Local Food/Talk

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'If you haven't heard already...
$50 Million Available for Organic Farming: Interested New York farmers must apply by May 29 for funding and assistance

New York farmers are eligible for funding and assistance through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) to help tap into the growing market for organic agriculture products.

According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the NRCS has created a special $50 million pool of funding for a new Organic Initiative under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). The Initiative will provide payments and technical assistance to transitioning and existing organic farmers who adopt NRCS conservation practices used in organic production systems.

Eligible Farmers:
• Farmers just beginning or in the process of transitioning to organic production;
• Existing certified organic farmers who want to transition additional acres or animals;
• Existing certified organic farmers who need to adopt additional conservation measures;
• Producers who sell less than $5,000 in agricultural products and are thus exempt from formal certification are still eligible for Organic Initiative payments.

For full article go here: http://www.nysenate.gov/press-release/50-million-available-organic-farming

If you live outside New York�s Banana Belt, you must go to St. Lawrence Nurseries http://www.sln.potsdam.ny.us/and get their catalog pronto. Cornell leans to info that�s good for where fruits already grow (ie. Commercial viability), whereas St.Lawrence caters to the rest of us who live in marginal places.

If you live in zone 4, you cannot grow peaches, sweet cherries, nectarines, asian pears, apricots, hardy kiwi and all the other exotic stuff that grows at Cornell and in the pages of the Miller catalog. Stop trying! Even in zone 5 all that stuff requires more attention than you can give it. And don�t try to fool yourself into thinking that your planting site is in the zone the map indicates: in much of the state the topography (altitude)will put 90% of many counties into the next colder zone. Or the next one.

St.Lawrence�s approach is evident on their excellent website: its about survival, all the more so as the weather gets more unpredictable. We want standard size trees with good rootedness, not dwarfs that need to be trellised. With vigorous root systems, not dwarfing rootstocks that need protection from competition from every weed. With guaranteed hardiness that comes with nursery stock grown in colder areas than they will be replanted into: nursery stock grown in zone 6 are not going to like your zone 4 site. It doesn�t matter if that -22degree night happens once every two years, or ten years: it will still kill your tree and waste all the work you did in protecting it from deer and rabbits and voles, controlling insects and disease, pruning, etc. Don�t waste your time.

After 25 years of planting fruit trees in a homestead-plus arrangement, I have learned some:

1. Variety counts. One year all of my eight different pear trees bore fruit, but all years at least one of them does, but a different one each time.
2. Protection. If you don�t protect fruit trees the moment they are planted, chances are good that something will eat them that night. I put in four 7-foot stakes around the tree, cross-braced at the top, and wrapped in chicken wire that comes within 18 inches of the ground. This gap allows me to check for stem-borers (the major insect tree-killer) all summer, and then in winter re-wrap the base in hardware cloth up to 1 foot (and buried in gravel around the base) and spiral guards against rabbits standing on frozen snow eating young bark. If you protect a hardy young tree it will live; if you don�t, it won�t.
3. If you�re not growing for market, you have the choice commercial growers don�t: less spraying for trivial cosmetic considerations. For instance, all my apple varieties are resistant to scab (the worst disease problem for apples) but they are susceptible to a host of �summer diseases(funguses)� that appear as blackish smudges on the skin. So what? Rub them off if you don�t want to eat the fungus (you eat mushrooms, don�t you?), if you intend to peel them, or squeeze them for juice. In fact, since you will use a lot of your crop not-fresh (jams, sauces, juice, canned) you can dispense with a lot of anxiety.
4. Tree fruits are the marketable commodity, but bush fruits (which are too delicate to ship well or store fresh) are the survivor�s food, and ought to be the first choice of relocalizers. In 30 years, my blueberries , gooseberries and elderberries have never failed, raspberries , blackberries and blackcaps yield 9 years out of ten, blackcurrants and redcurrants 8 of 10. Grapes work for me nearly every year though they are extremely hardy and less desirable varieties. Strawberries are certainly fussier though they also yield every year, if less reliable in quantity.

The nearly-extinct American chestnut holds some lessons in this regard. The Northern hardwoods ecosystem was greatly impoverished, less able to support top predators, when the chestnuts disappeared. Because although beech, hazels, oaks, and hickories all offer a lot of feed for a range of prey species when they fruit irregularly, only the chestnut fruited every year without fail. As we try to rebuild our local food systems along the lines nature does, lets keep our eye on those foods that can be counted on, like bush fruits, rather than those that extended their range in the climatically-good-old-days and for the benefit of commerce.