Farm Life

About Farm Life

Five Rivers MetroParks staff members share helpful advice for creating a sustainable food supply as well as stories from local farmers and news from the front lines of the local food movement.

February 2010

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28

RSS Syndication

XML Farm Life
XML More 'DDN' feeds

More recent entries

• OEFFA - grains, weed trees
• Tiny Life blog
• Gardeners Resources
• OEFFA - more sessions
• OEFFA Conference - lots of information
• Wexner Center Food Film Series
• NAIS worries recede - for now
• Cow(poop)pots
• OSU Extension - Gardening & Bee Keeping
• UD Rainwater Harvest Designs
• More entries...

Archives

• February 26, 2010
• February 23, 2010
• February 19, 2010
• February 15, 2010
• February 11, 2010
• February 10, 2010
• February 5, 2010
• More archives...

Home > Blogs > Farm Life and Local Harvest > Archives > 2010 > February > 26 > Entry

OEFFA - grains, weed trees

By Luci Beachdell | Friday, February 26, 2010, 08:00 AM

Okay, semi-final installation of the OEFFA conference before February is over! All you folks who gave me information about the sessions you attended - thanks!

High Quality Organic Small Scale Grain Production
Presenter: Deb Stinner, OSU Organic Food & Farming Education & Research Program (OFFER)

One of the other presenters couldn’t make it to the conference, & Deb has a slightly less hands-on approach to the wheat trials, but she shared these things, and more research is available online. This was really a farmer’s workshop, with a target at commercial type farmers doing a corn/soybean rotation. But Deb and several farmers present talked about the capacity to raise grain and make money on it in fairly small areas - 20 to 50 acres or fewer - which is really what I was hoping to learn more about. I think that grains could be a wonderful, marketable product that might make good use of some of the vacant spaces across our county.

Small grains (wheat, oats, spelt, field corn, etc.) are disappearing from farms across the Midwest

small grains don’t fix nitrogen, but they do build soil and offer opportunities for low-no tillage

grains should be part of crop rotation - don’t grow grain year after year in the same place!

A nice rotation: Corn; Soybeans; Oats (high-oil hulless); Wheat or Spelt; Red Clover or Alfalfa

Weed Trees in your Forest Garden: What to Do?

Presenter: Janell Baran, USDA SARE Farmer/Rancher grant
Controlling ailanthus altissima - Tree of Heaven - organically, then using dead trees to cultivate mushrooms

Go here for the handout on killing Ailanthus - or other weed trees (not shrubs!)

Janell also then proceeded to inoculate the treated trees with mushroom plug spawn. We should know this year if they took & if she’s now harvesting mushrooms off her dying Trees of Heaven.

Janell is a big fan of Mushroom Harvest, a company in Athens, Ohio which specializes in native OH mushroom strains and also offers mushroom supplies.

The final OEFFA conference installation will be soon, and will include resources for chicken-raising, some simple ways to preserve food, and miscellaneous information I picked up while walking around the exhibition hall.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |