New Morning Farm

New Morning Farm

by | Dec 15, 2021

New Morning Farm

Jim Crawford, New Morning Farm, Hustontown, Pennsylvania. Credit: Jim Crawford.

“

I realize now how lucky we were for so many years. We didn’t see many of the classic vegetable diseases at all for most of our years. But in the last 5 to 8 years things have really changed. Why is it that we suddenly have seen a whole range of really devastating diseases that we never saw before?

Jim Crawford

New Morning Farm

Website: https://www.newmorningfarm.net

Northeast Region | Hustontown, PA

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 45 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Add protected growing/organic pesticides, floodplain retreat.

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FRESHFARM at 25 Years: New Morning Farm On Building An Urban-Rural Connection with Fresh Food

Jim Crawford on Growing New Morning Farm

 

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

For more than forty years, Jim and Moie Crawford have owned and operated New Morning Farm, a 95-acre certified-organic vegetable farm in south-central Pennsylvania. Jim and Moie manage a diverse mix of vegetables and small fruits — about fifty different kinds — on 45 acres of the farm’s best cropland. They also sell eggs produced on the farm.

New Morning Farm has a greenhouse and four high-tunnel cold frames for transplant production and season extension, access to ample surface water for crop irrigation with sprinkler and drip systems. Soil quality is maintained with a diverse crop rotation that puts about a third of the land in cover crops each year and includes the regular application of purchased and locally-made composts and plastic mulch. The farm employs six to eight year-round employees and twenty-five seasonal workers, including those participating in the farm’s well-respected apprenticeship program.

About two-thirds of the farm’s produce is marketed directly to consumers at markets in Washington, DC., while one-third is sold wholesale through Tuscarora Organic Growers, a marketing cooperative that Jim helped to organize in 1988 to coordinate the sale of fresh fruits and vegetables to retailers, restaurants and institutions in Washington, D.C.

Growing vegetables on bottom land in Central Pennsylvania has brought Jim Crawford a lifetime of intriguing challenges most of them related in one way or another to water. “I can remember my very first year farming, the big issue was it just kept raining all spring. The dry days were so few that we just couldn’t farm. People said, ‘Oh that’s just Pennsylvania. That’s just the way it is here.’…. Basically, our biggest challenge was to figure out how to farm when it was always raining.” Paradoxically, learning how to manage crop irrigation during frequent summer dry spells typical of the region was another big challenge. According to Jim, “Irrigation in this part of the country is a way bigger factor than many people realize. It’s just a huge issue for yields, quality and profitability, and production in general. Irrigation is an enormous challenge.”

About fifteen years ago, Jim began to notice shifts in weather on the farm. Temperatures seemed to be getting more variable and there was a definite increase in both heavy rainfall and summer drought. These changes seemed to intensify after 2010. “It’s really hard to draw conclusions, but the variability just seems so extreme in the last few years. We saw 80 degrees in April, in March and then in January. Those highs are then followed by real, real cold temperatures. Just extreme shifts in temperature, extremes you did not used to see so often. And there has been more drought and more flooding. We’re going through a drought right now that’s one of the most extreme that I’ve ever seen in forty years. I’m not complaining because we have been able to irrigate. It’s just that I think it’s another sign of extremes.”

One key to Jim’s success in managing vegetables in the typically wet conditions on his farm is the use of black plastic mulch as physical protection. The plastic mulch allows Jim to do much of his fieldwork during the fall and winter, when conditions are more often right for incorporating soil amendments and shaping planting beds. “What we have done now for six or eight years is to prepare beds and put plastic down on large acreage before we need it. That way the land is standing by and it’s ready when we need it. So the tillage is done, the spreading is done. Of course, we get weed control and moisture control out of it too, but the biggest thing it does for us is it keeps us on schedule.”

