 Today, with Orca Media, we present the sixth episode of Exploring Climate Change in Vermont, with host Steve Lobb. We will feature the full Moon Organic Farm of David Zuckerman and family in Heinsberg, Although the emphasis in our dialogue concerns building healthy, rich soil and preventing phosphate runoff into waterways, David speaks of the effects of climate change locally and how extreme thunderstorms present difficulties for farmers. As our film crew was videoing on June 18th, the sky turned exceedingly dark with huge thunderclouds and torrential rains followed, which caused havoc on the roadways and instantly raised the level of rivers and streams. Now we will turn to conversations while walking around the farm. Hi David, nice to be here to see you and your farm. I remember some years ago, I was at Interveil, your farm there in Burlington, and I saw this farm as a wonderful experiment and thought to myself then, this is a wonderful idea for all of Vermont farmers. Well, it fits for some, it doesn't fit for everybody. There are a lot of different kinds of farmers and they farm their own different things. Not everybody wants to do vegetables, but yeah. Of course, farming includes a whole lot more than just that. But now I see that years later now, you're doing the real thing and this is wonderful to see and to see an example of organic farms for present and of course future. Well, thank you and the for real thing might mean ownership as opposed to renting the land and in buying this land and some of the infrastructure and tractors and implements and fixing up the wash station. We went almost a half million dollars in debt, which I just point out because I think a lot of folks don't always realize whether it be a vegetable farm or a dairy farm, the kind of numbers people are talking about in terms of debt load. Sometimes with other professions, people talk about the debt load coming out of school and how people need to be paid well because of all this debt they have. A lot of farmers are taking on the same kind of debt, but aren't necessarily getting a remuneration in the same way because partly we're trying to provide a basic need, which is food. But there is this balance and as we get into climate change and we get into phosphorus and water quality, how farmers are trying to manage their land to do the best they can for the environment while also matching that very narrow margin of profitability when you're trying to pay off that kind of debt. So if you don't mind me bringing that into the conversation. No, that's very important. One of the things when I bought this farm, the old dairy farm had put in a ditch right here. You can see this little swale down. We've mowed some of this area because not right into the ditch, but we're going to have some of our pastured chickens. We've got about 30 laying hens. They'll be on this taller grass. But the ditch was used as a drainage scenario and those are on farms all over the state. And depending on the farm, that ditch is either collecting a lot of water and becoming a bit more eroded and running out. Or in this case, it's a very flat ditch and it goes over a thousand feet before it gets to the woods, where then it starts entering some streams. And it's very grassed, which helps slow any water flow. I've never seen water actually flowing in this ditch. I've seen water work its way into it, but at that time this might have been corn or other surfaces that weren't as good at absorbing water as the grass fields that we have now. So those are some of the things that farmers are inheriting and some are useful to the farmer and some are a relic of a past farm. But those ditches are part of the whole phosphorus discussion. And also those ditches were more reasonable when we had long, showery rains over the course of eight or 10 or 12 hours as used to be more of the norm. As we now, in fact, with potentially a looming thunderstorm right now, we're seeing more severe storms now. Heavier doses of rain in a shorter window of time. And that is a big piece of that whole erosion issue. And that erosion carries that phosphorus laden sediment into the ditch and then down into the water, into the streams, into the tributaries. Or for those farms right next to a bigger river, sometimes right off into the river. And so those climate chains, phosphorus, nutrient loading, those are all interrelated aspects of this conversation. Summary, our farm is about 150 acres. And we produce about 20 to 25 acres of vegetables. We produce about 20 to 30 hogs to slaughter each year. And another 80 or 90 piglets that we sell each spring. We also raise meat birds between, we've been doing about 1,000. We're at about 750 this year. All of our meats and vegetables are certified organic. Occasionally, the pork is not certified in the end because not all slaughterhouses are certified organic. And depending where we can get our pigs in and who's going to make the cuts we want, it doesn't all end up certified. But we