#the tomatoes and squash are still producing yet things are starting to wind down and transition to nuts and winter squash etc

[earthandsunandmoon]

I picked chestnuts today :D

[redfoxwritesstuff]

Of Dust and Ashes (Chapter 5)

tHappy Friday. Has everyone’s week treated them well? Hearts in recovery? Ready for more? Good, very good. Thank @winterisakiller for believe it or not- keeping my killing instinct in check. Also thank @tnystrk-exe for encouraging me to embrace my inner King. 

Eventual Clint x ofc. 

Chapter warnings: warning, mentions of suicidal thoughts, gun violence

Chapter 5: When in Rome 

The dog bounded over the shards, easily clearing the glass spilled on the ground after Deanna had knocked the shards free from the door. The sunlight filled the warehouse as best it could from the large windows that lined the front of the store. Still, it did little to banish the darkness from deep aisles.

Looking around, she found the place creepy. It wasn’t somewhere she wanted to be. Closing her eyes for a moment she tried to tell herself she was back home, she would wake and find her children safe in their beds. They would get ready for school that morning and later they would have a birthday party. They would smile at her then do something to get on her nerves toward the end of the night before they fell asleep and she enjoyed a glass of wine.

She would snap at them, yell at them. They would cry and everyone would be tired. In the moment she would feel like a terrible mother. She would give anything to lose her temper with the children one more time, to yell at them one more time. She would trade everything to have the tears in their eyes make her feel like the world’s worst parent.

A bark echoed through the abandoned building. The sound shattered the fantasy around her, much like the glass under her boots. This was the new system of things and while she would give anything to have her kids with her, to see their faces just one more time, to hear their voices and feel the warmth of their hugs- she could never wish this world upon them.

It occurred to her not for the first time that she would have preferred to be on the bus with them, to burn with them, to have died with them than live in this world. She could end it now, she knew. However the simple fact was that she was too much of a coward to do so though the thought plagued her every night.

Slowly, she made her way up and down the rows of shelves with a cart. It felt almost sinfully normal. If not for the clicking of the dog’s nails on the linoleum floor and darkness, she could pretend it was normal. She could close her eyes and almost pretend there were employees manning the registers and other customers milling about. Almost.

A proper toolkit was tossed into the basket along with large box of nails and screws. She didn’t really have plans for the items but they could be useful just the same. A handsaw joined the items. She wasn’t sure really what she’d do with the things or if she really needed them. But she knew she could potentially need them and that was a good enough reason to have them, right?

A neon green display caught her eye and a pointless fear washed over her. Flat tire repair kits glared at her. It was a possibility she hadn’t even considered but could very well happen. She tossed six kits into the cart, unsure if they would even work for the RV’s tires. Simply having them made her feel better. There were so many potential issues that she hadn’t even thought of yet. What else had escaped her attention?

It was outside in the garden center that she found what she hadn’t been sure she was looking for. Plants were mostly still growing left and right, the natural environment seemed to have been kind enough to them. On the far wall were stacks of ‘do it yourself’ greenhouse kits.

She spent more time than she wanted to looking at the kits, ripping boxes open and checking how strong they seemed to be. What she settled on was clearly intended to be stationary but with enough tow straps perhaps just maybe she could make it work. It was heavy, so damn heavy that it felt like it took hours to wrestle it onto the cart. How the hell she would get it in the truck bed was a question for another hour.

Sweat poured down her face as she huffed and panted. Next to her, the dog panted. She felt like was going to die. With determination that surprised her, she pushed herself up off the ground and made her way to a cooler that had lost power and grabbed out a few bottles of warm water. A decorative pot made a good enough bowl for the dog and she dumped one bottle in for him before downing almost half her own in one go.

“You trust me, eh?” She asked the dog who only wagged his tail. “Trust- how’s that for a name?” With a woof it was decided.

After failing to work the box into the bed of the truck, she ended up opening it and unloading it piece by piece. It took time, longer than she had ever wanted to spend in the town. Once done, she took the cart back inside, dog on her heels.

Walking up and down the plant filled rows, she picked out what seemed like the best choices. Broccoli, leafy greens, squash and a cherry tomato plant that already was heavy with fruit beginning to turn red. The rest would come along, at least she hoped. After doubting for a few long moments she wrested a small citrus tree and apple tree into the cart. If they could or would produce fruit for her in a moving greenhouse, she didn’t know but the risk was worth taking. If she could keep them alive even until she found somewhere to settle, they could still prove valuable.

She grabbed soil and deep rectangular pots, more than she thought she could need. Fertilizer was added to the cart. The last thing she grabbed before returning to the truck was seeds for produce- all of them. Peppers, carrots, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins and melons. She didn’t care. Not a single packet of seeds was left on the shelf when she left.

That night, she slept restlessly. It was far too late to build the greenhouse when she made it back and instead, she had to hope no one would find her and take what she had found. Still, the weight of a dog sleeping against her legs was comforting in a way she hadn’t expected. When she wasn’t sleeping, she cried into Aurora’s stuffed fox and Frankie’s blanket as she clutched them both to her chest.