Like many other farmers, Jim has used the lengthening growing season to his advantage. For example, with the addition of physical protection in the spring and fall, he has been able to extend his harvests of sweet corn and snap beans. “We have actually doubled the number of weeks that we harvest sweet corn and more than tripled the weeks of green beans. We’ve drastically increased the length of our season for those two crops.” But Jim acknowledges that improved season-extension practices have played a large role in lengthening harvests too. “It’s definitely not all weather. We’ve also had big successes on season extension with various techniques. But it does indicate that the growing season is longer. And I have to say we have made money on it, even though it makes me very uncomfortable because I know it is a sign of climate change.”

Another sign of a changing climate may be the increasing costs and management challenges created by a growing number of novel plant diseases. Late blight arrived on the farm for the first time in 2003 and has been a frequent disease problem in Jim’s tomato crop since then, significantly reducing yields in four of the last ten years.

Another recent arrival to the farm is downy mildew. “We didn’t see downy mildew in cucumbers until 2007. Now we see it every year, around the first of August. It wipes out the cucumbers. No more cucumbers. It’s really dramatic. It’s amazing to me. We used to have a full cucumber season from June to October and I can remember beautiful crops of cucumbers in October. Cucumbers lying everywhere. Now, we don’t see a cucumber here after the beginning of August.”

Other costly new diseases that have arrived on the farm in the last decade are Alternaria in brassicas, a mildew in basil and a rust in their raspberries. Jim explains, “We grow a lot of basil, it’s one of our bigger crops. It’s in our top ten of the fifty crops that we grow. We went for decades never having a disease problem with the basil and now we have disease all the time, every season, all season long. But the biggest new disease is this rust in our raspberries, which are a pretty big crop for us. We never saw it until last year when it wiped out the whole crop starting in July. We thought we were on top of it this year and now here just this week, it’s back and it’s wiping us out again. Thirty-eight years, we never saw it. Now we’ve seen it two years in a row. It isn’t a little problem. It destroys the crop.”

Central Pennsylvania is in the path of Atlantic hurricanes, which make a regular appearance on the farm. “Hurricanes are the single weather events that have definitely cost us, by far, the most money over the years,” says Jim. “They usually come in September. That’s been our most vulnerable times. Although we’ve had them through the years, the biggest ones ever have both hit in the last decade. Both came in September and both wiped out probably a third of our year’s production all in one day.” Jim has investigated insuring his crops through the USDA, but found that the programs available to him were not appropriate to his farm because of his crop diversity and the value of his crops relative to conventional vegetable farms.

In 2019, Jim and Moie began transitioning the business to Jenni Glenister, a long-time member of the management team who joined the farm as an apprentice in 2009. The sale was completed in June 2021.

Over the last decade, Jenni and Jim have made major changes in farm operations to manage increasingly challenging weather related risks. They have moved crop production out of low-lying landscape positions on the farm to reduce the risks of heavy rains and flooding, dropped some profitable crops – such as fall brassicas, strawberries and raspberries – that have become too risky as weather patterns and pest pressures have changed, added some redundancy into crop planning to allow for weather-related adjustments during the growing season, and dropped wholesale markets in order to maintain revenues at a lower volume of production.

Jenni and Jim continue to rely on some proven climate risk management tools at New Morning Farm, including: the adaptive analysis of risk and profit for individual crops; a focus on soil health; an effective irrigation program; fieldwork flexibility through the use of physical protection and multiple strategies for accomplishing specific tasks such as planting, cultivation and harvesting; and active participation in research and educational programs hosted by the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture.

 Jim regularly leads farming workshops, gives lectures and hosts field days at the farm for farm organizations and local colleges and universities. In 2002, the Crawford’s were recognized for their long and active support for organic farming with a Leadership Award from the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture.  New Morning Farm was featured as one of sixty model U.S. sustainable farms and ranches in the 2005 USDA-SARE publication The New American Farmer: Profiles of Agricultural Innovation.

 

The 77 Ranch

The 77 Ranch

by | Dec 15, 2021

The 77 Ranch

Gary and Sue Price, The 77 Ranch, Blooming Grove, Texas. Credit: Karl Wolfshohl.