raise them organically. Organic grain, pastured, no antibiotics or shots for those pigs, et cetera. And some people think that pastured is nearly organic, but it's not. It really depends on the feed they're getting as well. And those other, whether they get hormones or shots. Even non-GMO grain fed is, in my mind, an improvement. But it's a long way from organic. Non-GMO grain still has herbicides and pesticides and synthetic fertilizers on the ground that the feed is growing on. Right behind you, we actually have a high tunnel. We could either look in the door or look in from the side. But we have two high tunnels that we grow winter greens in, as well as summer tomatoes. So our tomato plants are starting to get some size to them and some fruits down at the bottom. And these are all direct marketed either through our CSA or through the farmer's market. We direct market about 75% of our product. And then we wholesale about 25% of our gross is wholesale. But the tomatoes, we tend not to wholesale very much. There's already a big production line and supply line for wholesale on tomatoes. But again, you want good airflow to keep diseases down. And so we trim back the plant some. And these are about to get clipped up again. They're just getting to where they need a new clip added on to their stature. Actually, Steve opened the discussion with it being David Zuckerman's farm. I want to be very clear. It is David Zuckerman and Rachel Nevitt's farm. And Rachel Nevitt's name could almost be first, because she ends up doing so much management while I'm partly Lieutenant Governor. But she does all the greenhouse starts. So my memory is going to be early April. OK, from seed? From seed. And then transplanted in early mid-May. We could probably start a couple weeks earlier, because these high tunnels would protect them from the cold of May. So you don't write your maturity inside yourself? Oh, yeah. But we tend to do a lot of other things early. And so we don't always get the tomatoes in as early as we'd like, which is just a reality. This is the, we call it the children's garden. We run a summer camp for kids. And so we plant some plants in there early. And then when they start next week, they'll plant some more things. But they'll have some things that they plant here. Like they might plant carrots next week. But then they'll go out to the field where we already have carrots that are coming up pretty good. And they can see and learn all the different stages of agriculture. Because in one week, they can't really see it to fruition in the children's garden. But each camp session sees the work of the prior week and more. And then they can go in the fields where they see bigger crops. Here we have one of our two irrigation ponds. This one, we actually had drained almost all the way down already this year. And we just pumped water from the other pond over to fill this one as much as we could before we start watering the fields again if it doesn't rain. So our property is this pond. All the fields, including that barn, we don't own the brick house. But we own those far fields with that golden straw on it. That's straw cover crop, rye cover crop, that is partly for soil containment. And then also we cut and bail some of the straw for bedding for our pigs. But other straw, we chop and turn back into the soil to try to build organic matter. One of the things with any farming is it's hard to keep your organic matter levels up. And I'm still working to improve my ability to build it up as opposed to deplete it. When you have open soil, which with organic ag, you do a lot of cultivation, typically, you tend to lose some of your organic matter. So you've got to be pretty aggressive at growing cover crops and turning organic matter back in to try to build that up. All right. So we have transplanted sweet corn here, including the block farther away. You can see some a little bit taller. The tallest stuff is over there. It's already up to about mid-thigh, which on June 18th I feel pretty good about. It's even starting to put up its tassels a little bit. So sometime by mid-early July, we'll have ears of corn. We primarily cultivate with mechanical cultivation, but you'll actually see a couple spots here where some weeds are not killed by the mechanical cultivation. And we'll come through and we'll hoe these couple spots. But the goal is to do as much of it mechanically as possible because the labor cost is quite high when you start having to hoe every single crop. So there's sunflowers and you've got successions of sunflowers. You've got your first planting here and your second planting there. This is basil we transplanted, which actually we're gonna start harvesting tomorrow for our CSA members. Celeriac is the shorter, darker green. We've got some dill and cilantro here, head lettuce, cut lettuce in the next bit over, the green-red and red-green mix. Under the row cover are spicy mix and arugula. That's one way to prevent pests, little bugs from