The Happy Berry

The Happy Berry

by | Dec 15, 2021

The Happy Berry

Walker Miller, The Happy Berry. Credit: The Happy Berry

“

I knew that frost was the biggest risk going into this. It’s still the biggest risk, and it has gotten worse. In the 80s, we would typically start frost protection in April. Now we start as early as the first week of March, so we’re also at risk for a longer period of time, because we still can get a freeze through to the end of April.

Walker Miller

The Happy Berry

Website: http://www.thehappyberry.com

Southeast Region | Six Mile, SC

Main Product: Fruits & Nuts

Scale: 22 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Add frost protection, add cover crops, drop sensitive species, shift to frost and disease tolerant cultivars, interplant shade trees, shift to less sensitive species.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Fill Your Fridge With Fresh U-Pick Or Pre-Picked Fruit From The Happy Berry

Big Smiles and Blueberries Running Down Their Cheeks at The Happy Berry

When Walker Miller was looking to start a fruit farm, he knew that one of the biggest risks he would have to navigate would be late spring frost. He also knew that kudzu could help him find some frost-protected land, because kudzu flourished in the warmer places in the mountains of South Carolina. He was looking for the perfect place to grow fruit, a place just above the colder bottom land as his first line of defense against late spring frosts.

Forty-two years ago, Walker found what he was looking for. “We have mountains to the north and west of the farm,” Walker explains, “with Lake Keowee in between, and a ring of hills around the farm. When the cold air slides off the mountains into the Keowee River valley and settles on Lake Keowee, the warmer air on the surface of the lake is pushed up and over our farm.” And so Walker and his wife Ann got started bringing new life to an old worn-out cotton hill farm, farming at night and on weekends when they weren’t busy with their day jobs working in agricultural research and extension at Clemson University. Until her death in 2021, Ann and Walker managed the farm with the help of their daughters, Betty Ann and Zoe, a few seasonal workers and volunteers.

The Happy Berry Farm produces blackberries, blueberries, seedless grapes, muscadines, seedless muscadines, figs, persimmons and pussy willows, plus a number of minor crops such as mulberries, olives, chestnuts, and tea.1 The farm totals about 22 acres of steeply sloped, highly eroded and erodible land that was farmed for cotton starting in the early 1800s and then abandoned from about 1930 until Walker and Ann purchased the farm. Market production is focused on about 14 acres, with about three acres in infrastructure support land, parking, driveways and buildings. “From the get go, marketing the farm was a key part of our plan,” Walker says. “We wanted to focus on the pick-your-own market with wholesale as a secondary, so finding a location that was surrounded by five medium-sized towns and one major metropolis was ideal.”

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

Lundberg Family Farms

Lundberg Family Farms

by | Dec 15, 2021

Lundberg Family Farms

Bryce Lundberg, Lundberg Family Farms. Credit: Paolo Vescia Photography

“

It just seems like we used to have a lot more regular storms that would come through. They weren’t five or six inches of rain or ten feet of snow type storms, they were just regular, consistent rain patterns. Now it seems like there isn’t such a thing. It’s either really wet, or really dry.

Bryce Lundberg

Lundberg Family Farms

Website: https://www.lundberg.com

Southwest Region | Richvale, CA

Main Product: Grains

Scale: 1500 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to shorter season cultivars, increase field equipment, purchase production insurance, carbon farm planning.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Bryce Lundberg Of Lundberg Family Farms On The Future Of Modern American Farming 

Growing Season with Bryce Lundberg

ORGANIC FARMER Q&A: BRYCE LUNDBERG 

“‘Leave the land better than you found it,’ was one of those phrases we heard often when we were younger,” says Bryce Lundberg, a member of the third generation of his family to produce, process and market rice in the Sacramento Valley of California. Bryce and his brother Eric, together with their wives Jill and Heidi, have grown rice on about 1,500 acres since 1985. Today, they are one of about 40 local farms who produce rice for Lundberg Family Farms on about 20,000 acres near Richvale.

Lundberg Family Farms supports a network of growers using organic and eco-farming practices that cultivate soil health, enhance biological diversity and reduce or eliminate the need to use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.1 These practices include crop rotation, cover cropping, innovative water management and soil incorporation of crop residues. Lundberg Family Farms growers also use practices that benefit wildlife, for example, by salvaging the eggs of waterfowl nesting on their farms in spring2 and flooding their fields in winter to provide rich overwintering grounds for waterfowl.

These efforts to promote biodiversity extend to the diversity of rice varieties — 17 at last count — currently produced by Lundberg Family Farms growers. “Some are easier to grow than others,” Bryce explains. We like to have the farms take a mix of varieties to spread the risk around of the hard varieties and the easier varieties. Some varieties just want to jump right out of the water, and other ones you really have to watch them a lot closer to make sure they’re going to come out of the water.” In any given year, Bryce grows a mix of red and black rice, Arborio, Jasmine and Basmati and also a variety of sushi rice called Calhikari. Bryce follows his rice crops with a winter cover crop mix of oats, vetch and fava beans.

