300.

300 is how many seedlings I will need to start this year to plant my whole garden. That’s a HUGE number compared to my previous years and doesn’t even cover half the seeds that will be going into the ground, since many of them are direct-sow. For me and most of the people I know, this is some epic-levels of gardening going down.

Ok, I know for some people it’s not that impressive. Most people who do homesteading, hobby farms, farming, etc are planting whole acres. They wield small tractors, horses, or at rolling devices to till and seed. I still do all that by hand. I don’t even have a whole acre to my name, let alone available to plant. But for me, this is a huge step. The kind of step that I am hoping will lead into even larger scale production.

I finally finished the gardening layout. For reals this time. I discussed it with the boys and we agreed that it would be best to just expand the garden beds even further and we came up with the final garden layout below;

 

 

 

We added a second path, widened the original path (which is currently only 1′ wide and tedious to walk on) and are planning on expanding it to half again it’s current size. (Everything from the second path on will be new.)

We added carrots to the list of vegetables grown, and swapped out some normal onions for green onions. There’s also been some major improvements to the locations of crops grown. The spinach and regular herbs now reside where the kale once did. This helps mix up the crops a little. Kale and spinach, while both similar leafy greens with similar nutritional needs, are in different plant families. (Spinach is an amaranth, kale is a brassica.) This helps deter pests. The kale has been moved far away into the edge of the sun in front of the peas, still surrounded by dill. The dill may get shuffled a bit more into the sun because dill and carrots are not supposed to grow next to each other and they’re a bit close right now. Surprisingly, in my garden, the locations that have mid-day shade are the ones we have the most competition for. Mid-day summer sun and many plants just don’t mix around here. The carrots are taking up residence where the kale usually lives, in rows along the shadiest spot of my garden bed.

We HAVE to use raised beds, or everything floods. Most people are concerned about their raised beds drying out quickly, but we need that additional 6+ inches to lift the plants out of standing water. (Cleveland gets near-rainforest levels of precipitation each year.) We’re going to have some issues anyhow because the path is right in the wettest spot on that half of my lawn, so I have some concern about soil erosion if we get a very wet spring. Because of how massive this garden bed addition is going to be, we’re seeking out more organic matter and dirt to put in that spot. On thursday we’re going out to get bags of composted horse manure, as much as we can fit in the wee little car that Dan drives… It’ll be bagged in black plastic, which from a sustainability standpoint is maybe not so good… But I can reuse those plastic bags on the garden bed this spring to help warm my soil, kill weeds and germinate the 128 pea seeds we plan on growing. Afterwards, standard black garbage bags are recyclable. So we’ll get more than one thing out of that carbon footprint.

We’ll also be placing an order for dirt (leaf humus, sand, topsoil and compost mix) and seeking out some fresh woodchips. The woodchips are a desperately needed long-term addition to help break up the clay. A combination of sand (which I bought a few bags of recently) and wood chips do wonders for our dense, mucky orange clay that’s just 6-8 inches down in most areas. Do note, wood chips do take real amounts of time to break down. Typically I am seeing them break down significantly after 2-3 years if they have plants growing on them, a healthy worm population, and some nitrogen mixed in. Some of the bigger chips still remain, but in general they add a large amount of biomass to the soil that is essential for absorbing water, holding it over time, and draining it during floods. A 4′ high pile of woodchips, removed from my chicken pen floor a few years ago, has broken down into a 1′ pile of dirt at this point that weeds can’t resist growing in. This year, I hope to take the wood chips from my chicken pen floor to trench into the garden beds, then replace them with fresh wood chips to help keep the chicken pen cleaner and healthier.

And maybe, if you have been with us for a very, very long time… You will remember this post, showing where I once tried to grow a root garden bed, very deeply embedded in the shade. It was WAY too much shade, and so the plants never grew. But that dirt is still there, contained, waiting to be tilled up, the bed taken out, and the dirt recycled into the newest parts of my garden bed!

So plans to expand the beds, grow enough vegetables to see our needs met from our own land regularly, and have enough to can, are moving forward! I am excited to make big progress on homesteading this year and improving our over-all sustainability.

Whoops, more garden space!

