Preparing the 2021 farm crops

The fall on the farm had some ups and downs. I was able to get peppers to market from late summer to November. I sold wholesale to a local supermarket but the price fetched was not that great at $2 dollars a pound. Weekly I would take about 20 pounds to that supermarket. I tried a lot of different venues but with COVID there were simply not many buyers. Wholesalers kept saying they were full, some would actually tell me they didn’t sell the product when I could see it on their shelves. “Locally” sourced places would actually source their stuff from non-local places. It is frustrating. I have read many books and listened to podcasts about farming and the hardest part is finding a market. This is where I am now for produce. I have found ready markets for sheep and goats but not fresh produce. My original plan was to sell to restaurants, COVID made that kind of difficult in 2020. Hopefully, 2021 brings some new customers.

Getting a New Barn

I am now focusing more on capital improvements to the farm. I will be building another 24 x 105 high tunnel in March and will start work on a new 48×30 barn in April. Two big expensive projects. I am going to switch focus to fixing some fencing for the goat pen, building a small shelter for the goats in the pen for kidding, and electrifying about 1500 feet on the outside perimeter of the farm to help manage coyote attacks. For the high tunnels, I have a potential restaurant customer that wants cilantro so I will be planting more of that in one high tunnel and will start germinating both orange and red habanero peppers in racks for transplanting in May to the second high tunnel. That might seem late but I have found that at least here in Florida you can sell your peppers pretty much until early fall.

Finally I will be posting more updates regularly on the website, if you have any questions on what i have been doing or what i have learned, if you have read this far then you can email me at abdiel@abdielsalvafarms-us

Regards,

Juan

Once you understand what type of soil you have on your land then you can begin to work on improving soil quality with cover crops. You can check out my previous two posts to get the basics of understanding your soil if you need a refresher on how to get soil quality information. This week I listened to the Future of Agriculture podcast interview with Russ Conser, the CEO of Blue Nest Beef, in which they extensively discussed Regenerative Agriculture. You can find that podcast here. I highly recommend that you listen to it if you have the time but it basically summarizes some of the history of the regenerative agriculture movement. Mr. Conser has an empirical and scientific approach, evidenced based perhaps, of how brining carbon back into the soil is beneficial and how it can be measured. This is the latest in research that I have been doing over the last several months on how to use cover crops rotations to improve my soil quality and feed my goats.

I started with reading almost all of the materials I could find on the Green Cover Seed website after receiving my order of Sunn Hemp and Peas and Oats cover crop in the fall. I followed that by reading two books, Dirt and Growing a Revolution by David R. Montgomery and then spending a ton of time reading academic articles on the University of Florida’s online library.

I have learned 3 things doing research. This will be the topic of the next couple of posts.

1. Its important to research cover crop mixes. It is also important to rotate your cover crops
2. Cover Crops can improve your soils but its more important to keep your soils covered. Having the right cover crop is like a bonus
3. Adding livestock is essential to improve your soil faster.

Improving soil quality is my goal and I firmly believe it should be the goal of every farmer. Below is a picture of the second cover crop try out that i have done in my farm. Its a mixture of Sunn Hemp and a Peas/Oats mix. That picture was taken last month, as you can see Sunn Hemp grows fast. More to follow on the next post.