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

Circle 7 by Fuller Farms

Circle 7 by Fuller Farms

by | Dec 15, 2021

Circle 7 by Fuller Farms

Lynette Miller and Gail Fuller, Circle 7 by Fuller Farms. Credit: Farmer’s Footprint

“

We’re still seeing the extremes. We’ve not experienced a huge drought since 2013. Actually, we’ve kind of seen the opposite. As of this June, we’ve gone 21 consecutive months with average or above average rainfall. And some months it wasn’t just above, it was much above. In May 2019, 35 inches of rain fell on our farm — that’s just one inch below the annual average, in one month.

Gail Fuller & Lynette Miller

Circle 7 by Fuller Farms

Website: https://www.fullerfieldschool.com

Southern Great Plains Region | Severy, KS

Main Product: Grain and livestock

Scale: 3200 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Holistic management of conventional corn and soy on 3200 acres, shift to diversified rotations and cover crop cocktails w/livestock integration on 2000 acres, shift to direct markets, downsize to 700 acres, retreat from floodplain and downsize to 160 acres at new location w/agrotourism facilities.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Meet a Farmer: Gail Fuller

Farmside Chat w/Gail Fuller 

Gail Fuller is the third and last generation to own and operate Fuller Farms, located in east central Kansas near Emporia. In his 20-year effort to carry on his family’s farming tradition, Gail has transformed his family’s 3,200 acre conventional corn and soybean operation into a 160-acre diversified pasture-based livestock farm producing nutrient-dense whole foods for direct markets. Gail’s journey from Fuller Farm to Circle 7 is both a personal and a universal story of the barriers and opportunities that many American farmers are likely to encounter on the path to a resilient food future.

Gail first learned about farming from his grandfathers, who were both farmers, and then by working side by side with his father on their 700-acre family farm. In the late 1980s, Gail took over the grain production side of Fuller Farms. Like many producers in those times, he adopted no-till to try and reduce serious soil erosion problems and improve profitability. By the mid-1990s, he had dropped livestock from his operation and expanded corn and soybean production to more than 3,200 acres by leasing neighboring land.

Thinking back on the transition to no-till, Gail recalls following best management practices of the time which involved simplifying the farming system quite a bit. “During the ’80s, we had a four-way rotation — corn, soybeans, wheat and milo —and we raised cattle. Everything except the corn and soybeans got kicked out with the big rush to no-till in the ’90s. When no-till first really got popular, cows and no-till weren’t allowed. It was thought at the time that cattle were too destructive to soils and the damage they caused by trampling farm ground couldn’t be fixed without tillage, so the cows got kicked off.” 

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

Straus Family Creamery

Straus Family Creamery

by | Dec 15, 2021

Straus Family Creamery

Albert Straus, Straus Family Creamery. Credit: Straus Family Creamery

“

In 2020 and 2021, we have not had any significant rain at all. It’s been the driest year on record. It’s never happened before that we haven’t had any rain, and it looks like we’re going to continue to have extreme shortages into the future.

Albert Straus

Straus Family Creamery

Website: https://www.strausfamilycreamery.com

Southwest Region | Petaluma, CA

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 500 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to intensive grazing, add processing/retail marketing, growers’ network, carbon farming.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Q&A: Climate-friendly agriculture at Straus Family Creamery, with Albert Straus and Joseph Button

First Full-Scale Electric Truck—Powered By Cow Manure

First U.S. Commercial Trial Using a Specific Red Seaweed on the Straus Dairy Farm 

Albert Straus returned to his family’s dairy farm in the late 1970s during a time of dramatic change in the dairy industry. Small family dairies were under increasing pressure to either get big or get out of the business. Returning home after earning a Bachelor’s degree in Dairy Science, Albert thought he could see a third option, one that put new best agricultural practices to work saving the family farm. In the early 1980s Albert and his father, Bill, implemented no-till seeding of crops to prevent soil erosion and reduce fuel consumption. They were already farming without herbicides or chemical fertilizers.

Despite these innovations, falling milk prices continued to threaten the economic viability of their dairy business and Albert wondered if the growing consumer interest in organic food offered a solution. He began to imagine a new kind of market for his milk, one that reflected the true costs of production, promoted responsible land stewardship and offered a viable, principled and sustainable business model for small dairy farms. Albert realized that going organic would allow him to fully embrace his deeply held belief in land stewardship, while also addressing the challenging economic realities of family farms in an era of intense industrialization.

Inspired by these ethical and economic considerations, Albert transitioned his farm to organic production in 1993 and founded the Straus Family Creamery in 1994. “How do you create a viable farming system?” Albert asks. “That’s the challenge we’ve tried to address with certified organic production and collaboration with the 12 family farms supplying our creamery. What I’ve tried to do is create a sustainable organic farming model that is good for the Earth, the soil, the animals and the people working on these farms, plus helps revitalize rural communities.”

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

by | Dec 15, 2021

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.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Jordan Settlage

Organic Dairy Farm Tour | Jordan Settlage

Benefits of Rotational Grazing | Jordan Settlage 

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.