Twenty-Five Years of Waiting

Originally broadcast on A Farm and Garden Show, WBCR-LP 97.7 FM, Great Barrington, January 17, 2022. Co-hosted by Bill Taylor and Jaye Moscariello.

The first question was about the name.

It comes from football. A redshirted player practices with the team for a season but doesn’t play. He waits, and gets the year back later. My son redshirted at Williams. I was a coach. And the name fit something I’d been doing myself without a word for it.

“So essentially, Red Shirt Farm, I mean, that was partly my son’s experience. He Red Shirted and I was a coach, but I essentially Red Shirted for 25 years waiting to start my farm.”

Twenty-six of those years were spent teaching in Pittsfield public schools. The farm waited until the kids were through college and the mortgage was paid.

The wanting started much earlier. “So I grew up in a suburb of Boston, and from a very young age, all I wanted to do is homestead, build my own house, live off the land and that kind of thing.” Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life landed freshman year of high school and set the direction.

On the word organic

Bill asked about “beyond organic,” which is the kind of phrase that deserves suspicion.

“I think some people aren’t really clear on organic and beyond organic and all those kinds of terms, which, frankly, I think are just becoming more and more just greenwashing, just things that are out there for marketing purposes.”

Here’s where we actually stand. “Our practices are completely organic. We use no chemicals, no chemical fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, even organic ones.” The farm isn’t USDA certified and won’t be. That program now permits hydroponics, permits a long list of organic-approved sprays, and doesn’t say enough about how animals live. We’re heading toward Real Organic Project certification instead.

The hydroponics piece is the one that bothers me most. “I don’t know how you can grow something that’s not in the soil and have it truly benefit from all the microbial activity and the minerals and all of that, as opposed to the hubris of us injecting some sort of water solution that has everything that the plant needs.”

Which leads to the harder discipline. No sprays means no rescue.

“It’s on us. It’s something about our management practices that is causing the issue, and we’re not going to address it by causing further harm by using fungicides, herbicides and pesticides, even if they are organic.”

Three passes at the soil

The soil work has gone in three phases, each one narrowing the question.

First, minerals. Dan Kittredge’s Bionutrient Food Association program, with regular testing, then correcting deficiencies and imbalances by the Albrecht method. Several years of that made a visible difference.

Second, the plant itself. John Kempf’s work at Advancing Eco Agriculture, including sap analysis, which is close to a blood test for a plant. The greenhouse tomatoes made the case. “First year we started using that program, SAP Analysis, we identified some issues with phosphorus deficiency and with some foliar sprays, stopped leaf mold in its tracks.” The existing lesions stayed. Everything that grew after came in clean, and the plants carried through to the end of the season instead of collapsing in August.

Third, biology. Elaine Ingham’s course, biocomplete compost, teas and extracts, and a microscope to find out what’s actually living in there rather than guessing. We’re three years into Johnson-Su compost as well, though without the microscopy you’re flying blind about what you’ve made.

The finding that surprised us

We’ve been part of a nutrient-density study through NOFA and the Bionutrient Food Association, correlating practices with what actually ends up in the vegetable.

The biggest factor wasn’t organic practice. It wasn’t no-till either.

“It was cover cropping and keeping the soil covered and having a regular rotational cover cropping program, which shouldn’t be surprising.”

About twenty percent of our ground is in cover crop at any point, rotating. Where it isn’t, we try to keep living roots in the soil some other way, with spinach, lettuce mix, undersowing the brassicas. Otherwise mulch hay off our own pasture, or tarps.

Why the tillage question matters

“So you’re basically burning off the organic matter that you have in your soil and then putting that up into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, which is why agriculture is the second biggest contributor to global warming.”

That’s the case against the rototiller in one sentence. Breaking new ground here means tarping for six months to a year under compost and wood chips, then a single tillage event with a walk-behind and a rotary plow, which pushes soil aside instead of turning it upside down the way a moldboard does. After that, permanent raised beds, compaction confined to the walkways, and a broadfork when aeration is needed. Charles Dowding has found even a broadfork costs you something by tearing fungal hyphae.

Animals belong in the system too, and the objection to that misses something. “If you think about nature, there’s nowhere in nature where there’s not a mix of animals and plants.” Feedlots are indefensible. Animals moved properly built the Midwest’s topsoil ten and twelve and fifteen feet deep.

The greenhouse that stores summer

Jaye asked what was growing in January. Tuscan kale, spinach, Asian greens, arugula, lettuce.

They’re growing in a greenhouse heated by last August.

“The climate battery greenhouse is heated in the sense that we’ve stored all the surplus heat from the summer 4ft in the soil beneath the greenhouse to act as a battery, as a heat storage battery.”

Low-power fans pull the hottest air off the peak and push it through perforated pipe buried at three levels, the deepest at four feet. By the end of summer the soil is in the mid-to-high seventies all the way down. In winter the fans keep running and the ground gives it back. There’s a second benefit nobody expects: in summer moisture condenses on the pipe and moves into the soil, so the system cools and dries at once, which is most of the fight against fungal disease.

“On temperatures down to as low as ten degrees, we’re able to maintain almost 40 degrees in that house from the banked heat that’s in the soil.”

It holds through about February, when the bank runs out. A propane heater keeps it near thirty on the worst nights so the battery isn’t drained completely.

None of it would exist otherwise. “Because we did it largely through a grant that we wrote and paid for the bulk of it. And I don’t know, I personally could not have afforded it without the grant.”

Roots Rising

Ten minutes down the road in Pittsfield, high school students, a deliberately mixed crew, some of them kids who’ve had a hard time of it. They come out once a week through spring, summer and fall. They’re paid a stipend, which matters: it makes it real work rather than a field trip.

Ten or twelve of them can do in an afternoon what a small crew can’t. Spread compost, flip beds, pull out heavy biomass. We try to make sure the work comes with the whole arc attached, so a student might seed a crop, weed it through the season, harvest it and eat it. This is our fourth or fifth year hosting them.

“So to have this influx of really wide eyed, enthusiastic young people onto the farm is a boon to us as well.”

Where the food goes

Thirteen acres. Two in intensive vegetables, the rest pasture for heritage chickens, turkeys and pigs, with another ten acres coming.

“On those two acres, we support 130 family CSA and a full time farmers market with some virtual marketing and a wholesale outlet to Guido’s and a restaurant.”

The market that matters most is North Adams. Half an hour away, culturally alive and economically squeezed at the same time. It runs June through the third week of October, then once a month through the winter. “We’re committed to serving that population.” That’s a choice, not an accident of geography.

What the farm is for

“Our mission here is one of our primary core missions is education. So we want to really let people see what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we’re doing it and be fully transparent about how we’re growing our food.”

Farm tours took a hiatus through COVID. When there’s enough interest we run them Sunday mornings, ten to noon, off a sign-up sheet.

We’re still short apprentices most seasons. If you want to learn this work rather than read about it, get in touch.