The 2009 Season (Year 1 of ?)

It truly has been an exciting ride our first year, with both ups and downs, successes and failures. We entered into this with certain vague expectations, but without experience to back us, mostly uncertainty at how our various enterprises would turn out. What follows is a cursory wrap-up of the 2009 season, the first of what I hope to be many season wrap-ups. Much written here I've covered in earlier posts, but it's worth repeating.



The Field Crops

We leased 15 acres along with the use of many of the buildings and equipment. On the 15 acres, we planted 8 acres of white lentils, 5 acres of emmer, and on the last 2 acres, different varieties of wheat, milk thistle, and an Indian corn variety called Painted Mountain. Both the lentils and the corn were spectacular failures. I planted the lentils fairly early in the year, right before a big spring snow storm. By the time the snow melted away and the ground warmed back up, the weeds had a huge head start on the non-competitive lentils. No one could accuse me of growing a monocrop, since on those 8 acres was a diverse array of weeds and volunteer barley with an occasional lentil in their midst. At one point during the summer, when the weeds were in full bloom, it was suggested I consider plowing the field under and calling it a loss. I couldn't bring myself to do that; I wanted to learn from this and see the whole process through to the end. And that is what we did. We swathed the lentils to dry everything down (weeds and all) before picking up the windrows with a combine. Jerry, our farmer friend who is leasing the rest of the farm's acreage, helped out a lot this year, lending us his swather and taking the time to pick up our lentils. Right now the lentils have been cleaned and we will know soon enough how much we ended up with.

The other failure was the small plot of Indian corn. After spending countless hours hand planting, weeding and hoeing the corn, in the end, all the hungry wildlife feasted on the maturing cobs. I'm guessing deer and pheasants nibbled here and there, but the raccoons cleaned us completely out. Next year, we will plant the corn closer to the farm, and maybe put up an electric fence and bird netting to protect it.

With failure came partial successes. Both the emmer and the milk thistle did very well. The emmer was machine planted and harvested but I planted, weeded, and harvested the milk thistle by hand. Both were beautiful crops in the end. Where I failed on these crops was with post-harvest follow-up. The milk thistle, which I harvested by cutting individual heads with scissors, sits on a tarp in a shed awaiting threshing and a market to sell them into. I'm well aware of the sage advice to sell your crop before you plant it, but my enthusiasm and excitement in the spring conveniently pushed that to the back of my mind.

The emmer was a different story. A seed company had expressed interest in the crop before I planted it. There is a growing market for older grains and emmer is one that is making a comeback. They wanted to test the market, so I grew the emmer for them. After harvesting it, I asked them, "what now?" Well, it turns out, what they decided they wanted was a parboiled version of emmer, that is, partially cooked, and therefore didn't want my crop at this time. This was a bit of a letdown, since all season, I had been so proud of my emmer crop and knew that it was going to be sold at the end of the year. So now it sits in the back of the truck in the shed, beside the milk thistle, uncleaned and unsold.

While no crop in our 15 acre field was a success through and through, I am still happy with what we accomplished. We learned quite a bit, especially from our failures. And for the milk thistle and emmer, all is not lost. We will still be able to thresh, clean, and sell the milk thistle with a bit of time and effort. Next year we will sell some of our emmer through a new CSA program we are going to start. We will create a grain and seed CSA where customers will pay upfront for 100-200 pounds of a variety of grains and seeds such as lentils, emmer, spring wheat, Kamut, and others.

The Turkeys

We started off with 100 heritage turkeys of two breeds: Narragansett and Standard Bronze. They arrived in the mail on the tail end of that huge spring snowstorm. I thought for sure they wouldn't make it to Conrad, but they did and all survived the journey. They began their fragile lives under heat lamps in the brooder on the farm. Courtney's dad, Clyde, had helped us put together the brooder, walling off a section of the building and putting in new windows. The turkeys stayed in the brooder until it was consistently warm enough outside. Once outside full time, we moved them onto fresh ground every week. Twice in the fall, we herded them back inside the brooder when the temperature dropped to the single digits. The weekend before Thanksgiving we had a large group of friends help us butcher them in time for the holiday. What could have been an unpleasant and tiring task was a festival of sorts with wonderful friends generously donating their time to help butcher and bag our turkeys. We used the Mobile Processing Unit (MPU) to process our birds. The MPU is an enclosed truck and trailer with a scalder, plucker, evisceration stands, cooling tanks, and an ice machine. The MPU is owned by a non-profit in Livingston, Farms for Families, and as members of the Montana Poultry Growers Cooperative, Prairie Heritage Farm was able to use it in the fall.