Deanna had survived the second week of the new system and was well into her third week.

~~~~~<3

Morning came and with it dark clouds, heavy with rain in the distance. A sigh slipped out of her lips as she sat up in the bed, Trust was cuddled close to her. This was the 17th morning of the new world and mornings felt less jarring as each one passed her by.

She had established a routine that had served her well. Before getting out of the bed she looked out of the three windows that surrounded her and checked for threats. The truck was where she left it as was the plants, leafs rustling in the breeze and greenhouse parts stacked neatly to the side. Very good.

She made her way out into the living space and checked outside the rest of the windows. Once she was satisfied that she was as alone as she expected to be, she opened the curtains and started the coffee pot. While the magical liquid brewed, she changed and made her way outside with Trust at her side.

Popping the lid off on of the five gallon buckets she had grabbed at the last minute from the store, she began dumping container after container of dog food into the bins. A whine by her side reminded her that Trust was probably still half starved and waiting for food. She filled his food and water bowl, feeling guilty for not doing so the night before. When they were empty, she filled them again. In time she would have to make sure his food lasted but not right now, not for a few days.

Going back inside she made herself a cup of coffee, tossed some bread in the oven to toast up while she sliced an apple. With the dried out almost toast pulled out of the oven she smeared a healthy serving of peanut butter and set the thin slices of apple on top. This had become her typical breakfast, a cup of coffee and fruit topped toast eaten while sitting in the doorway looking at the haze in the sky.

With breakfast out of the way, she set about building the greenhouse atop the trailer. As she wrestled pieces in place, sometimes having to move the truck to use as a ladder and step to reach things, she was sure she was going to accidentally kill herself. Thunder crashed in the distance and the wind was just starting to pick up, blowing dust, dirt and leaves into her eyes.

The sky darkened as she used strap after strap to try and secure the greenhouse down onto the trailer. If it would work in the long run, she had no idea. But as she rammed into it with her shoulder from each side, it remained firm. The sun was now hidden behind the heavy clouds and the wind had a chill to it. The storm was rolling in quickly.

Deanna unrolled the awning, hoping that the wind wouldn’t make her regret it and slowly shuffled bags of potting soil and plants under the cover as the rain began falling. It started slowly, lightly at first and she shooed Trust into the RV. There was a sinking feeling in her stomach as the rain splashed on her skin though she couldn’t pinpoint why.

The rain was pouring when she finally had everything under the awning. Grabbing the keys to the truck, she jumped inside and started the engine. It was then that she finally saw why the rain disgusted her so. Running down the windshield in gray rivers was the rain. At first she assumed it was just dust that had settled on the truck while it had been sitting for the last two weeks but looking down at her hands she found the same slightly oily gray water pooled in droplets on her skin.

The rain was pulling the dust from the air and sending the remains of those who had been turned to dust back to the ground from which they had come. In a rush she tried to push the water off her, pushed her sopping wet hair off her face. She didn’t want to touch the water, to have it be on her. It took longer than she wanted to admit to calm herself and move the truck so that she wouldn’t have to walk into the rain when she left.

She sat in the truck for a few moments longer, praying that the rain would let up. Unsurprisingly, it did not. With the way the clouds looked, she wouldn’t be surprised at all if it remained steady for the rest of the day. At least she had gotten the greenhouse finished.

With one last deep breath, she got out of the truck and set about going back to work. She thought about letting Trust out but he didn’t need this weird water on him. She didn’t even want to get it on her. But this was the new world and apparently this was the new rain.

Slowly, she set about moving the large pots into the greenhouse. She slipped them into position along the sides of the greenhouse. Smaller pots were placed on the shelf above above the larger ones as rain pattered against the greenhouse.

Next she hauled the dirt in and planted what she could, planting the greens on the shallower pots on the shelf and wrestling the large potted trees into the back where she moved them into even larger pots. As she moved the heavy bags of soil, rain poured down her face and dripped into her mouth and eyes. The water burned her eyes and left an oily taste in her mouth that caused her to retch.

The greenhouse didn’t fit as much as she wanted, but it would do. Some fresh produce was better than none. Looking around, she realized that the pots would slide around and fall over as she drove. A trip back to the warehouse was going to be required before she left.

After a shower she felt much better. She took her time brushing her hair and pulling it back into a braid. A notebook was set on the table where she had wrote down the measurements needed for the homemade framework that would secure the pots and keep them from sliding. On the stove, a pot of rice bubbled and cooked next to a small chicken breast in a pan. She had moved Trust’s bowls into the camper on her way in and as she waited for her food to cook, she had forgotten about the large dog sleeping on the other side of the U bench.

When he growled, it shocked her. Her knee bashed against the underside of the table as she jumped in a panic, she cursed and told the dog to hush. Instead he stood tall on the bench, hackles raised.

“What is it?” Looking outside, she didn’t see anything but Trust darted around toward the cab where he continued to act aggressively.

Deanna switched off the burners and grabbed the gun off the table. Though she tried to listen, all she could hear is the sound of the rain and Trust’s growling. Out of nowhere came banging on the door. The whole RV rocked with the force of the hits.

When they couldn’t get the door open they moved to try the driver’s door on the cab. She hissed a whispered order at Trust to hush up and be still. When the dog did as she told, at least for the most part, Deanna said a silent prayer to a god she wasn’t sure she even believed in anymore. With the gun gripped in her hand she unlocked the door and stepped outside.

“What do you want?” She yelled and the man came running around. His hair was plastered to his face and his eyes looked wild.

“Give it to me.” He said and held his hands out.

“I have nothing for you. Leave.”

“Give me it. Give me everything. I have to have it.” He took a step forward and the pipe clutched in his hand came into view. The end was dark and Deanna told herself over and over that it was colored with dirt. Just dirt. Only dirt. Dirt wasn’t typically red.

“Don’t come any closer.” The man was walking, circling wide and she prayed as he moved away from the cab that he would leave. Instead he rushed a few steps forward, swinging his pipe. “Get back!” Deanna yelled as she blindly jerked her gun up and pointed toward the man before jerking it toward the right.

She fired off into the woods as a warning. In the last few days she had occasionally had run ins with other people and when they found that she would fire the weapon they would leave. In this new world where everyone was trying to survive, it was best to not pick a fight with someone who would fight back. Any sign of a fight was enough to know that they should leave.

He didn’t leave.

“Give me everything!”

It all happened so fast. Deanna wished she could say she didn’t remember making the choice. She wished she could say that it was reflex and panic. But that would be a lie. She made the decision herself to pull the trigger.

The man however kept yelling even as he put his hand to his stomach to be covered in blood. He swung the pipe and continued forward so she pulled the trigger again and again until he fell to his knees then to his side just under the awning.

Deanna stood there stunned for a few moments. She couldn’t say what she was waiting for. Perhaps she waited for him to move, to jump up and continue his attack. He did not.

Slowly she moved forward, toward the man’s still form. Her hands shook as she reached out and pushed on his shoulder. He didn’t make even a sound. A backpack was on his back, looking full and heavy and she opened it. Inside was cans of infant formula, some busted open from bullets that passed through his body or the way he had landed when he fell, she couldn’t be sure- didn’t want to be sure.

“Water. Dara.” He whispered and she scooted back in a blind panic.

She scrambled back toward RV. For a few minutes she sat with her back against the cool metal before she went inside and locked the door behind her. She turned on the burners and allowed her still warm food to finish cooking while she sat in a numb silence, gun sitting on the table like a viper.

She didn’t think she would have been able to eat, but she did. She hadn’t looked outside since she had locked the door and finally, as she washed up her dishes, she peeked. The rain had slowed but not stopped and the man was right where she left him. She had to do something about his body. She didn’t know what would be drawn to it.

Dara. The name kept circling in her mind along with the baby formula. It wouldn’t let her rest until she went back out. Each intact can of formula was set to the side and at the bottom of the bag she found a wallet. The man’s name was Markus and he had a local address.