I was coming back in from weeding, feeding (with compost) and pinching suckers in my garden. Dan was sitting on the old wicker couch that is slowly crumbling outdoors and when I offered him a hand up my eyes settled on a forgotten home depot bag on the bench. A slight breeze came through at that moment, blowing it open a bit. Inside were several heirloom variety seed packets… Eggplants, cucumbers, cantaloupe, winter squash, etc. The cucumber packet was puffed up like a jiffy popper, puffed out in all directions.

Oh no.

They’d been outside for WEEKS.

I tore into the bag, only to find some DOZEN of perfectly sprouted, healthy, green cucumber plants. Every Single Seed had sprouted. The winter squash was also starting to sprout and all the seeds had been wet and warm for daaaays.

Well, there’s no stopping it now. Either they germinate and grow right now, this year, or they don’t grow at all ever. But my garden bed is literally FULL!

The plants in my garden bed have grown, pretty much doubled in size, since this photo was taken, and this was just about a week ago. There’s literally no space left.

Which means digging a new patch of garden and hoping for the best. We have PLENTY of compost still, so in it went. Dan bought me a bag of sand to help break up the blue glacier bed clay that makes up most of our soil. Tomorrow we go out and finish double digging with that sand and some more compost. Then we mulch and plant every seed we can.

Whoops.

It’s SO late in the season. It makes me so sad, even though it’s only a loss of about $10 in total. I sure hope we get at least SOME delicious food out of this effort.

I drew a thing

Today I spent hours helping a friend with his freshmen thesis for his Technical Writing and Professional Composition course for his engineering degree. He decided to write his thesis on a design for using human and cow manure in integrated crop growing systems to recycle and preserve nutrients and soil quality.

I spent the day helping him with this report, digging out sources and helping him with citations. This is the sort of stuff I do for funsies in my free time after all.

Somewhere down the line I ended up drawing a nice diagram for him of a complete nutrient cycle. I figured I’d throw it on my blog for… I don’t know. Posterity?

Yep. Exciting.

Eat up.

Garden Madness

Working on a garden can be very strenuous, but I have been finding it to be extremely rewarding this year. I shifted gears with my garden this year and instead of just sticking plants into the ground and hoping they would work I’ve been trying to focus on growing just a handful of things well. But the resulting time spent researching, frantically working, and tenderly caring for plants has been pushing my limits. So much has been going on that this will be a big post… Hopefully to go with my big garden this year!

In previous years I had some success with Red Russian Kale (which is perfectly suited to our cold climate and will even over-winter our heavy snows) and various squash plants. The squash plants like my lack-luster care so much they grow whether or not I bother to plant them and I often have volunteer acorn squashes popping out of my garden. The biggest problems I have had is powdery mildew and blossom end rot. A bit of research says that if I mulch my plants and give them extra calcium that they will grow into happier, healthier plants and rot less. So kale and squash; plant with some ground egg shells and top off with some wood chips. Check. We’re all good. Beyond that I can practically toss them in the ground and ignore them. I have two leggy zucchini seedlings starting to sprawl in their seedling pots and about a dozen direct-sown kale seedlings starting to pop out of some weedy ground outside. I am feeling pretty confident about caring for these buggers.

Next to these lovely zucchini is a watermelon and some corn. I think my corn seed has been rendered sad by age as only two of the dozen seeds I plants germinated. So that will likely be a “stick it in the ground and hope it grows” scenario. I have to pick my battles and learning how to grow corn for two sad plants is not a priority. The watermelon seems to be doing well… But I only planted it because I wanted to see if I could get some fruit and, really, I have lots of garden space available. I did a bit of learning but thus far none of it has stuck. We’ll just have to see on that plant.

Somewhere down the line I had pretty much given up on m pepper plants. But right when I did, two tiny, waxy leaved seedlings popped out of the same cup. They are heirloom bell peppers and in theory maybe I can save a new crop of seeds from these two. The Adam and Eve of my own little local pepper landrace. They have been living under the heat lamp ever since, but haven’t grown much. Fingers crossed I get anything out of them.

The plants I have decided to focus on learning to grow extremely well are tomatoes. And so far so good. I had 30 seedlings as of this morning, meaning not only did my 27 seedling survive transplant shock from tiny seed cups into large pots filled with compost and soil… But actually the soil being looser allowed for three MORE tomato seedlings to come up in those same pots.

