Mega corporate blowout expansion

Sometimes people ask us how the farm is doing. What they mean is, "You guys are in your 3rd or 4th season, and I was wondering, is your farm business where you would like it to be yet?" And over the course of this season, I have found myself giving this answer -- "The farm is great. Each of these last three seasons we have made huge leaps. But we still a couple more huge leaps to go until we get to the scale where we want to be." And the scale that we want to be at is to be big enough to be economically sustainable for our family, but not so big that we are sitting in an office all day checking our GPS and wondering how crew #5 is doing in field #7.

So this off season, we continue to expand.

New hoophouses going in. One frame is up (on left), one frame is all laid out ready to go up (on right).

Up in the field we are building two new hoophouses. These will be unheated greenhouse frames with one layer of plastic. What these structures will do is help us extend our season on both ends by about a month. We can grow both early and late stuff in these houses. Since these structures are up in the field, the trick will be venting them properly and irrigation. I have an idea for a gutter system to collect rainwater, send it into a tank in the hoophouse, and then use a solar livestock water pump to move the water into a low pressure drip irrigation system. It is one of those ideas that should totally work in theory, but will probably need to get hammered out a bit over a couple of seasons. As for venting, we are getting some of these solar powered greenhouse vent arms that will open vents at each end of the top ridge when it get too hot. We are hoping that the solar arms, plus roll up sides, will be enough. Boy, it is hard to believe that this is where we started a little over three years ago. We don't even use that little house anymore, lol!

New field plowed for 2007

We have also plowed down another 2 acre strip to bring into production next year. While that may seem like a lot for the scale we are on, we will also be trying to rotate out some older strips next year. The idea has been to do four years of veggie production on a strip, and then two years off in intensive cover cropping. Our first year, we had a 1/2 acre strip to work with, and next year we will be taking that out of production. So next year, we should have about 4.5 acres to work with altogether. Note: I wish I had gotten a cover crop down on this new strip for winter, but alas, we only finished discing it out the week before last week, and the ground will be frozen by next week. Oh well. It doesn't always all work out perfectly.