We sold our turkeys directly to customers as well as through our Thanksgiving CSA, which includes onions, potatoes, and winter squash. We've gotten feedback from several of our customers who told us their turkey was the best they've ever had.

I sense there is a huge demand for our turkeys and we can certainly scale it up in the next few years. We will definitely raise more next year, but haven't decided how many more. With more turkeys comes more time to manage them, more feed to purchase, and of course the big upfront cost of purchasing the 2-day old poults (baby turkeys), which ran us $8.60 per bird this year. We purchased our organic turkey feed from our friends at Big Sky Organics out of Helena, but it is expensive. I would like to establish better pasture for our turkeys to reduce some of the feed costs, as well as grow some of the ingredients we would need for the feed, and mix and grind it ourselves. We will face a few obstacles, though. One is our lack of knowledge about turkey nutrition, which can easily be overcome. Another is equipment - we don't own a mixer-grinder. Additionally, we wouldn't actually have feed until late summer and early fall since we'd need to grow the crops. Also, our turkeys tasted so good this year partly because they were outside pecking at bugs and eating grasses, but also because they were raised on high-quality feed. No obstacle is insurmountable, but it's easy to become overwhelmed with everything else we're trying to learn and accomplish. What is the value of the peace of mind that comes with providing the turkeys with top-notch feed which is a large part of why they were such healthy and tasty birds?

The Vegetables

Given the large variety of vegetables we grew and each variety's needs to grow well, I'd say our vegetables were a great success. We grew them on approximately 1/2 acre of what had been 10-year-old pasture. Because of the well-established root systems in place, we worked the ground over and over with numerous implements (a Noble blade, spikes, disc, plow). We broke it down enough to set up our 50'-long beds and either direct seeded or transplanted the vegetables. We started our transplants in the greenhouse, a large, solid structure with fiberglass panels. Unfortunately the propane heating system had been broken for some time and was outdated, so we made do by starting our flats and trays on a germination rack with fluorescent lights, heating pads and insulation. Once we ran out of room on the rack, we moved them to what was essentially a greenhouse within the greenhouse - a small carport shelter covered with painter's plastic and heated by two space heaters. By the time we ran out of room in there, the weather was consistently warm enough to keep our seedlings in the unheated greenhouse. It froze only twice inside the greenhouse which we got around by covering the seedlings with a row cover.

We sold our vegetables through an 11-member CSA (4 families in Conrad, and 7 in Great Falls) and at the Great Falls Farmers' Market. Every Saturday from June to October, Courtney and I would wake up at 3:30am to load up the pickup, drive out to the farm to grab any seedlings we wanted to sell at the market, open up the greenhouse, take care of turkeys, and get to Great Falls (60 miles away) by 6:30am to set up for the morning. We offered the only organic vegetables at the market. Vegetables sold at the Great Falls Farmers' Market are mostly dominated by Hutterites, who we are unable to compete with. They have far more labor for such a labor-intensive enterprise and can sell their vast quantity of vegetables at much cheaper prices. Our advantage, surprisingly, was that we weren't Hutterites. We can't capture those people looking for inexpensive produce, but we can draw in those people who believe in the quality of our organic products. We established a loyal customer-base, with the same people coming back week after week. It was an incredibly satisfying experience, to see people so happy to have us there.

We also sold some of our vegetables to our good friend in Choteau who owns the natural food store, Mountain Front Market. Next year we will expand the number of CSA shares we offer and begin to reach out to local restaurants and grocery stores. Our long-term vision would be to sell all of our vegetables locally to CSA shareholders, grocery stores and restaurants in Conrad, Choteau, Dutton, Shelby, Valier, and Cut Bank. As the local food scene builds in Great Falls and more small-scale organic vegetable growers enter the scene, we would like focus on our local communities and reduce our reliance on the Great Falls market.