These tomatoes are perhaps a few inches above the soil and growing fast. You can see (in the big pot on the lower right, nest to the lowest plant) two of the tiny seedlings that decided to emerge after transplanting. Now that the seedlings are in larger pots, there’s a daily scramble to keep them in the sun. As I mentioned previously, our house has two south facing windows, which are partially shaded. So every morning it’s a small scramble to move them to my east-facing windows to catch the morning sun, to crowd them in my singular south facing window (as seen above) for mid-day, then shift them to the west-facing bay windows with added artificial light for the evening and over night. To utilize my extremely small space, I have been placing plants both inside and outside of the window. This also hardens them off simultaneously. Despite being hardened off and transplanted at the same time, they’ve been surprisingly resilient and I haven’t lost a single one.

I feel like I can learn to care for more than just one plant at a time, so I am also going to be attempting potatoes in feed bags and strawberries this year. For the potatoes I shall be using some very-sprouted Yukon Gold organic potatoes I have in my cupboard right now and some seed potatoes from a friend. But while I was learning how to tackle this project, I discovered a big problem in my gardening.

My compost sucks.

I have a dozen breeder rabbits, a dozen kits and a dozen chickens at any given time. My grass clippings and leaf litter tend to be allowed to rest and decompose right on my lawn to add mulch and biomass to our sad, clay-heavy soil. You would think that all of this messy bedding would make AMAZING compost. But it doesn’t. It comes out yellow-ish, smelly, wet, clumpy and gross. In the videos of potatoes their compost was crumbly and beautiful. And while the earthworms SWARM in my compost, it’s just not broken down like theirs is.

And I think I know why. Compost relies on a carbon/nitrogen ratio to break down. Too much of either can drastically hinder the process. Most compost piles have a lack of nitrogen, and so trouble shooting for compost piles says to add nitrogen in the form of urine, manure, or greens. But these are compost piles that people make to toss vegetable scraps in from their kitchen or weeds, to put on flower beds. Not compost piles made from various forms of animal waste to feed a massive vegetable garden.

So I ran a quick mental calculation. The bulk of my compost is rabbit bedding. My rabbits bed in hay (including some alfalfa) which has a 20:1 C:N ratio. Which is OK for breaking down into compost, but is a bit nitrogen heavy. No problem on it’s own. Another big chunk of my compost is chicken manure plus shredded newspaper which SHOULD be about a 70:1 ratio… But the newspaper often clumps and doesn’t break down. So I often add leaves, straw, or hay as bedding to break it up and help keep my coop clean. Resulting in a ratio of about 60:1. I have some table scraps, which go in and probably have a ratio of about 20:1, based on what ends up in my compost. Plus there is the occasional dead animal, feathers, dog poop, etc. which probably has a C:N of around 8:1. It comes out to about 40:1 and that makes up about 1/4th of my compost pile. Combined with 3/4ths hay, it should be a perfect ratio of around 25:1.
But the other 3/4ths aren’t JUST hay. Perhaps 1/3rd of that bedding is actually rabbit poop which has a C:N ratio of 15:1. And then there’s the urine. An adult rabbit may drink a single 32oz bottle in a day. A mom with kits may drink as much as 100oz a day. All of that comes out as urine, which is nearly pure nitrogen (0.6:1). There’s probably about 3.5 gallons of urine a day hitting that hay, or about 1 cubic foot every other day. Now some of that runs out of the cages into the drain in my garage. But at the end of the day, the urine completely saturates a good chunk of the bedding as well as the manure, and I’d be willing to bet that the C:N ratio of my discarded rabbit bedding averages somewhere around 10:1, and it makes up 3/4ths of my compost. Meaning that I probably have a C:N ratio of about 17:1, which is nowhere near the 25-30:1 ratio for ideal composting.
Additionally, we get a lot of rain and snow, and my compost pile is in the shade. I don’t have a lot of straw going on so air pockets are hard to create in my compost. It compacts together and breaks down very slowly because it becomes urine-soaked poo mush with bits of half-decomposed hay strewn through it. The earthworms RELISH it. There may literally be a hundred worms per square foot in my compost pile. But it’s not breaking down.

