Category Archives: newsletters ’14

Peregrine Farm News Vol. 11 #12, 5/30/14

What’s been going on!

A huge week.  Starting with getting all the peppers in the ground, ending with the start of blueberry picking.  We have moved our pepper planting date back to the third week of May for numerous reasons.  Most people plant their peppers too early when the soil is still cool and the weather unsettled, by the end of May those conditions have improved and the plants can really take off, growing a strong plant that doesn’t have to struggle to get established.  We have two other reasons to plant later; one- we want to let the hairy vetch cover crop get to bloom stage for maximum nitrogen and it is easier to kill, two- because we are in the colored bell business we want the peak of our harvest to be in the somewhat dryer and cooler nights of early September when the fruit quality is higher.  If we were in the green bell business, it wouldn’t matter as much, those things are tough as nails.

Conditions were perfect the end of last week go get the soil ready and Friday was not too hot so that the plants went in without too much stress.  The soil moisture and texture for the no till planting of bell peppers was a good as we have ever had and we rolled quickly through the planting.  A good watering in with the hose and then a long irrigation a few days later and the whole field looks as beautiful as can be possible.

While we could have picked some blueberries last Friday, we always feel we rush it a bit and the first ones aren’t as full ripe as if we wait a few days so Monday was the first official day and we had a small crew make the first pass through the field.  Now they are really rolling, fortunately other than a few days it has not been really hot so we are able to keep up, barely.  Next week should be the peak and we will need more pickers, if you know of any able bodies who might want to come out and pick any weekday morning have them contact us.  We pay cash, $8 an hour for the most enjoyable job anyone has ever had.

Just one week out from the Farm to Fork Picnic.  This year we are paired with our friend and good customer Bret Jennings from Elaine’s on Franklin.  We are still working on our menu items but for sure a blueberry desert and something savory.  Get your tickets now while they are still available and help raise money for new and beginning farmer programs at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems and the Breeze Farm in Orange County

Picture of the Week

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A lot of beautiful berries to pick

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 11 #11, 5/22/14

What’s been going on!

The end of an era and a sad day.  A quiet collapse of part of our local food system rippled through the area last week.  Chaudhry’s Halal Meats in Siler City, who has run the only local independent poultry processing plant since 2008, announced he was throwing in the towel and closing.  He will keep his profitable red meat plant open but despite building a state of the art poultry plant there were not enough birds going through it to keep it open.  This will probably be the last time we will see an independent poultry processing plant operating in the Piedmont of North Carolina.

What happened?  You may remember that when we first began raising turkeys in 2003 there was a small poultry processing plant between Pittsboro and Siler City who had been in business for a few years, struggling to make a go of it.  In the fall of 2005 they announced they were going to close just as the Thanksgiving season was approaching.  We quickly formed a group to take over the plant to at least run it through the end of the year.  In the end we formed a cooperative, Growers Choice, and we fought a losing battle for nearly two years to keep the plant running and get enough birds on the ground to make it profitable.  Between the condition of the plant, the USDA, and not enough birds we closed down operations as Chaudhry announced he was going to build a new plant.

We thought “great you run the plant and Growers Choice will work on increasing the number of local birds being raised”.  In the long run two things happened.  Farmers are independent sorts and really don’t work together well, we could not get them to cooperate to even buy feed in bulk, which would dramatically reduce their production costs.  The other change was loosening of the self-processing rules that allowed people to process more birds on their own farms without USDA inspection; most of the new growers of chickens now process their own.  Only those growers who raised a lot of chickens or turkeys would take them to Chaudhry’s, it was not enough.  I will say that Abdul Chaudhry and his folks did a good job and he kept the plant open longer than was economically feasible made only possible by having his other plant next door to absorb some of the costs and employees.

