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Home > Blogs > Farm Life and Local Harvest > Archives > 2010 > February
February 2010
OEFFA - grains, weed trees
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.
Weed Trees in your Forest Garden: What to Do?
Controlling ailanthus altissima - Tree of Heaven - organically, then using dead trees to cultivate mushrooms
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.
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TweetTiny Life blog
A colleague sent me a link to this “Tiny Life” blog.
Look at the really clever use of old gutters as “window-boxes”!
The Tiny House movement - as you might guess - is about minimizing the space you live in and using fewer resources, etc. I’m not quite ready to give up my lovely brick home, but the site is quite nifty - and the garden page (see link above) has several cool ways to add garden in little space.
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TweetGardeners Resources
A few online resources have recently come to my attention - or rather, they send me emails with updates and new and exciting (or old and really useful) information.
Mother Earth News is a great online resource for organic gardening (and more), as well as being a periodical. They’ve been sending out all kinds of good stuff - from “what’s an heirloom seed” to “Grow $700 of Food in 100 square feet”.
Park Seed is sending out fairly regular emails, called “Know Before You Grow…”, and posting that information online here in their garden library. The Library includes the Know Before You Grow series, as well as useful information here on growing a variety of vegetables.
These are only two of acres of online resources - but again, they’ve been prolifically emailing me lately, and I thought you might like to see them.
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TweetOEFFA - more sessions
The second OEFFA conference session I attended was Joe Kovach’s, an Entomology & IPM Ohio State University guy. He keeps lots and lots of stuff - good man - on the OSU IPM site. You can find the powerpoint of this presentation (that I attended - as well as other presentations) online. Go take a look at the powerpoint for good in-depth definitions of IPM (integrated pest management) and details more than I’ll include here (Principles of Good Farming, Biodiversity, etc.).
Anyway, Joe’s ORGANIC test plot is an acre, I think, in Wooster, Ohio. Certainly fewer than 5 acres. He has been growing apples, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries for the past five years.
Here were some of the tidbits I took away:
Tune in next week for the Small Grain production session as well as How to Kill Tree of Heaven Easily - and USING NO CHEMICALS!
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TweetOEFFA Conference - lots of information
This past Saturday, I attended the Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association 31st Annual Conference, “Growing with Integrity, Eating with Intention”. I’ll give a brief overview over the next few days of workshops I attended & what I learned - and hope to add to this with news from the other local folks who also attended.
Weed Control in Organic Production. Doug Doohan, OSU Dept. Horticulture & Crop Science.
This workshop turned out to be, in part, an advertisement for organic farmers to join the upcoming study that Doug will be leading, to determine what are the most successful strategies for managing weeds in organic production. But if you didn’t know already, here are a few useful snippets of information, gleaned both from the presenter as well as the audience.
OSU is currently looking for 30-40 Ohio organic farmers to participate in the study to help develop weed management models - I don’t know how many signed up on Saturday. Within the first 2-3 years, an e-organic website will be open to farmers.
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TweetWexner Center Food Film Series
Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts and Columbus’s Local Matters are presenting a “Field & Screen” series of films about the state of food during the month of February in Columbus, Ohio.
Click here for the full schedule.
This evening’s film is called The Great Food Speedup: From Hunter-Gatherers to Microwaves.
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TweetNAIS worries recede - for now
Almost a year ago (and at least once since then), I’ve written about the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), which is a tracking system for the animals in the meat food chain. Click here to read that Feb. 2009 post.
The US Department of Agriculture’s Secretary Vilsack has concluded his listening tour on the subject of the NAIS. Small farmers had been very concerned about the financial and time-consuming constraints which would accompany a mandatory national implementation of NAIS. Again, for more details, please refer to the Feb 09 post. Last week, Secretary Vilsack announced the conclusion of the listening tours and said,
After concluding our listening tour on the National Animal Identification System in 15 cities across the country, receiving thousands of comments from the public and input from States, Tribal Nations, industry groups, and representatives for small and organic farmers, it is apparent that a new strategy for animal disease traceability is needed. I’ve decided to revise the prior policy and offer a new approach to animal disease traceability with changes that respond directly to the feedback we heard.Read the full USDA release here.
One of the major changes to come out of this listening tour is that the new disease traceability system will apply only to animals being moved in interstate commerce. This would mean, I believe, that farmers selling their animals within their home state are exempt. However, if they purchase their livestock from out of state, those animals might have to be traceable? I’m delighted to see that Vilsack responded to clearly to the feedback he’d received about NAIS, and hope that the final policy reflects that same kind of thoughtfulness.
Farmers, ranchers and the public will have continued opportunities to provide input at the final system is created.
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TweetCow(poop)pots
Although I generally steer away from recommendations for purchasing a product, these silly “cowpots” are at least worth looking at, whether or not you’d want to use them to start or transplant seedlings into. They’re made with “100% renewable composted cow manure”, and are a fascinating sort of byproduct of agriculture as we know it, in which manure can become an excessive, unwieldy byproduct. As with any gardening product (even though I couldn’t get the little “buy this here” arrow off the picture), please do your homework before purchasing anything!
You may have seen these biodegradable pots before - I hadn’t but immediately wanted to share this information. Here’s a link to the history of the cowpots - and how the farm’s inventors ended up with weed-free, composting manure that they then turned into pots. It’s kind of nifty, actually, featuring a methane digester from which they harvest gas, then separate the remaining solids for composting and liquids as fertilizer on the fields.
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TweetOSU Extension - Gardening & Bee Keeping
OSU Extension has upcoming education opportunities which may be of great interest to gardeners and people who want to learn more about gardening or beekeeping. (There are more that I haven’t listed! Please visit their website for more information.) Also - take a look at the new, exciting Miami Valley Extension Education & Research Area Regional Calendar. This is divided up into the following categories: Agricultural & Natural Resources, Commercial Horticulture, Home Gardening, Master Gardeners & Naturalists.
These programs have deadlines for registration! Please contact OSU Extension (at the links below) right away for more information!
March 2 - May 5 (deadline has been extended to Feb 4!). Master Gardener Volunteer Training. Contact the Montgomery County OSU Extension office for more details.
March 5 & 6. The 32nd Annual Spring Beekeeping Workshop, Wooster, OH.
March 27 (deadline March 1). SouthWest Beekeeper School. Loveland, OH.
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TweetUD Rainwater Harvest Designs
Last semester, a class of first-year Civil Engineering students from the University of Dayton designed 6 different rainwater harvesting systems. Their cost for materials was $250 or less. Here are their final designs - if anyone would like further information, please contact me at lucille.beachdell@metroparks.org.
Thank you! to Kenya Crosson, PhD, UD Assistant Professor, and to the teams of students who designed these rainwater collection systems! I hope to build and test some of these designs this year.
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