One Month

Well, today we have been on the farm for a month! We still love it. It has been crazy lately here on "el rancho" (starting to get into planting summer crops). Last week, we had a little heat wave; it was 93 degrees for a couple days! Things grew like crazy. Lately, we have been working on the herb garden, planting sage, thyme, rosemary and other experimental varieties. We have to dig up the herb garden by hand, so its a lot of hard work. There has also been a ton of planting of going on in the field lately. It seems that half of the 28 acres has been planted since we arrived. We just seeded basil in the field last night, along with some more lettuce. Lots of vegetables are grown on the farm, but lettuce is the main crop. There are at least 10 different varieties!

We went with the farmer to get some seeders for the tractors in Salinas this week from a large scale organic farmer friend of his (he had just planted 60 acres of summer squash). It was very interesting to drive through Salinas, since this is the heart of large scale farming in California. The seeders will go on the back of a tractor to seed "beds". The beds on our farm are 60", but it seems like on the larger scale farms the beds are 80". We plant generally 5 rows to a bed, but sometimes less. We will plant only two rows of squash in the 60" bed. In the large lettuce fields in Salinas, they plant 12 rows to an 80" bed! They pick it by essentially mowing it with a large picking machine. That is pretty much the opposite of how we do it here at our farm. Yet, it was very interesting to see how things are done on an even larger scale! Most of the farms in Salinas that we saw while driving did not appear organic (no weeds kind of gives it away).

Looking back, this last month, we have really discovered how different a farm is from a garden in your back yard. In a garden, you weed everything and it all looks so nice and organized. You manage your pests (hopefully organically) and pick almost anything that is ripe. Things are different here, on the "small" 28 acre farm we live on, considering that the average farm size is around 450 acres. Small farms, however, account for only a very small share of total farmland. Farms with fewer than 50 acres operated less than 2 percent of all farmland in 2002, while farms with more than 1,000 acres operated two-thirds of all farmland (http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/November07/DataFeature/). When a crop gets hit by pests, we usually will just mow it down. The limited amount of weeding that we do is done by a tractor that gently plows between the rows of young plants. Since we have several different crops, if one is lost to some bug, it is not a huge deal. There are also several beds of each crop planted at different times on the farm (successions). Therefore, if one crop gets hit, in a week or two, another bed of it will be ready elsewhere on the farm. Also, not everything always gets picked. Some crops towards the end, will just get mowed and disced into the soil and will increase the organic content of the soil.

We are learning lots every day and looking forward to applying what we've learned on our own farm sometime soon.