Are you a farmer or gardener with love for our winged bird friends? Did you know that there are ways to support them when thinking about what you’re going to plant, or what structures to build? The Wild Farm Alliance is offering a FREE online 5-track course, made up of 10 individual classes and is designed to have participants learn more about how to support bird species while farming or gardening. Courses begin in March and continue until July.
You can register for one class or take all 10. All the classes are an hour long and start at 8:00 am (EST).
Track Topics Are:
Introduction: Birds as Pest Control Allies
Nest Boxes and Other Structures and the Birds That Use Them
Managing and Co-Existing with Birds
Designing a Farm to Be Bird Friendly
Seeing Land Through the Eyes of Birds
Sign Up HERE, the first class begins on March 14th!
The wintertime brings a host of shifting timescales and events. It’s the overlap of the New Year, and notably the less busy time for the majority of farmers and food producers (sorry livestock folks, I realize there’s still a hum of activity in your barns!). For many of us, there’s a January lull before the thaw kicks many activities into gear.
Along with my partner, I operate a small community farm in Canton called littleGrasse Foodworks that raises vegetables, herbs and flowers for “Free Choice Shares”. My partner is on the farm and I juggle farm tasks with another job. I reckon that rings true for many northern New York producers. We are entering our 13th season and I’ve gotten much better at not losing sleep worrying about every issue of our farm, but rather tackling a couple things at a time for incremental improvements that lead to a range of small and big impacts.
One of the fields at littleGrasse
If you are looking for ideas, here are three easy ways to enact positive changes in your farm or food business in 2022.
Track time for one enterprise OR activity
It’s true that we cannot understand our cost of production without accounting for how we spend our time. And it can be overwhelming to consider. For years, I felt the pressure to figure out how much time we were spending tending every one of our 50+ crops to see if any were too time consuming and adjust accordingly. It seemed daunting and I hesitated to take the plunge. And in reality, as a farm with shares, diversity is essential to the quality of our overall offering. We cannot decide to stop raising carrots on a CSA farm, but we can prioritize improving efficiencies in our processes. Anyhow, in your own business, I bet there are certain activities you’d like to get a better handle on and there are very simple ways to track activities, for example an online platform called Clockify.
I decided that instead of figuring out how long tending the carrots versus the cabbage took, it would be more useful to get a grasp on categories of activities. So in 2021, once per day I logged onto Clockify to enter my time spent on certain activities such as Accounting, Communications, Maintenance, Harvest, etc.
Screenshot of the Clockify software.
Logging my activities each day was easy and took around 5 minutes. Some days only included a couple hours of farm work and others included a long list of tasks. Now we are planning for 2022 and with that investment of a couple minutes per day, I have a wealth of new information that I can choose to use in various ways. These options include but are not limited to: Read more Adapting and Improving, one year at a time
Are you one of the 600+ viewers who saw the June Fruition Local Food Showcase online? It’s an amazing time of year for food grown or made in our region and our livestream shines a spotlight on three unique food producers each month.
Daniel and Mendy Martin started with a you-pick berry patch in 1998 and now, 20+ years later, has a full complement of items from their homegrown vegetables to meat, maple and more sourced from other area growers they know and trust. In our conversation, Daniel elegantly explained how a food system only works if both the growers AND the eaters are dedicated to each other. We created a snippet of his interview. Learn more about their family business here.
Visit Martin’s for a well-stocked local food shopping experience.Martin’s grow the most perishable crops on site, such as strawberries and lettuce so they are at their freshest, while sourcing from other growers to increase their selection at the stand.
“When we buy birds we look for some of the best flocks in the United States and get the best genetics we possibly can,” shares Matt Martin. M & M Eggs’ pride and passion is conserving chicken breeds that are in danger of disappearing Read more June Fruition Showcase
