One day, there is a luxurious green meadow tasseled with wild flowers. The next day, after the tractor has gone, everything is neatly shorn. Wildness replaced by a playing field.
And at the edge of the field, you might see neat 1,200-pound round bales of hay wrapped in white plastic. It’s as if, my daughter once noted, a giant has strewn about a bag of huge marshmallows.
Hay—basically dried grasses and plants—is the single most important source of nutrition for animals in the winter months, or when access to good pasture grass is limited. A dairy farmer, for example, needs an acre of pasture per cow. If she is running a hundred head in New England, it may be hard to find that much pasture in one spot. Hay to the rescue.
When you think about greenhouse farming you probably get the image of hothouse tomatoes. In fact there is a giant greenhouse in Madison, Maine run by Backyard Farms that year-round produces many of the tomatoes eaten on the East Coast. We no longer need to settle for hard pink tomatoes—picked green in Florida and shipped by truck, that taste like cardboard.
Greenhouse farmers are exploring new types of growing, including hydrodynamics and the vertical greenhouse farms that Backyard Farms employs. Theoretically, a greenhouse farm can be located in the desert or on the roof of an office building in midtown Manhattan.
Greenhouse Farming a Business and an Art
Jack Algiers of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY has a stunning greenhouse with plants bedded in soil. The level of analysis and detail that goes into running his operation is extraordinary. It has to be: Of 22,00 square feet in the greenhouse, he can farm on just 13,000 square feet, or less than a quarter-acre. To make the most of this land, Jack harvests twice a week year round. He calculates the output of his greenhouse down to the square foot., andhe’s ready to share this information with other farmers to give a full sense of the productivity for this type of farming.
It helps that Jack is selling to Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber’s fabled restaurant. But Blue Hill is only one of many buyers Jack needs to satisfy at a price that consumers and restaurants can pay. To meet Jack and view the greenhouse and farm visit the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.
I was very much opposed to solar power, because it just doesn’t make sense economically. But then we got a grant of $40,000 on a $61,000 system, or $21,000 net cost to us. Then it becomes very hard to say no.
Generally, the model for solar systems effectively requires you to pay your electric bill 25 years in advance. But that doesn’t really make sense.
In this program the system is leased to us for $87.00 per month plus $16.00 per month for the meter. That’s never going to change. Essentially you lock in your electric use at 50% of what it now costs and push it out 20 years. Will rates go up? More than likely. In that case we’ll really be in great shape.
One issue with this system is that there is no storage. We feed directly into the grid and draw from the grid. If there is any overage it becomes a part of the grid. So far, about 20% of our power is going out to the grid each month.
In fact, we haven’t had a negative month yet. At first, it was hard to sort out what happens with surplus production, but now we understand that we accumulate credits for repairs or modifications.
This is residential rather than a program for businesses. Basically we have zero dollars in—plus the $110 cost of conduit from the house to the unit. (Well, actually we ended up building a barn rather than a freestanding structure for the panels. If I’m going to build something, I want to get some other utility out of it.)
This program is funded on money collected from utility bills—each customer could check that you want to support renewable energy. Something like $200 million was collected over five years. Now the money is being pushed into the general fund for the State of Connecticut. But there is still time to apply.
Franklin Hiram King. You may not know the name, but you know the legacy: More than 100 years ago King invented the cylindrical silo.
It was King’s aversion to waste — something that any farmer can appreciate — that led him to create a new way of storing corn.
Until King, grain was held in rectangular buildings that had to be incredibly strong to support tons of weight and pressure. Rectangular buildings used up valuable land, and yet they waste space (those corners rarely get filled).
Wall and roof joints admit moisture, rodents and insects that led to rot and spoilage.
In fact, even today, the lack of proper storage facilities in India leads to the loss of 10 per cent of the total foodgrain production—in a country where hunger still claims the lives of a million children every year.
But the cylindrical silo has just two joints, is airtight and therefore easier to fumigate, and seals the harvest safely away from the elements.
Silos also put gravity to work. So, no need to use equipment to push grain into a corner, and no need to use a machine to load it onto a truck either. Both problems are easily solved when you load from the top and unload from the bottom.
A modern marvel and distinctly American invention, the cylindrical silo is a form so beautiful that some say Frank Lloyd Wright used it as inspiration for the Guggenheim Museum.
A new study has determined that cows raised on grass (rather than grain) produce milk that’s better for human beings. Those findings held true even after researchers took into account “heart disease risk factors such as high blood pressure and smoking.”
Turns out that milk from grass-fed cows has significantly more of something called conjugated linoleic acid (which may create insulin resistance in the body) than grain-fed cows. Some researchers will add that cows fed on grass are just plain healthier. Cows may love grain but it’s not great as a steady diet.
Smart farmers don’t just turn animals loose on pastureland; they follow a process called rotational grazing.
Goats Are Your Offensive Line
Jen Dustin and her husband, Phil Leahy, of Leahy Farm in Lee, Massachusetts, will tell you that Step One is clearing brush, especially the invasive species. This is most efficiently done with goats—nature’s own brush-clearing machinery. They’ll eat the bark right off the trees if you’re not careful. Only when the goats have cleared up overgrown fields will Jen and Phil bring in their cows.
Phil makes sure that his herd of Milking Devons only spends a couple of days on any one area of pasture, so they’re always on fresh grass.
Like a gardener working on a massive scale, he knows that when you cut back a plant—as grazing does naturally—it stimulates growth. The pastures are more productive, the animals healthier and the milk they produce is apparently more nutritious and tastier. And if the cows don’t nibble the grass all the way down to the ground, they are less likely to ingest parasites, which would require medical intervention.
It’s more work to do rotational grazing; Phil and Jen are constantly moving electric fences powered off a car battery. They’re fortunate to have enough land to feed their herd. But many farmers are limited by acreage in how they feed their animals. Grain becomes a necessity or a supplement if pasture is limited.
Helping the Farmer Next Door
Do you live next to a farmer raising animals for dairy or meat? Do you have open land that is lying fallow? Consider leasing that land to your neighbor. You’ll get a nice tax break, a nominal cash payment and fresh meat and dairy. And the inevitable manure factor can be mitigated when a right-sized herd is moved frequently.
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