    A practical guide to propagation and succession planting to keep your entire farm or garden yielding an abundance of nutrient packed fresh produce every day of the season.     

AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>A practical guide to propagation and succession planting to keep your entire farm or garden yielding an abundance of nutrient packed fresh produce every day of the season. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Breakout Session 1

Byron Smith

1- From Seed to Harvest: Planning and Scheduling to Maximize Yield

You created man to work in the garden, to dress it and to keep it.

And you've said that you would love to give us wisdom today to know how to do it better.

We invite your presence that you will inspire and motivate us and enlighten us as well.

Going to talk today about some relatively mundane nuts and bolts parts of agriculture and really about succession planting and the propagation and transplanting and things that go along with that.

And I try out this, this make sure that I knew how to use this.

Alright, so the first thing is I'd like to start with just asking the question, what is the goal in farming?

Well, the answer to that can probably be varied, but I read a book recently, it was written a while ago, called The Goal by a business author.

And it really, I think, clarified with me what that goal is, but it can be different for different people.

But I'd like to read the statement here from Education 262.

Now you think, that's pretty broad when God says any line.

So success in any line demands a definite aim.

All right, an aim is somewhat synonymous with a goal.

You have to have something that you are targeting, a direction that you're going, a goal that you have, and for me, I think particularly if you're trying to do something as a means of support, if it's a business venture, This paragraph has been a motivating paragraph for me.

It says farming has been pronounced what?

Now I would like to put a caveat here at the beginning that profit is not necessarily cash in the bank.

And I say that not from a business standpoint, but if you are a home gardener, you can have a profitable operation even if you are having to invest cash into your garden.

Because for you as a home gardener, your objective may not necessarily be a surplus of income over expenses.

Your profit might be the development of character for your children, for example.

And I would also like to say that for schools, I believe that there should be a different standard of profit.

For a school to profit from the farm does not necessarily mean that they have to have a surplus of income over expenses.

There needs to be a clear understanding that the purpose of education is not to make money on the students, on the educational process.

We need to have agriculture in schools because God says it's the only way that we can be successful in educating our young people.

In fact, I have a statement that I read that was very profound to me, where she says that work, particularly in agriculture, is a necessary step to resist temptation.

And there's different things, but for me as a commercial farmer, it says farming has been pronounced unprofitable.

That the labor that you put into farming does not give you enough return to really justify it.

And that's why so many people steer clear of that as a vocation.

But she says, should persons of profitability take hold of this line of employment and make a study of the soil and learn how to plant, cultivate and gather in the harvest, what does it say?

So I would like to say that for me, the goal is a profitable farm.

So, to reach that goal, for the approach that we've been taking is summarized in this little statement, every square foot every day.

Every square foot that you have in your farm or garden costs capital, input such as labor, fertilizer, seeds and then you overhead and obviously I'm oversimplifying the cost but it also every square foot can grow stuff that stuff that has value.

Now I'd like to just for illustration to make my point, if you take a map of your farm or garden and you were to overlay it with a grid, square foot grid, every expense in your operation is divided into those square feet.

The purchase of the land, the insurance on your property, everything can be divided out over those square feet.

And Therefore, I would like to look at, we don't use square foot gardening and yet I think in terms of square feet gardening.

Okay, so in our operation we have established spacing protocols for every crop that we grow.

And here's a, here's a, not an exhaustive list, but this is a list of some of the things that we do.

We grow several crops that are not particularly well-known crops, such as kohlrabi and komatsuna.

And I'd like to put a plug in for some of these less well-known things.

We started selling to our customers kohlrabi and people are like, what in the world do you do with this thing?

All right, so we started sending recipes in our, we have, it's not really a CSA, but it's kind of sort of related to that.

It's a highly modified CSA where it's really more like an online store.

You go on there and go through our web store and find what you want to order and place the order and then we deliver the box of produce.

So in a way it's kind of like a CSA but it's much more flexible.

So we started including recipes for kohlrabi and making kohlrabi french fries for example and people just loved it.

It's quite amazing actually, it's a wonderful vegetable.

