As organic farmers, we see soil as a living, complex, microscopic ecosystem of which our crop's health is entirely dependent on.  Plants depend on microbes to access nutrients and to convert them into a usable form as well as for combating disease, so we strive to support soil microbial populations that are healthy and diverse by intensively feeding the soil with organic matter from cover crops.

Cover Cropping:
We work to always have our fields in cover crops whenever they are not planted in a main (or "cash") crop.  Cover crops  can reduce weed pressure, fix atmospheric nitrogen into soil nitrogen, add organic matter to soil, relieve soil compaction, reduce erosion, improve nutrient cycling, and host beneficial microbes, insects, and nematodes.  We only use certified organic cover crop seed (unless not available like for sunn hemp).  Using legume cover crops, we're able to grow all of our nitrogen needs directly in our soil.

Beneficial Insects/Birds:We use flowering insectary strips of buckwheat and interplanting of sweet alyssum to attract and provide habitat for beneficial insects which pollinate our crops and are natural enemies of our crop pests.  We have 22 songbird on the farm to increase insectivorous bird populations - plus 2 American kestrel boxes.  These beneficial insects and birds are our primary strategy to regulate pest populations.

We do not use any pesticides that are not safely compatible with beneficial insects/bird populations.  We do use natural insecticides like Bt and azadiractin (a protein from a soil bacterium and a plant extract from the neem tree, respectively) that can be harmful to pollinators if sprayed directly, but these are only applied in evening hours when blooms have closed and pollinators have already left the fields for the day.

Crop rotation:
We rotate each field into a different crop family every year to break life-cycles of soil-borne pathogens - the conventional alternative to rotation is fumigation of the soil with non-selectively toxic gas.

Organic fertilizers:
In the past, we used composted chicken litter from certified organic laying hens.  In 2024, we reached our goal of relying only on legume cover crops for all of our nitrogen fertility needs.  We do not use any fertilizers that are by-products of conventional agriculture like feathermeal, bonemeal, soymeal, ect. so that our farm is not dependent on conventional ag.  Our soil is deficient in potassium, so we use the mineral potassium sulfate which is solar evaporated from Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Organic pesticides:
We only use naturally-occuring, OMRI-approved pesticides that are effective towards the target pests while relatively non-toxic to other organisms (including humans, birds, fish, frogs, ect.) and thereby have little to no environmental impact.    Our organic pesticides fall into 3 categories:
          
          Botanical - e.g., azadiractin, a plant extract from the Neem tree, which has insecticidal activity.  Botanical pesticides degrade rapidly in sunlight and water to benign constituents.   

          Microbial - e.g., BT, a protein produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis which has insecticidal activity against caterpillars (and other insects depending on the bacterial subspecies).  Aside from the target pest species, BT is non-toxic to wildlife and humans, and like botanicals it degrades rapidly in sunlight and water.  Other examples include Beauveria bassiana, an entomopathogenic fungus that colonizes pests like caterpillars and aphids.  All of the microbes that we use as pesticides are naturally-occurring and were isolated from soils or plants in nature.

 

          Mineral - e.g., sulfur and copper, minerals that have been time-tested in organic agriculture to control our most difficult fungal diseases like downy mildew and alternaria.  Since they're minerals, they can accumulate in soils as demonstrated in vineyards over a century of high use.  However, our soil is naturally very deficient in copper and sulfur and our soil tests track their levels each season.  We use them at low frequency and very low rates (compared to university recommendations) to responsibly avoid build up in the soil.  Both are easily washed off by rain, during our post-harvest wash process, or when washing in the kitchen (and copper piping, which in terms of environmental health remains the safest way to transport drinking water, is likely to be supplying your kitchen faucet).

Bare soil production:
In Summer of 2019, we stopped using plastic mulch on our farm except for strawberries, and in 2024 we stopped using it even for strawberries.  Plastic mulch results in an enormous amount of non-recyclable waste and is very likely to be contaminating farmland (and crops?) across the globe with microplastics.  While plasticulture does offer significant yield and early maturity benefits, we've decided these are outweighed by the unsustainable waste and likely microplastic pollution.


If you have any questions about our organic growing practices, feel free to email us any time.  We want our practices to be fully transparent to our customers - plus we are nerds and really enjoy "getting in the weeds" on organic agriculture.