How We Farm

As a CSA farm, we get a lot of questions about how we grow our vegetables. In this article I’ll address some of those questions at least in a general way.

We are certified organic by CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers). While in some cases the rules to qualify as certified organic don’t go far enough, they do go a long way towards addressing many of the concerns that consumers have. We meet or exceed all the organic certification requirements. I’ll discuss a few of the big ones that we get the most questions about here.

GMO seeds are not allowed in organic farming under any circumstance. We don’t use GMOs, and we have never had any issues with cross-contamination from neighboring farms. We are fortunate that our home farm is bordered by Harkins Slough on one side and a 350 acre organic farm on the other, and our Lewis Road property is also isolated from conventional farms.

While there are many organic-approved pesticides, such as Neem or Safer soap, we rarely use any of these on our crops. We have a variety of ways to handle pest issues. As a diverse farm growing small blocks of many different vegetables, we are not subject to the same level of pest pressure that can develop on a many-acre crop of a single vegetable. A crop-specific pest can easily get out of hand with such a huge source of food in one place. Still we do have pressures from pests. The worst are probably the aphids that love our brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, etc.). Rotating these crops to different areas of our farm and tilling them in as soon as they are finished help to keep the aphid levels in check. We also provide substantial habitat (we have native plant hedgerows along most of our farm borders) for beneficial insects on our farm who like to eat aphids and other crop pests. We have a thriving population of ladybugs. We use row cover as a physical barrier to keep flea beetles and certain flies from susceptible crops. For the strawberries, we actually release a beneficial predatory mite to eat the tiny but terrible two-spotted mite that can be a huge problem. In addition, we plant alyssum in rows between our brassicas and lettuces to attract beneficial syrphid flies—the larval form of the syrphid fly eats aphids.

To improve soil fertility our main approach is extensive use of cover crops and compost. The compost is tested during the composting process and is certified to be pathogen free. When a crop needs a very high fertility (like strawberries) we use organic fertilizers made from feather meal, chicken manure, and fish based liquid fertilizers. The fertilizers we use are always certified for use in organic farms. Needless to say, sewage sludge is not permitted in organic agriculture. Even if sewage sludge is able to be composted at high enough heat to destroy bacterial contamination, it contains heavy metals and toxic waste of all sorts from industrial and domestic sources.

Certified organic farmers are allowed to use non-organic seeds only if organic seed is not readily available. This rule is a little bit nebulous, and honestly, certified organic farmers can get away with using non-organic seed or starter plants more than they should. We use organic seed whenever possible, and we grow almost all of our own starts in our greenhouse so we have control over everything that goes into nurturing the young plants. We use organic cover crop seeds. We use organic seed potatoes. When available we use organic crowns to start our strawberry plants. For next year, we have committed to purchasing 2000 organic strawberry plants from a new producer in order to help the market along, even though they cost ten times as much as conventional plants. The lack of availability of organic strawberry crowns (planting stock) continues to be a travesty that the certifiers need to take a much stronger position on. (See Steve’s article from 2010.) To us, using organic seeds and planting stock is an obvious part of farming organically.

This is just an overview of our farming practices. We are always looking for ways to address specific problems, keep our soil healthy, reduce water and energy use, and maintain a thriving native environment around our farm.