Hi Everyone,
In this update:
1. May Day Celebration on Saturday, May 2nd
We're just two weeks away from our annual May Day celebration. You are all welcome to join in the fun and enjoy the beauty of the farm in the spring. The event will start at 12:00 noon, with the May Pole festivities starting promptly at 1:00. Mary Alice and Dan Colvin, along with their daughters Amber and Lilly, have graciously agreed to lead the May Pole again this year. We'll have hay rides for young and old, seed planting for the kids, tours guided by Farmers Erick and Wendy, a special biodynamic farming activity, and, of course, there'll be visits to the fields to meet/greet the cows and chickens (I'm sure they can hardly wait!).
We also have the barn open this year, with one of us offering an "introduction to the farm and to CSA" for people who would like to know more about the details of our farm and our CSA. If you have friends who might be interested in joining our farm, this is a great way for them to see the farm and find out more about our program. The event is open to the public.
May Day Schedule:
2. Summer CSA Session
We are now in the full swing of crop planting for the Summer Session. We are planning (and planting) for a group about the same size as last year. These are hard times financially, and we, along with other CSA farmers we know, have noticed fewer member sign-ups for this time of year. We are still optimistic that many of you are just waiting to make sure the bottom doesn't fall out of an already bad economic situation.
It's so hard to predict what will happen in the future, and we understand that many of us are in a "wait and see" mode. Many believe that we've finally bottomed out in our national (and global) economic plunge, but our recovery may be slower and take longer than we expected.
In the mean time, we still have to eat. I doubt that few of us would choose to eat poorly for the sake of the small savings that choice would make. More tempting is the choice of eating "mystery organic" from large chain stores. We certainly can't and won't be judgmental, but the thing that makes the local economy work through good times and bad is that we consistently support the businesses in our area. So as we enter the final run up to our CSA, we hope that many who are, quite understandably, in the "wait and see" mode will be able to commit to a summer CSA membership. As we work hard to improve our CSA service for our community we need your support more than ever!
We also want to make sure that during these times of personal and collective hard times that none of you give up this summer's membership because of the inability to make early lump sum payments. We understand and are willing to work together to create payment options that can work for everyone's budgets. Please contact Wendy at jubileefarm@hotmail.com to set up a payment plan if needed.
3. Volunteering at the farm (want to get on the list?)
"If you ever need any help on the farm, let me know—I'd love to volunteer."
I can't tell you how many times people have said that to us. Maybe you have. As the farm grows, so do the opportunities to volunteer. We have a Work Share program for people who can commit for a full summer of once-a-week work. But a lot of people want something less demanding.
Until now we haven't had a mechanism to access would-be volunteers. But now we've thought of a simple way that people who would like to volunteer some time at the farm can be notified about opportunities. We are building a "folks who would like to volunteer at the farm" e-mail list.
What we are thinking is this: Anyone who would like to be on the volunteer list will let us know. When opportunities come up (i.e. a Saturday or Sunday when the forecast is for good weather and we have a lot of work to do(!) or other days when we are swamped with work), we will send an e-mail to those on the list. Those who are available and interested can come.
Getting schedules to match is always a hard thing, but there would be no commitment or obligation for anyone on the list to come on any given day, or ever, for that matter. We would simply use this group list as a means for contacting those who would like to be made aware of volunteer opportunities; whether those on the list can or even want to come on a particular day is up to them.
If you have said (or thought) that you'd like to volunteer some time at the farm but that it would have to be on a non-committal, "as available" (and so inclined), no-expectation basis, then this is a way for you to be informed when times for volunteering occur.
Please send an e-mail if you'd like to be on the volunteer list (jubileefarm@hotmail.com.)
4. Centennial
Every year is a centennial for something. 2009 is the sentential of a significant event in the history of agriculture, and in the history of population growth. In 1909 an event occurred that stands as a watershed in the history of sustainable utilization of the resources of our planet. This event, were our calendar numbered with sustainability rather than religion as the supreme value, would require all history before 1909 to be designated as "BE" (before the event), and what we now call 1909 to be the year 1 AE. This is the year 100 AE. Do you know the event to which I refer?