“

We should be very wet right now. We have cracks that you can put your hand in and that’s highly unusual for the middle of March. Our grass is not growing because it’s been too cold and it’s way too dry. We’ve gone now 90 days with a little less than one inch. In a time that is usually one of our wettest times. We are following 20 inches of rain which was unusual for the fall, so I mean right as we speak (March 2014) we’re seeing tremendous variability. You just don’t know what’s around the next corner, so you have to prepare for the worst. Hope for the best of course, but you know, hope’s not a plan.

Gary & Sue Price

The 77 Ranch

Southern Great Plains Region | Blooming Grove, TX

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 2500 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Holistic management, reduce herd size, grasslands restoration with planned grazing, grazing cover crop cocktails, carbon farming.

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Ranching with an Eye Towards Tomorrow

McDonald’s Flagship Farmers – Gary and Sue Price, 77 Ranch, Beef Producer, USA  

Gary Price, Producer Circle Co-Chair, 77 Ranch

Working Lands Perspectives: Gary Price

NCBA’s Cattlemen to Cattlemen: 77 Ranch

Better water, better beef and better beer? 

This story is based on a 2013 interview.

The 77 Ranch near Blooming Grove, Texas, sits at what could be considered ground zero for climate change impact in the continental United States. Historic drought in the southern Great Plains in 2011 and 2012 led to massive destocking of beef cattle on ranches throughout the region. Declining cattle herds drove the closures of cattle feeding and processing operations in the region and cost hundreds of jobs, while rising beef prices set new records. Yet through it all, Gary and Sue Price, owners and operators of the 77 Ranch, were able to maintain production of their 190-head cowherd without the need for supplemental feed or water. What sets the 77 Ranch apart from other ranches in the region? Why is it so resilient to drought?

The Prices began assembling their ranch almost forty years ago through the purchase of neighboring croplands and degraded rangelands. The productivity of a remnant native tallgrass prairie on the ranch in drought made a big impression on Gary. Using planned grazing, along with technical and financial support from numerous public and private organizations, Gary began to restore native prairies throughout the ranch, convinced that they could form the basis for a resilient, productive and profitable cattle production system. The historic drought of 2011 and 2012 seems to have proven him right.

Today, Gary uses planned grazing to manage a 190-cow beef herd on the restored native grasslands that dominate the 2,500-acre ranch, which also has 200 acres of cropland and about 90 acres of improved pastures. More than 40 acres of small stock ponds and small lakes provide water for livestock and waterfowl and generate extra income through the lease of fishing and hunting rights. The majority of the ranch’s income comes from marketing cattle produced on the ranch into value-added wholesale cattle markets through a source-verified program.

Gary has noticed a number of changes in the weather, which used to be pretty reliable, over the years he has been raising cattle at the 77 Ranch. “We had winters, very cold winters, and then we had a good spring flush that was very predictable,” he says. “We knew when our clovers were going to start growing, and we could almost predict to the day when we were going to have enough grass to stop feeding, usually about mid-March.” Gary remembers that July through early September was predictably hot and dry. “You knew you needed to get your business taken care of by middle of July,” he recalls. “We always used to say, you need to just hang on until the middle of September and then you were going to get fall rains again, and then you would be okay. That was fairly predictable. October was the transition month, November was nice and we would wean calves in October and November. We have our calving season fixed for that, but you just don’t know what to expect these days. It’s incredible, but you can throw all of that out now.”

Gary understands that memory can be faulty, particularly when comparing changes in weather through the years. “I know there’s probably some error, but with that said, I know that I’ve seen some things in the last five years or so that I’ve never seen before. I’ve never seen clover die in March or April for lack of water. It was much more usual to be challenged with mud in the spring and with figuring how are we going to get around and get cattle fed. That was fairly predictable.” Another big change he has noticed is the intensity of dry periods and drought. “The complete loss of precipitation for periods of time is very unusual,” he says. “We had a period in 2011 where we went three months with zero rain. I never saw that before. And that is not just my perception, those were records.”