What will happen next?  The next closest plant is now in 3 hours away in Marion, no one I know will drive their birds that far; so for many, including us, it is the end of their pastured poultry operations, especially turkeys.  Some may begin self-processing their own chickens because they are relatively faster and easier to do than other birds but will do them in smaller numbers than they did before.  All of the turkey producers I have talked to have indicated that they will not be raising turkeys.  Few people self-process more than a few turkeys because they are heavy and much more work than chickens.  So savor that rare local pasture raised chicken you see at the Farmers’ Market and be prepared to go back to a Butterball turkey or have one shipped in from someplace else.  For us it is certainly the end of a long experiment but we will not be raising turkeys this year and probably never again.

Picture of the Week

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We finally got the last of the Big Tops covered on Monday, now the top of the hill looks more normal

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 11 #10, 5/16/14

What’s been going on!

Well that was quite a bit of rain, 4.5 inches!  We actually needed a good rain, maybe not that much but because we have somehow missed all of the big rains in the last month and have been pumping lots of water it was good to get, might be a bit muddy harvesting for market today.  Cool the next few days, blackberry winter for sure and then probably right into summer conditions for the duration.  Must be time to plant peppers.

Running behind this week after my two day Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) board meeting.  There are a lot of good sustainable agriculture organizations across the country doing great work in all areas of farming to make the lives of farmers and agriculture in general better and we have worked with a number of them over the years.  RAFI is one of the keystone organizations in the movement and has been working on the issues of fairness and farm sustainability since the 1930’s, tracing their roots back to the National Sharecroppers Fund.

Few organizations have the history or the experience to do the work that RAFI does both in North Carolina and around the world.  It is one of those groups that you probably have never heard about because they work either far out in front of emerging issues or quietly in the halls of the USDA, UN-FAO or the North Carolina General Assembly.  Their headquarters are right here in Pittsboro!

This small group has had far reaching impacts on fairness in contracts for farmers, literally writing the legislation for the National Organic Program and other farm bill provisions, saving hundreds of family farms from foreclosure, issues of rural poverty and hunger, preserving the rights of farmers to save seed and develop new varieties, farm worker’s rights and more.  The work is so important that anyone who eats should donate to RAFI.  Betsy and I have worked with them for nearly 20 years and continue to be amazed at what they do; I am honored to be the current Board President.

Picture of the Week

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All washed clean by the rain, beautiful spinach, baby fennel and other spring greens

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 11 #9, 5/9/14

What’s been going on!

Jennie and Liz say that I have to be more upbeat when it comes to the newsletter; I say I am just reporting what is going on here at the farm occasionally with some editorial comment.  Hey, it’s like a reality TV show but in real time, what happens is sometimes not under our control and I tend not to sugarcoat things.  To that end, we have had a great week and been going like a house a fire getting a lot done.

There is always a week in the spring when all of a sudden the pace quickens, normally it is a few weeks earlier in April but this is the week.  Usually it corresponds with the beginning of deliveries to Weaver Street Market and warmer weather.  It is later this year due to the cooler spring and the fact that all of us local farmers were delayed getting most of our springs crops in the ground because of the wet conditions and the cold.  I have been predicting that the next few weeks will be spectacular at market with everyone harvesting huge amounts of produce, the heat this week will just push things along faster.

Lots of planting this week with the big winter squash field going in yesterday and more lettuce and flowers going in today and tomorrow, another half an acre all together.  Of course with the heat we are having to irrigate everything to keep it moving and still setting up irrigation in the new crops too.  Mowing, markets, deliveries it’s all happening now, compounded with the addition of Graduation and Mother’s Day festivities this weekend, we are running fast.

Just one month out from the Farm to Fork Picnic.  This year we are paired with our friend and good customer Bret Jennings from Elaine’s on Franklin.  We are still working on our menu items but for sure a blueberry desert and something savory.  Get your tickets now while they are still available and help raise money for new and beginning farmer programs at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems and the Breeze Farm in Orange County.

Picture of the Week

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Jennie and Liz planting flowers, the winter squash in the next block all down in the creek bottom field

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 11 #8, 4/30/14

What’s been going on!

