Our Passion

Our passion is farming and we love to grow great vegetables for our customers. You cannot be a leader in your field without a passion for that activity, its technologies, and the result. 

Passion causes us to move towards our goals and it creates leverage or a force multiplier to our efforts. It keep us going when the days are long. The market and face time with our customers is a catalyst for this passion.

For example:

Change How You See Things

A smart farmer named Don Cambell said, " If you want to make small changes, change how you do things. When you want to make major changes, change how you see things."

Gabe Brown a farm innovator says, "The greatest road block in solving problems is the human mind."

In farming we are prone to impose our will on the natural processes at work on the farm. Instead we should...

Soil for Future Generations

Dad had a 40 year long collaboration with the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) in the 70's dad built terraces, in the 80's he planted windbreaks and completed a wet area tiling program, and in the 90's he completed riparian strips, headlands and continued a hay rotation. In the 2000's the CSC came out with a new program to integrate various conservation practices under one umbrella. There were three tiers a first level with basic practices, a second tier with intermediate level practices and a third tier with some really stretch goals that a farm could achieve over time.

When the tier system first came out the CSC came to Dad's farm to evaluate his practices against their system. What they found was one of the few farms in the state of Iowa that met all the tier three criteria and then some. Dad didn't do all these things to achieve a tier system or fit into a government program,

Carbon Sequestration

Carbon sequestration is taking carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it in the soil or plant material growing in the soil. The more organic matter in the soil, the more carbon you have locked up in the matrix.

In this post we will look at the science of soil building and sequestering carbon.

There are some more stable forms of organic matter that last a long, long time. Such as lignins, the organic matter remaining after woody plants break down.

Charcoal is the carbon matrix that remains after the water and terpines are remove at high heat in the absence of oxygen.

I was exploring the best ways to sequester carbon and stumbled upon some ideas from the ancient peoples of Central America. The Incas would improve their soils by adding biochar (charcoal) to their compost piles and then incorporate this into the soil where they grew their crops. This enrichment was so good that now hundreds or even thousands of years later these soils are mined and sold as a soil amendment or fertilizer in garden centers.

Reed and I were playing around with making charcoal from wood on the farm. We used several steel trash cans to limit oxygen and heated the "reactor vessel" using junk wood from the farm. We sold the big chunks at the farmers market for sustainable BBQs. But there are a lot of small pieces and dust that we incorporated into the soil. This form of carbon is very biologically active, similar to clay particles when it comes to exchanging nutrients with the plants. So when you first apply the biochar it may take some time to load up on nutrients. This can be accelerate by mixing the biochar with compost or other biologically active materials to speed things up.

With this approach it is possible to lock up carbon for 100's of years and enrich the soil. Interesting how those two things go together. When you look for one solution it is highly probably you can find other solutions as well.

I haven't gotten back to the charcoal making recently, but the beds where I used the charcoal are doing well.

More on this later.