Category: Weather

Swiss Chard

I promised you “more on this topic” last week, and well, I’m just getting to it today for another photo Friday.  I will say again that this is yet another new crop for our farm.  We have added quite a few in the past couple of years.  This is due to many factors.  The saying of “putting all your eggs in one basket” comes quick to my mind.  But more than that, we are always looking for good crops to rotate through our soils.  In our soils good and consistent crop rotation is a huge help with weed pressure, soil preservation, disease management and adding organic matter back into our soils.  I will also point out, that we are incredibly lucky to farm where we farm.  Crop rotation with as many different crops to choose from isn’t the norm in many agricultural areas in the world.

Vegetable seed crops in general are a bit harder to grow because just getting the “permission” or go ahead to plant the seed is tough enough.  There are strict rules on isolation (or area around your field) due to pollination boundaries, plant back timing, ability to get a contract, etc.  Because of many of these reasons we haven’t been in the vegetable seed market for very long.  An opportunity came up last year to put cabbage and radish in the ground and we jumped at the chance to add to our rotation options.  This year Swiss chard became available and we again jumped on it.

  
Swiss chard has become a more popular crop because of the growing market of mixed green salad mixes.  Many of which I buy, many of which have random groupings of lettuces and leafy greens that I can’t decipher from each other.  But thankfully, people seem to love an alternative to the iceberg lettuce head and the added variety of something maybe a bit easier to grab and maybe a little fancier looking on their plates.

  
So not only have opportunites for our farm’s location opened up, markets also always continue to change and make the list of crops on our farm change from year to year.  This coming crop year we plan to grow 11 different crops and if you follow along for the next year I’m sure  you will get to know more about each than maybe you care to…but it’s a sneak peak at what we have to work with as farmers.

In other news it was a little foggy morning here in the Willamette Valley! I love fall, which means by default I love the fog! Here’s a sunrise photo I caught on my way to work this morning.  

 Happy Friday!

 

The Weather

The weather is one of those things that doesn’t just annoy us farmers, at times it can infuriate, frustrate, and just plain get us down.  Now I say this all with the disclaimer that I really can’t complain too much here about the weather.  It’s fairly predictable when compared to other areas of the country.  But sometimes, sometimes it just breaks your heart what the weather can do.

Farmers take on incredible risk with the crops that we grow.  We work all year to nurture the plants as best as we know how, take care to meet their every needs.  Then we pray that harvest will come and it will go into the combine, come out as seed, and head to the market (just another thing we can’t control but more on that in another post).

So when Matt and I headed out to check on our crimson clover field to see if it was ready to start harvesting for the day, this is what we saw.

FullSizeRender(8)Not anything too crazy, just looked like a usual whirlwind type of damage, a fairly big pile, but nothing that was too devastating.  It wasn’t until we looked up from that pile to see the real damage.  It’s hard to see in the first photo and it didn’t look too bad even then looking from the seat of the pick-up.

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It wasn’t until we walked out to see the true damage of what a whirlwind can down as it races across a field of swathed clover.

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I was devastated.  All the seed for a large portion of our field was now no longer on the stem that is supposed to hold on to it while we harvest it with the combines, it was laying on the ground where it would lay and never be harvested.  The idea of a vacuum jokingly crossed all our minds, but that just isn’t feasible.  It’s one of those frustrating days followed by the days of having to now go deal with the stems, manually pitchforking them into the harvesters so they don’t get plugged taking in such large piles.  Just another thing that you get to deal with as a farmer, grin and bear it is what comes to mind with many of these situations, grin and bear it and pray it doesn’t happen again anytime soon.  It’s that eternal farmer optimism that keeps us all going on to the next crop, the next year, the next challenge.

As Will Rogers once said, “The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.”

Photo Friday…Baby It’s Cold Outside

All of you who live in Oregon wouldn’t be agreeing with me right now and my title.  But here’s the disclaimer, yes it looked like this outside…

FullSizeRender (2)Except when you offer to drive the cabless tractor home from the field, and you realize when you hit the throttle that it really is only all of 36 degrees outside!

FullSizeRender (3)Wowzas….that will wake you up in the morning!! Happy Friday and here’s to hoping that weather across the country will get this good soon!