The "event" was actually an invention, and the invention to which I refer was made by a man most of us have never heard of: Fritz Haber. Haber was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1920 (11 AE) for his contribution to civilization. At that time he was formally recognized as the person who, eleven years earlier, had been the first to synthesize nitrogen.
Why did the invention of a technique to synthesize nitrogen have such an enormous impact on our earth? Why has it taken just 100 years from this invention for the united voices of the scientists from around the world to say that we have irreparably harmed our earth?
People have long known and acknowledged that life on our planet is dependent on the sun. Modern science hasn't added much to the observation of Plato that "all life is constantly dependent on an ‘influx' the energy from our sun." Without this energy from the sun, we have no photosynthesis, and without photosynthesis, we wouldn't have life on the earth as we know it.
But there are other requirements for life, and one of those is nitrogen. Nitrogen makes up about 78% of the earth's atmosphere, and is essential for all living things. The unusual thing about nitrogen is that even though it's everywhere, and it is essential (arguably the limiting factor) for life, it's not directly available to living things.
Until 1909, there were only two ways to get nitrogen from out of the atmosphere and render it available for living organisms. The first of these is the "fixation" of nitrogen by a group of plants called legumes (peas, beans, vetches, clover, etc.—remember those grade school lessons on the nitrogen cycle?); the other is by lightning strikes during electrical storms. Farmers have long known how crucial the growing of legumes is for plant growth, and from the dawning of agriculture have knowingly (or unknowingly) depended on nitrogen fixation for the crops they have produced. Lightning strikes are a little harder to control—although we had one once in a corn patch which was followed immediately by the most dramatic growth I've ever seen!
It would seem that the invention of an industrial way to extract nitrogen from the air would be a huge boon to human existence on earth. It appeared that way for a long time, and, as I mentioned, Haber was awarded a Nobel Prize for his invention. But now we have come to see that there have been some serious and potentially devastating impacts of our 100-year project of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere.
The problem that is currently most prominent is that it takes enormous amounts of energy to make the extraction. For the last hundred years that energy has been plentiful, cheap, and, or so we thought, environmentally "neutral." But now the energy to fuel the synthesizing of nitrogen is no longer plentiful, it is no longer cheap, and we now know that the process leads to the releasing of enormous amounts of green house gasses. There are other problems, such as the soluble form that the synthesized nitrogen takes that causes leaching and water quality/health issues.
The Haber technique of synthesizing nitrogen has allowed for a lot more life on our planet. We have, since 1909, gone beyond what the sun provides on a daily basis for our sustenance—that daily "influx" of life-giving energy of which Plato spoke. We have created an "artifice" (one can't help think of Thomas Hobbes' leviathan in this context) whereby we use more than our daily allotment of energy from the sun. Some have estimated that 20% of people living on the earth today are alive only because we have, so to speak, "extorted" from nature an additional supply of nitrogen.
But that additional supply has come at a cost, and we are now beginning to recognize that cost. Without some kind of major break-through in discovering an environmentally friendly, new source of energy, we simply cannot continue to exist as we are now. One might think of the nursery story of the goose that daily laid a golden egg as an analogy. We haven't killed the golden goose; we've just decided we could find another means to get more than our daily gratuity. The cost of those means and the irreparable impact of those means are just occurring to us.
The situation is also analogous to deficit spending. We are "spending" more energy than our earth can create, and we have been for a long time. It's now catching up to us, and something has got to give.