~~~~~<3

Clint stood in the morning light of the 18th day since his family turned to dust. The sun was rising but he didn’t pay it much mind. Behind him on the ground was the unconscious body of the man who had tried to stop him from taking the last cans from the grocery store.

As he loaded up what food he found, he ignored the guilt that tried to wash over him. He had told people to leave, go south toward better areas and make themselves homesteads and they didn’t listen. Sure, if he called the team and said he needed support they would send him some.

He couldn’t do that however. How could he ask them for help when they were already doing the best they could to distribute aid and keep peace along the east coast and he was here, doing nothing. Clint Barton wasn’t helping save people from unrest. He wasn’t making sure those in need had supplies.

No, he was beating a man for the last of the can goods in the small town closest to his home. He was refusing to leave the place he had last seen his family.

All he could do was check in with the team every few days and ask the question he already knew the answer to- “Any leads on how to undo this?” The answer was always ‘nothing yet’. No one could stomach saying ‘no’.

~~~~~<3

Tag list: @usedtobegoodfriend96, @0-0-0-0-0-0-0-7, @theoneanna, @alexakeyloveloki, @toozmanykids, @j-u-s-t-4, @missaphrodite23, @bambamwolf87, @nonsensicalobsessions, @tinchentitri, @michelegurl, @carissime72, @xoxabs88xox

Want in on tags? Just let me know and let me know what you want tagged in as I have this and another series running at the moment. 

[starsailorstories]

Here’s my current setup at the very beginning of the growing season. Almost nothing has sprouted yet except a few brave onions, which I started from seed for the first time ever this year after learning that starts produce Very Small onions for everyone not just me.

The square bed on the right gets basically no direct sun until later in the season, so I’m kind of bracing myself for nothing to grow there (its main purpose is to keep plants that like it cooler happy once the hot weather comes). But the WEEDS manage to grow, so my thinking is that anything is possible and worse case scenario I’ll be out a few bucks’ worth of seeds. My philosophy is kind of to keep pushing the envelope and find the absolute minimum needs of each type of produce, and sort of develop a body of knowledge about what will grow where in this particular microclimate (I THINK I’m using that word correctly). I specifically planted things that have done well in this yard in March/April before, or that, last year, germinated well in the other bed and then fizzled out in the heat, so, we’ll see. If they DO sprout I’ll probably add some succession plantings of radishes (I love radishes lol) in between the rows.

In May I’m going to transition things over to the main event, harvesting the broccoli, radishes, carrots and beets and adding:

Sunflowers, soybeans, and squash in the main bed—squash loved it there last year (almost a little too much lol) and while soybeans aren’t native or part of the traditional “three sisters” grouping, they still fix nitrogen and they are a staple crop in my state, so I’m hoping they’ll yield enough for a block or two of homemade tofu. This will be another experiment—i honestly have no idea how it will go. But I want to know what it takes for a small garden like this to produce nutritionally complete food supplies, with complete protein, fat, and complex carbs. Saving money on produce is great, but can i get a satisfying meal out of a space like this, with the limited resources I have? Maybe not but let’s find out

Herbs in the wall planters and around the edges of the beds—basil, chamomile, rosemary, mint, borage, oregano, chives, thyme (mostly propagated over the winter)

Strawberries in the deeper wall planters (I tried to overwinter last years strawberries but they didn’t make it. Going to have to reconsider my techniques next year)

Potted tomatoes and eggplants—more tender herbs and greens will be planted in the pots to maximize usage of the space (whatever I don’t eat fresh or give away gets boiled up with salt and frozen).

Bell peppers and hot peppers in the square bed—when I first moved in I assumed they wouldn’t get enough light in this location, but thanks to the raised bed they should get close to 8 hours of sun in the summer. I had tried peppers in the wall planters but they just didn’t have enough space and were fighting for their lives all summer. Hopefully this will go better. These will also be interplanted with herbs, greens, and mini carrots.

In fall when all that starts to wind down I’m hoping to do a second crop of broccoli, some cabbage, woody herbs to keep the absolute plague of cabbage moths away (LESSONS WERE LEARNED) and a couple more rows of beets and carrots. Last year the kale and Swiss chard did great right up to the snow, so I’m hoping to keep harvesting from those into October again. When the bulb onions are done I’ll cure them and plant some new onion seedlings in their place for scallions.

I’m also hoping to grow a few more flowering perennials. The bleeding heart and columbine made it through the winter and I’m jazzed. I’d love for the patio to be totally surrounded with flowers but I know it’s going to take time and patience…

In addition to my serious plans, a few pipe dreams I’d love to undertake this season if I get the opportunity to:

A potato tower. Even better a SWEET potato tower (I know nothing about growing sweet potatoes lol)

In the back corner that never gets direct sun, mushrooms! Preferably shiitake or oyster

A trellis up against the house for maypop aka north american passion fruit. I’ve always loved the flowers and I’d like to have more sweet flavors available from the garden for the kitchen

Ginger root. Saw a YouTube video where a guy grew ginger root in pots and overwintered it inside then put it out in the hottest part of summer and as a daily ginger consumer this appeals to me lol

Whether any of that is possible idk but I’d love to fuck around and find out

Anyway hopefully soon we’ll have some more seedling baby pictures! Really excited to see how the new stuff for this year works. I played it really safe with my first season in this place so branching out feels awesome

I know this is technically my writing blog but I might need to infodump about my vegetable garden today, for my health

[gardeninghowto-blog]

Benefits to start an organic garden

You've been trying to eat more organic foods, both to decrease the amount of pesticides you and your family consume and to help protect the environment. But take one look at your grocery store receipt and you know that buying organic can get very expensive, very fast. Luckily, there's a way to grow your own delicious, fresh produce while having fun and learning at the same time: organic gardening! Don't know where to start? It is possible to hire someone to install and maintain a beautiful organic garden for you, but most of us can roll up our sleeves with a surprisingly low amount of effort. Remember, you can start small, even with just a single plant or two. Don't worry if things aren't perfect right away.

Organic gardening means you won't use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, but that doesn't mean your plants fend for themselves. There are an array of tools you can use to bolster plant health and ward off pests. Read on for specific tips, taken from expert garden blogger, Leslie Land, her New York Times book 1000 Gardening Questions & Answers, and other sources. How to Revive An Air Plant https://www.justhomegardening.com/how-to-revive-an-air-plant

Getting Started

Lightweight Watering Can: Union Watering Can ($10, amazon.com) Preparing the Soil

In order to get the best results with your new organic garden, you'll want to make sure the soil is properly conditioned. You have to eat, and so do plants, so make sure your veggies get lots of fresh nutrients. Healthy soil helps build up strong, productive plants. Chemical soil treatments can not only seep into your food, but they can also harm the beneficial bacteria, worms, and other microbes in the soil. The best way to gauge the quality of your soil is to get it tested. You can get a home testing kit, or better, send a sample to your local agricultural extension office. For a modest fee you'll get a complete breakdown of pH and nutrient levels, as well as treatment recommendations; be sure to tell them you're going organic. Typically, it's best to test in the fall, and apply any organic nutrients before winter.

Even if you don't have time for testing, you'll want to make sure your soil has plenty of humus — the organic matter, not the similarly named Mediterranean spread. According to 1000 Gardening Questions & Answers, you'll want to mix in compost, leaf and grass clippings, and manure. Manure should be composted, unless you aren't harvesting or planting anything for two months after application. Preferably, get your manure from local livestock that's organically and humanely raised. How To Get Rid Of Bugs In Houseplants Soil https://www.justhomegardening.com/how-to-get-rid-of-bugs-in-houseplants-soil Making Good Compost

All gardens benefit from compostetty Images and you can make your own on site. Hey, it's free! Compost feeds plants, helps conserve water, cuts down on weeds, and keeps food and yard waste out of landfills by turning garbage into "black gold." Spread compost around plants or mix with potting soil — it's hard to use too much! The best compost forms from the right ratio of nitrogen- and carbon-rich organic waste, mixed with soil, water, and air. It might sound like complicated chemistry, but don't worry too much if you don't have time to make perfect compost. Even a minimally tended pile will still yield decent results.

1. To get started, measure out a space at least three feet square. Your compost heap can be a simple pile or contained within a custom pen or bin (some can be rotated, to improve results). 2. Add alternating layers of carbon (or brown) material — leaves and garden trimmings — and nitrogen (or green) material — such as kitchen scraps and manure, with a thin layer of soil in between. 3. Top off the pile with four to six inches of soil. Turn the pile as new layers are added and water to keep (barely) moist, in order to foster microbe action. You should get good compost in as little as two months or longer if it's cold. 4. A properly maintained compost pile shouldn't smell. If it does, add more dry carbon material (leaves, straw, or sawdust) and turn it more frequently. How To Care For A Yucca Plant: A Comprehensive Guide For Beginners https://www.justhomegardening.com/how-to-care-for-a-yucca-plant-a-comprehensive-guide-for-beginners

Choosing the Right Plants

It really pays to select plants that will thrive in your specific micro-conditions. As a general guide, check the USDA's Hardiness Zones. Choose plants that will adjust well to each spot in terms of light, moisture, drainage, and soil quality. Most gardens have gradations in these variables. The happier your plants are, the more resistant they'll be to attackers.

If you're buying seedlings, look for plants raised without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. A great place to look is at your local farmers' market, which may also have native plants and varieties well-suited to your area. It's better to buy stocky seedlings with few, if any blooms yet, and root systems that don't look overcrowded.

Many things are best grown from seed, including sunflowers, annual poppies, coriander, dill, annual phlox, larkspur, annual lupine, morning glories, sweet peas, squash, and cucumbers.

Planting Crops

Plants that you will be harvesting, such as vegetables or cutting flowers, should be grouped tightly in beds that you don't walk on. Raised beds work great. Grouping reduces weeding and water waste, and helps you target compost and nutrients. Ample space between rows helps promote air circulation, which repels fungal attacks. Remember that seedlings won't always stay diminutive, and you do want to limit overshadowing. It's a good idea to thin crops based on nursery suggestions.

According to Leslie Land, if you want the highest returns of organic produce with limited space and time, these plants are typically winners:

1. Indeterminate tomatoes: so named because the vines keep getting bigger and producing new fruit until frost.

2. Non-hybrid (old-fashioned) pole beans: They keep growing and producing 'til frost — assuming you keep them picked. 3. Zucchini: Everything they say about avalanches of zucchini is true, especially of hybrid varieties. 4. Swiss chard: You can keep breaking off outer leaves for months, and every picking will be tender as long as plants get enough water. 5. Tall snow peas and sugar snaps: They grow readily and produce delicious rewards.

Watering