For days now we have been awaiting the weather Armageddon which, thankfully, has missed us and hopefully will continue to do so.  Always before these big rain events we are trying to make sure that things are planted and projects rounded up that might be on hold for some time until things dry out.  We did finally get the last of the tomatoes in the ground that we couldn’t get done on Friday due to way too much lightning from that set of storms.

The big push this week has been getting ready for and coordinating the planting of a very large (a quarter acre) pollinator plant trial.  We have been cooperators in a lot of research projects here at the farm over the years and always learn a number of things by doing so.  Generally they have been studies that fit into or look at crops that we are already growing so the interruption of our normal flow is minimal.  This one, not so much the case.

Referred to us by the NC Botanical Garden, the large national non-profit Pollinator Partnership contacted us in late winter to see if we would be interested in being a site for one of their first large pollinator gardens funded by Burt’s Bees who is trying to increase wild bee habitat in the US by 10,000 acres.  The conversation went like this “How much area are you looking for?”  “An acre or so”.  Gulp, “not possible, maybe a quarter acre?”  “Well that would work, can we come and look?”  “Sure.”

Some weeks later the project leader comes in from California to do several site visits.  We get a few details as to timing and what they are trying to do with these early gardens, they tell us they will make their site selection decisions soon and let us know.  We hear nothing and figure we are off the hook.  Five weeks ago the phone rings, it is the project coordinator asking if a late April planting day will work, I reply “I assume this means you have chosen us to be cooperators?”  “She says yes didn’t you get the email?”  Uh, no.  So here we go the race is on.

The plan was to install perennial plants (25 or more species) to be observed for 3-5 years to see which ones attracted which wild pollinators, when and how well they survived in the conditions.  One of the ultimate goals is to come up with recommendations for plants and procedures so that farmers can reasonably plant pollinator habitat on their farms.  In a perfect world we would have known a year in advance so that we could have turned over the grass sod to kill it and spend that time reducing the weed populations that always appear in newly turned ground.  Four weeks not optimal to say the least.  We say the only way it will work is if we can mulch them heavily (3” minimum) to help keep the weeds at bay.  Last Thursday 60 yards of mulch and 2000 plants arrive, that is a lot of shoveling and the rains are coming!

There is very little info from the project folks and we have no layout plan and not enough mulch to cover the whole area so I make an executive decision as to design and spacing so that on Monday when I have my class of 16 students here they can help us move mulch.  We got half of it done Monday morning before the project folks show up to plant.  The four project people arrive but they say ten more volunteers are coming.  No volunteers show and Armageddon is coming.  Tuesday becomes a very long day of moving mulch and planting but the rains held off and by early evening all the plants were in the ground.  We think this project has some good potential to gather information about the very important problem of pollinator loss but remind me next time to ask more questions before signing on.

Picture of the Week

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Impending rain, a bit more mulch to move but all planted.  There is even more area on the other side of the rows of shrubs.

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 11 #7, 4/25/14

What’s been going on!

Wow, an insanely busy week and just about every muscle we have has been sore at one time or another, a lot of ibuprofen going down!  Tomato Week, started last Friday with covering the four Big Tops that keep our plants happy and dry.  Monday, we did the final tillage on the beds and laid the irrigation lines and landscape fabric.  Wednesday and Thursday Jennie and Liz built the 1600 feet of trellis for the plants to climb up.  Right now they are out planting the 23 varieties on a perfect overcast day for transplanting, hopefully it will just shower and not thundershower this afternoon.

Last Thursday I spent the day down at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) for a Board meeting and tour.  Now in its 20th year, it is the largest organic and sustainable research farm in the US.  More than just a farm, they also do work all across North Carolina in both farming practices but also food systems, food access and other parts of a healthy farming and marketing system.  We have been involved from its inception and continue to serve on the advisory board.  On top of all that I taught three classes this week, whew!

