Floyd Farms

Fall leaves are dropping and the growing season is winding down here in Floyd. Before our season here ends, we’d like to offer up this blog entry as a tribute to the many farms we’ve worked with throughout the year.

FULL CIRCLE FARM:

This is the farm that employed us this year. You can read more about it in our July 29, 2009 post, but here’s a couple new shots:

Dan Harvesting Sungold tomatoes off 12’ vines in the hoop house.



Dan during one of many, multi-weekly, sunrise harvests. Here he carries Kale.



Our dear friends and employers, the whole reason we came to and remained in Floyd this year. From left to right: Tenley, SummerRain, & Dennis.



GRASSROOTS FARM:

This year, Good Food – Good People (Dennis & Tenley’s food distribution business) started a vegetable share that relied heavily on a diverse variety of produce from Grassroots Farm. Grassroots provided more for the share than Full Circle did! It’s hard to believe, but this incredibly productive small farm is only in its first year! To us, the most impressive thing about Grassroots Farm is the focus given to systems that foster efficiency. Joe, with support from his wife Caroline, strives in all things to minimize labor input on things that can be done more efficiently through simple technology and better organization – everyday he’s out working Joe is thinking “What can I do to get higher quantities of higher quality food out of my labor?” Here are some of the solutions he’s come up with:

Pictured above, Grassroots’ simple-technology overhead watering system eliminates time used dragging pipe & hose around, dramatically reducing the amount of time spent irrigating, and freeing farmer Joe up for other important tasks – such as those pictured below. Joe says, “Before I had this system, sometimes I’d spend the majority of my day irrigating” (which isn’t uncommon for a farmer to do).



Since it is Joe’s first year farming on his own, he has had to buy-in a lot of his own fertility. Though he is not certified organic, he uses organic composts only for fertility (not chemical fertilizers). While prepping to spread this bought-in compost, he described for us his plans to produce his own compost on-farm. He and his wife raise chicken, sheep, and goats for their personal consumption. All of these animals create rich manures which Joe plans to incorporate into his own compost system – eliminating the waste and inefficiency of buying-in fertility from elsewhere.

Here Joe uses a hand-held, human-powered, compost spreader, which spreads the fertility evenly across a soon-to-be-planted bed.



After adding compost to the soil, Joe puts his seed into this hand held seeder and as it rolls forward it spreads the seed evenly along the bed.


Joe has chosen to use simple technologies on farm for several reasons. The obvious reason is that importing fossil fuels onto the farm for power increases on farm costs and on farm waste/pollution… Less obvious to the non-farmer is the farmer’s ongoing struggle to maintain proper soil fertility, moisture, and tilth (texture – which helps maintain fertility and moisture). Tractors, or even rototillers, tear up the soil, destroying their natural tilth and thus reducing fertility and moisture – as well as leading to erosion of valuable topsoil. By treading lightly on his soils and tilling as little as possible, Joe is increasing the produce quality and productivity of his farm.


IDYLLOOD FARM:

Working at a much larger scale -- Idyllwood farm grows A LOT of produce (with the aid of a lot of mechanization). George and Sharon, owners of Idyllwood Farm, are the same kind folks who took us in over the winter and let us stay in their old farmhouse (see blog post: March 2009). Having seen their farm in winter, we were excited to take the drive to check-out what things looked like at the peak of summer production.

Delicious watermelons of all varieties abounded.


Colorful, nutty-tasting, October beans ripening for harvest.


…But what George is most famous for, in his decades and decades of farming, is his sweet corn – slated to be the best in the region:





Ever eaten raw sweet corn, straight off the plant? It’s divine! No butter needed.




MOON INDIGO FARM:

Mike at Moon Indigo coordinates a 75-member CSA (farm share program) that draws produce from mainly his own farm, Full Circle Farm, Grassroots Farm, and Five Penny Farm (not pictured, but they’ve got a great website).
Mike is a lawyer turned farmer, and takes far more pride in the latter title. He’s been very involved in the food movement here, including helping to start farm-to-school & school-to-farm programs, planning and holding collaborative meetings for all local farmers, helping start a Farmer’s Market here in Floyd, and plenty more. His wife is not involved in the farm and works full-time in the city, so he gets superhero title in our book for taking-on the “stay-at-farm” dad role while running the farm itself.

Here’s Mike with his lovely intern Shannon, harvesting carrots.


Mike teaching his son Rowan about the parts of the sunflower – after having made him a farm fresh breakfast and packed him a farm fresh lunch, all before the school day started.


Rowan helping Mike get food ready for their pigs.


Moon Indigo is a vegetable farm, but they raise a few pigs, sheep, and chicken for their own consumption. Rowan loves sausage ("cha-chege") and is a lucky kid to get to see that meat go from farm, 100-feet-to-table.