The best time to water plants is usually in the morning. Why? Mornings tend to be cool with less winds, so the amount of water lost to evaporation is reduced. If you water in the evening, plants stay damp overnight, making them more likely to be damaged by fungal and bacterial diseases.

Ideally, you want to water the roots, not the greenery, which is easily damaged. A drip or soak system can work great, or just carefully water the bases of plants by hand.

Most experts recommend substantial, infrequent watering for established plants, typically a total of about one inch of water per week (including rain). One or two applications a week encourages deeper rooting, which promotes stronger plants. To avoid shocking tender greenery, try to use water at or near air temperature; collected rainwater is best.

Weeding

No matter where you live, you'll still get weeds. Pulling them by hand may sound like hard work — and it can be — but it also can be good exercise, and gets you outside in the fresh air.

Reduce the number of weeds you have to contend with by applying mulch, which also helps protect the soil. Organic mulch and burlap can work in a pinch. Straw is cheap but doesn't last long. Wood chips are nice, but can get pricey. Many people opt to use lawn clippings, although it should be noted that because they are high in nitrogen, clippings should only be used on plants that need a lot of the nutrient, such as squash and lettuce.

Protecting Plants Without Pesticides

If your garden is being assaulted by pests, it may be a sign of other problems, so the first thing you should do is make sure plants are getting enough light, nutrients, and moisture. Also remember that a diverse garden helps prevent pests by limiting the amount of one type of plant offered up to enemies.

It's a good thing to foster natural predators in your garden, such as frogs, toads, lizards, birds, and even bats. Beneficial insects can be your best friends, especially ladybugs. Many nurseries even sell cans of them, though it's true there's a high probability they won't stick around. Leave a small source of water out to attract friendly predators. It's also a good idea to grow plants with small blossoms, such as sweet alyssum and dill, which attract predatory insects. Nets and row covers can also work.

Organic weapons include Bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring bacteria that disrupts the digestion of caterpillars and other leaf-eaters. You can also use horticultural oils, insecticidal soaps, garlic, or hot pepper sprays. Best Gardening Tool Set for Mom : Delightful Gift For Mom Gardener https://www.justhomegardening.com/best-gardening-tool-set-for-mom-delightful-gift-for-mom-gardener

Harvesting

Don't forget to harvest the fruits of your labor! Generally, the more you harvest, the more your plants will produce for you. During peak harvest season, you'll likely find that it's best to check your garden every day. Got herbs? If you use them fresh, pick them right before you need them. But if you'll be drying and storing them, it's best to wait until just before they flower, since they'll have the most flavor. Gather all herbs except basil in mid-morning, shortly after dew has dried. Harvest basil in the late afternoon, since it will last longer after some time in the sun.

When harvesting leafy greens, pick sporadically from the entire crop, a little from each plant. For broccoli, wait until the central head is as large as it will get, before sending off buds for flowering. Cut it off right above the leaf node, and you'll likely get better production from the rest of the plant. In general, it's best to cut produce off with a sharp knife or scissors versus ripping with your fingers, which can cause more damage to plant tissue.

If you get too much bounty, remember you can also freeze, store some types of produce in a root cellar, or take up canning. Enjoy!

Cleaning Up

If you notice sick plants either during the season or at the end of the year, make sure you pull up the entire organism. Don't forget to rake up underneath, since diseased leaves can harbor problems for a long time. Put all infected material deep in the woods, in the ground at least a foot deep, or on the bonfire.

Most healthy or expired plants can actually be left in place over winter. You'll provide some food and habitat for birds and other wildlife, and plant cover can help protect your soil from eroding. It's better to chop off annuals instead of yanking them out. That way you'll leave soil intact, and help prevent weeds from gaining a foothold.

[samyalter354]

Organic garden making ideas

You've been trying to eat more organic foods, both to decrease the amount of pesticides you and your family consume and to help protect the environment. But take one look at your grocery store receipt and you know that buying organic can get very expensive, very fast.

Luckily, there's a way to grow your own delicious, fresh produce while having fun and learning at the same time: organic gardening! Don't know where to start? It is possible to hire someone to install and maintain a beautiful organic garden for you, but most of us can roll up our sleeves with a surprisingly low amount of effort. Remember, you can start small, even with just a single plant or two. Don't worry if things aren't perfect right away.

Organic gardening means you won't use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, but that doesn't mean your plants fend for themselves. There are an array of tools you can use to bolster plant health and ward off pests. Read on for specific tips, taken from expert garden blogger, Leslie Land, her New York Times book 1000 Gardening Questions & Answers, and other sources. Related Articles : https://www.justhomegardening.com

Preparing the Soil

In order to get the best results with your new organic garden, you'll want to make sure the soil is properly conditioned. You have to eat, and so do plants, so make sure your veggies get lots of fresh nutrients. Healthy soil helps build up strong, productive plants. Chemical soil treatments can not only seep into your food, but they can also harm the beneficial bacteria, worms, and other microbes in the soil. The best way to gauge the quality of your soil is to get it tested. You can get a home testing kit, or better, send a sample to your local agricultural extension office. For a modest fee you'll get a complete breakdown of pH and nutrient levels, as well as treatment recommendations; be sure to tell them you're going organic. Typically, it's best to test in the fall, and apply any organic nutrients before winter.

Even if you don't have time for testing, you'll want to make sure your soil has plenty of humus — the organic matter, not the similarly named Mediterranean spread. According to 1000 Gardening Questions & Answers, you'll want to mix in compost, leaf and grass clippings, and manure. Manure should be composted, unless you aren't harvesting or planting anything for two months after application. Preferably, get your manure from local livestock that's organically and humanely raised.

Making Good Compost

All gardens benefit from compost and you can make your own on site. Hey, it's free! Compost feeds plants, helps conserve water, cuts down on weeds, and keeps food and yard waste out of landfills by turning garbage into "black gold." Spread compost around plants or mix with potting soil — it's hard to use too much! best mushroom growing kit for beginners https://www.justhomegardening.com/8-best-edible-mushroom-growing-kit-plus-growth-tips-for-beginners

The best compost forms from the right ratio of nitrogen- and carbon-rich organic waste, mixed with soil, water, and air. It might sound like complicated chemistry, but don't worry too much if you don't have time to make perfect compost. Even a minimally tended pile will still yield decent results.

1. To get started, measure out a space at least three feet square. Your compost heap can be a simple pile or contained within a custom pen or bin (some can be rotated, to improve results).

2. Add alternating layers of carbon (or brown) material — leaves and garden trimmings — and nitrogen (or green) material — such as kitchen scraps and manure, with a thin layer of soil in between.

3. Top off the pile with four to six inches of soil. Turn the pile as new layers are added and water to keep (barely) moist, in order to foster microbe action. You should get good compost in as little as two months or longer if it's cold.

4. A properly maintained compost pile shouldn't smell. If it does, add more dry carbon material (leaves, straw, or sawdust) and turn it more frequently.

Choosing the Right Plants

It really pays to select plants that will thrive in your specific micro-conditions. As a general guide, check the USDA's Hardiness Zones. Choose plants that will adjust well to each spot in terms of light, moisture, drainage, and soil quality. Most gardens have gradations in these variables. The happier your plants are, the more resistant they'll be to attackers. crimini mushroom growing kit https://www.justhomegardening.com/8-best-edible-mushroom-growing-kit-plus-growth-tips-for-beginners

If you're buying seedlings, look for plants raised without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. A great place to look is at your local farmers' market, which may also have native plants and varieties well-suited to your area. It's better to buy stocky seedlings with few, if any blooms yet, and root systems that don't look overcrowded.

Many things are best grown from seed, including sunflowers, annual poppies, coriander, dill, annual phlox, larkspur, annual lupine, morning glories, sweet peas, squash, and cucumbers.

Planting Crops

Plants that you will be harvesting, such as vegetables or cutting flowers, should be grouped tightly in beds that you don't walk on. Raised beds work great. Grouping reduces weeding and water waste, and helps you target compost and nutrients. Ample space between rows helps promote air circulation, which repels fungal attacks. Remember that seedlings won't always stay diminutive, and you do want to limit overshadowing. It's a good idea to thin crops based on nursery suggestions.

According to Leslie Land, if you want the highest returns of organic produce with limited space and time, these plants are typically winners: 1. Indeterminate tomatoes: so named because the vines keep getting bigger and producing new fruit until frost.

2. Non-hybrid (old-fashioned) pole beans: They keep growing and producing 'til frost — assuming you keep them picked. 3. Zucchini: Everything they say about avalanches of zucchini is true, especially of hybrid varieties. 4. Swiss chard: You can keep breaking off outer leaves for months, and every picking will be tender as long as plants get enough water. 5. Tall snow peas and sugar snaps: They grow readily and produce delicious rewards.

Watering

The best time to water plants is usually in the morning. Why? Mornings tend to be cool with less winds, so the amount of water lost to evaporation is reduced. If you water in the evening, plants stay damp overnight, making them more likely to be damaged by fungal and bacterial diseases.

Ideally, you want to water the roots, not the greenery, which is easily damaged. A drip or soak system can work great, or just carefully water the bases of plants by hand.

Most experts recommend substantial, infrequent watering for established plants, typically a total of about one inch of water per week (including rain). One or two applications a week encourages deeper rooting, which promotes stronger plants. To avoid shocking tender greenery, try to use water at or near air temperature; collected rainwater is best.

Weeding

No matter where you live, you'll still get weeds. Pulling them by hand may sound like hard work — and it can be — but it also can be good exercise, and gets you outside in the fresh air.

Reduce the number of weeds you have to contend with by applying mulch, which also helps protect the soil. Organic mulch and burlap can work in a pinch. Straw is cheap but doesn't last long. Wood chips are nice, but can get pricey. Many people opt to use lawn clippings, although it should be noted that because they are high in nitrogen, clippings should only be used on plants that need a lot of the nutrient, such as squash and lettuce.

Protecting Plants Without Pesticides

If your garden is being assaulted by pests, it may be a sign of other problems, so the first thing you should do is make sure plants are getting enough light, nutrients, and moisture. Also remember that a diverse garden helps prevent pests by limiting the amount of one type of plant offered up to enemies.

It's a good thing to foster natural predators in your garden, such as frogs, toads, lizards, birds, and even bats. Beneficial insects can be your best friends, especially ladybugs. Many nurseries even sell cans of them, though it's true there's a high probability they won't stick around. Leave a small source of water out to attract friendly predators. It's also a good idea to grow plants with small blossoms, such as sweet alyssum and dill, which attract predatory insects. Nets and row covers can also work.