getting on those crops. Again, as an organic farm, we're very limited in what pesticides we can spray because they have to be naturally derived. And there's very little that addresses the flea beetle problem. So we use row cover for that, which is another job for people to put on after a seed. And beyond that is spinach. So this block has a pretty diverse range of things, whereas the block over here is 100% corn. We grow about four acres of sweet corn. Pretty hot commodity at the farmer's market, members like it. One thing that a lot of farms are doing more and more of now is cover cropping. A lot of organic farms have been doing it for a long time, like I said, in order to put organic matter back in the soil. A lot of conventional dairy farms are now starting to plant winter rye or winter oats on their corn crops. Again, it gets started growing right as they're harvesting, and then it grows up through the fall and holds that soil in place. And then it's a plant matter that gets incorporated in the spring or some of them spray kill it, but it still holds the soil, which is a benefit. One of the things we do with cover crops, you've got two examples here. This is clover. I just actually, there's another block above and there were two more blocks that literally this morning I mowed. We then disc them into the soil. We spread compost on top of that, till that in, and now we're starting to plant plants into it all in one to two days. Ideally, we would do the cover crop incorporation about a week or two earlier. We just got a little behind. But this is a clover cover crop. That's a winter rye cover crop. Both of those are gonna get chopped and then put into the soil to break down and build the organic matter. So that's what you see behind you here. And some blocks we don't grow vegetables on every year. These ones are cover crop blocks, whereas these other ones are vegetables. We also try to contour the direction of our blocks to the slope of the land so that we have green drive strips to buffer any rolling down water from the slope and to try to reduce erosion. We do see a little bit of erosion in each block and that gets caught on those green drive rows. But it's tough and growing on a slight slope, luckily this is not particularly sloped, but it's great sandy soil. But in the deli-u drains, it's tricky to not lose a little bit of it. These are chicken tractors. So for our meat birds, we put those on the clover cover crops and move them every day, twice a day. And the chickens can roam around within the cage, so they are pastured, not free range, technically. And they eat the clover every, as soon as we move it, they run and just eat up all the clover. It helps make them sweet. We raise about 30 to 45 birds per pen. And at about seven weeks, they're ready to move towards your plate. So this is our potatoes. He just hilled these this morning, again. And that's probably the last hilling they'll get because they're gonna get too floppy. And that block up there is our kales and a little bit of broccoli. And we got some more Napa cabbage and then that's almost all fall cabbage that just went in today. They got the plants in, the hoops on, the row cover over it to protect it from those same flea beetles that affect your rugula, those little black beetles. So this morning, this was that green clover cover crop this tall. And I mowed it, we disked it, chisel plowed, disked, then we'll till it and plant in it. And part of that was to get that material down into the soil. Again, normally we would do this way to week and we probably will be able to way to week because we got all our cabbages in there. But these two blocks are just turned in today and they'll be planted into over the next couple of weeks. How many farm hands do you have? We have two to three year round and right now we have eight additional seasonal. Okay. Yeah, so that's 11, well, another seasonal, nine seasonal. So we have 11 or 12 people plus me and my spouse right now. But that's not that many for all you've got going. Well, they're good. If you do your tractor work on the right timing, you can keep, you know, that corn, if we can keep them out of whole corn, we can save ourselves a lot of time. So if you cultivated just the right time and I just, as we walked, I was taking note of the things I need to cultivate tomorrow. I didn't want to cultivate today because if it had rained, any of these rains, right after I cultivated, some of those weeds would reroute. So if I cultivate, if it rains tonight, if I wait till late tomorrow or Wednesday, then I cultivate, then they'll dry back out on the surface again. So, Zucchini and summer squash, we just started harvesting them two weeks ago and had good markets within the last two Saturdays and now we're starting to wholesale because we're starting to have a little extra. So we got about two and a half beds of those, cucumbers and pickling cucumbers. And then we've got melons, watermelons. Lots of good stuff. This is another planting of melons. So the first melons have been uncovered because they flowered. The second melons have been uncovered. They're smaller, but they started flowering. The third melons, when they plant melons, we cover them up to protect them from the cucumber beetle, let the plants get bigger and more robust. Then when they start flowering, you uncover them so they can be pollinated. And by then, the leaves can take a little bit of damage and the plant will be okay. All right. From the cucumber beetle. All right, that's a very interesting progression. Pest protection. Earlier in the season, when we first transplanted our Zucchini and summer squash, it was both pest protection and frost protection. So that row cover will add two to four degrees. So those nights that are just light frosts, those crops will live, which lets us get them in earlier and then harvest plants earlier. We actually will do a combo. If we get them in particularly, and then it's a particularly cold night along with the row cover will run irrigation. So right now this is mostly water with drip irrigation to conserve water and to get water underneath the plastic to the roots. But we can use those overhead pipes. One row of pipes will water this whole block. And so if you sprinkle water on right during a frost, then you can withstand the frost from your crops because the water will freeze. And as it's freezing, it's releasing warmth. And that warmth it releases keeps your crop from freezing. Some of these will incorporate and we'll just put another cover crop on them. So you put sometimes a couple rounds of cover crops on in a year to just keep growing matter for the soil. And the more organic matter you have, not only is it beneficial for the farmer in terms of you can count on adding less nitrogen if you have more organic matter, when you're doing your formulations of what you're fertilizing. Also more organic matter in the soil absorbs more water. So if you've got richer soil from an organic matter perspective and tilth, then when it does rain that soil could hold more water, which means less of that erosion. So I'm trying to get more organic matter in the soil so I don't get erosion coming off the slope. How's it going guys? Looks good, I saw up at the other end getting all those random little ones last chance for it grows over. Maybe it's gonna rain, we need rain. To finish up this program, here are some ending thoughts on global weather patterns and Vermont. Extreme flooding continues again this summer, all throughout Japan, China and Southeast Asia, displacing millions of people due to the warming of the Pacific Ocean. This warming has effects as far away as Vermont. Very alarming to me, having lived in Sweden is the unprecedented drought and heat waves there, right now, resulting in over a hundred uncontrolled forest fires that reach even above the Arctic Circle. Sweden with all its wealth and help from the European Union has no means to contain these fires. Know that middle Sweden and lower Sweden have a very similar climate and forests to Vermont. Alaska, Canada, Siberia and even Greenland this year as well as last summer are also having extreme forest fires sending soot northward to the Arctic and polluting the marine environment there in very democratic Norway, also with forest fires. The population is challenging big oil and there are plans to export wind energy from Norway to the European Union. Wind energy is another marvelous example to replace fossil fuel. Though some people consider windmills ugly, the use of fossil fuel is much worse. Even large scale hydro has many problems, especially with aging and deteriorating dams. So beware and do all you can to prevent climate change from bringing Vermont to the brink. Phenomena of weather nowadays happens faster than one might think. On a happier note, some good news is that Palau in the Pacific is ridding themselves of fossil fuel and planned to be 100% solar by 2020. What a good example for a country with little wealth. Iceland is cutting back on the use of fossil fuels and most of their energy needs come from thermal energy. Hawaii and California are leading the way in US with many alternative schemes for energy production. Another exciting story is the new Marshall Plan for Climate Change by 28 year old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the upcoming youngest Congresswoman from New York. We should all listen up because she thinks big and smart, like good leaders do. This is not to mention her historical name, Alexandria. Finally, I call it good news is that Vermont has a bright leader in government, David Zuckerman of the Full Moon Farm, plus others in and out of government who are aware and doing something about climate change locally. We here can set an example that goes worldwide, but government can only do so much and the rest is up to you and me. All of us need to be alert and do all we can on every level to counteract the bad effects of climate change. Of climate change.