So we take these spacings And I want to show you here if you do the math using those spacings We can get 3 beats in Every square foot And if you look at those things there, 20 carats and 2 and a quarter romaine, 4 Salanova.

How many of you are familiar with a Salanova lettuce?

1 cut and it turns into a salad and it's got a really terrific flavor.

So you can see those things there and I put tomatoes there because just as an example of something that actually takes up more than a square foot, so 3 square feet per plant kind of spacing, So I put a third of a square foot, I mean a third of a tomato per square foot because it takes 3 square feet.

Now at retail pricing in Arizona, I got these prices off the stores, okay that means that that the revenue we would get per square foot at retail pricing would give you, for example, $2.69 a square foot for beets, $4 a square foot for carrots, $4.50 for Romaine, etc.

And you can see down there, now these are greenhouse, more greenhouse figures, $13 out of tomatoes and so on.

Now if you looked at that, What crops would you choose to grow?

Now, I want to keep in mind, why are we talking about this?

I'm trying to help you to understand from my perspective why succession planting is really valuable.

Okay, so this is part of wanting to give you an understanding of our motor Saperandi on our farm and now if you take those figures right there and you divide them by the number of weeks that that plant is in the ground this is what you get okay look at tomatoes not so favorable for tomatoes because the tomatoes have to be in the ground essentially a whole growing season.

So you got a lot of money out of that square feet, but if you look at it by how many weeks it's there, that changes the picture.

And if you look before, carrots, you got more revenue off of a square foot of carrots than off of a square foot of beets, but when you factor in the number of weeks it's in the ground, the beets do better than the carrots.

Okay, So there's several factors that come to play in determining some of these things about how you do things, particularly in relation to succession plantings.

And 1 of them is, of course, the length of time that it's in the ground and number 2 is day length and number 3 is temperature.

Now you can see here the impact of day length and temperature in the table.

At the top you see the crop down here, weeks after last crop etc etc.

Now over here the short weeks to harvest and the long weeks to harvest and the average weeks to harvest.

That is the length of time that it's going to take to harvest at the shortest time of the year, that's midsummer, June, July particular.

And then the long weeks is the length of time that it's going to take in the early spring or in the late fall when the temperatures are cooler, the day lengths are shorter, and you can see that between the shortest and the longest it's about 50% and that's a good rule of thumb.

50% we get, we grow year-round, we harvest from our farm 52 weeks a year which is just really really nice because it means that we can have much more consistent systems.

I was going to actually make them in printouts.

I actually had this page here, the complete 1.

I had the complete 1 actually printed out, but I didn't get it over here in time to get made into handouts but we could put it up on the website.

My daughter tells me that she does more with the website than I do.

I do nothing but In case you think that I live in San Diego or anything like it, I don't.

We live where temperatures can get down in the single digits, but because the light levels are high in the mountains of Arizona, we can grow in protected high tunnels, etc.

And we found that from our own trial that, right, we do, we do, my wife wanted to make sure that I pointed out that we do a lot of high tunnel stuff that's not heated.

It's about 50% difference between the shortest and the longest.

Now, if you look there, look at the, if you look here at this, these numbers here, and then you look over in this last column to the right, you see weeks from transplant to harvest.

You see the difference between, It can be anywhere from anywhere from 30% to double that it takes longer to grow from direct seed than it is from from transplant and that's the that to me is a really key thing if you want to get If you want to maximize your productivity, you do more transplanting and less direct seeding.

A couple of crops you can't do that, like carrots and radishes aren't worth doing that.

Now, there's a couple here that we don't normally think of.

It's pretty easy to see that you can have a consistent supply of product for sale and that's really important.

Darren Greenfield

Shawn Speidel

Irrigation Management

Welcome to the irrigation management class.

And my cohort today is Darren Greenfield from Weimar Academy.

Why don't we start with a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, we want to thank you for this day.

We thank you for all your blessings of just having beautiful scenery around us and Lord just the ability to come together and come apart from the busyness and hecticness of life.

Lord, we just pray that your mission will become accomplished in your people.