Organic weapons include Bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring bacteria that disrupts the digestion of caterpillars and other leaf-eaters. You can also use horticultural oils, insecticidal soaps, garlic, or hot pepper sprays.

Harvesting

Don't forget to harvest the fruits of your labor! Generally, the more you harvest, the more your plants will produce for you.

During peak harvest season, you'll likely find that it's best to check your garden every day. Got herbs? If you use them fresh, pick them right before you need them. But if you'll be drying and storing them, it's best to wait until just before they flower, since they'll have the most flavor. Gather all herbs except basil in mid-morning, shortly after dew has dried. Harvest basil in the late afternoon, since it will last longer after some time in the sun.

When harvesting leafy greens, pick sporadically from the entire crop, a little from each plant. For broccoli, wait until the central head is as large as it will get, before sending off buds for flowering. Cut it off right above the leaf node, and you'll likely get better production from the rest of the plant. In general, it's best to cut produce off with a sharp knife or scissors versus ripping with your fingers, which can cause more damage to plant tissue.

If you get too much bounty, remember you can also freeze, store some types of produce in a root cellar, or take up canning. Enjoy! flower bed ideas front of house https://www.justhomegardening.com/flower-bed-ideas-for-front-of-house

Cleaning Up

If you notice sick plants either during the season or at the end of the year, make sure you pull up the entire organism. Don't forget to rake up underneath, since diseased leaves can harbor problems for a long time. Put all infected material deep in the woods, in the ground at least a foot deep, or on the bonfire.

Most healthy or expired plants can actually be left in place over winter. You'll provide some food and habitat for birds and other wildlife, and plant cover can help protect your soil from eroding. It's better to chop off annuals instead of yanking them out. That way you'll leave soil intact, and help prevent weeds from gaining a foothold.

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Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It

When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.

That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.

Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.

“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.

Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.

“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”

Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.

But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.

“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.

In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.

The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.

They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.

And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives. 

Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.

Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.

Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota

Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota. 

Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago. 

Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention. 

Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.

“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”

The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.

“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.” 

Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina

When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.

Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.

Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.

Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual. 

“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”

But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.

One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.

“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.

“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”

Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado

Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.

The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.

“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.

He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.

“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”

He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.

Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.

But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.

“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”

Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin

Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.

Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.

But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm. 

“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.

He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)

And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).

Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.

“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”

Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin

As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.

A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm. 

One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.

That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.

Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.

“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.

It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.

Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.

She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.

“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”

Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.

“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.

She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.

“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”

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―

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

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Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It

When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.

That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.

Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.

“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.

Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.

“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”

Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.

But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.

“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.

In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.

The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.

They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.

And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives. 

Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.

Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.

Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota

Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota. 

Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago. 

Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention. 

Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.

“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”

The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.

“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.” 

Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina

When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.

Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.

Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.

Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual. 

“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”

But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.

One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.

“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.

“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”

Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado

Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.

The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.

“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.

He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.

“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”

He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.

Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.

But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.

“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”

Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin

Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.

Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.

But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm. 

“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.

He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)

And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).

Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.

“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”

Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin

As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.

A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm. 

One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.

That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.

Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.

“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.

It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.

Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.

She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.

“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”

Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.

“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.

She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.

“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa

―

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6

[repwincoml4a0a5]

Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It

When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.

That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.

Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.

“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.

Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.

“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”

Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.

But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.

“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.

In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.

The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.

They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.

And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives. 

Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.

Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.

Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota

Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota. 

Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago. 

Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention. 

Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.

“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”

The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.

“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.” 

Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina

When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.

Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.

Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.

Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual. 

“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”

But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.

One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.

“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.

“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”

Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado

Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.

The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.

“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.

He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.

“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”

He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.

Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.

But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.

“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”

Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin

Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.

Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.

But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm. 

“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.

He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)

And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).

Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.

“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”

Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin

As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.

A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm. 

One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.

That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.

Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.

“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.

It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.

Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.

She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.

“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”

Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.

“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.

She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.

“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa

―

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6

[rtawngs20815]

Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It

When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.

That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.

Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.

“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.

Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.

“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”

Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.

But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.

“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.

In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.

The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.

They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.

And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives. 

Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.

Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.

Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota

Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota. 

Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago. 

Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention. 

Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.

“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”

The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.

“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.” 

Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina

When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.

Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.

Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.

Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual. 

“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”

But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.

One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.

“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.

“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”

Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado

Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.

The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.

“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.

He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.

“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”

He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.

Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.

But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.

“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”

Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin

Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.

Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.

But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm. 

“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.

He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)

And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).

Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.

“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”

Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin

As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.

A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm. 

One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.

That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.

Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.

“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.

It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.

Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.

She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.

“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”

Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.

“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.

She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.

“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa

―

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6

[grgedoors02142]

Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It

When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.

That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.

Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.

“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.

Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.

“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”

Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.

But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.

“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.

In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.

The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.

They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.

And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives. 

Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.

Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.

Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota

Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota. 

Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago. 

Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention. 

Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.

“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”

The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.

“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.” 

Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina

When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.

Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.

Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.

Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual. 

“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”

But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.

One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.

“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.

“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”

Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado

Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.

The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.

“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.

He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.

“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”

He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.

Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.

But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.

“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”

Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin

Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.

Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.

But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm. 

“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.

He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)

And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).

Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.

“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”

Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin

As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.

A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm. 

One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.

That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.

Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.

“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.

It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.

Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.

She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.

“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”

Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.

“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.

She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.

“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa

―

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6

[rtscrndr53704]

Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It

When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.

That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.

Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.

“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.

Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.

“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”

Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.

But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.

“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.

In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.

The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.

They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.

And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives. 

Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.

Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.

Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota

Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota. 

Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago. 

Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention. 

Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.

“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”

The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.

“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.” 

Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina

When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.

Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.

Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.

Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual. 

“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”

But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.

One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.

“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.

“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”

Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado

Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.

The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.

“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.

He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.

“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”

He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.

Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.

But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.

“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”

Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin

Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.

Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.

But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm. 

“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.

He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)

And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).

Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.

“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”

Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin

As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.

A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm. 

One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.

That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.

Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.

“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.

It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.

Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.

She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.

“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”

Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.

