organic farming
- Thread starter deere755
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lakngulf
Veteran Member
Take a look at Gardening Tips - The Helpful Gardener There are many dedicated organic growers there. Also, RalphVa on this forum is all organic.
Did she give you any inkling to what she want as far as a crop?
Do you know if she is thinking row crops or something like a market garden?
WayneB
Elite Member
I have several friends that are Organic certified and they all run CSA operations. One nice thing with a CSA is you collect money up front for the goods that will be grown and then deliver items weekly to each customer. Most are working 12 to 16 hours a day 7 days a week. All of them did not start out as a CSA but worked up to that and away from the local farmer markets.
Certification as an Organic farming unit is not simple and requires a pretty good understanding of the regulations. But, with that one can certainly charge more for the products that they sell. That is one side of the equation. The other side is, most have a concern as to what they put into their own bodies and elect to have a chemical free diet.
I have a small operation, which includes berries, potatoes and winter squash of all things. We have grown raspberries for nearly thirty years and never used any chemicals what so ever on our property, this includes chemical fertilizer. We do use cow manure which could have chemicals due to what the cows are feed, but I have found most people understand there is just a limit as to what one can do to protect themselves.
The cost of certification is pretty high and I decided to advertise our sales as 鼎hemical Free and would never say we run an organic operation. We get $4.00 a pint at the door and when we were doing the markets we were getting $5.50 a pint. We gross about $5,000 a year from berry and raspberry plant sales. Certainly this would not enough to live off from.
The rest of the summer we are selling cucumbers, tomatoes, beans and just about anything we can grow and get in early so we beat the over flow of stuff available locally.
We stopped doing farmers markets due to the demands of getting things ready to go and the time it consumes weekly. So everything is sold from our stand at home! Could we make a living doing it, I do not think so, but we do grow enough to pay for the seed, operating cost and we eat great stuff.
A few years ago I decided to start growing more vegetables for sale at our little stand and decided to plant potatoes. This year we have over 800 pounds of seed potato in the grown and will start digging them in September and will finish up sometime in October. One nice thing with potatoes is that I am planting when it is cool, do the hilling with the tractor and then we dig when it is cool and very few bugs around. Not too bad of a deal.
Equipment required are, tractor, plows, rototiller, cultivators, hillers, planter, and digger. So the investment into equipment is pretty high so don稚 expect to pay for it in one single years growth. Heck I don稚 think I will every get my equipment paid for!
If I was younger I think I would focus on products that have a really high selling price. This would include several varieties of fingerling potatoes. They require a very dedicated approach to digging but the cost is extremely high and most people are selling them for about $4.00 to $5.00 a pint! Problem is you have to go into the hills early and start removing the fingerlings by hand. This is on your knees and hand picking the potatoes out of the hills. I think the only way to sell them is to join a farmers market and have an area that supports that type of special cooking. In my area I have to travel to the cities and even out of state to sell them for top dollar.
With seven acres planted you might gross enough to pay for your efforts and support the operation, but there would be little profit for the first few years. But, if you are a home body type it will certainly keep you home!
Sorry I got carried away! Wayne
lakngulf
Veteran Member
Good discussion Wayne. I have never been into produce growing for selling, but I feel your pain! I grew up on a farm where we raise beef cattle, hay crop, and sometimes corn, and always a BIG garden. Garden was just for us and give away to neighbors, but was work. Intensive is the best word I can think of. Intensive when time to plant, time to weed and lay by, and especially when time to harvest.
Seems to me the organic method works if you have (1) very good soil (2) enough soil for good rotation of crop and even resting of land and (3) a good source of organic fertilizer. Oh, and a commitment to the time involved.
RickB
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One of my pet peeves, at least locally, is that folks don't understand the difference between "Organic Farming" and "zero input farming" which is how a lot of the uninformed go about farming organically. A successful organic operation has significantly higher input costs than a conventional operation producing the same crops on the same scale. Organic farmers need premium prices for their products to offset those higher input costs.
WayneB
Elite Member
Rick, I agree with you totally and believe many people consider Organic Farming to mean "Charge Higher Prices". I am not organic approved mainly because I just have not gone through all of the soil testing and certification paperwork for approval. There is also something within me that won't get involved with government run rulings! We have worked this land for over 30 years and the people before us did the same for nearly the same length of time and never used soil enhancement chemicals or sprays.
I will not consider using synthetic fertilizers and we stick to green crop manure and good olde animal manures. We do crop rotations, cover crops and compost just about everything we can get our hands on. We do not have the soils that are found in the St Lawrence region of New York, heck we are lucky to have 12 inches of topsoil around here, but with constant soil work we have built up the soil to a point it will provide a good yield for our crops.
For weed control we used the old method of cultivating and hand pull weeding, not fun, but it does get the job done. We always tell people there are no green thumbs here just brown knees.
By the way the worse offenders of all these spray on weed control chemicals is usually the homeowner. Just about all of them never measure anything and just pour away into the two-gallon sprayer.
Bottom line is when we sell our produce we know what has been put into the grown, sprayed on the plants and there isn't a single thing here we wouldn't eat ourselves.
MarkV
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I don't know the certified organic rules so this is just a question. Deere755 said this land joins another farm he works. Have I not read that it can be a problem getting certified if adjoining land is using chemicals because of run off contamination?
MarkV
MarkV
You just have to leave a buffer strip, 25' IIRC.
inveresk
Platinum Member
We have an organic apple orchard and have elected not to pay the fees for organic certification. We advertise our produce as "organically grown" rather than "organically certified". We sell under the name "Heirloom Organic Apples" and have included a simple "organically grown" definition in the leaflet we provide which gives some information and history on the varieties of apples we sell.
So far we've not run into any problems with local health food stores - which are the main outlet for our apples - asking for certification.
So far we've not run into any problems with local health food stores - which are the main outlet for our apples - asking for certification.