BRIGHTS & WEATHERTOP FARMS:

We wrote about these folks briefly, back when my brother Joe was visiting (see blog entry: April 2009)... but since then we were privileged to get to spend a morning and afternoon harvesting 200 chickens with these folks, and wanted to share the day with you:

The evening before the harvest, the chickens are collected from their pasture and brought in in cages to spend their final night of life as their first night ever in a cage. When we got to them in the morning they were surprisingly calm for chickens, just looking out blankly at us.

Bright’s Farm shares their chicken (and turkey when in-season) processing facility with Weathertop Farm, and they both help out with each others’ harvest days. The facilities are stainless steel and immaculate, laid out on a concrete floor which is thoroughly cleaned after each processing.

Here Larry Bright stands at the beginning of the process, with 8 funnels in front of him. During processing he slides chickens upside down into the funnels and cuts into their jugular veins – which kills them instantly and allows them to bleed out. Next the chickens are briefly boiled at the precise temperature needed to aid the feathers in detaching from the skin. Then the chickens are brought to the automatic plucking machine where rubber fingers strip them of their feathers. After that, Larry cuts off their feet (to be fed to their many hound dogs, which they breed and hunt with), then he hands the chickens to his best worker, Lily, who brings them to their first rinse tank.

(Lily is six, and very interested in and tickled to be involved in the whole process – this is her fourth harvest).

“Let me slit the chickens throat again this time Larry!” requests Lily:



After plucking, “I want to carry TWO chickens at once now Larry. It’s faster to carry two!”



Lily sings and improvised song about washing the chickens, and giggles about the few funny white feathers that remain on their now naked bodies.



Lily leaves the chickens in the first rinse tank, and as they’re ready the folks most experienced with removing the chicken organs take over:

Sarah & Cedric of Weathertop Farm – whose five children also aid in the harvest from time to time.

Debbie Bright



Next the chickens are moved to their second rinse:


I was lucky enough to get to take over from there – doing final detail work on cleaning up the insides of the chickens so that no chicken-consumer who doesn’t like thinking of his/her chicken as an actual animal has to “deal with” the (very healthful) remains of hearts, lugs, or other innards).



Dan got to help out with the harvest too (but only once Lily got distracted and decided to make rock piles in the driveway):


Here’s Lily’s mom, Deb (who volunteers her time at harvest so she can learn how to process chickens for herself and her family), doing one last check-over of the chickens before we move them to their third and final rinse before packaging.



Thanks to the Brights for letting us take part in this! We learned a lot, and look forward to processing our own birds one day. (Yes, we WERE vegetarians for the last several years until the Brights and Weathertop converted us with their ethically raised, deliciously healthful, pastured meats.)



LEVERING & DAWSON ORCHARDS:

I want to finish this entry with a shout-out to our friends down in Cana, Virginia – 40 minutes south of us, right along the North Carolina border. Good Food – Good People runs a 350-member fruit CSA (farm share program) that, in its 10 years running, has been heavily supplied by these two family-run orchards. I got so distracted chatting it up, I didn’t have many photos from my trip down there. But here’s what I have to offer:

The entryway to Levering’s Orchard – which I found funny since it seemed the biggest cherry orchard in all the South had a very dilapidated sign and fence! ;-)


This is the gigantic pack-house that Levering owns and shares with Dawson. It used to see hundreds of tons of fruits packed and shipped through it – back before mass-transportation of food across state and country boundaries allowed consumers to forget that fresh, local apples are WAY more delicious than old, mealy, tasteless, shipped apples from other places. This year, they did not even turn on the apple storage facilities in this pack-house – as the demand for Virginia apples has fallen so much in favor of prettier (WAY less fresh) apples from Washington State and abroad. I find this reality even stranger knowing that Dawson & Leverings’ apples sell for less than the out-of-state/country apples sold in local supermarkets… But Levering is creative and resilient, he’s turned this pack-house into a theathrical performance space in off-apple hours. [Sign reads: Cherry Orchard Theater leveringorchard.com]



Here my employer Tenley and I found “old-man Dawson" (Glenn) sitting along his roadside, selling peaches to passer bys. His orchard is a fourth generation orchard, and one of his sons is in training to take it over (the other is a writer for the Roanoke Times).




Here Glenn shows Tenley the plums and grapes he grew and set aside for our fruit sharers. Thanks Glenn!




CLOSING COMMENTS:

It’s worth stating that the most impressive thing about the local food system here is its foundation on collaboration. All the farmers know each other, and most keep in touch, and share plans and ideas with one another. It’s been like that for years, and will continue we hope. Certainly there is competition – we cannot escape the economic system that surrounds us and permeates life across the globe – but the survival of the small farm depends heavily on collaboration and fairness in competition. We may be small, but we are many, and we have a higher value product to offer than big agriculture ever will… value in local and value in freshness.

Thanks for everything you’ve taught us Floyd farmers! We’ll carry it with us when we go.