By Zoë Bradbury

February 28, 2009

These past couple of months have exploded any notion I may have harbored about a farmer’s winter being an inherently slow, leisurely thing. Last year, I got to blame it on being Big Year One, with infrastructure to build and farm systems to put in place. Of course it was a nutty time, and as I put up the greenhouse last year I remember thinking how mellow Winter 2009 would be in comparison — nothing to do but knit a few rows by the fire and cook good dinners, right?

I haven’t picked up the needles yet. At this rate my new niece, Raven, is going to be fifteen before I get her baby sweater done.

So what keeps a farmgirl running, even when the days are short and the fields are muddy? Here’s a little glimpse of the “off-season” this year…

Planning for the 2009 season
We decided to start a CSA (community supported agriculture) program this year, which catalyzed a pile of other projects, like a website (www.valleyflorafarm.com), marketing outreach, and a big ol’ crop-planning Excel-fest — to ensure we’d have kohlrabi on June 8th and French fingerlings on July 13th and romanesco cauliflower in mid-October. After a few weeks of squinting at those endless spreadsheets on a 10″ laptop screen you find yourself dreaming in the language of Excel keystrokes.

The CSA was full at 55 members within 3 weeks. It’s been an amazing thing: sign-up forms arriving in the mailbox and my inbox everyday, accompanied by handwritten thank you notes — from people I’ve never met who haven’t seen a lick of produce from us yet. Dear Zoë, We are SO excited about this season! We’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time here and are so grateful you’re doing this! Can’t wait til June!

The southern Oregon coast might not be a food desert, but it is a local food desert. Most of what gets produced or harvested here — lamb, beef, cranberries, fish — gets exported. And because we don’t have a USDA-certified meat processing facility, you’d be hard-pressed to find a local lambchop at the grocery store, in spite of the fact that Curry County is one of the state’s top producers of lamb. As for fruit and veggies, produce farms are few and far between. Which I suppose helps to explain the avalanche of interest we’ve received in the past month. For me, it’s exciting to connect with this nearby community of people who are passionate about good food, and hungry for it. And it’s also inspiring to see that the interest in homegrown food and local farms is everywhere, not just hotbeds like Portland.

So now, the planning is done, the seeds are ordered, the CSA is full, and the greenhouse is toasty warm and green again with baby seedlings. Outside, the raspberries are leafing out, the winter cover crops are knee high, the asparagus are beginning to poke up, and there are signs of life in the orchard where the plum trees are opening in bloom. It’s the beautiful spring prelude to summer’s madness.

And fortunately, help is on the way. I learned my lesson last year about farming single-handedly, so I did some recruiting for 2009. Blake Mennella, a former Sauvie Island Organics employee, is joining the team this year. I’ve been pondering this lately — with the economic recession as a backdrop — and feeling intrigued that a small farm like ours is actually creating jobs at a time when so many other businesses are slashing them. We are growing (and the pun, unintended, is perfect). It made me wonder if the same is true on other farms, so I sent out an informal survey to a bunch of other farmer friends around the country. The response: growth, continued growth. People’s CSAs are getting bigger, sales are going up, support for local food is still on the rise.

Maybe it’s scary peanut butter and spinach, maybe it’s the realization that buying direct from local farms is often cheaper than the supermarket, maybe it’s flavor, maybe it’s people’s instinct to look closer to home for their basic needs when the global economy is crumbling. Maybe it’s all of these things. All I know is that it feels good to do something so grounded and to be able to create a job or two for others at the same time. With Blake arriving soon, I’m looking forward to having a partner in crime, to sharing both the physical work and management load, to having a couple other 30-somethings around, and to creating a structure on the farm that leaves me with more time to work the horses in the field.

Speaking of Draft Power…
Barney, Maude and I got started together on the farm last season with basic, easy work: cover crop management, some cultivation, discing and soil prep. But we were limited by a lack of equipment, field spacing that prevented me from using the horses to cultivate all of my crops, and my own beginner skill set. This winter we’ve made some major leaps forward with new pieces of equipment (some old, some hand built, and some borrowed) that will allow me to use the horses for almost any job on the farm. I’ve also spent a lot of my winter weekends away at workshops, farmer-to-farmer gatherings, and draft horse events to hone my skills and build my confidence at putting the horses to work on the farm. It’s a profound feeling to see this dream coming alive. At a time when people farm with satellites and lasers, it’s easy to dismiss it as far-fetched and unrealistic to rely on draft power to operate a commercial farm, and I’ve had my own doubts as I’ve set out to do it. But I’m seeing with my own eyes that it’s possible, so long as you love the jingle of trace chains, the smell of horse sweat, and the daily routine of shoveling horse turds. To be more specific, a lot of horse turds.

That said I have no plans to abandon internal combustion altogether just yet. My little Toyota pickup is as much a workhorse on the farm as the real horsepower is, and I’ll continue to rely on my sister’s tractor for certain jobs — using the bucket loader to turn compost and using the rototiller for my final pass over a bed before planting (to get a finer seedbed). These two things remain critical tools on the farm. I can’t resist pointing out, however, that neither can take credit for the giant windrow of horse manure compost that will feed the asparagus this year.

And still there is more. Planting the new orchard, building trellis for the raspberries, knocking back perennial weeds, building a new packout shed, installing a walk-in cooler, dividing artichokes, mulching dahlias, taxes. The lists make summer look like a vacation.

Here’s to loving what you do when you farm, because there’s plenty of it to do, all the time.

Zoë Bradbury is a Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow. She lives, writes, and farms on Oregon’s southern coast.