Current Weather and the Challenge of Growing Food.

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on October 18, 2007

Weather has had its swings this growing season in Minnesota, from an above average rainfall in June to an apparently never ending drought, to a never ending wet fall.  Nobody has probably been affected hardest than farmers who did not get their crops out of the fields before this rainy spell started.

Our grounds at the community garden behind Benjamin bus are still unprepared for the winter.  We need some dry weather to get out there, mow, spread lime and manure and lay the ground to rest for the winter.

Half of our black turtle beans are still out in the field, and if the farmer’s article in the Wednesday 17th Northfield News makes you think about soybeans rotting, think about black beans, which once mature don’t stand half of the rain that soybeans do.

Meanwhile, on another agricultural front, we have been busy processing our experimental crop of meat chickens and making plans to grow many more next year.  A group of four of us have built most of the infrastructure so that next spring we can grow free range chickens by rotating them between paddocks, which we have also planted with hazelnuts or filberts to establish a permanent root system to protect the soil, absorb the fertilizer from the chickens and produce an alternative crop of nuts in the future.

As for the black beans, I guess we will get to it when we get to it as the saying goes, I went out this morning and found even the pods high up are moldy.  The black spots you see in the picture, are from already rotting pods.  At least we got enough out of the fields to fill the orders we have already received.

Back to the chickens, we decided to grow free range broilers for many reasons, here are some of them:

- Building fences is cheaper than buildings. 
- Because we are growing these chickens to fill a market niche for healthy locally produced meat.
- Because we want them to feed on weeds, insects, and cover crops, while getting some exercise and improving the taste of the end product.
-Because we also want to grow a buckwheat crop ahead of the chickens rotating into the paddocks, and have them harvest and process it straight into meat and fertilizer.

Come spring, we will start taking orders from people interested in having their chicken locally grown, if current interest in this project is a sign of future performance, we will be filling the paddocks to capacity, so stay in touch.