One thing we are not participating in this week is the Farm Tour, third year in a row after 16 straight years.  Next year is the 20th anniversary and we will probably jump back on to commemorate the founding and steering of it all those years.  It is a great way to see so many of our local small farms and where your food comes from but with so much going on here, it is just too hard to do both.

Picture of the Week

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A beautiful field of lettuce and the tomato Big Tops looming in the distance

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 11 #6, 4/16/14

What’s been going on!

For some time I have been thinking about writing a piece on why the Carrboro Farmers’ Market is different and unique from all the other markets in the area.  With the recent N&O article about how difficult it is for farmers markets to take food stamps, in which they interviewed and mentioned many people and markets from across the state but the only nod to the Carrboro Market was about our novel idea to use the fees from our ATM (first farmers’ market in the state to have one) to support our SNAP program, I said maybe now is a good time.

I mean we only wrote the book on how farmers’ markets in North Carolina can independently accept SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) better known as food stamps.  Starting almost a decade ago, the market tested out several different systems before going directly to the USDA and working through the bureaucracy so we could run our own more efficient program.  This was after meeting with state legislators and others to try and improve the currently available programs, researching the few markets across the country that were taking SNAP and running a multi-year, grant funded, test to determine exactly what the costs of the program to the market would be.  Then we did as we always do, we freely shared our knowledge with many other markets across the state and the country.

A bit of a digression but it is a perfect example of how the Carrboro Market operates and one of the ways that makes it different from all the other area markets.  But with so many markets in the Triangle area (at least 25 at last count and too many really) it is hard for people to decide which market they want to support.  Now I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t shop at a market that is close to you, especially if it has the selection and quality of products that you are looking for but sometimes you don’t have that option.

Yes because we are the oldest market in the area (35 years) and have the most vendors (over 80) of any of the non-state run markets, we have had many first chances to do things well.  First we are a producer’s only market that is run by the vendors not the town or the chamber of commerce or another outside group.  There are now a few other markets with that kind of governance in the state and mostly because we have promoted it to new markets as the best way to go by sharing our rules, by-laws and procedures with them, so that doesn’t make us different.

We were among the first to do many things now common to markets across the country.  Special events of all kinds (Tomato Day, Strawberry Day, Canning classes, etc.), the first with a pre-Thanksgiving market, the first to accept WIC checks, food stamps, etc., the first with an ATM, had the first certified organic farmers in NC, the first to allow farmers to take a year off without losing their space at market, the first to limit the number of crafts and prepared food sellers so that it would remain a farmers market, the list is long.  But most markets do all that now, so that doesn’t make us different.

There are two very important things that set the Carrboro Farmers’ Market apart from all others in the Triangle and I think the state.  First because we are a large and successful market, we have a very engaged and active membership which participates in market governance and elects and supports a very active Board of Directors.  The market has always pushed the envelope on what a market should be, not only to its customers but to its members as well.  It is being able to work on issues like food access to the community as a whole and taking care of our members needs that makes us different but most customers don’t see that side of the market.

The single thing that makes our market unique, amongst all the markets in the area, is that we require the people selling at market be the owners of the business or their immediate family.  No other market has this rule.  All the other markets allow any employee to sell at market, you might be helped by someone who has a real stake in the food you are buying but many times not.  This is how many farms can sell at 5 and 6 markets a week, sometimes all on the same day!  Big families I guess.  At Carrboro, the person selling you the food is the one that produced it, the one whose feet are to the fire financially and whose reputation is on the line.  It is a farmer who has been recognized, regionally or nationally for their work or the person who developed the recipe and was written up in Food and Wine.

This makes it difficult for some of our vendors who don’t have employees and want to be able to sell at other markets or to take weeks off during the season but I think that it is what makes our members so active and engaged in running the Carrboro markets.  They are actually there representing their businesses and seeing how things are going at market every week so they share their ideas and concerns directly with the manager and Board, serve on committees and help to make the market the best it can be.

