AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Breakout Session 4

Judy Johnson

USDA GAP Program

Well, these are the things I'm going to be discussing this morning.

Phasma is an act that has been made by FDA, and it actually came in effect as not voluntary, but mandatory or required as of October 31st of this year.

And so after prayer, I'll start discussing some of those things with you to educate you on what's coming forward for food safety and how it affects our farms.

Dear Father, I want to thank you so much for another day and for the gift of life today that you've given to each of us.

I want to thank you so much for this conference and being able to share with each other your love and information and knowledge that we brought here this weekend.

I just ask that you be with this presentation, that you will guide me in my words and thoughts to the things that need to be presented, amen.

I'll give you just a little bit of my background.

I don't know that I was specifically called to farming as some people may have been, but in a way I feel like I was.

I grew up in Los Angeles and you kind of get acclimated to where you grow up.

It wasn't like weird to me, the traffic was kind of normal.

Now I go to a city and I stop at every stoplight at every street and wait 3 minutes and I go, ugh.

And then it hit me, this used to be normal for me.

My long-term dream was to marry a farmer.

The TV series Little House on the Prairie, well that was my make-believe play thing out in the backyard.

I just never really dreamed that that would ever happen growing up in Los Angeles.

But through God's intervention, I have the pleasure of being a wife of a farmer.

There's going to be 2 parts of my presentation here today.

The first part is, as though it was not required in our harvest time this year for the FASMA, the food safety regulations, it's getting to be where your customers are not going to be buying from you if you do not have food safety certification.

And so we started having that issue come up for us this summer.

And So this, the first part is a lady we had come and she does consulting and getting you ready for your USDA audit for your food safety.

And so she's put together the first part of the presentation and then I from that put together a part of my presentation that has to do with how we implemented that on our farm, how we made our safety operating procedures.

Okay, so This is just her introduction here that she made this for me to present to you.

Cultural practices that can help improve the quality and safety of the produce grown And these general guidelines can be adapted to any production system.

And I'm just showing this part of it because I want you to see basically what they are expecting and why they have made this Food Safety Modernization Act.

As good stewards of the land, we are also good stewards of produce.

We grow, harvest, pack, and transport to our customers.

I saw a couple of people of you that have had the experience of food poisoning, but that is probably the main thing behind this act that they've made is to be able to prevent people from getting foodborne illnesses with their food.

Factors of foodborne illness, 1 in 6 American annually will have a foodborne illness.

It attacks mostly the young, very young, and the older that have immune or underdeveloped immune systems.

Also those that have immune compromised illnesses outbreaks can occur Because foods are mishandled Almost all foodborne illnesses are linked to time and temperature abuse poor personal hygiene and improper hand washing cross contamination and contaminated ready to eat food such as the bagged lettuces salads and things like that or cut carrots or whatever you get in a package that's been processed or cut or handled.

So these are some pictures of some of the bacteria that cause these illnesses.

Here is a Escherichia coli on a lettuce leaf and also a salmonella on a lettuce leaf here.

The growth rate for these bacteria is amazing.

The temperature danger zone for these is 40 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit and your main 3 bacteria that cause these illnesses is Salmonella, E.

Here's an example in a 30 minute time period in 80 degrees Fahrenheit of how they multiply.

So salmonella symptoms causes diarrhea, fever, cramps, incubation period is 12 to 72 hours and this illness can last from 4 to 7 days.

Coli can cause bloody diarrhea and possible kidney failure which means that you would need to be on dialysis for the rest of your life.

Incubation period is 1 to 10 days, and the duration of this illness can be anywhere from 5 to 10 days.

Listeria is the same, same symptoms, time period.

They're found in the intestines of animals.

They're naturally occurring in your soil and in your environment.

These illnesses can come from cross-contamination, motions such as hand shaking with dirty hands, walking through puddles, and contaminated cloths.

So here's where our good agricultural practices come in and this is what they're looking at for you on your farms of how you're handling your harvest.

They look at your soil, water, hygiene, surfaces, and wildlife and domestic animals.

Illnesses cause microbes are always present in the soil and soil and harvest is product in bins.

