prepared than people who just go along thinking everything is business as usual,” says Jim. “You could say I have developed a sustainable business plan that protects me from both political and weather extremes.”

Since 2013, the Koans have continued to develop their business in response to changing weather patterns as well as changes in labor availability and customer behavior. The farm now supports 10 year-around full time employees, plus 12 seasonal experienced apple pickers for the apple harvest season from late August to November. For the last five years, Jim has participated in H-2A visa program for temporary agricultural workers to recruit experienced apple pickers that return to the farm each year.  Jim says the program is “expensive, but workable.”

The hard cider operation, now managed by Jim’s son Zach, has been expanded and automated and a new tasting area and on-farm store has been developed, complete with seating and a children’s play area.  “We’ve moved back into giving more attention to the agritourism end of our operation,” Jim explains, “because more and more families seem to understand how important healthy food is to their long-term health and they are seeking out fresh organic food. Since we last talked, we’ve seen a big change in our customers – now most of the customers visiting our farm are buying apples to make their own apple sauce and other products just as they did 25 years ago. And people are curious about our unusual varieties. They want to know the history of each variety and how they taste. I would never have believed we would come full circle and get back to eating homemade food together.”

Weather has become the most important factor in the success of the farm, according to Jim. “It used to be that about once every 7 years we could expect less than half a crop of apples because of a late spring freeze. We’ve had these kinds of losses 4 out of the last five years. We are surviving because we’ve cut our orchard size down from 150 to 80 acres, we’ve quit selling our apples to big companies, and we’re focused on growing only the very most profitable varieties.”

Jim was the first apple grower in Michigan to transition to certified organic production. He has been actively involved in the leadership of many sustainable agriculture and organic farming organizations over the years and is a longtime collaborator in on-farm experiments with Michigan State University faculty and staff. In 2013, Jim’s long years of dedication towards the improvement of the Michigan fruit industry was recognized with a Distinguished Service Award from the Michigan State Horticultural Society.

 

 

Sap Bush Hollow Farm

Sap Bush Hollow Farm

Sap Bush Hollow Farm

Jim and Adele Hayes and family, Sap Bush Hollow Farm, Warnerville, New York. Credit: Jim Hayes.

Variability in precipitation is always a challenge when you are producing livestock on pasture. It wasn’t too bad here until around 2000. But since then, particularly in the last couple of years, we’ve seen more variability with respect to some drier periods as well as excess moisture and flooding which is causing some problems.

Jim & Adele Hayes

Sap Bush Hollow Farm

Northeast Region | Warnerville, NY

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 160 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to intensive grazing multispecies pastured livestock production, direct markets, add backup solar, drainage, raised barn, ponds, reinforced poultry shelters, FAMACHA monitoring system, mob grazing, shifted lambing season.

This story is based on a 2013 interview.

At Sap Bush Hollow Farm, three generations of the Hayes and Hooper family produce grass-fed lamb and beef, pastured pork and poultry, all-natural wool fiber, organic honey and all-natural handcrafts in the hills of Schoharie County, New York. All these products are sold through direct markets on the farm and at local farmers’ markets, and the non-perishable products are also marketed through the farm website and a regional foods website.

Jim and Adele Hayes established Sap Bush Hollow Farm in 1979 on 160 acres of upland pastures and wooded mountains near Warnerville, about an hour west of Albany, New York. With the goal of slowly building a pasture-based livestock business, they concentrated on sheep for the first decade, producing lambs for seasonal holiday markets. As they gained experience and marketing knowledge, they next expanded into pasture-based poultry, both layers and broilers, and finally added beef and pork, all in an intensive grazing management system.

Today, Jim and Adele manage a 200-ewe flock to produce their lambs and purchase all the other livestock they finish each year. The ruminants — beef and sheep — are 100-percent grass-fed and are rotated through a system of twenty paddocks on the farm, while the poultry and pigs spend their lives on pasture and are fed grain sourced from neighboring farms. The Hayes appreciate the multiple benefits of their diversified, pasture-based livestock production system to soil quality, pest management and marketing. They use no pesticides, other than worming medications when needed for the sheep, and there is virtually no soil erosion on the farm. They have not used any soil amendments, other than lime, for more than thirty years.

Over the last decade or so, more variable weather and extremes have created new challenges at Sap Bush Hollow Farm. Jim and Adele have adapted to more dry periods and drought by leasing some additional pastureland to increase their capacity for forage production and they have built ponds to provide water to every paddock on the farm. Stronger and more frequent winds are also challenging farm operations, even though the farm is in a sheltered location, and they have had to reinforce their portable poultry huts with steel bases to withstand higher winds.

In 2011, Sap Bush Hollow was right in the path of two back-to-back hurricanes — Irene and Lee — that caused catastrophic flooding in South Central New York. Jim says that the storms were an eye-opening experience for everyone in the community, particularly with respect to how quickly the road system in the area was destroyed. “The damage that those storms caused was very frightening,” Jim recalls. “That really reset our thinking in a lot of ways. Within a three-hour period the stream that runs along the state road below our house flooded and gouged out the entire road, the whole fifteen feet of macadam.” Jim and Adele had moved their flock of sheep to a neighboring farm that is at a higher elevation to protect them from the storm and were disturbed to learn that they could not get to them after the storm passed.