So I decided to prep a tiny batch of compost for potatoes special. I took a big tub, and mixed shredded leaves and some sifted aged wood chips into the compost. I made a small pile in the shade and I will let it rest for a few days and then stir it daily for a week or so before I plant my potatoes in it. It’s my hope that this pile will break down swiftly into the black gold that I need.

So the potatoes will be going into bags with this specially-prepped compost. And the strawberries get their own bed that’s undergone a similar treatment. I spent some time this week double-digging the spot in my lawn upon which once sat my animal tractor. It first housed three different rabbits over winter and then two half-grown hens in the spring and was an awful, gross, smelly mess of poop and rotting feed. A bit of compost, some half-rotted straw and a bit of elbow grease turned it into a good place to plant strawberries.

It’s mulched thick with straw over the top while the bed contents break down a bit. I shall probably be moving some of the straw and giving it a good fluff with the pitch fork today or tomorrow to help it along. It’s my hope to get the strawberries living in it, mulched with straw, in about a week.

It is about 4×4 feet, in lots of sunlight and so should be a rather expansive home for these six everbearing strawberry plants I picked up a few days ago. It’s my hope that they will spread and run madly throughout the bed and grow into a thick cover. While each of these plants had grown blossoms and berries on them already, my partner picked them all off while I prepped the bed so that they would put more energy towards leaves and roots. I can’t wait to see some runners taking root!

When I go to amend this year’s garden bed with compost, I shall be doing something similar. I will rake all of our yard litter (the lawn clippings and aged leaves) into my garden bed. I may sift some wood chips and add those as well. I have some vermiculite and sand to help break up the clay that I will be adding. Then I will be mixing in lots of almost-finished compost filled with worms. It’s my hope that the ground will respond rapidly to this mixture and finish breaking down the compost fast. After letting it sit for a few days and occasionally fluffing it with a pitchfork I hope to have well-rotted compost and soil that I can feel confident planting seedlings into.

Which leaves me prepping my garden bed for this work in advance. I will be having several people over on Saturday evening to re-dig the bed and mix in amendments. So yesterday Greg and I went out and built a new border for the garden bed. We actually moved the edge of the bed in by about a foot so that I would be able to reach both sides of the bed. I have long arms, but the 4-5 feet that the bed is wide is too much. So with a few garden stakes and a bit of string we marked a new edge for the bed and built a border. We dug the over-flowing soil into the bed, and dug up the old markers. We flattened the dug spot and lay down a barrier of cardboard (to help keep the border out of the soil and suppress weeds), then placed logs and stones along the line, close to the dirt. We then shoveled a small amount of wood chips over the border to help secure the logs and stones and cover the cardboard, as well as to help the border blend in. Mission complete! Border built!

After I took this photo I watered the border in and trampled it a bit to help compress everything into place. It’s my hope that it will stay put while we work the soil throughout the week and into the weekend when we amend it. I have a few friends already lined up to help me haul, dig and transport gross compost, wood chips and dirt. Hopefully this bed will look like black gold in a week’s time, just in time to get my plants in the ground. Wish me luck!

Getting the ball rolling!

With the first few glimmers of the hope of spring I have been getting started on some of the major work to be done on the homestead this year! The biggest thing of note is that I am adding a slightly more official and professional website and while part of me loathes the thought I am branching out into social media sites (wanna like us on facebook? Please Go Here and do so!)  to help expand my customer communications. Word of mouth is great and all but it is kinda hard to communicate that way so this should allow me to touch base more directly with my customers.

Another major project is cleaning up, hardcore! We have been shut ins this winter in regards to the homestead, what with the two or three feet of snow and the -40 windchills and all that it has been a struggle just to keep things warm. For a short window we had temps above freezing, as high as a whopping 56*F! So intent on our gardens this year I vowed to spread my compost from last year on the garden beds to let them finish rotting over the winter and build me a new compost pile by taking the top off of the old to get it started. How naieve! Tomorrow is our last day above freezing and the snow is not yet gone despite 50s and rain. Places in our back yard still have four or so inches of thick, icy snow on the ground (more ice than snow). I got the top layer off of the old compost but the rest of it is just a solid frozen block still. I did get my new compost pile built by chipping the top off of the old and mucking out the chicken coop but starting on the gardens is really a pipe dream at this point ddespite nearly a week above freezing.

I did see a breif glimmer of hope today after loading up the “new” pile with the deep litter from the chicken coop… As I chipped away at the older compost to load it onto the new pile a few determined seeds from the end of last summer had begun to sprout into green shoots and leaves. I am sure it was just some hay seed or perhaps a bit of leftover scratch but it was green and growing! In a world where we have had so much snow that the brown of mud is exciting that little blade of weed was a slice of heaven!

The deep litter from the coop and the hay from some rabbit cages as well as from on the ground in the chicken pen formed the start of our new compost pile and it is around 4′ tall already. It is an important step for the homestead since our location so desperately needs the soil to be raised up in order to grow anything! Tomorrow we will be adding even more to it as we try our best to take full advantage of the nice weather. I might be just a wee bit desperate to be outside right now!

By Wednesday we will be back into the teens and single digits. I am hoping against hope that the majority of the rest of the snow will go away tomorrow, our last day above freezing. But it shan’t and so the very wet, icy, slushy mud that lies on the ground right now and merely annoys, with its tendency to seep into ones boots and make ones toes cold, will transform. It will become a treacherous lake of ice that is uneven all over and is just right for catching ones foot on funny causing them to slip and severely twist an ankle. I am very ice-savvy having spent seven years of my childhood falling on a lake of deliberate ice while on skates in a rink. I dread and fear this kind of ice! I will probably be mulching our path through the back yard with the cleanest of the used rabbit hay tomorrow so that it will freeze into the snow and ice pack and become a much less slick surface to walk on! Then when we get a couple of inches of snow again I will be safe at last from the dreaded, awful ice!

In the meantime, though I am going to sit and pretend it is spring just a little bit longer! The Ameracauna eggs hatched out… They were shipped very poorly and so only 3/8 made it out alive. I am hoping against hope for 2 pullets. They are now growing out in my basement in a brooder and already are getting in their beautiful practice flight feathers! The brightly colored mice are due very soon, and Lucy’s litter of four are growing out beautifully! After that we have three more litters on the way, including another from Lucy! (We bred back early to try to kickstart her system into producing larger litters for us and get her used to having kits.)

So things are starting to move forward around these parts… Who knows what will happen during the next big thaw!

Garden Changes 2014

Homesteading can be such a slow process sometimes. Last year I was just getting my first litters of rabbits, just starting to really learn. This year, though the rabbits are producing well, winter feels like a waiting game and our recent burst of temps in the 40s hasn’t helped with that. By the end of the week we will be in to 20s with snow again, but all I can do is dream of spring!

This year I have once again placed an order for heirloom seeds and I will be ordering a truck load of dirt to expand the gardens. In these moments of quiet without much going on I have time to reflect on the changes I need to make.

Last year;
The Good!
Tomatoes grown from store bought seedlings and Red Russian Kale did extremely well. We got lots of tomatoes for a while and the Kale is STILL growing!
The random modern jalepeno plant I picked up produced quite well!
Strawberries did very well if somewhat infrequent. They also spread significantly and we expect they will come back very strong in the spring.
Our Basil and mint thrived, flowered, seeded, and then flowered and seeded again! Herbs do well here.
The grapes were delicious, but didn’t give as many as we would have liked. We will try cleaning up the area around them to reduce diseases.
Everything that came out of our garden was delicious!

The bad…
I got the cold weather crops into the ground too slowly. Most of them didn’t grow at all over the spring and by the time they really took hold it was broiling hot out and the seedlings died.
I started some of my plants indoors and they were tropical plants. The result was they didn’t get enough heat to take off as we keep our house at a cool 62 most of the time.
The soil, filled with sand to make it “loose” in my root bed compacted severely. After spending all year in the ground my carrots, beets and onions gave me plenty of tops and only a few inches of roots and were constantly trying to force their way up out of the garden beds!
The corn grew surprisingly well for months, but the pot it was in was too small for three budding corn plants. By the time they could be transplanted they were so crowded they never really took hold outside. Then they got dug up by my dog.
The arugula we got sucked. The flavor was far too strong and it bolted very easy. Not even the rabbits wanted it anymore!
I didn’t trim most of the plants back properly, giving them real time to grow before trying to fruit again and again.
I got some veggies in abundance and did not have a way to process and store them for later use and so they simply went to the animals.
Because I did not turn my compost pile, it needs extra time to sit post stirring before being used a lot.

The Ugly?
My zucchini, pumpkins and cucumbers all had strange issues I have yet to identify the cause of, but its not just me. My sisters cucumbers grew equally strangely.
-The cucumbers grew pale, with the top half growing thick and round and the bottom half staying small and tightly curled. Then the plant eventually just started dying from the roots up, leaves and stems drying up and turning pale.
-The zucchini grew quite well, giving us several large fruits before suddenly the fruits stopped growing properly. The plant itself seemed healthy but the fruits would grow to about 6 inches before the ends of the fruits would start rotting away. Late in the season the plant also developed powdery mildew.
-The pumpkin grew a single vine which turned pale, fast. That vine then produced one little blossom and died.
-My whole lawn is still a bog, even after the ammendments last year.

So this year there are some things I will be doing again to bring my lawn and garden around properly!

The gardens and lawn will be amended heavilly early in the year. Probably when our next big week long break in the weather is scheduled. This is our biggest change!
I will be bringing in a huge batch of wood chips again… And double digging them into my planned garden sites into the existing, clay heavy soil. They will offer some mass, absorbtion and drainage to the back yard. They will also be scattered to fill in low areas, wet areas, and in the chicken pen to add to their deep litter which was so effective over the past year. The number one thing people are shocked about with my chickens is that they Do Not Smell. That is because of their deep litter of wood chips!
On top of the double dug soil and wood chips I will spread my current garden soil out. The leaf humus was combined with the feces of many meat chickens over the months and has turned into a rich, thick, black soil that is high in nitrogen. Seeds from other plants, roots from weeds, spilt scratch grain and general garden litter is prevelant in this soil now and I no longer want it on top where such things can take hold and spread. Instead this will add to the general nutrient level of the soil and will help to raise the general height of the garden beds.
On top of that will go a thick layer of this past years compost, stirred and rotted all winter to make sure it has broken down properly!
On the topmost layer of the garden beds will go a mixture of leaf humus, topsoil and sand. The topsoil/sand mix I find to be too thick and compacts too easilly, while the opposite is true of leaf humus. A mixture of the two should be ideal for delicate seedlings, retaining moisture and draining properly. The mix will be mostly leaf humus still, but a bit of topsoil and sand will give it some real grip and support for seedlings!
Individual areas of the garden bed will be lightly amended for the individual plants. Egg shells will be ground down for the spinach crop, magnesium and other required trace minerals added to the squash area, etc. Since all the soil is being tilled together and altered heavilly, there will be no significant crop rotation this year.
We will be positioning our plants more appropriately for our environment. Last year we accidentally planted our tomatoes in the shade, our delicate greens in the sun, and everything else was a bit scattered. Now that we know where the shade falls we will make our placements in a more effective manner!

We will also be doing something very new to us. We will be using “cover crops” and nurse crops. We ordered a large amount of radishes and red clover to plant with other plants in order to give them support and extra nutrients as they grow. We will also be putting in at least one large flower bed in our front and side lawns and using a clover cover crop there as well. We will have medicinal, edible and bee attracting plants such as Echanacha and sunflowers. It is my hope to build a top bar hive (or two?) And place them on my garage roof in an attempt to attract and capture swarms of wild, local honey bees.

The last major change is how we grow our seedlings and handle our early season crops. They will still grow in toilet paper roll seed starters, but they will be placed in our terrarium with our snake. This is a glass box, surrounded on one side with aluminium, and always has a heat lamp shining into it! This should give our plants the heat and light to grow, grow, GROW into huge seedlings, strong enough to withstand the hardening off and transplant to outdoors. After that, when they finally move to their garden beds, they will have small hoop houses over them for the first month before the temperatures finally rise up enough to support the crops without them.

There will also be a few thing we did right that we will be doing again! We will be getting a few more strawberry plants and expanding the garden bed there. We would like strawberries to become a major cover crop for our lawn! We will be planting a LOT more kale this year. We will be putting down woodchips anywhere we can. We will continue to harvest local, wild plants… And next year we will make extra sure to have enough jars and freezer space to store the harvest!

