Growing Practices at Bellair
We've been getting some questions lately about growing practices on the farm and wanted to write up a little article about our veggie growing methods here for your reference.
It takes a combination of cover cropping, our own livestock manure, mineral & animal byproduct fertilizers, biodegradeable "plastic" mulch, tractor cultivating + hand weeding, and the occasional organic approved pesticide to bring over 50 types of veggies from seed to harvest to market.
The farm typically crops about 23 acres in annual vegetables each year and has another ~20 acres "resting" in cover crops for the season. Until Fall of 2022, we were certified organic. At that time, we made the decision to drop the certification for several reasons, including cost, additional admin labor, and because we wanted to fully utilize biodegradeable plastic mulch. You can read about the details in this blog post from 2023. In short, we continue to grow to the organic standard, but are not USDA certified.
There are two main categories we get asked about a lot, and they are fertility sources and pesticides.
Soil Fertility
On the fertility front, our main goal is to rely more and more on our on-farm animals to provide manure for us. With this method, a lot of planning and other work go into doing this safely and effectively. We need to observe commonly accepted food safety windows of time between manure application and harvest. We get these guidelines from the National Organic Program guidelines. Because of the seasonal/time restrictions, we can't fully fertilize the farm in this way so we will always source fertility off the farm.
For the most part, our fertility products are either byproducts of animal agriculture: bone meal, feather meal, and blood meal, for example, or mined rocks and minerals: soft rock phosphate, sulfate of potash, elemental sulfur, elemental boron, etc. We have on occasion sourced fresh turkey or chicken litter from local poultry houses but have not done so in several years.
We also source foliar-applied liquid fertilizers that are mainly plant- and fish- based, made with things like fishmeal, seaweed extract, molasses, and similar plant derivatives.
One source we are committed to not using on our farm is biosolids, which is an umbrella term to describe processed human sewage and/or industrial waste. While we aren't opposed to exploring humanure, there is too much risk with microplastics and pharmaceuticals and not knowing the source or contents of the industrial waste components.
Pesticides
We only use ones that are approved for use under the National Organic Program. These include:
Pyrethrum (brand names incl. Pyganic) - made from chrysanthemum flowers. There is a synthetic version used in conventional systems. We use the naturally derived but they are chemically similar.
Saccharopolyspora spinosa (brand names incl. Entrust and Conserve) - soil bacteria that kills soft bodied insects
bT (brand names incl. Dipel, Monterey Garden Spray) - another soil bacteria that kills soft bodied insects
Kaolin Clay - literally just a clay barrier
Diotomaceous earth - again, just a mined product. We don't use this much in veggies but do use it in our poultry coops as needed.
All of these pesticides have short half-lives and dissipate into non-toxic forms. We don't spray pesticides very much at all. Maybe 2-4 times per year on some greens plantings and then 2 times on average on our broccoli and cabbage crops. Most years we need to spray part or all of the potatoes for the colorado potato beetle. Some years we need to spray eggplant seedlings as well. It's definitely done on an as-needed basis. I can guarantee you there is plenty of work out here and we don't go around doing things that aren't specifically needed in order to get a harvest.
When it comes to the application of all these components, there are federal regulations within the FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act) Produce Safety Rule that we follow and also of course the Safety Data Sheets on the pesticides themselves. Folks that apply pesticides here also hold certifications in order to do that.
We're still in the process of learning more about the best ways to grow. We need to balance the physical sustainability of our crew's bodies, the economic sustainability of the farm finances, and the ecological sustainability for our natural resources and wild ecosystems. As we move forward, we're committed to transparency with our growing!
