Aiming for efficiency

Meet this week’s vegetables:

Regular readers of our blog and newsletter will already know that Casey and I are highly analytical farmers. From the first days of our farm’s beginning, we’ve aimed to develop efficient and profitable farming systems — and, due to our analytical nature, we’re constantly re-thinking and re-designing every system, from the mundane to the profound (they’re mostly mundane).

Our farming conversations would probably bore and confound most people (‘how can they possibly care this much about [fill in the mundane farming blank]?’). If you were curious about any aspect of our farm, we could give you a long detailed description of why we chose that particular set-up (or why we aren’t satisfied with that set-up and what we’d like instead). We once had an hour-long conversation describing why we prefer overhead irrigation to drip (and we spent many hours conversing between the two of us before initially deciding that we prefer overhead irrigation). It’s ongoing.

So, anyhow, this week — since we were once again kept from planting by rain, cold weather and even some snow — we engaged in further analysis and planning for the upcoming 2008 season. Our primary goal for this year is to continue improving our systems and infrastructure set-up, with the goal of achieving a higher level of efficiency. For us efficiency doesn’t simply mean speed and/or profitability — we’re also thinking about the physical comfort and ease with which we complete tasks. Since we are currently a two-person operation, we personally feel every single bump and burden involved in producing and marketing our veggies.

The big question we’re always wondering when we go to spend money on capital purchases: what is an area that could use immediate improvement? Last summer, buying the Gator was an easy purchase that immediately improved every aspect of our farm work. We gained hours each week just by eliminating the need to pull materials around in garden carts.

This year, we’re looking at two potential big improvements. The first is an almost sure thing — this week we sourced and purchased a set of used 1¼” x 40’ Wade Rain irrigation pipes to supplement the 40’ long 2” irrigation pipes we already own. With the two systems combined, we now have an almost complete set-up (we still need to purchase a few valves) that will allow us to have a ”solid set” of irrigation this summer.

Let me explain how significant this is. The last two years, we have irrigated with a limited set of irrigation materials — enough to run our capacity of water but no more. What that meant was that we had to move our irrigation system around the field each time we wanted to water, which was every day. Using our surface water pump, last year we could only run two runs of our 2” lines (12 sprinklers) at a time.

While they’re not the most burdensome thing in the world, moving 40’-long pipes day in and out takes time and patience. The most consistent arguments we had on the farm last year involved moving irrigation (imagine carrying a 40’-long pipe with your partner on a hot afternoon when you’re dead tired — it’s not an ideal marriage moment).

Instead, as we plant this year we will set up lines for each 40’ section of beds (the sprinklers have a 40’ radius) and attach it to a mainline with a valved fitting. We have enough of our smaller diameter pipes to place permanent lines covering the entire field, all attached to mainline with a valve. Even with our new well, we’ll only have enough water to run three 200’ runs at a time (a mere 50% increase from last year) — but we’ll be able to direct the water around the field by simply opening and closing valves. That’s it.

This upgrade in our system, which so far has only cost us $2500, will save us literally at least an hour every day in the summer — and it will save us infinite frustration. The ease with which we’ll be able to water will also insure that we will keep up with our planned water rotation. Last year we would sometimes delay watering simply because we didn’t have time to move pipe. No more.

Hopefully, anyway. We’ve learned enough from two prior seasons to know that you can’t guarantee any thing will work until it’s set up and put to the test. But so far, we have every reason to think our new solid irrigation set will function.

Our next exciting plan for increased efficiency is still very much in the works. We were inspired by a trip to Persephone Farm in Lebanon this weekend to seek out our own version of a device they use: a Drängen crawler. The Drängen (Swedish for ‘farm hand’) is essentially a low, riding platform that is self-propelled. You lie on it, face down over a bed, and use your feet to direct the motor and steer. Basically, it takes farm tasks that would normally be back bending (weeding, harvesting, transplanting) and makes them more comfortable. According to one study, worker efficiency (and happiness) increased 25% with the use of one of these crawling platforms.

We’ve been thinking about something like this since last year, when we tried to design a transplanting platform. We’re now drawn to the Drängen solution because it offers more flexibility: we could use it for hand weeding, transplanting, and harvesting items such as bush beans.

We’re in the early stages of researching how we could obtain our own Drängen (or the Finnish version made by another company). They’re incredibly simple, well-designed, human-scaled machines, but they’re not currently sold through any American distributors that we know of. So, we’d have to actually get one imported. Our friends Jeff and Elanor of Persephone went through that process successfully, so we know it’s possible, but it’s certainly not an easy task to begin. (If other farmers out there are interested in these machines, let us know, because we might be able to reduce the import costs if we brought over several at once.)

We’ll keep working on it, but hopefully some of our planning activities will be stalled this week by nice weather. The forecast is for a dry spell, which could mean that we might actually have the opportunity to plant. Our greenhouses are full of transplants (we look at all those transplants and wish we already had a Drängen …). We were unexpectedly grateful that we didn’t already have baby plants in the fields during the bizarre round of cold weather this week (including the latest snowfall in Portland history!), but we’re ready to get things growing in the fields now.

Hopefully the forecast is correct, because we’re beginning to see real signs of a potential ‘hungry month’ creeping up on us. We’re slowly but surely depleting the supply of over-wintered vegetables. This week’s share contains the last of the celeriac, which means that we’ll be living on cabbages, greens and alliums until our first radishes mature. Considering the variety of alliums and greens we have, the reduction in options will hopefully still provide for delicious seasonal meals in your households.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers,

Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics