AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

Breakout Session 4

Judy Johnson

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

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.

Breakout Session 3

Shawn Speidel

Best Fertilizer Sourcing

I'm the farm manager there, and we are gonna talk about sourcing fertilizers.

This can be a real pain if you have a quantity and you need to get a certain, you don't need to spend an arm and a leg.

So I'll do my best to go over just some of the basic ingredients to get your soil kind of balanced.

And we'll just talk about all sorts of things.

Up here on the table in front of me are a bunch of fertilizer ingredients.

So this is, you wouldn't need all these ingredients, but some of these are just examples of what would be needed.

A lot of times, you know, when it's all said and done, you come up with a blend, and the blend is what goes on the field.

So this thing has about 5 or 6 different ingredients in it according to the soil test that was pulled.

Why don't we, though, before we get really rolling, let's start with prayer.

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

We thank you for this agricultural conference and the possibilities that it brings to your church and your people.

I pray, Lord, that you'd just be with the leaders behind the scenes and you'd be with all the volunteers, the students, Lord, and just bless in a mighty way.

We love you, and we want to serve you in our most nutritious capacities.

So, the reason that I feel to use fertilizers is to improve our nutrition, you know, to improve another person's nutrition.

To have food that stores well, that doesn't rot in storage, that lasts a long time, that actually does our body a lot of good, where we can actually eat less of it and it produces more for us.

On the first slide here, these are basically the nutrient sources that we have available.

There might be a few that I forgot of major groups, but You have the vegetable compost, so plant-based compost.

You have what's already starting in the soil.

I wanna key in on this, that there's always something starting in the soil, always.

Are you in a place in the Central Valley in California where it's a lot of boron.

Some of these things are large considerations.

You have another source is concentrates that get mined and refined from either the earth, the air, or the water.

So from the earth would be something like, well, monoammonium phosphate.

You take something out of the air and you take something mined out of the earth and you create a fertilizer.

So you take nitrogen out of the air and you take phosphate mined out of Idaho or Utah or Wyoming.

So that's typically what people think of with fertilizers, either compost or the granular fertilizers.

And then there's also something to consider is what's unavailable in the ground.

As you balance your soil, you'll notice that a lot of times nutrient levels increase because there's more biological life.

So the goals of soil fertility is to create real nutritional food.

I think this is really important for the time we live in.

Be the best examples of stewardship and husbandry possible.

I mean, this is the world that the Lord has given us.

Be financially solvent, and I think you can do that better with nutrient-dense food than you can with struggling with insects and diseases.

Have more fun due to more success and live without regret.

We're trying to build a home for the microbes, but it really, if we husband the soil right, it turns back and feeds us.

And start the health message from the ground up.

It's probably not even going to be totally accurate, but if you look in Genesis 2, verse 6, this is how nutrients used to flow.

But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the earth." Now my mind is viewing it like you have this mist underground that's coming up.

It's kind of like a perfect sub-irrigation system.

It's carrying nutrients along with the mist and it's coming right to the plant roots.

And along with that you have the microbes that are feeding things to the plants as well.

We don't have this now, but This is the way it was.

All these slides, I'm gonna try to put it together as a PDF so you can all have access to them because there's gonna be way more information and there's gonna be some things on here that you're gonna be squinting and not being able to see.

I've already looked through here and I didn't realize how grainy it would look up on here, I think.

So, do plant and human nutrients appear in balance in all soils today?

It's kind of a rhetorical question, but...

You know, if they did, there would be no localized deficiencies in people or animals.

You wouldn't have, you know, like for instance, back in Missouri at World War II time, you know, they had some soldiers had better teeth than other soldiers out of the same state.

The Ozarks obviously have worse soils than the northern part of Missouri, which is tallgrass prairie.

I guess I say obviously, but that's not obvious.

Trees don't necessarily indicate a healthier soil.

You'd also have no reason to be sitting here.

It doesn't totally show it because it's a little dark on the south side of the canyon there, but it's basically, you can see that the world really did get destroyed.

We essentially, we live in this world that's really imbalanced, really imperfect, really destroyed.

If we don't recognize our spiritual deficiencies, then, you know, the Lord is really good at showing us.

But we're essentially at a point in history where we really have to make our nutrition happen.

You know, if we really want to live in the country, I think it's time right now to build up some land so that it can carry us.

I don't discount that, but it's like building your house.

You know, Does the Lord Himself stand up your 2x4s so you can frame your wall?

Does He drill holes and string your wire?

No, there's things that He's given us to do.

It says, and every living substance was destroyed, which was upon the face of the ground, both man and cattle and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven.

And they were destroyed from the earth, and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

I think we have this idea sometimes where the flood really didn't destroy the earth.

Like it just kind of like, there's a bunch of water and then it kind of drained off.

But there's quite a few differences now than what we had before.

Anybody know what this nutrient deficiency is?

Larry Lesher

Cover Crops, Smother Crops, and Green Manures

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day, Lord.

We thank you for the opportunity to come together and study, to grow in a knowledge of who you are and what you'd have us do.

Father, as we look into this topic of cover crops and smother crops and exactly what the purpose is for them, I pray that your spirit would guide us and lead us and teach us that we would understand a little closer your idea of agriculture that we would implement it according to your will and purposes and that ultimately it would bring glory and honor to you.

We thank you that you've promised to teach us, that we can rest in the idea that as we put our feet forward, you will guide.

So the title of this lecture is cover crops, smother crops, and green manures.

My name is Larry Lesher, and I will be the 1 engaged in this dialogue today with you folks.

Oftentimes we have this idea of what these words mean, but we don't necessarily understand exactly what they mean.

Because a lot of times we use them synonymously, and it can be used that way.

There can be some particulars to them and why they're called what they're called at a given time for a particular application.

So I thought it might be a suitable endeavor to go through the terminology a little bit and I think it helps us to define and give us some structure of what we're talking about.

You know, it's not a, people don't talk about this much.

How many people here are practicing any type of cover cropping?

How many people here are actively doing any kind of agriculture?

So, these are actually several, these are pretty long definitions and If it gets a little too tedious for you guys, I'm kind of information, I like information.

And so if it's too much though, just let me know, okay?

So cover crops, cover crops are those crops that are planted to provide a cover for the soil.

They are grown primarily as a biological soil conservation tool to prevent soil erosion by water and or wind and to foster multiple benefits in a farming system.

These benefits include, but are not limited to, optimization and or normalization of the fertility profile, improvement of the soil properties such as water holding capacity structure and aggregation, resource lost fertility, I'm sorry, rescue lost fertility that is leached away or could leach away.

So before it leaches away, we can hold onto it.

Provide deep root channels for the next crop and increase organic matter.

Cover crops are typically planted before and after the main designated cash crop in a rotation.

Cover crops may be used as a ground cover or mulch, green manure, nurse crop, or smother crop.

The cover crops can be annual, biannual, or perennial species, including legumes, grasses, and the brassicas.

Basically, as I understand this, cover crops make up the overarching theme of what a smother crop is, a catch crop, a scavenger crop.

Any of these different titles that we're gonna look at, they're cover crops in some form or fashion.

Well, I'm gonna, these are all things that are gonna get defined.

We're going through the definitions right now.

And so as we go through the definitions, we're gonna kinda, that's the baseline.

Understand what we're talking about when we say what we say.

Because people will say, like the title infers, that there's this different thing, but really they're all cover crops and they're all just performing a function.

And so like a green manure is a cover crop that you till in while it's still green, right?

And so something could be like a scavenger crop like you asked.

It's still a cover crop It's just performing a specific task You're putting a specific cover crop in to perform a specific task And so we're going to say that specific task is scavenging for, say, taprooting cover crop that is going to go deep and scavenge things that are lower in the profile of the soil to bring them up.

So cover crop is kind of an overarching term.

So now we're going to get into some of the specific types of cover cropping.

Any crop that is grown and incorporated into the soil while it is green or soon after flowering which can improve the soil, especially with the addition of organic matter plus N, P, and K.

Does everybody know what N, P, and K are?

And other elements contained in the plant.

The average availability of nitrogen in green manure material turned under is typically about 50 to 60% of the initial amount and is determined by a feed or tissue test.

Just, unless you're doing something very specific and you wanna know exactly how much nitrogen you took in on a specific crop, you aren't gonna do probably a tissue analysis when you turn it in.

As a small farm or a garden, it's not typically gonna happen.

But what it's saying is is that when you get the report back of how much, however much nitrogen you tilled in as a green manure, it isn't immediately available, all of that.

It's gonna come over the course of time as the breakdown of that plant occurs.

But because you tilled it in green, it's gonna break down rather fast initially.

Okay, So green manure was once the conventional method of supplying nitrogen and other fertility to crops and was practiced widely before commercial nitrogen fertilizers became available.

So do we need nitrogen based fertilizers outsourced in our system.

And all we need to do is figure out how to get it from this gaseous form in the air to some sort of organic form in the ground, right?

Some sort of solid form that can break down in a gaseous form in the soil where it's available to the root system of the plant.

Why that works so well and why it's a very functional?

Here's something, plants prefer elements that were once in a plant.

You can put an element in the ground as a rock, right?

You can put it in as some synthesized form into the ground, but it prefers above all of that an element that was once in a plant.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

USDA GAP Program

49m

Best Fertilizer Sourcing

57m

Cover Crops, Smother Crops, and Green Manures

1h

The Ideal Soil: Biology

59m

Pest and Disease Control

1h

The Ideal Soil: Water

1h

11. Jeremiah: The Covenant

55m

Popes, Prophecies, and the Sons of God

1h

Jesus An Unsurpassed Leader

45m

L-I-V-E or E-V-I-L

53m

Utopia in Prophecy

27m

Have MERCY On Me

49m

Sound Doctrine