Scaling up, organic edition

Karen Blixen had a farm in Aafrika; we have a farrm in the Irish Midlands. Insofar as we are farming, we are organic. We are not Certified Organic because we haven't found the energy to, or seen the benefits of, filling in the 12 page Form App21/15 from the Irish Organic Association or the 1 page Form ORG1/DAFM form from the DeptAg. All the successful Organic-at-scale farmers are chewing their beards at being unable to find and lease Certified-Organic fields. Maybe certification-process tail is wagging the organic dog ? Paperwork infrastructure and bureaucracy is holding up housing and hospitals across the land: maybe Perfect is the enemy of the GoodEnough.

Our organic is fine for us:

• Sow seeds in pots in the Spring
• Transplant to nature after the 1st week in May [last frost]
• Water on the regular 
• Reduce the number of competing weeds
• Pick off slugs and fire them over the hedge
• Remove withered, spotted or furry leaves
• Insert sticks to support beans and tomatoes
• Eat what has been left by the competition 

We don't make a living out of this! But surplus courgettes and tomatoes make almost as good a social glue gift as home-made scones or marmalade.

A couple of years ago, we signed up for Teagasc's Signpost webinars which are broadcast every Friday at 09:30hrs and later get archived for folks who were haying or calving when the live broadcast went out. I've made sour comment about the surplus mouths battened onto these webinars. And also ranted at the screen when presenters read their own slides [and run over time arrrrgh!] and so make the whole live exercise a bit redundant. But in general it's a data-rich way of spending an hour and I've learned a lot.

These Signposts have induced me off-site to attend three [3] Open Days in the last two weeks. Teagasc Centraal at Johnstown Castle near Wexford. A Somers Evening on a big commercial environmentally friendly farm at Oylgate. Scaling up Organic Tillage near Wicklow Town. I confess that I bugged out of two of these events when drifting drizzle turned to decisive rain. It's not just me getting wet, it's anxiety that my delicate, under-powered, low-slung Yaris will bog down in a bucketty mud-field.

But not before I'd been amazed at the tech with which proper commercial organic farmers address the problem of weeds. The next three images are lifted from a recent Signpost Prez.

This a GPS connected, solar-powered Roomba aka FarmDroid FD-20. You deliver it to a field of, say, carrots or onions. It remembers where it sowed seed 15 days ago [straight rows, precisely spaced]. When the sun comes up the beast starts trundling down the first 5m of rows. Anything green growing between rows gets a jolt from a laser, gives up the fight and dies. When the sun goes in, it stops, not least because clouds are associated with rain and you need to keep moving machinery off wet fields b/c soil compaction. But this baby is far lighter on the earth than a 5 or 10 tonne general purpose farm tractor. Yes it's expensive, but so is the kit for spraying herbicides from behind your GP John Deere and consumables are much lighter on the farmer's pocket and the planet.

Same problem, different solution. Thulit MF 1200 [above] Harrowing between rows has been the weed-solution since peasants were wielding a hoe, deftly detaching weeds from crop fields. Doing it mechanically requires a) skill b) tricking about with a spanner adjusting the tine-settings and tractor speed to optimize the weed/crop kill ratio. But in a large known field the soil quality [and weed-holding] will vary. Is it worth rejigging the tines for than awkward corner or is it better to accept some missed weeds or collateral crop loss. Precision tine harrows have each tine hydraulically adjustable from the tractor cab. I don't think that we're there yet, but GPS-encoded data could adjust tine angle and depth automatically to suit the micro-locality.

This kit also required precise row spacing. Instead of static tines, on the Lemken EC-Steer & EC-Weeder little propellers scoop out the weeds, maybe only turning if the associated camera sees a docken Rumex obtusifolius. We saw a similar camera driven solution to docks of the Somers [not organic] farm. They have a 30m-wide boom on the back of a tractor for spraying weeds; there are nozzles every 0.5m; each individually controlled. Herbicide is only released where/when it sees a dock! Big saving on the use/ release/ cost of 'chemicals'. They seemed to imply that a drone can act as the eyes for each nozzle.  Software aGoGo! 

One final demo to share. Flahavan's in Kilmacthomas, CoWD mill and sell organic oats. Current demand far outstrips supply. Weeds are a big problem with organic cereals. One part of the solution [blind weeding] is to clear, harrow, roll the field then sow the oats Avena sativa 55mm deep: at least 2x the usual depth. Wait two weeks then harrow to a depth of 30mm, hiking all the weed seedlings to oblivion. That gives the oat coleoptyles a clear run to get their heads up. The weeds under that regime exist, but they are struggling for light under a dense canopy of oaty leaves. Next door, the trad, shallow-sown, part of the field was spackled with yellow and blue flowers [aka weeds] at the same height as the oat seed-heads. 

On Sunday we drove up to Dublin on another mission. On the M9 just N of Carlow Town there was a field of barley with a great broad streak of scarlet running through it. Whoop whoop poppy Papaver rhoeas alert. I said "must be organic". 3 days later we're traipsing through another barley field at the Oylgate Open Day. Not a poppy to be seen! I mentioned this to an ex-colleague from The Institute as we stood in the drizzle at the next Open Day. Colleague is also a farmer in South Wexford and he pointed out that, whatever about docks, poppies are really not a thing in Wexford. Carlow, Kildare, Kilkenny: plenty of roadside poppies. Wexford: null. Who knew?.