Land use history, floods, garbage, prior usage, were there a pig farm on your land before you bought it or started farming on it or what kind of issues were there before you were growing your produce?

Are you down from an industrial operation or cattle farm or pasture?

So the rules for raw manure composting, if your produce is grown on the ground, 120 days before you harvest, you're not to put any raw manure, apply it to your ground.

Orchard or any food grown off the ground such as your fruit and nut trees, things like that, 120 days before harvest you're not to put any raw manure on your ground.

Again land history what was there before we kind of went through that already and again the adjacent land use you know what was going on in that land before you were growing there.

Here's a sample of maybe where there's contamination down under your aquifer space from another area.

Someone close by that seeps into their water can come back up into your water.

Any kind of eating or bathroom facilities or anything should not be in your growing area.

Wash hands before entering the growing area and returning to work.

Water sources, there's basically 3 main water sources.

There's your rivers, ponds, streams, anything that is open to the environment, such as your fish, your birds, whatever, animals swimming in the water, beavers, things like that.

And then there's your municipal water which would be like from your city and surface and I said your surface waters and then there's the well, your groundwater.

They like them clean and neat and groomed up without being overgrown or anything.

And part of the reason for that is because anytime you have any kind of big grass or brush or anything that draws animals to that area for hiding or eating which can cause a contamination problem.

And then here's an example of your open water and you can see some birds here swimming and standing around.

Water usage also includes irrigation, methane, and timing.

With overhead, you have the possibility of soil splash and contact to your edible product.

So what you want to test in your water is for your generic E.

Here's a slide of the little bacteriums that they're looking to have tested in your water.

So these are the standards that they have for produce safety rule and I'm not going to really get in detail with that at this time.

So hygiene and hand washing, that's very important throughout the whole process of your farming.

Having clean hands during production and processing, good hygiene and health, clean clothing and shoes, and providing clean and well-stocked restrooms and hand-washing facilities.

And I stress this, I know a lot of people use hand sanitizers, but they were very adamant, it does not replace soap and water.

They just really did not like the hand sanitizer thing.

So, And their rule of thumb is you sing happy birthday to yourself 2 times while you wash your hands, and that's the length of time to wash your hands.

They also require that you have a visitor sign-in sheet.

Anybody that comes to your location, your farm that is going to be going out into your growing area, they want to make sure that they're following the same standards that you're following and so they need to sign a visitor list and that they're willing to abide by the hygiene rules of washing hands, eating in designated areas and so forth.

Jonathan Dysinger

Tools of the Trade: Tools and Techniques for Increased Productivity and Efficiency

And for recording purposes, the date is November 13.

So let's have a prayer before we get started.

Definitely, Father, we thank you so much for the opportunity to come together and talk about the exciting topic of farming and the tools that we need to do the job efficiently.

I ask that you would bless us and help us to have a wonderful rest of the day.

It's impossible to do them all in an hour.

So we're going to get just a few of them, and if you have any questions, feel free to interject at any time pretty much.

I'll ask if anybody has questions throughout the time, but if you have 1, just raise your hand.

So, efficiency on the farm is largely about having the right tools to get a job done.

If you don't have the right tools to prepare a bed, it may take you just twice as long, 3 times as long.

So I've kind of broken down different categories.

We have bed preparation tools, seeding tools, weeding, and harvesting tools.

The broad fork is probably, well it's very important, especially when you're getting started, to loosen up your soil.

Spading fork, sorry, broad fork's the next 1, I'm looking at the wrong slide.

Spading fork's real important for loosening up hard soil.

We have used these for hours and hours, just breaking up soil that hasn't been grown on before, maybe stuff that's very hard packed.

Now, I'm gonna be, Julia, I'm gonna be like moving around.

I guess I need to hold the mic a little bit maybe.

It would've been nice to have a pinned on 1, but we'll just go with this.

So I have a lot of these tools up here, and you can come and play around with them after the fact, but this is the spading fork.

And there's lots of different kinds you can get, but you want to get a really heavy duty hand forged 1.

If you just get like a form steel 1, they bend, the tines bend really easily and they just won't hold up.

So, hand forged spading fork is the best.

And so you would just stomp on it and just go back and forth across your bed and take, you know, 3 or 4 inches at a time and just work your way back, just pushing it in, pulling back.

Once you have done that a few times and your soil's looser, then you can move to a broad fork, which is wider, and you can do the whole bed in 1 pass.

But when your soil's loose, you can just push all those tines in and then pull backwards and loosen up the soil.

So, once you've done that, the next step that we do is with the three-tooth cultivator.

We put our amendments on, shake your compost out over the bed, and then run over it with the three-tooth cultivator, kind of integrating that amendments and the compost into the soil.

And the three-tooth is a pretty heavy-duty tool here, And you can even use it for kind of breaking up some clods.

If you have some clods, you can kind of hit them with this and bust them up a little bit.

This just kind of goes 3 or 4 inches into the top layer of the soil and mixes everything up real nicely.

So our next 1 would be the 30 inch bed preparation rake.

This is a really great tool, especially if you're doing direct seeding.

It's real important for your soil and your bed to be very smooth with not a lot of clumps.

If you're transplanting, you can work around those a little bit with a fork or a trowel, a transplanting trowel, but if you're direct seeding with some seeders we're gonna talk about here in a bit, it's very important for the bed to be smooth and get the rocks and clumps out.

So this is a very lightweight aluminum rake, 30 inches wide, that Johnny's sells.

We have kind of a handout here that talks a little bit more about these and where you can get some of them.

So you can see there, he's just kind of bent over.

That looks a little bit awkward, but it's got a nice long handle, so you can reach out and just pull it along your bed and get it all smooth.

The other cool thing about the bed preparation rake is you can take just some short pieces of like pex tubing and put it onto the tines for kind of, using for marking your planting spacing.

But you would just put these on, say you were doing 3 rows of like lettuce plants.

Push these on and then run down your bed like this and it marks evenly your spacing.

So you go down lengthwise and then you can also go crossways to kind of create a grid for planting.

So that's really, really neat kind of multiple purpose tool that we use a lot on our farm.

All right, so mostly what we're gonna be talking about is hand tools like this, but I can't help but mention some of the power tools, and this one's 1 that we've started using a lot on our farm, the Power Harrow.

You can also get ones to go behind a small tractor.

But it incorporates, it kind of does everything that we've just talked about all in 1 pass.

It has vertical tines that rotate, and I think they say about 6 inches into the soil, roughly.

Goes about 6 inches deep, and just kind of breaks up all your clots, mixes in, you know, you can put your compost and soil amendments down before you use this.

It mixes it all in, and then it has a roller behind that smooths the bed out and kind of compacts a little bit and just gives you a perfect seed bed.

So that's a really great tool, but they're fairly expensive.

And so if you're doing farming on more of a commercial scale the great thing to have but probably not something that your average home gardener would would shell out the money for.

It's a couple thousand for a new 1, yeah.

And of course, that's just the attachment.

Richard Daly has a booth over here, and he sells BCS equipment.

And so if anybody's interested in this more, he would be the 1 to contact.

We'd have to look at the schedule, but somewhere around 245.

He's gonna be doing a demonstration on a lot of different BCS equipment, and you can get all that information from him.

Alright, so now we're gonna move on to seeding, if there's no questions on the bed preparation.

Does anybody have questions on bed preparation tools?

All right, so we're gonna talk about a few different types of seeders.

So, we'll start with the Earthway Seeder.

It's got a lot of pros and cons, I guess.

It works well for large seeds, like corn and peas and beets.

But it doesn't work well for small seed, like lettuce or anything like that.

It just kind of jams up with the small seed.

It's really affordable, $109 at Johnny's.

I think you can get it cheaper than that other places as well.

It digs a furrow, drops the seeds in, covers it over, and then the rear wheel kind of compacts the soil again a little bit.

And then it also has a row marker that you can adjust so as you're seeding your first row, it marks your second 1 so that when you go back, you have a mark to follow, so you have even spacing.

So, it's a good tool for the price, but if you're getting into commercial farming, you'd probably want to get something a little more advanced.

