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Week of June 24th – CSA Newsletter Week #3

Howdy folks. If you’ve been a member of the TC3 Farm CSA for a couple of years now, you know that I have two themes that recur often throughout the growing season. The two dubious “W’s”, woodchucks and weather. Well, this week I’m going to focus on the weather because it’s been so wonderfully wet, … Read more

Week of September 4th – CSA Newsletter

Sunrise over the farm

Ok, so who forgot to pay their heating bill? Saying last week was unseasonably cool would be an understatement. We had nights in the 40s and even a couple that were right below 40. Friends of mine that farm in Cortland County even had a light frost. Yowza! I always look forward to the fall and cooler temperatures but this is definitely too early for me. There’s not too much that can be done so I try not to worry about it that much.

The students doing their internship on the farm this semester had a great week. There’s a lot to get caught up to speed but they seem to be rolling along with it. A lot of what we do for the first part of the semester is harvesting and post-harvest handling of vegetables with a little bit of planting sprinkled in. They seem to be catching on quick and are asking great questions and being thorough with their work. We’ve got a lot of work to do before the farm is put to “bed” for the season, so I’m hopeful that the momentum will continue.

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Week of August 14th – CSA Newsletter

It was a somewhat quiet week on the farm last week. The Sustainable Farming and Food Systems students are done with their Summer Internship, although we had a couple of students who came out because they missed the farm so much :)! I even took a long weekend to enjoy a camping trip with my family. And even though taking a 3.5 year old on her first camping trip is exhausting, it was a much needed break from the grind of a farm season. We still have our youth workers through the end of this week, so we plugged away at as many projects as we could get through. We took a break from a lot of the ongoing hand weeding and focused some of our energy on some lingering housekeeping. The barn and classroom got a great cleaning and we got mostly caught up on a project that is usually done in the late fall, sanitizing our seedling trays. “Why do we sanitize our trays?” I’m glad that you asked. Even though our plants don’t spend a lot of time in their trays, we want to make sure that we aren’t harboring any diseases that may linger into the next season. It’s not the most glamorous job but it’s an important one. Another glamour-free job that we started to tackle last week was moving rocks. The joke around hear (any many of my friends) is that the best crop on the farm are rocks. Some of the rocks in our fields (ok, most of them), make transplanting, direct seeding, weeding and even harvesting a real pain. We move them out of the fields into big piles at the end of our beds, always thinking that we’ll get to moving them. Well, that usually doesn’t happen as often as I’d like. This past week we moved about 2-3 tons into our massive rock pile. My estimates is that we’ve pulled about 20 tons of rocks out of our fields since we started farming this land. So, if you were looking for some rocks for a project around the house, just let me know:) 

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Northland Sheep Dairy Field Trip

Northland Sheep Dairy Farm Tour – Student Post by Ben

As part of TC3’s integrated pest management (IPM) program for the summer of 2017, the class went on a field trip to Northland Sheep Dairy. Located in Marathon NY, amidst beautiful hilly countryside, Northland is “a 100% grass-fed seasonal sheep dairy powered by draft horses & mules and some committed, hard-working farmers,” to quote their website’s welcome page, which you can find at www.northlandsheepdairy.com. We were joined by a class from Binghamton University Acres Farm and the VINES program from Binghamton, and we made for a very large group altogether.

Draft Horse Northland Sheep Dairy
Draft Horse at Northland Sheep Dairy

We were introduced to the farm by Northland Sheep Dairy co-owner Donn Hewes, the man with a passion for and in charge of the draft animals used for power in the fields and property. He showed us the barn where the animals are kept and explained a bit about the nature and nurture of these horses and mules. These included Percheron and Belgian varieties of draft horses, and Suffex mules and Cleveland Bay mule crosses.

It was a treat to be able to see an operation that implements work animals on a farm, as we have learned that there are a variety of benefits of an integrated farming system. The horses and mules not only provide work in return for calories taken directly from the farm they live on (in grass and hay) but also cycle those nutrients through their manure, and reduce the need for external sources of energy (diesel for tractors, grain based feeds). The horses and mules are fed on a permanent pasture system, which means that the land for grazing is always for grazing, as opposed to cropping it one year and grazing the next or some permutation of the like.

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Week of June 13th – CSA Newsletter

Well folks, we made it. The start to another CSA season! As the TC3 Farm embarks on its third season, I find myself thinking a lot about the farm (I’m sure all farmers are constantly thinking about their farms). I think about where we started and how far that we’ve come in such a short … Read more