The Best Books for Market Farmers

Farmers, activists, academics and chefs in the racial justice in agriculture movement educate others through books and films. Here is a sampling.

It took me years to find, but I finally have a favorite broccoli. I’m actually not a fan of the standard hybrid types; I don’t love their flavor, they take up a lot of space for just one harvest, and ubiquitous as they are, I’m limited in what I can charge for them. So I kept trying all the open-pollinated and non-heading types until I hit on one that I love: Piracicaba.

I did not set out forty-some years ago to be a hippie, organic or alternative farmer of any sort. Deeply disillusioned after a few years of striving to reform society’s miscreants in California’s prison and parole system, I ached to produce something of unquestioned value for myself and my community – growing food seemed to fit that bill. Though it’s been a jolly good ride, the journey proved to be not as simple as it looked. Let me share a “thing or two about a thing or two” that I learned along the “way of the dirt farmer.”

Farming is easier than it has ever been. By “ever,” we mean right back to those river valleys famous for the start of settled food production: Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, Nile, Mississippi, Yellow.

Let’s start with what farmers call “the steel.” At any farm auction, on many electronic listings, multiple generations of used implements and tractors are up for sale. From the earliest time- and back-saving machines, up to last decade’s state of the art versions, will be a range of size, sophistication, and price.

This year, I was offered a contract by an established essential oil/tincture company to grow hemp for them. And I happen to have a field that has grown vegetables in the past but wasn’t growing anything this year. So I figured, why not, and applied and got a license.

I was going to rely on my experience growing a wide variety of vegetables and flowers to figure out how to grow this new (to me) crop. But then I remembered that Concentrates Incorporated, organic agriculture specialists in Oregon, has experience consulting on many different crops, including cannabis, hailing as they are from one of the first states to legalize the many forms of cannabis. Read on for their advice on how to have a great hemp crop.

Something we often get asked about at conferences is what it’s like to manage a crew. First off, bringing on other people was one of the best decisions we ever made. People are an investment, so it takes time and money to make it work, but all of that is worth it if it helps accomplish your goals for the farm and also helps give you more personal time back.

Think of it as not only an investment in your business, but also a quality of life investment because you aren’t doing it all on your own. Yes, it’s scary, but it forced us to be a lot more organized with our time and efficient in transitions between tasks. You will always be the fastest at everything, but we know that our time is well spent working ON the business instead of IN the business.

Farmer to Farmer Profile

In case you don’t remember the genesis of this column, I wanted an excuse to get myself onto as many farms across the land as I could manage. I had retired from my own farm, and wanted/needed to stay up to date on what’s happening on real farms in real time. Thus, the Farmer to Farmer Profile column! Sometimes I travel for a conference, and then find a cool farm nearby to visit. And other times, I just need to get on the road.

So it went this March, as I returned from weeks and weeks of farm conference travel, but hadn’t visited more than one farm (47th Avenue Farm, profiled in last month’s GFM) along the way. Right off the top of my head, I thought of asking Radical Roots Farm if they would host my visit, and they agreed right away. I’d met Lee and Dave O’Neill a few times over the years, mostly at the Virginia Biological Farming Conference. I knew a couple of folks that had worked there, and I’d consistently heard great things about the farm. So, off I drove 125 miles from my home in Maryland, down the Shenandoah Valley on a beautifully clear March morning.

Mycorrhizal fungi are receiving lots of attention in the farming community. More and more companies are selling pre-packaged mycorrhizal inoculum for gardeners and farmers. Increased yields, reduced transplant shock, reduced need for fertilizers, improved drought tolerance, and reduced soil erosion are just a few of the benefits to soil and crop health that companies promise.

Although these benefits are possible, they are not guaranteed and depend heavily upon your farming practices and your farm’s unique conditions. Understanding the ecology and biology on our farms helps us make informed decisions that impact plant health, soil health, and our bottom line. This article will cover some of the basic biology and ecology of mycorrhizal fungi, as well as practical guidelines for promoting mycorrhizas on your farm to maximize benefits to crop health. By the time you’re finished reading, you should know some basics about managing mycorrhizas on your farm.

There is, with all of us, a lens through which we see the world. And while each of ours is different—informed by our past, by our present, where we have come from—a common lens we can all share is the recognition that our globe is changing.

While climate change receives increased amounts of attention by global leaders, there is still a lack of intention placed on one of our greatest questions—how will we feed ourselves with increasingly unpredictable weather patterns? Global predictions on staple crops are that by 2050, climate change could cause irrigated wheat yields in developing countries to drop by 13%, and irrigated rice could fall by 15%. In Africa, maize yields could drop by 10–20% over the same time frame.

Making and dealing with the decision to stop farming

One decision many growers will have to make at some point in their careers is whether to stop farming, and if the answer is yes, how to negotiate the transition.

This article is the first of two on leaving farming. Both authors have recently stopped operating or scaled down their farms. Despite there being a wealth of good materials on starting up and operating a small farm, there is very little information available for producers who might be considering the hard choice of leaving farming as a full-time job.