2024 Vegetable Manufacturing on the School Farm – Dickinson School Natural Farm

Season Abstract

The vegetable facet of the School Farm has loved a affluent and productive 2024 thus far. The 12 months is marked with steadfast dedication to glorious soil stewardship, impactful infrastructural enhancements, dialing in methods for environment friendly manufacturing, and a handful of yield data regardless of some very distinctive climate and pest challenges. Our perseverance within the face of these challenges is a testomony to the passion of our staff and the power of our mannequin of diversified, local weather change mitigated agriculture.

In spring, we had sturdy greenhouse and transplant manufacturing season. We utilized our greenhouses to provide Eating Companies and Farm Works with recent greens and different merchandise for the spring semester. We additionally grew about 80,000 transplants that we later planted in our vegetable fields to turn into our crops. Getting them off to an optimum begin was important in last crop efficiency.

In April, prematurely of the apprentices arriving, we eliminated the growing older covers of the yurts and put in new insulation and new covers. Physics main and longtime Farm Pupil Employee Gavin Frueh ’24 rebuilt the bottom to our root washer. The brand new arrange features a leveraged dumping characteristic that makes it a lot simpler and safer to scrub the tons of carrots we produce every year.

In Might, we invested time to determine a brand new, perennial herb backyard. We have now discovered that herbs are a really low-cost product that provides beneficial selection to the CSA and farmer’s market choices. The herbs planted there ought to produce for a number of years with little extra work.

June is usually a really busy month on the School Farm with onboarding, orienting, and coaching for the season. Normally, irrigation isn’t an excessive amount of of a priority, however this June we discovered ourselves irrigating practically continually along with our regular work. The extreme drought in June was uniquely difficult throughout all of our late spring and summer time crops. Spring broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage suffered significantly from drought strain and subsequent insect strain. It was very tough to determine our early summer time lettuces and greens that often flourish in June rains, in addition to our marquee most important season crops like tomatoes, peppers, and candy potatoes.

The upside of a dry June was that the crew spent much less time pulling weeds by hand than we usually do. This surplus labor was leveraged throughout the farm in a number of impactful methods. First, the vegetable rising staff assisted the livestock staff in fence row cleansing in addition to the elimination of particles and invasive plant species all through the pastures. We additionally rehabilitated the greenhouse that previously housed the biogas initiative’s pilot mission. This included eradicating the defunct infrastructure, re-grading the inside, and repurposing the home to extra effectively remedy the firewood that heats the yurts and bakes the farm pizzas. And lastly, we redoubled dedication to our groundhog initiative.

For the reason that summer time of 2023 the vegetable staff on the School Farm has been engaged in a calculated effort to fight groundhog herbivory in manufacturing fields. Our focus has been to destroy lengthy established groundhog habitat to discourage annual colonization of the farm. This contains trapping stay hogs, collapsing the tunnel methods, filling these methods in, and reseeding the soil. The staff spent a number of sizzling days with weedwhackers, shovels, picks, rakes, and tractors to destroy dozens of tunnel methods in a 12-acre perennial pasture adjoining to manufacturing fields.

Vegetable Manufacturing:

This 12 months, we endeavored to develop eighty-three distinct recent product strains. Regardless of the challenges of the season, we loved document setting manufacturing in a number of key crops.

We’re happy with the yields outlined above however conscious that they don’t inform the entire story. Ever keen to enhance efficiency and effectivity, we try to gather necessary knowledge and interpret that knowledge to make knowledgeable planting and gross sales choices.

One necessary metric is yield per planting measurement. This offers an image of the general crop efficiency and is simple to check yields to different years, and different growers. Yield per planting might be tough to tease out for some crops as a result of the margin of knowledge entry error turns into very excessive. However different crops which can be “one and performed” are a lot simpler to trace.

Instance:  Potatoes carried out extremely nicely this 12 months. They shattered our earlier document of yield per row toes. We principally attribute that success to good soil stewardship within the discipline, an sooner than regular planting, and a brand new irrigation protocol this 12 months.

We additionally use this metric to judge selection efficiency. For many of our crops we develop a couple of selection as a hedge in opposition to underperformance of one of many varieties. It additionally affords us the chance to see which varieties develop finest on our farm and inform future selection choice.

Instance:  Watermelon. We succeeded in controlling each illness and bugs the heat-loving watermelon crop by August. In consequence, we harvested greater than ever earlier than, over 5 tons of melons. We grew 4 varieties to hone down which of them do finest for us. In fact, an important metric of watermelons is taste. College students, apprentices, and farm employees took on the grueling process of evaluating the 4 varieties’ consuming high quality by a blind style check. With this knowledge, we will concentrate on the higher performing and higher tasting varieties subsequent 12 months.

On the conclusion of 2023, we recognized a couple of crops that we over-produced:  cucumbers, zucchini, summer time squash, and tomatoes. We deliberately grew much less of these crops this 12 months whereas nonetheless satisfying our current market demand.

Different crops that didn’t exceed 2023 manufacturing: 

• Cabbage: We’re nonetheless harvesting cabbage and can seemingly significantly exceed 2023 manufacturing by the top of the season.
• Carrots: We terminated a complete wave of carrots in June for poor germination resulting from drought stress. About 10% of our fall carrot crop was washed out by the 8/9 deluge.
• Garlic: Garlic manufacturing is decided by the quantity of seed garlic grown the 12 months earlier than. Seed garlic is a crucial income for the farm, and we withheld lower than regular for our personal planting final 12 months. Regardless of that, good plant care yielded a really wholesome, and enormous bulbed crop of garlic this 12 months. In October of this 12 months, we planted 21,960 garlic seed cloves that ought to every yield a really marketable bulb subsequent July.
• Candy corn: As famous above, the candy corn harvest was sadly compromised by a heretofore unseen pest on the School Farm. In any other case, we might’ve seemingly harvested much more candy corn this 12 months than final. We’re at present engaged on methods for deer administration subsequent rising season.

Additionally in 2023, we recognized strawberries as a manufacturing power of the School Farm. In August of 2023 we dedicated to doubling our planting of berries for manufacturing in 2024 (berries are a planted the 12 months earlier than harvest). That doubled planting yielded an enormous crop of berries for the 12 months throughout a wider than regular harvest window. This afforded us an necessary income stream early within the season. This was so profitable, that in August of this 12 months, we planted much more berries for the 2025 manufacturing season.

Be a part of our CSA or go to us at Farmers on the Sq. to see the outcomes of our manufacturing in 2025!