Gary has made a number of changes at the 77 Ranch in response to the increased variability and extremes of the last five years. He has reduced the size of his cowherd to about eighty-five percent of the maximum he knows the land can support and he has leased additional rangeland as it becomes available near the ranch as some additional insurance against declining forage yields in times of drought. “In ranching, production challenges are always going to be related to your ability to produce forage,” says Gary. “You’re trying to grow as much grass as possible and do it as economically as possible. That is really the center of what we do. Producing high-quality forage takes healthy soil and then obviously it takes water as well. So the three main considerations would be the forages, the soil and the water.”

Gary is experimenting with grazing cover crop cocktails on his croplands for the first time. “We’re learning to manage for less water, we’re planning on less water and more heat, so we’re keeping as much cover as we possibly can on the land and then trying to balance that out with our stock numbers,” he explains. “These are great times in the cow business. We have the best markets ever. We want to try to take advantage of that, but not at the expense of our resource, because we’ll end up hitting a brick wall. It’s a short-term gain, and then you’re out of grass and that will not work in the long run. We want to do any and everything we can to protect the resource. We know that’s very, very important to not take these grasses down too far. We want to manage them so that they have the ability to respond to whatever rain we do get.”

Although the last few years have been extremely challenging, Gary sees some opportunity in the changing climate conditions. He admits he is an optimist and says that the increased variability has helped him become a better manager. “It’s given me a better understanding of the water cycle,” Gary explains, “and the importance of organic matter and soil health. These are things that we sometimes took for granted in the past and did not pay enough attention to. Once you go through a deal like 2011… we had thirty ponds that were completely dry. We had dead fish everywhere and gates thrown open, and some pretty big lakes that were dry. The extreme drought has made it clear how important soil health is to our overall operation. It has really motivated me to learn everything I can to make the place a sponge.”

Gary is pretty upbeat about the future, because the ranch has such a healthy natural resource base. He also appreciates the easy access to technical assistance and support to help him maintain the productivity and profitability of the ranch under changing conditions. “We feel pretty good. We think we are on the right track. We’re not wringing our hands over this. We’re thankful that we chose the right track many years ago. Everything in ranching is a moving target. It’s constantly changing, some things more than others. We must be very flexible in all that we do, and especially in our thinking, to adapt to changes. That’s just the way it is.”

Gary and Sue are both very active in civic, natural resource and agricultural organizations, regularly host visitors, field days and workshops at the ranch and collaborate in federal, state and nonprofit research projects. Gary and Sue were recognized by the Sand County Foundation with the Leopold Conservation Award in 2007. In 2012, they received the Outstanding Rangeland Stewardship Award from the Texas Section of the Society for Range Management and the Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association named Gary and Sue the national winners of the 2013 Environmental Stewardship Award.

 

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.

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CAFF Podcast: Full Belly Farm  11/21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nash’s Organic Produce

Nash’s Organic Produce

by | Dec 14, 2021

Nash’s Organic Produce

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

“

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

Nash Huber

Nash’s Organic Produce

Website: http://nashsorganicproduce.com

Northwest Region | Sequim, WA

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 1000 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

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

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

Washington farmers help feed U.S. appetite for quinoa

Sequim’s Resident Idealist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Cow Creamery

Happy Cow Creamery

by | Dec 12, 2021

Happy Cow Creamery

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

“

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

Tom Trantham

Happy Cow Creamery

Website: https://www.happycowcreamery.com

Southeast Region | Pelzer, South Carolina

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 90 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

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

Story featured in Resilient Agriculture (1st Edition)

Get Downloadable Story PDF

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Gov. presents Tom Trantham with Order of the Palmetto

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

Meet Tom Trantham, Farmer of the Year 

Happy Cow Creamery: The Milk Process 

12 Aprils Year Around Grazing 

30 Days: Tom Trantham, 12 Aprils Farm

This story is based on a 2014 interview.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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