Please bless this class, Lord, and help us to clearly spell out some of the principles that make for easy management.

So, should have practiced this before I did it, but Daystar is located in a really, really dry region.

If we don't irrigate, plants die really fast.

So we can lose up to .3, well, a third to a half an inch of water a day is how much the plants are actually transpiring.

So it's pretty hot and dry in the summertime.

Darren is from Weimar and it's also fairly dry as well.

A lot of you folks here in the east, you're, you probably don't have to irrigate a lot of the weeks, but we have to irrigate all the time out there.

Let's start with a simple model, like the ideal soil.

And you have, you know, the air, you need 25% air and 25% water in that soil for the optimal plant growth.

Now that's kind of subject to some, you know, that can adjust from, you know, 20% air and more water, but the minerals in the organic matter help to set the, how much air and how much water is available to the plant, how quickly that water actually infiltrates.

So, a lot of times the focus is on irrigation when really the focus should be a little bit more on the soil fertility side.

It's not good to be totally imbalanced on your soil and expect that your irrigation's gonna do what it should do.

So, there are some places in the world where irrigation patterns look like this.

Oftentimes, especially in landscape situations, it happens because of very poor design or very poor sprinklers, specifically the Orbit brand of sprinklers.

I'll just say stay away from those, period.

These folks with this large of a field, they obviously have something going wrong.

It looks like there's a sprinkler that kind of jets out there and makes a donut.

A little bit of mist goes out, but it misses a huge portion.

So you don't want your garden, if you're doing a market garden where every square foot counts, you don't want it to look like this.

So the things that'll hinder crop growth is if you have not enough water, bad frequency of the water, bad timing in the day.

We even at the farm, we irrigate our salad mix beds in the field in the middle of the afternoon because I've got a low application rate and it carries it over about a 2 hour period of cooling, so the plants are under almost no stress during that period.

You know, the placement of the water, obviously in this picture, really matters.

But I also want to bring to light that the nutrition of the plant matters.

If you're lacking potassium or lacking zinc, you're really not going to use water very effectively.

So this is also where soil balance comes in.

That's what it looks like on the natural setting.

So you can tell that when you see, we're called to be husbandmen, we're supposed to make the world a better place.

It's not to say that the natural world is completely ugly, but I think the Lord calls us to dress things up a bit.

So this is irrigated with side rolls, well, with 1 side roll, and this 1 has some significant issues.

So this is a Google image from this last summer.

I didn't need the image to tell me this, but I knew what was already happening.

We didn't get the water on quick enough after an alfalfa cutting.

And our pattern for this impact sprinkler is 60 foot by 40 foot.

Oops, I better get through some of these things.

So 60 foot by 40 foot, that's a long way to try to throw water with a simple rain bird style impact sprinkler.

Our uniformity is probably no better than 60, 65% at best.

You want to make sure that when you do irrigation, you have the highest uniformity possible.

You don't want to be in the 67% range unless that's all the technology that you can put in that field.

Well, it's basically, it's a measurement of distribution, There's different ways of measuring distribution uniformity.

I'll kind of come to that as we go along.

But basically, if this field is 60% or 65% and we need 2 inches of water a week to maintain that crop, we really have to put on about 3 inches of water a week in order, so every place gets 2 inches a week.

So that's the concept I'm trying to get across.

You can put containers and catch them and then you run the calculation based on what you catch.

So essentially, this field would require another 29, 000 gallons of water per acre, so it's quite a bit of water.

How many acres do you guys have at the base farm?

We have about 200, but we don't irrigate all that many.

We just don't have enough water, so we have to...

I'm gonna just bring out, there's a really good resource here, it's called Managing Irrigation Water Quality for Crop Production in the Pacific Northwest.

This doesn't just stay in the Pacific Northwest, but I think it's a really good article.

I was trying to figure out our water quality, how bad it is, how good it is.

You know, our water has a lot of good features to it.

It's bringing enough calcium and magnesium where it maintains.

You know, there's chloride that comes with it, there's sulfur that comes with it.

But the bicarbonates are high, so it causes some surface sealing.