There is an alternative. Instead of pouring huge amounts of time, energy and capital into artificial, inefficient, and ultimately unsustainable means of synthesizing nitrogen, we need to look at "new" methods of agriculture. These are really the old methods that were supplanted by Haber's artifice. We need to turn back to rotational cropping, and the utilization of what we call "green manures"—cover cropping with legumes. All the nitrogen we need is available from the sun and the nitrogen fixing capabilities of the microbial life of the soil, if only we nourish that life. In the long run, cover cropping is much cheaper than synthetic nitrogen and it sustains the life of the soil and the lives of the plants and animals that depend on the life of the soil.
5. Thanks for the letters
Many of you took the time to write e-mails to the King County Agricultural Commission and I thank you for that. Those e-mails have been effective in highlighting the need to decide what kinds of activities on land designated and protected for agricultural production in our County should be considered to be truly agricultural.
The Commission is now in the process of writing its report and recommendations to the King County Council. We are hopeful that the Commission will take a strong position supporting the "food for people" position adopted by Sno-Valley Tilth farmers. I'll keep you up-to-date on where this issue goes from here.
6. Farm chatter
What a day today (Monday) was. One time when I checked about mid-day it was 82 degrees—a good day to plant wine grapes, which we did! Actually, we're just planting cuttings into a seed bed where they'll sit for a year. During that time we will work on establishing a legumous perennial cover crop into which we'll plant our sprouted cuttings next year. This isn't the fastest way to start a vineyard, but it's the most frugal. The cost of cuttings is about 5% of the cost of ready-to-plant starts. And by taking cuttings from plants that we know to be "clean" we avoid the possibility of introducing some kind of dreaded disease to our vineyard.
It's early, but we did a lot of direct seeding today. Well, that's the royal "we." Wendy actually did the direct seeding, planting our first crops of beets, turnips, perpetual spinach, and some Asian greens. We also finished a large planting of strawberries. Last year we got way more berries from our first-year plants than we expected. This should be a very good year for strawberries, as we'll have about the same number of new plants this year, plus all the second year plants from last year, which produce better than first-year plants. Yum-yum—it's not far away!
The cows have been out for two weeks now, and are settling into the routine of their daily moo-ves. Every morning they are waiting (somewhat patiently) for us to arrive with water and a move to the new pasture. It's taken a while, but the 14 calves are finally figuring out that they, too, have to stay in the pen. We had a few escapees the first week, but lately they've been on good behavior. There are a lot more of them this year and they are really cleaning their plates (fields) before they get moved.
I've talked a lot in these newsletters about our transition to Biodynamic farming. It's a big undertaking. Each year we try to add one more part of the BD program. This year we have started planting by the celestial calendar.
I think we all know that our earth and everything on it is impacted by our moon. When I fished in Alaska we often had thirty-foot tidal shifts between highs and lows. That's a lot of water to move and to literally "stack up" off shore, which is an indication of just how much lunar impact we experience (though we don't often immediately sense it).
In addition to our moon, the other planets, and even the constellations as they come in and go out of alignment and proximity to each other and to our earth have a large effect, both individually and collectively. Based on careful studies of these subtle and not-so-subtle influences, planting calendars are published annually highlighting the times that it's best to plant each of the four plant groups: leaf, flower, root, and fruit.
It's been a bit of a challenge to hold off on seeding something, or to plant earlier than normal, and we haven't always been able to follow the calendar exactly. Fortunately, everyone in the BD world (including Steiner himself) acknowledges that local conditions take precedence of planting guides. If it's been raining for three weeks straight and you finally get a dry day, you plant whatever you can! So it's not really a rigid demand, but more a recommendation that, all other factors being equal, certain crops will germinate and grow better when planted under certain celestial conditions.
I could chatter a lot more, but time is limited and there's so much to do. The farm is looking and "feeling" so good to us this year. I'm thinking we're going to have a great spring, and we're certainly off and running to a great planting season. I hope a lot of you can come out to our May Day celebration. It's great fun, and it's always nice to get the "before" view of the farm. When you all come out this summer, it will be well into the "after."
Our best to all of you. See you a week from Saturday.
Erick and Wendy