“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.

She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.

“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa

―

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6

[pat78701]

Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It

When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.

That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.

Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.

“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.

Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.

“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”

Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.

But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.

“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.

In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.

The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.

They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.

And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives. 

Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.

Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.

Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota

Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota. 

Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago. 

Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention. 

Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.

“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”

The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.

“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.” 

Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina

When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.

Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.

Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.

Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual. 

“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”

But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.

One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.

“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.

“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”

Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado

Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.

The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.

“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.

He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.

“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”

He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.

Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.

But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.

“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”

Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin

Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.

Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.

But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm. 

“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.

He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)

And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).

Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.

“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”

Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin

As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.

A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm. 

One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.

That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.

Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.

“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.

It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.

Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.

She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.

“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”

Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.

“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.

She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.

“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa

―

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6

[gardeninghowto-blog]

How to start vegetable garden?

Growing your own vegetables is both fun and rewarding. All you really need to get started is some decent soil and a few plants. But to be a really successful vegetable gardener — and to do it organically — you'll need to understand what it takes to keep your plants healthy and vigorous. Here are the basics.

"Feed the soil" is like a mantra for organic gardeners, and with good reason. In conventional chemical agriculture, crop plants are indeed "fed" directly using synthetic fertilizers.

When taken to extremes, this kind of chemical force-feeding can gradually impoverish the soil. And turn it from a rich entity teeming with microorganisms insects and other life forms, into an inert growing medium that exists mainly to anchor the plants' roots, and that provides little or no nutrition in its own right. Related Article : https://www.justhomegardening.com

Although various fertilizers and mineral nutrients (agricultural lime, rock phosphate, greensand, etc.) should be added periodically to the organic garden, by far the most useful substance for building and maintaining a healthy, well-balanced soil is organic matter.You can add organic matter to your soil many different ways, such as compost, shredded leaves, animal manures or cover crops.

Organic matter improves the fertility, the structure and the tilth of all kinds of soils. In particular, organic matter provides a continuous source of nitrogen and other nutrients that plants need to grow. It also provides a rich food source for soil microbes. As organisms in the soil carry out the processes of decay and decomposition, they make these nutrients available to plants. For more on this subject, read Building Healthy Soil.

Make Efficient Use of Space

The location of your garden (the amount of sunlight it receives, proximity to a source of water, and protection from frost and wind) is important. Yet just as crucial for growing vegetables is making the most of your garden space.

Lots of people dream of having a huge vegetable garden, a sprawling site that will be big enough to grow everything they want, including space-hungry crops, such as corn, dried beans, pumpkins and winter squash, melons, cucumbers and watermelons. If you have the room and, even more importantly, the time and energy needed to grow a huge garden well, go for it. But vegetable gardens that make efficient use of growing space are much easier to care for, whether you're talking about a few containers on the patio or a 50-by-100-foot plot in the backyard. Raised beds are a good choice for beginners because they make the garden more manageable. How to Revive An Air Plant https://www.justhomegardening.com/how-to-revive-an-air-plant

Get Rid of Your Rows

The first way to maximize space in the garden is to convert from traditional row planting to 3- or 4-foot-wide raised beds. Single rows of crops, while they might be efficient on farms that use large machines for planting, cultivating, and harvesting, are often not the best way to go in the backyard vegetable garden. In a home-sized garden, the fewer rows you have, the fewer paths between rows you will need, and the more square footage you will have available for growing crops. If you are already producing the amount of food you want in your existing row garden, then by switching to raised beds or open beds you will actually be able to downsize the garden. By freeing up this existing garden space, you can plant green-manure crops on the part of the garden that is not currently raising vegetables and/or rotate growing areas more easily from year to year. Or you might find that you now have room for planting new crops — rhubarb, asparagus, berries, or flowers for cutting — in the newly available space.

Other good reasons to convert from rows to an intensive garden system:

Less effort. When vegetables are planted intensively they shade and cool the ground below and require less watering, less weeding, less mulching — in other words, less drudgery for the gardener. Less soil compaction. The more access you have between rows or beds, the more you and others will be compacting the soil by walking in them. By increasing the width of the growing beds and reducing the number of paths, you will have more growing area that you won't be walking on, and this untrammeled soil will be fluffier and better for plants' roots. How To Get Rid Of Bugs In Houseplants Soil https://www.justhomegardening.com/how-to-get-rid-of-bugs-in-houseplants-soil

Grow Up, Not Out

Next to intensive planting, trellising represents the most efficient way to use space in the garden. People who have tiny gardens will want to grow as many crops as possible on vertical supports, and gardeners who have a lot of space will still need to lend physical support to some of their vegetables, such as climbing varieties of peas and pole beans. Other vegetables that are commonly trellised include vining crops, such as cucumbers and tomatoes.

The fence surrounding your garden may well do double-duty as a trellis, so long as the crops grown on the fence can be rotated in different years. Other kinds of vegetable supports are generally constructed from either wood or metal. However, no matter which design or materials you use, be sure to have your trellis up and in place well before the plants require its support — preferably even before you plant the crop. With some vegetables, such as tomatoes or melons, you may also have to tie the plants gently to the support, or carefully weave them through the trellis as they grow.

Keep Crops Moving

Crop rotation within the vegetable garden means planting the same crop in the same place only once every three years. This policy ensures that the same garden vegetables will not deplete the same nutrients year after year. It can also help foil any insect pests or disease pathogens that might be lurking in the soil after the crop is harvested. To use a three-year crop rotation system, make a plan of the garden on paper during each growing season, showing the location of all crops. If, like most people, you grow a lot of different vegetables, these garden plans are invaluable, because it can be difficult to remember exactly what you were growing where even last season, much less two years ago. Saving garden plans for the past two or three years means that you don't have to rely on memory alone.

A Continuous Harvest

Planting crops in succession is yet another way to maximize growing area in the garden. All too often, though, gardeners will prepare their seedbeds and plant or transplant all their crops on only one or two days in the spring, usually after the last frost date for their location. While there is nothing wrong with planting a garden this way, wouldn't it be easier to plant a few seeds or transplants at a time, throughout the course of the whole growing season, rather than facing the herculean task of "getting in the garden" all at one time?

After all, a job almost always becomes easier the more you divide it up. Plan to plant something new in the garden almost every week of the season, from the first cold-hardy greens and peas in late winter or early spring, to heat-loving transplants such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplant once the weather becomes warm and settled.

Then start all over again, sowing frost-hardy crops from midsummer through mid-fall, depending on your climate. Keep cleaning out beds as you harvest crops to make room for new vegetables that will take their place. You can even interplant crops that grow quickly (radishes) alongside other vegetables that require a long season (carrots or parsnips), sowing their seeds together. This makes thinning out the bed easier later on, since you will have already harvested the quick-growing crop and given the long-season vegetables that remain some much-needed elbow room.

Another benefit of succession planting, of course, is that your harvest season lasts longer for every crop. This means that, instead of getting buried in snap beans or summer squash as your plants mature all at once, you can stagger plantings to ensure a steady, but more manageable supply of fresh vegetables.

Print Your Plans

If you use our Kitchen Garden Planner, you can print your plans, make notes and save them for future seasons. dr pye's scanmask https://www.justhomegardening.com/how-to-get-rid-of-bugs-in-houseplants-soil

Keep Good Records

Finally, we end up where we started — with the realization that, although vegetable gardening can be rewarding even for beginners, there is an art to doing it well. There is also a mountain of good information and advice from other gardeners available to you. Yet one of the most important ways of improving your garden from year to year is to pay close attention to how plants grow, and note your successes and failures in a garden notebook or journal.