All of these slides should be made available, so I'm just going to kind of roll through them pretty quickly.

And then, you know, you can always get the PDF and then just click on some of these links and download some of these things.

But this is a really good, if you're questioning your water quality or if you're buying a property, get a soil test and get a water test first.

It's just not worth having bad water or extremely bad soil.

A lot of times it's more costly that way.

How do you, if you're not educated on these...

How do you know which ones are good quality?

You can tell by the packaging or packaging.

There's, this little pamphlet does explain a lot of that.

I probably should have organized these differently.

I didn't have time to reorganize some of these things.

You probably can't really see them from up there all that well.

Actually, it's pretty, it's not real clear, is it?

We have our own water plant, so we would have to go and talk to our water guy.

Whitmar McConnell

The Ideal Soil: Carbon Fertility

Father in heaven, this morning we're just thankful for this day.

We're thankful for the refreshment of rest and nourishment.

We just pray now, as we've already partaken of the physical nourishment and even some spiritual nourishment and meanings that have already transpired, that you would continue to bless us with your presence, that we might have knowledge and understanding that would result in wisdom.

So today we're going to move to trace elements.

Does anybody have any questions about what we've gone over so far?

Okay, so this session we're going to talk about the trace elements.

These are elements that are used in small quantities.

And 1 of the nice things about, well, first of all, 1 of the sad things about this is that these are widely ignored in conventional agriculture and even in organic agriculture.

Well, to tell you the truth, in every school of thought in agriculture, they're largely ignored or minimized.

But these trace elements, when you get all your major elements where they need to be, and you start bringing these trace elements up to the optimum.

You can't bring them up to the optimum levels until you have these major ones in order, particularly calcium.

But once you start bringing these trace elements up to their optimum levels, that's when things start significantly changing.

That's when you start getting the elimination of diseases and pests and weed pressure and those type of things You will start getting those things as you move along and when we look at When we look at insects pests and diseases We're going to look at how that progression takes place, the steps that happen that bring you to that place where you have functional immunity.

Again, they're positively charged metals.

It's the first 1, there's actually 2 anions we're gonna cover.

And boron is essential for cell wall integrity.

And an analogy that a lot of people who talk about this give is that calcium is the truck and boron is the driver.

In other words, you have to have the boron to keep the calcium mobile.

And remember I said that calcium is actually the element that carries everything else into the plant.

And so you can see the boron is essential in that, in the role of helping to make sure that everything is, is getting done that needs to be gotten done.

It's involved in flower set and the translocation of starches and sugars.

You have to have it around when you're starting to move the sugars, the photosynthates, into the fruit or the seed, either 1.

If you have it or you don't, it's going to determine a lot of the fruit size and the quality.

A lot of interior problems in fruit are a result of a lack of boron, because there's not proper formation.

It's just a matter of how much water is with it.

And so conventional or organic, whatever, it's the same material.

So the stuff that's the easiest to get is borax, or borax, I'm sorry, borax, borax in the grocery store in the laundry section.

You can go to Walmart or the grocery store, go to the laundry section and buy borax, borax.

I'm having a hard time with the borax this morning.

There's a 10% calcium-sodium borate that has calcium with it.

It slows down the release of boron, and boron is a highly soluble element.

It doesn't stick around unless it's built into something.

And the calcium sodium borate, which is a 10% boron material, slows that process down a little bit.

And so it lasts a little bit longer than the full sodium borate materials.

And then there's a 20% they call solubore, which is typically used for foliar applications.

And in most cases, for people, because they're not in a position where they have adequate boron levels.

Foliar boron is a great way to offset the lack of it.

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Series

Breakout Session 1

1- From Seed to Harvest: Planning and Scheduling to Maximize Yield

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

1- From Seed to Harvest: Planning and Scheduling to Maximize Yield

45m

Irrigation Management

57m

The Ideal Soil: Carbon Fertility

55m

1. Online Marketing: The Next Step

57m

Basics for True Education

51m

Intro to Small Fruit

58m

Container/Suburban Gardening

1h

Sound Doctrine