So the next time you are wondering what market to go to think about location and product diversity and maybe your favorite farmer but certainly if you want to actually talk to the people who grew your food, ask them how it was grown, what variety it is, how the season is affecting the crops or where the ingredients in the jam came from then there is only one market in the Triangle where you can be sure that will happen, Carrboro.

Picture of the Week

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32 degrees this morning, the green green of  spring

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 11 #5, 4/4/14

What’s been going on!

Spring here is always herky jerky as my mother would say. Cold, warm, cold, warm and then all of a sudden it happens, not all at once but in a number of big steps. This week was the first big step. Finally a stretch of days (not just two or three) with nights above freezing, the soil temperatures warm up just enough that things begin to move. The red buds and the blueberries started to bloom, the worms are moving all over the place, the wild garlic starts to grow fast. The next step will be the dogwoods blooming, certain trees leafing out, ants on the move.

The farm moves in jumps too. Last week we were waiting for it to dry out and warm up, this week we are wearing shorts and setting up irrigation. It has been a careful dance this spring to try and keep the plantings on schedule but for the most part we have managed to do so. Now the rush is on to keep it all weeded and watered. It always happens this way.

Good week though as we have made the first pass with the cultivation tools across all the crops, great weed killing weather. The blueberries have all been pruned and a layer of mulch spread. The sliding tunnels have slid(?) and are full of tomatoes and cucumbers. Even the first Zinnias have been seeded out in the field along with the first Sunflowers, no turning the clock back now. Soon we will be covering the Big Tops and getting ready to plant the big array of tomatoes.

Winter schedules overlap with spring realities. Meetings, classes and other obligations that were made back in the slow days of winter now seem hard to manage. All day board meetings, evening classes, morning classes, conference calls are now distractions to what needs to be done outdoors and increasingly can’t wait. In another month even those will mostly be gone, the last big step into the full swing of another season.

Picture of the Week

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Happy Anemones and Poppies just raising their heads

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 11 #4, 3/14/14

What’s been going on!

An interesting milestone this week as we realized that the last of our “Advisory committee”, Max Perry, passed away on Monday.  We live on Perry Rd. and the Perry clan owns large swaths of land up and down the road including the 400 or so acres on our south side.  Max was the patriarch of the family and the last of his generation, he was 77.

When we first moved here in 1982 we were like most of today’s new farmers in that we were not from a farming background and had to learn almost everything from scratch.  Today’s new farmers have vast and incredible resources from which to draw knowledge and information that we could only have dreamed about back then.  Sure we had degrees in agriculture and lifetimes of family gardening but never farmed for a living.  So we did what the Ethnologists would describe as gathering “indigenous knowledge”, we consulted the good old boys in the neighborhood or more accurately they freely volunteered their opinions.

Of course when we moved into a tent, next to our tractor shed with the 1949 tractor, they first thought we were crazy and doomed to failure (so did our parents).  Over time they would stop by and introduce themselves and to see just exactly what we were up to.  Most wrote us off but a group of them kept an eye on our progress and we were great fodder for discussion as we were some of the few folks in the neighborhood who were not from the “families”.  Max was one of them; he was an avid hunter and observer of the local flora and fauna.  He loved it when we started raising turkeys because he was very protective of the recovering turkey population that mostly lived on his land.  He was also the unofficial community watch as he worked third shift and would drive up and down the road late at night when he couldn’t sleep.

All of our advisory committee had similar backgrounds, they had grown up here farming but in the end had gotten “public work” in either construction or at the university.  Their family farms stopped with their parent’s generation and they were now just the stewards of the land which either stayed in pasture or trees, some they rented out to other farmers.  Their experience was that you couldn’t make a living farming but were interested in keeping farming alive in the neighborhood and to see what this new farming was all about.

Lenny Perry, Max’s uncle, would stop by regularly in the early years especially when we were clearing new land and commiserate with Betsy who was working alone with a chainsaw as I was in town trying to make some money to keep our dream alive.  “How’s that new ground coming” he would ask and give some advice on what to do next.  He had even farmed our land back in the 30’s and 40’s, raising wheat and other grains.  After a few years he was overheard at the corner store, where the old boys would gather, telling them that “she can drive a tractor as good as a man”.

Our other immediate neighbors, Herbert and Peggy Lou Thomas, owned all the land between us and the Haw River on our east and north sides. They actually lived down the road a few miles but raised a big garden in the bottom field across the creek from ours.  As we would be down in our field working they would be over there just talking away to each other while harvesting corn or tending tomatoes.  Let’s just say that Peggy Lou had a voice that could carry.  We would always find a basket of corn on the steps or Herbert would always check in to see if he had beaten me in having the first ripe tomato (he always did).  When we started using cover crops to improve our soil, he would advise me on when they were ready to turn under.

George Graves (who was married to a Perry) was particularly influential in our development.  He was one of the early members of the Carrboro Farmers’ Market and grew huge amounts of maters, taters and beans among other crops.  He told us what varieties of spinach and other crops to grow that were best for our area, when to plant them, where to get seed.  He and Betsy would drive together to the local farm supply to get onion sets and parts for things.  When he would stop by and see us doing something crazy he would just shake his head and say “sheeeeit” and steer us in the right direction.  Without George it would have been many more years before we started selling at the market, he frequently encouraged us to “get down there and sell those berries” until we finally did.

Faye and Ervin Perry rounded out the committee.  Ervin was George’s brother-in-law and he and Faye farmed across the road from George and sold at market too.  They came to market farming late in life but with ingenuity and of course the local knowledge.  We would watch them in their 60’s and 70’s slowly and patiently tend and harvest their two acres of crops and never break a sweat.  Ervin could somehow do it all off of a riding lawn mower.  Their “grocery house” was the picture of an efficient small packing shed and cool room that many small growers even today would want to have.  We would occasionally go out to dinner with them after market and just soak up their stories.

They are all gone now, we are on our own to screw up, make all the mistakes and figure out the answers.  I guess we are now the indigenous knowledge, not sure we can ever be the characters they were, damn few like them.

Picture of the Week

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Thousands of onions on a sunny day

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Peregrine Farm News Vol. 11 #3, 3/7/14

What’s been going on!

Closely watching the creek and river levels, so far so good.  Who knows how much rain we have had over the last 24 hours but fortunately almost no ice.  Like everyone else we have really been looking forward to the warm and sunny weather starting tomorrow, particularly so we could get caught up on planting but now are not sure when we will be able to get back into the fields.  As it is we have delayed planting many of the direct seeded crops like spinach and beets because the soil temperatures have been so cold that we would potentially have really poor germination especially in wet soil and now we will have to hope the winds pick up some early in the week to help dry the soil out.

We did manage to get the first beds of lettuce in the ground as well as 7000 out of the roughly 13,000 onion and leek transplants.  Otherwise we have been pretty successful in whiling away the time on indoor pursuits and various travels while we wait for the weather.  January was really busy starting with our annual Southern Foodways Alliance Fellows event in Tennessee.  Betsy had to fly out of Knoxville to be able to attend the Gathering of Agrarian Elders in California, a really unique opportunity to meet with a number of the leaders of the local/organic food movement.  You may have seen the article in the NY Times.

I barely got home and had to turn around and go to Mobile, Alabama to give several talks at the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Groups conference.  A few weeks home and then February started off in West Texas with a long walking trip in Big Bend National Park (it was cold there too).  Back just in time for the big snow storm and off again to the Georgia Organics conference to teach some more.  In between all of this have been lots of meetings, teaching the community college class and other workshops around the area.  So you don’t think we just have Jennie out here taking care of things, she also slipped off to visit a friend in Hawaii for ten days.  But we are all here now, pacing the floor waiting to get rolling.

Picture of the Week

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The creek behind our house, roaring by

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