2020 Farm Update
Hello all! It’s time for the 2020 TCBC farm update, where I reflect on the 2019 season and let everyone know about what we can look forward to this upcoming year.
2019, my second official growing season, was a year of refinement and growth. Our big changes were a switch of growing sites (from Northfield to Farmington, MN) and a trial of something called ‘exclusion netting’ (more on that later), but mostly I focused on getting better at doing everything for the second time. This strawberry production system is something I had years of experience implementing, but only on smaller, research trial plots during my PhD work. There are always unexpected difficulties when scaling things up to a commercial scale, and last year was devoted to ‘anticipating’ those difficulties instead of ‘reacting’ to them.
There were definitely environmental setbacks. 2019 was literally the wettest year on record for MN, and while you may think that was good news for farmers, there can always be too much of a good thing, especially for organic fruit farmers. Most fungal diseases can only infect plants if there is standing water on the leaves, and since I irrigate my strawberries using drip tape, I want things to be as dry as possible in the field in order to keep disease pressure low. Pests also seem to thrive more in humid environments. Alas, dryness was not the farming theme in 2019, and our changing climate implies things won’t be consistently dry in the future either. I came to the realization that if MN’s future supply of local, organic fruit was to be secure we’d have to pivot away from open field production. In order to protect the fruit figuratively, we’d have to protect them literally.
Which brings us to a new mission for 2020 and beyond- the complete elimination of open field production for my farm. Now I know this means getting rid of the nostalgic visuals of open green fields that you see on marketing material and stickers, and I know that this is not the way things were done in the past. But new challenges are arriving, pressures are changing, and I believe if we don’t change to meet them we risk completely losing local, organic fruits at stores and farmers markets in MN.
So how are we trying to realize that goal in 2020? Well, for strawberries this means exclusion netting. I trialed using a netting enclosure on a quarter acre in 2019 and am doubling that coverage this year. Below is a pic of inside the netting in 2019 (It definitely looks like a first year project!). While netting has an upfront cost and represents another piece of infrastructure to worry about in the field, the benefits are just too good to ignore.
2019 netting enclosure. As you can see, it suffered the rigors of trial and error.
The primary benefit of exclusion netting is the almost complete elimination of pest pressures without using sprays. This is huge, as organic pesticides are expensive and many are still quite harmful to local pollinators. Disease pressure was also reduced in netting structure in 2019, and yields were better too. This year the netting structure will be expanded, improved, and I hope by 2022 we can be a completely pesticide-free operation.
Which brings us to our second big expansion for 2020- RASPBERRIES! This past winter and spring I constructed a 3,000 sq. foot ‘high tunnel’ greenhouse that will house our first raspberry plants.
The high tunnel has been customized to embrace our goal of ‘protected culture’ production; there is insect netting on every sidewall opening and ventilation duct to keep the bad bugs out and the good bugs in. We hope to have the tastiest raspberries around available at farmers markets from late July through October.
At this point in the season everything has been planted and we hope to have all netting up by the end of the month, along with our first harvests. As of now we are still full speed ahead for farmers markets and co-ops; stay tuned for updates on our Facebook and Instagram (@twincitiesberry) feeds. We also started a YouTube channel last year called ‘The Young Berry Farmer’, where I post farm updates and wax poetic about current issues in agriculture; please like, subscribe and comment on my videos! It’s a highly exclusive club; We have literally dozens of followers, so I’m a pretty big deal now, you could say :)