Equipment

The scale we are working at puts us in a tricky situation. If we were only growing vegetables and raising turkeys, our equipment requirements would be much different and we could potentially get away with mostly hand labor. But we are also growing field crops in order to build a viable, diverse farming operation in a rural area. I believe there is a lot of potential in our field crops and how we choose to market them. Because we've chosen to pursue crops like lentils, emmer, and spring wheat, our equipment requirements increase. We need a larger tractor to plow and plant with, we need implements for the tractor, we need a utility tractor for moving manure, hauling heavy totes, and for some planting and cultivation. We need a swather to cut hay or to pile lentils or wheat into windrows to dry. We need a combine with both a straight-cut header as well as a pick-up header to harvest our field crops. We need a truck and auger to handle the grain once it's been harvested.

This year we were able to make do with the farm's 30-year-old 100 horsepower tractor and various implements, by borrowing a swather from Jerry, and getting help from Clyde and Jerry with their combines to harvest our crops. We bought a truck and an auger, and spent $350 on an old combine with a 20' header (modern combines are very efficient and have headers as wide as 30-40'). Just last week I took a very scary plunge and financed a 70 horsepower utility tractor (a 1976 John Deere 2640 with 3-point, PTO, and loader), the exact same type of tractor every farmer has or needs, thereby making them very expensive pieces of equipment. I had been searching for just such a tractor through dealer listings and private parties for quite some time. This type of tractor at this age can run from $8,000 to over $18,000. I decided to buy it from a dealer rather than through a private individual because they have gone over it and given it a thorough checkup, whereas you have to take a private party's word on the quality of their tractor. Additionally, I didn't have to immediately put up more money than we could comfortably part with at this time and was able to finance it. I went with the John Deere because they tend to hold their value and finding parts will be fairly easy. Finally, finding a decent tractor through an individual could have meant me driving to the far corners of the state (or another state) to check it out and bring it back to Conrad. I bought this tractor from a local Conrad equipment dealer, so getting the tractor to the farm will be an easy task. For all the advantages of buying this particular tractor, it's still a huge expense for our fledgling farm operation.

The Future

What the future holds for Prairie Heritage Farm is anybody's guess. I know the future I desire for the Farm, but much of what happens is out of our control. Courtney and I have sat down with our farm patrons to talk about both next year as well as the long-term transition of the farm. In the short-term, we will continue to lease the 15 acres as well as the buildings and equipment. We are also considering leasing 40 acres of dryland to grow lentils to try to create a (semi-) reliable source of income from our field crops. By growing on the dryland, we will have less weed pressure, we won't need to deal with the time and energy that goes into flood irrigating, and we can continue to slowly take on more of the farm's acreage.

In our discussions of the long-term, since the entire farm (houses, buildings, infrastructure, and farm ground) is far beyond our financial reach, one option we're considering is only buying the farm ground. Of course, that doesn't give us a place to live right away, but what if we were able to finance the ground and build a modest home? While we built our homestead over a long period of time (coops, greenhouse, sheds, barns, etc.) we could still be using the existing buildings. Right now interest rates are very low and there are beginning farmer programs where we could put 5% down and finance 45% of the total purchase price at 1.5% and the other 55% through a conventional bank loan (also with low interest rates). But are we ready? Rates are unlikely to be this low in the near future, the price of land will likely not drop, but is the time right? On the other hand, when will the time be right? How long do we wait before taking the plunge to build our lives in one place, to set down our roots on a piece of land? This is what I mentally struggle with daily.

I just have to remind myself we are building our business, which can happen independently from our particular physical location. In other words, we can build the business of Prairie Heritage Farm whether we're in Conrad, Eden, Belt, Simms, Fairfield, or right outside Great Falls. That part doesn't really matter from the business's standpoint.

What does matter to me though, is satisfying this urge to settle in one place and make it our own, to be able to plant a few rows of apple trees and plant asparagus and berry bushes and to watch the seasons and years go by and in our short lifetime, learn as much as possible about one small spot on this great Earth.

While this post cannot even begin to capture our first season, I hope it conveys well enough what we accomplished, where we failed, and where we hope to head in the future. For those who follow this blog, thank you for letting us share. We look forward to the adventure that awaits us in 2010. Stay tuned.