Our primary goal in farming is to grow our produce in a way that is as healthy as possible for both the people who eat it and our environment. We try to make our little corner of the farming world a sustainable and beautiful place. But just one look around us shows that our farm is but a sliver among the vast farming acreage around us. This is one of the reasons that we participate in research studies – it’s a way to possibly have a greater impact on how farming is done in this area. Because conventionally grown strawberries are one of the most heavily sprayed and chemically treated crops there is, we particularly have an interest in helping to get good research out there that provides scientific evidence of the effectiveness of organic growing methods.
Last fall we set aside a half acre of our field for a research project that will go through 2015. We are one of seven farms that are growing out on-farm trials that are part of a larger project called the Cal CORE Network. Based out of the University of California at Santa Cruz, it was funded by the USDA—Organic Research and Extension Initiative, and involves dozens of collaborators from many different institutions. Our half acre field was divided into five different plots which were each planted to a different cover crop treatment last fall. After we mowed and incorporated the cover crops in spring, each plot was given a different pre-plant treatment—either feather meal, mustard meal, or nothing at all. We then planted broccoli over the entire field. For the next two seasons we will repeat the same cover crop treatments over fall and winter, and plant vegetable crops in summer. The year after that, the entire field will be planted to strawberries. Ours will be a four year strawberry rotation, other grower/collaborators are doing two year rotations.
According to the handbook I received as a participant at the beginning of the project , the goals of this project are to “compare the effects of 4 versus 2 year vegetable/strawberry rotations with varying fertility , disease management, and cropping patterns on crop yield, weed and disease suppression, soil N, nitrate leaching, denitrification , C sequestration, methane and carbon dioxide emissions and economics of production”—ambitious to say the least.
Even though we are about a month away from harvest time, there are already some striking visible differences between the plots. Where rye was planted as an over-winter cover crop, the broccoli plants are much smaller and lighter in color—even after having received a heavy preplant application of mustard seed meal which contains about 6% Nitrogen. (You can see in the photo on the left that the closer plants are darker.) This is because so much of the Nitrogen becomes “tied-up” by the micro-organisms that are trying to break down the huge amount of carboniferous matter that the cover crop provided (it was taller than me when it was incorporated). I am really looking forward to seeing what the differences in yield will be at harvest time.
We already have a system that we’re pretty happy with for growing our organic strawberries, using long (4-5 year) rotations and specific pre-plant cover crops, so in some ways it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to participate in trials like these. It takes a lot of my time to set the trials up and there are usually record keeping requirements as well. But these projects stimulate our innate curiosity and usually teach us something we can use in our own growing. And if they can help convince a larger grower to grow organically because they can use a shorter rotation between strawberry crops, or improve the results for organic growers to make the organic options more attractive, then we’ve been part of a greater accomplishment.
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