What are your garden plans for the year? Now is the time to plan! I hope we all get bountiful harvests next year!

New Produce Regulations Threaten Small Farms

I hate to have such a news-y blog post but our great, grand money-grubbing government and FDA has done it again. They’re overhauling our food regulation system only for fresh produce, and it could seriously effect small farms. Some of us could loose our only real opportunities for profit because of this bill they are proposing. Currently it has a heavy focus on regulating fresh produce production with no focus on regulating big industry farming with accountability in areas such as corn or dairy.

The bill is called “Standards for the Growing, Harvesting, Packing, and Holding of Produce for Human Consumption”.

Things like this slip by many of us who are just getting into the industry (and many of us who aren’t) with no notice. This bill has been in proposal for months now and yet I am only just now hearing about it? They’re not making these things known to small farmers. This does not show up on the evening news. There’s nobody delivering pamphlets about it. And because of a lack of exposure there’s no campaign to make these terrible regulations STOP before they get worse. The best part is? It takes the better part of a week to read all the nearly 550 pages of the bill and understand them all. How on earth are we supposed to even propose a carefully written comment to our government about the poor management of a bill that, because we spend all our time farming, we don’t even have time to READ THE BILL. Ignorance is how they push it past us, and we should not tolerate it!

This bill will cost small farmers thousands of dollars a year. In the proposal itself it says that it will cost “very small farms” (previously in the bill suggested to be people who SELL less than 25K/yr in produce, not even who make 25K/yr profit) nearly $5000 annually. That means it could take what little profit you make and sweep it away if you’re a very small farm, especially an urban farm.

The bill is very vague on it’s regulations in regards to small farms. Most of us have direct accountability for our food anyhow. If I sell you a chicken and it makes you sick, well, then I’m screwed. You know exactly where that chicken came from and you’re gonna tell everyone I sell chickens that make people sick. We don’t need more regulations because we already have the highest standards from the highest level of accountability and transparency in our food production.
Now they’re imposing regulations on small farms that, due to poor wording, could make it so that many farms cannot sell “value added” products such as chopped bagged salad mixes, jams, jellies, pickles and other canned goods, grain mixes, milled grains, dries fruits or roasted nuts. These products would make your small farm a “food production facility” and subject to dozens of more regulations that would cost you thousands of dollars to meet each year; more than what most of us make profit-wise. Some small farms may not even be able to sell regular produce because they use things like saved rain water for their plants.

This same bill is coming from the organization that has allowed companies like Monsanto to control our food supply, that has banned raw milk because factory dairy production can’t meet safe raw milk standards, that is run and paid for by nothing but retired big agriculture CEOs pushing their own agenda… By the same organization that thinks it’s OK to pump our animals full of hormones, to feed calves cow’s blood in place of milk, and has NO regulations on a whole range of chemically and genetically “enhanced” plants that are banned in over 50 other countries. You’ll notice that this bill does NOT regulate those things at all. It almost exclusively effects fresh produce.

Please note that the comment period for this bill is only until September of this year. It’s only open that long because of a 90-day extension and it’s only JUST NOW showing up in our news at all. Take a moment out of your day, even just to write a few lines on this to our government and the FDA to express our displeasure with them once again trying to run small business farms into the ground. If you want to take more action, contact all your family and friends. There are less than two thousand comments on it right now, and we can make that number skyrocket. Share this through your social media, through e-mail, ask people to just take ten seconds out of their day to write something as simple as “Please re-word this bill to make sure that small farms are protected. I support my local small farms and they are concerned about how this bill will impact their already small profits.” It only takes a moment and it makes all the difference in the world.

Support your local small farms and businesses. Write a comment. Make sure the FDA knows how you feel about it. Do you eat local, organic, sustainable produce? If you don’t say something that could no longer exist in just a few years. Don’t let that happen; make sure your voice is heard!

Huffpost article on the bill;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-miller/for-farmers-farmers-market_b_3716429.html?utm_hp_ref=green

Comment on the bill now!

http://www.regulations.gov/#!submitComment;D=FDA-2011-N-0921-0087

The entire 547 page proposed bill can be seen here;

https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2013-00123.pdf

 

Let’s fix this!