Although the sheep were less than a mile away, the flooding had destroyed the two bridges between their farm and the farm where they had sheltered their flock. “With the help of neighbors, we were able to repair the bridges enough so that we could walk over them. And so we were able to go up and drive the sheep home.”

Loss of power after the storm was also a worry. “We didn’t know how long we would be without power,” recalls Jim. “I thought we would be out for weeks at least and we have usually several tons of meat here in storage in our walk-in freezers. We have a generator that runs off our tractor but we only have storage for about three hundred gallons of diesel fuel on the farm.”

Another worry was feed. The hurricanes hit near the end of the poultry and pork production cycle, so the farm did not have a lot of feed on hand. “We were near the bottom of the line for feed,” Jim recalls, “and we had maybe a thousand chickens out here and hogs which needed grain. Fortunately, the power and roads in our area were repaired quite quickly. We were lucky in that respect.” Since these storms, Jim and Adele have put in a significant amount of solar power on the farm because of concerns about the reliability of the power grid. They are now looking into adding a reserve battery system to give them additional options for powering the walk-in freezer in the event of a major disruption of the electrical supply.

An indirect effect of the storms was a loss of farmers’ market sales, which are a large part of their business. “My daughter goes to a farmers’ market about twenty-five miles south of us, which is a little closer to New York City. That area has a lot of second homes. During Irene and Lee, they got hit pretty bad and got pretty much wiped out. That reduced our income by about thirty percent for quite a while. I would say that this year [2013] is probably the first year it’s been about fully recovered.”

Over the last fifteen years, heavy rainfalls have become more frequent and have increased in intensity at Sap Bush Hollow Farm. Jim and Adele have made a number of changes on the farm to try and manage the increased surface water flows during the heavy rains. “We were getting quite a bit of flow down the valley,” explains Jim, “and quite a bit of groundwater coming up and saturating the areas where we keep the livestock during the winter.” They built a new drainage system to redirect surface runoff and built a new barn with a raised concrete floor to provide dry shelter for livestock.

Jim and Adele have also noticed warmer temperatures, particularly in winter, and longer growing seasons, which create some new challenges and some new opportunities. “As far as normals go, we’ve been here a long time and the winters are not anywhere as near as severe as they used to be,” says Jim. The warmer and wetter conditions increased parasite pressures in the sheep flock. “About eight years ago or so, we started really having problems with heavy parasite loads,” explains Jim. “Because of the lack of effective deworming medications, we started using the FAMACHA System which is an eyelid test that allows you to estimate the level of infestation of Haemonchus, which is a major parasite of sheep. Overtime, the use of the system increases the flock’s natural resistance to parasites. It’s a whole new system and I think it does work.”

Jim also shifted to mob grazing, a special type of rotational grazing, to reduce parasite pressures. This involves managing pastures in more mature growth phases with high-intensity grazing over very short time periods. “Now we’re letting the grass grow longer,” Jim explains, “and we may only take 30 percent of the available forage from the top down. We have a higher residual level of thatch and the sheep aren’t grazing so close to the ground, so we’re having less parasite problems.” Jim has noticed some other benefits of mob grazing as well, including increased forage production, better production during dry periods, faster recovery after grazing, better weight gains and improved soil quality. “Many producers in the area are reluctant to use it because of the amount of forage that gets pounded into the dirt,” says Jim, “but I think the benefits are worth it.”

Jim and Adele have made some changes to capitalize on the longer growing season and to put their new barn to good use. They have shifted their lambing season from May to April. If April weather is cold and wet, they can lamb in the barn; if it is dry and warm, they can lamb in the open as they used to do in May. Earlier lambing gives the lambs more time to grow and mature during the best part of the grazing season. Jim explains, “We’re looking at a longer grazing season and we’re stockpiling more for winter grazing, two changes that are really going to help us because the difference between winter grazing versus purchasing hay is almost a factor of ten, as far as cost. We hope to get a higher percentage of our animals finished before the grazing season ends and it looks like we may be able to finish an additional batch of chickens each year as well.”

Jim says that most farmers in his area have noticed similar weather changes — more variability, warmer winters, more extreme events — and have adapted in different ways to them. Grain farmers are taking advantage of the lengthening growing season by shifting to longer-season corn varieties. Vegetable farmers are putting up more high tunnels to protect their crops from more variable weather and extend the growing season. Some sheep producers are switching from wool sheep to hair sheep, which have higher resistance to parasites, as a way to manage higher parasite pressures in the longer, warmer and wetter growing seasons. Hay producers have shifted to baleage or silage because more variable weather has made traditional hay making so difficult.

Jim and Adele’s experiences over the last decade have made them realize that they are quite vulnerable to heavy rainfall and more extreme weather events. “It’s come to be a major issue,” says Jim. They are actively working to identify and address major farm sensitivities to more variable weather and extremes and they appreciate the resources available to support their efforts over the last few years. “When we built the new barn we got some cost-sharing through NRCS on part of the flooring,” Jim explains. Federal cost-share money also helped with the project to divert surface water flows on the farm. The Hayes’ have considered federally-subsidized production insurance, but don’t think it would be beneficial because of their product diversity and the cost. Thinking about the future, Jim laughs and says that he isn’t very confident in their ability to manage changing climate conditions. “We’re doing this as best as we can,” he says, “but we realize that these things aren’t going to go away.”

Jim and Adele welcome their customers to the farm regularly and are active in civic and agricultural organizations in their region. Sap Bush Hollow 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.