One of 3 winter caterpillar tunnels. This one shown this morning, before it was skinned with greenhouse plastic.
What a day, what a week, what a year. As sheets of plywood started to sail through the air today, one after another like cards peeling off a deck I yelled, at the same time, over the radio, both “Look Out!” and “Put your body on the pile!,” it seemed to sum up everything. Mary was already in a full sprint towards the pile, throwing her whole self onto it to keep any more sheets from careening towards the tender plastic roof of our packshed. The whole crew works so hard to make it all happen and make this thing a farm. It’s a delicate dance with soil, weather, hope, chance. Mary and I didn’t flinch to too much when all the produce in one of the older double door coolers froze this morning. We’ve had so many wins and so many loses, we are getting strong, learning our rhythms more, even as the days get shorter and we long for less work. After all, yesterday we took down and moved two tunnels, put them up over winter greens crops and pulled plastic (what we call skinning) on one of the, finishing up by starlight. While that was happening I delivered a pallet of food to our growers cooperative after dark. And when the crew made the call today, sometime after they ate lunch and before Mary and I had lunch, that maybe we had a break in the wind, we decided to go with their gut and we got the second plastic on. They were right; we had just enough time. Then the wind came, and we wrestled hard to keep too many things from blowing away, fill that empty cooler space, our two page harvest list — yes, it’s fall, but the harvest isn’t slowing down (and there are even new crops ready), and we weighted down objects with pallets, tposts, more sandbags, and our bodies.
We had a few complaints about that third cooler being empty in the store, but it’s part of being part of a farm — that cooler did freeze. And yeah, we do need to buy new coolers that are connected to alarms and, well, you know how loud and hot they can make our current farmstore. We are working to change all that, with a brand new space. We didn’t work on much of that this week, with weather turning, we literally turned some whole days into epic harvest days, bringing in bed after bed of carrots, beets, radishes, cabbages. One of our 120 foot beds of carrots had nearly 700 pounds of carrots. That’s a SweetRoot record. The root washer with a full team of 5 of us, ran all day.
And then today, just before dark, we had a huge gust — maybe 60 miles per hour and one of chicken barns tipped over. The barn was parked next to salad greens we just took out of production - some of the hens were oblivious to the event, munching away. Others were in the barn. This was, well, kind of a disaster. We’ve moved all 120 laying hens — they all survived — into some emergency housing well after dark. We’ve made calls to have a crane come tomorrow and another call to have field welders on standby. As we’ve built this barns and this pasture system, we’ve been better builders and farmers and I’m grateful for that. On the farming front, we are better at pasture management, seeding cover crops, understanding the complex needs of laying hens, and we are probably the only place around — in western Montana - that has a significant amount of pastured laying hens. I’ve begun to worry about pasture a lot: our laying hens take up a precious five full acres of our farm. It’s really a lot of irrigated ground and they have access to some winter power and while they help produce farm compost — that literally feeds our winter greens that we will have through February — it’s a lot of area. For the past four years I’ve been spending thousands of dollars each year building a laying hen system that works for our farm and values. We’ve had some blunders in the process. There was one winter before we had established farm roads. We called the crane in then because one of the barns (um, the same one that tipped over) got stuck. Many of you coming to the farmstore this week have seen the 4th chicken barn that’s starting to take shape. We need it for a young new crop of chicks that are currently about 8 weeks old. They are enjoying short foraging sessions, but soon they will need more barn space, and having an additional, 4th barn means better and more consistent year round production — just allowing for overlapping flocks and some more flexibility with planning our laying hen ages.
Our egg price has been steady for more than five years now; with better record-keeping this winter, we realized we were overdue for a price increase, but delayed it because of the pandemic, knowing people were already stretched and on edge. We just can’t hold off any longer, though. The barns are still experimental, an awesome mobile pasture setup, but yeah, one did blow over. It actually ripped completely off its frame and then tipped over. It will take either a weekend, or a month to get this fixed. I’m terrified, I told Mary, that this will distract us from the Foodshed — our packshed — and just the harvests and crop maintenance later this month and into the winter. The 4th barn is another project. Built to withstand winds and not blow over they are about $4000 each. There are some investments in a new grain bin, better seeding strategy for pasture, and perhaps some more land (our neighbor is interested in selling and at least one large housing developer has made offers). That just concerns us and our farm would like to provide more protein for all of us and keep land in agriculture. So we need a strategy about that, and we have to make sure our laying hens just pencil out. One of my goals with this enterprise is to literally provide a pathway that shows laying hens can be practical, profitable and integral to our farming system. Other organic laying hen farmers have been pushing me on price — and our business model since January. They are right; with one of the barns literally tipped off, pushed off it’s 40-foot long camper frame, it’s more clear to me tonight than before. They are right — and my spreadsheet numbers show this as well. So now, starting tonight, eggs are $6 a dozen. I’ll do my best to make these the best eggs around. You can feel good that the extra dollar, for quite some time, is going to some local welders, lumber collectors, reclaimed building material hawkers, and one incredible crane operator. There’s some fancy UK hardware in the chicken barns that save labor, but the solar panels and even the rollout nest boxes are US made — by other farmers. Oh yeah, and an amazing organic grain corporative, and eventually, back to the farm here, where generations of chickens don’t bat an eye about wind, frost, the price of a good egg, or any objects in motion.
This is an evolving story - more to come. We have some new crops at market - the first winter squash, a new fall/winter salad mix along with some of our favorites, including sweet peppers and tomatoes. With luck, I will be back at the farm wrestling a 40 foot barn with some determined people with heavy equipment and, I hope, big good ideas.
The market goes until the last Saturday of October. Farm memberships stop for a week then. Then, we will be offering our first winter CSA that will go for 7 weeks, until Christmas. Our current farm members will be getting first dibs on this new enterprise that will help fund mostly our packshed and our first full-time, through the winter crew member (yeah, that’s Sabrina). We are excited about this; we have a lot of experience winter growing - with the farmstore full last year with greens through January, but we are generally terrified about both farming and the packshed build. The good news is that the winter tunnels and caterpillars are looking great and we have a lot of tools and techniques to make this happen. The farmstore will continue to have stuff for a long, long while. We will let you know about all of this, what’s in season, both at the farm and if there are any additional memberships available.
And finally, I’m sorry, we have one important warning. It makes the loss, or re-birth of a chicken barn, or the hundreds of hours that each one takes to build seem trivial. In recent weeks, cases of COVID have been rising drastically in Ravalli County. We take this seriously. By some policies, with current numbers, our community should be considering renewed stay-at-home orders. We have worked to keep the farmers market open, and our booth as safe a place to shop as possible, but we do recommend that you get to market early, do your shopping, and get out. Now, at this point in our year, with a big crew and so much in the field, and storage crops in a walkin cooler, well, we need every penny and you need food. We will be masking and sanitizing as we’ve done all season. Someone will be here at the farmstore while we are away sanitizing and helping keep all of us safe. We’ve had a few outside visitors recently for the big work pushes, but it’s just a core team of masked farmers that run the packshed and we are doing are best to stay healthy and make sure we all work on our sleep. We still think that the farmstore is the safest place you can come to shop. Even Tuesdays, when it’s really really busy here, you don’t need to wait more than 5 minutes to go inside the farmstore while other households are shopping. We are so grateful for your support; and I say this not only on behalf of our farm, but all of the farmers in our valley.
-Noah, Mary, and all the SweetRoot Farm crew