1 neat thing about them is you can do like, this person's done and kind of daisy chain them, so this guy has 4 together for being able to plant more in 1 pass.

So, we still use it a little bit on our farm, I think, don't we?

For beans, yeah, beans, stuff that's a larger seed, it works well.

The other 1 we'll talk about is the Haas seeder.

Now, We have actually not used this, but we've heard a lot of good things about it, and if you look at it, it just seems like it's very well constructed.

Seems to be well built, and the people that have used it seem to love it.

Whitmar McConnell

The Ideal Soil: Environmental Influences

So we're going to start looking at the ideal soil in relation to biology.

When we get to this level, if we've done everything right, we've got all the conditions right, this is the final key to optimum growth and fruitfulness.

It's getting this biology, I call it the unseen agencies.

We don't see them in action, but they're doing all kinds of things that might make life more abundant.

But they can't work, they cannot work if they are not given the conditions to, to do their jobs.

But once they start doing them, all these things, You know, people will ask me questions about, what should I do to treat this disease, or do with these weeds, or why is this happening?

I don't spend a lot of time on the effects in the work that I do, in the study that I do.

Because if you address the causes, most of the effects that you're going to expend tons of resources on will go away.

And so, too many people spend their time on figuring out how to suppress the effects, rather than figuring out why are the effects even there and how do I eliminate them.

So, we're going to look at the different aspects of a soul food web.

This is just a, and listen, like I said before, with the internet, you have access to information in an unprecedented way.

Of course, how you benefit from that is going to be determined by what you invest your time and your attention in.

There's all kinds of things on there that are total distractions and diversions and destructive.

But it's unprecedented in history, the access to information that people have.

I tell my kids, they have all their smart devices now and everything and it's at the access of their fingertips.

And of course, impatience usually comes with that.

If you can't have a personal text, and if you don't respond to them, and in 15 seconds, they're texting back, did you get my text?

But the truth is that it's unprecedented in history, the knowledge that we have access to individually.

It's not limited by the access to books or other parts of the world and the information that could come from that.

You can reach the whole world now and acknowledge this there.

The question is, what knowledge are you pursuing and what understanding do you want to have?

So let's just look at the different aspects of this and we'll see what they do for us.

Like I had mentioned in 1 of the other classes, there's all kinds of interventions coming in now.

The soil's falling apart, it's blowing away, it's washing away, the biology's dead, and so we've got all kinds of man-made interventions to try to compensate for that dysfunction and everything.

But all of that is done, and it's done in a much better way than any intervention that man could come up with to compensate for it.

So the first group we're going to kind of start from the foundation, biological foundation, and work our way on up.

First thing we're going to look at is bacteria.

Bacteria tend to proliferate in a more alkaline environment.

And so if you were to go into, now the soil, the biologists in the biological school of thought again come from a premise of evolution, largely.

And you need to understand that, because a lot of people, because biology is natural, they think, well, this is a reasonable thing to think is the solution.

But conventional wisdom comes from a foundation of evolution.

And so they'll say that life is successional.

But what you'll see is that the succession is 1 of deterioration, not 1 of evolution or advancement, if you want to put it that way.

And so in more productive ecological systems, like grasslands and things like that, the pH will be higher, and there will be a higher proliferation of bacteria.

If you were to go into a forest, first you would go into a deciduous forest and then it would succeed on as they would call it into a coniferous forest.

You switch to a more acidic environment and a more fungal dominated environment.

Again, it comes back to the balance again.

And so in a soil that's properly constructed, the pH falls exactly where it balances the function of bacteria and fungi in the soil.

So that you get the benefit of both of them without the extreme influence of either 1.

And so there are different types of bacteria.

There are basically 3 kinds of nitrogen fixers.

And again, as I've mentioned multiple times, this should be your objective as a grower to get this nitrogen system, this system to work for you.

You shouldn't be spending your money on nitrogen.

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Series

Breakout Session 4

The Ideal Soil: Environmental Influences

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

USDA GAP Program

49m

Tools of the Trade: Tools and Techniques for Increased Productivity and Efficiency

52m

The Ideal Soil: Environmental Influences

58m

Methods Without Madness

59m

Sound Doctrine