Just as drawing a garden plan each year helps you remember where things were growing, taking notes can help you avoid making the same mistakes again, or ensure that your good results can be reproduced in future years. For instance, write down all the names of different vegetable varieties, and compare them from year to year, so you will know which ones have done well in your garden.

Many people keep a book in their car to record when they change their oil and perform other routine maintenance. In the same way, get in the habit of jotting it down whenever you apply organic matter or fertilizer to the garden, or the dates on which you plant or begin to harvest a crop.

Over time this kind of careful observation and record-keeping will probably teach you more about growing vegetables than any single book or authority. That’s because the notes you make will be based on your own personal experience and observations, and will reflect what works best for you in the unique conditions of your own garden. As in so many other pursuits, so it is in the art of vegetable gardening: practice does make perfect.

[chpatdoorsl3z0a1]

Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It

When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.

That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.

Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.

“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.

Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.

“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”

Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.

But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.

“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.

In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.

The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.

They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.

And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives. 

Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.

Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.

Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota

Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota. 

Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago. 

Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention. 

Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.

“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”

The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.

“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.” 

Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina

When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.

Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.

Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.

Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual. 

“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”

But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.

One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.

“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.

“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”

Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado

Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.

The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.

“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.

He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.

“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”

He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.

Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.

But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.

“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”

Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin

Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.

Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.

But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm. 

“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.

He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)

And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).

Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.

“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”

Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin

As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.

A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm. 

One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.

That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.

Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.

“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.

It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.

Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.

She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.

“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”

Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.

“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.

She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.

“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa

―

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6

[stormdoors78476]

Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It

When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.

That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.

Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.

“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.

Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.

“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”

Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.

But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.

“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.

In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.

The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.

They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.

And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives. 

Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.

Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.

Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota

Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota. 

Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago. 

Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention. 

Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.

“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”

The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.

“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.” 

Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina

When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.

Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.

Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.

Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual. 

“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”

But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.

One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.

“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.

“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”

Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado

Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.

The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.

“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.

He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.

“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”

He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.

Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.

But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.

“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”

Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin

Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.

Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.

But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm. 

“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.

He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)

And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).

Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.

“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”

Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin

As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.

A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm. 

One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.

That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.

Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.

“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.

It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.

Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.

She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.

“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”

Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.

“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.

She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.

“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa

―

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It

When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.

That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.

Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.

“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.

Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.

“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”

Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.

But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.

“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.

In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.

The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.

They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.

And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives. 

Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.

Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.

Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota

Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota. 

Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago. 

Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention. 

Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.

“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”

The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.

“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.” 

Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina

When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.

Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.

Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.

Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual. 

“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”

But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.

One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.

“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.

“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”

Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado

Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.

The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.

“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.

He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.

“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”

He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.

Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.

But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.

“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”

Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin

Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.

Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.

But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm. 

“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.

He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)

And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).

Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.

“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”

Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin

As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.

A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm. 

One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.

That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.

Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.

“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.

It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.

Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.

She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.

“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”

Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.

“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.

She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.

“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa

―

Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6