A young broccoli plant gets its start. Photo by Scott David Gordon

From the Farmer's Perspective: Organic Certification

Heads up: this week's blog post is a long one!

As we spend the weeks hurdling towards Fall on the farm, busily trying to finalize crop plans, purchase seeds, and get the fields prepared (how many hours in a day again?), we are also gathering our paperwork for a very significant day at the farm: our annual organic inspection and re-certification. This year, I thought it would be a good opportunity to tell the JBG community a little bit more about our growing practices at the farm, because "organic" can manifest itself in a number of different ways and I'm very proud of what we've accomplished here. It also dawned on me that you might not be aware of what an organic certification looks like, and we wanted to let you in on the process.

When I first started in the backyard garden, I knew each and every one of my customers, and I didn't need a USDA seal to tell them about my growing practices. When I became a full time farmer in 2008, we made the decision to undergo our first organic certification, and man, am I glad I made that decision early on! The biggest lesson I've learned is that organic certification requires some meticulous record keeping - tracking all of your crops from seed to sale. Now that we're on 200 acres, that record keeping has gotten extremely complex, so I am grateful that our organic certification required us to develop our record-keeping systems early on.

We are certified organic Nature's International Certification Services (NICS), based out of Wisconson. Nature's International Certification Services.  When our certifier comes for their annual farm inspection this Fall, we'll take them on a grand tour of JBG. This includes a field walk, facilities inspections, a look into where we store seeds, tools, amendments, soils, etc., and a sit-down interview where we review our 5 year Organic System Plan (OSP), our records from the previous year and plans for the coming one. We'll walk through an audit of a crop or multiple crops, tracking the vegetable from purchase of organic seeds, through our greenhouse and planting in the field, to weeding and pest management, to harvest and finally to the customer. Wow! We'll go into the details of everything from our buffer zones around the farm, to logo colors and placement on our CSA boxes. It's an extremely long and detailed process, but thanks to a hard working staff I know that we have all of our ducks in a row. For the large part though, the certification is looking for the following areas of our production system, with a few details on how we do it at JBG:

Pepper abundance. Photo by Scott David Gordon

1. Long-Term Soil Fertility through Ecological Methods

When we grow nutrient-rich food for you and your families, we're pulling a lot of organic matter and nutrients out of our soil! As organic producers, we don't use synthetic fertilizers on the farm, which can cause unintended ecological harm, but rather use natural materials and grow our own fertility:

• Crop Rotation: different types of vegetables take different nutrients from the soil. Our Kale will tackle your vitamins A and K requirements, while Tomatoes have you covered on vitamin C and biotin! We never plant the same crop twice in a row on the same piece of land, but we rotate our crops around the farm to ensure that we don't deplete our soil of any one nutrient.
• Cover Crops: Did you know that you can actually grow your own fertility? As part of our crop rotation system, we include blocks of cover crops, also known as "green manures," to build both soil fertility and microbiology. This mix of grasses and leguminous crops is planted specifically to be turned back into the soil when fully grown, enriching it with organic matter and nitrogen fixing bacteria from the legumes!
• Compost compost compost! We make sure to add a lot of compost back into our soil - we want to make sure our vegetables have everything they need to grow you the healthiest food! In addition to compost, we are also able to add harder-to-find nutrients into our soil by using things like crushed rocks, bones, or feathers (byproducts of the agriculture industry), and marine products that are byproducts of the fishing industry.

Tractor work at the farm. Photo by Scott David Gordon

2. Natural Pest Management

The general idea behind pest management at JBG, is that if you have healthy soil and are growing seasonally appropriate crops and varieties, your plants should be heathy and free of pests and disease! This isn't always the case though, and we use an integrated pest management (IPM) system to address our plant health on the farm.

• Attract predators: Have you seen our farm flowers yet? In addition to being a beautiful farmer's market buy, our farmscaping efforts have been attracting all kinds of great insects to the farm! In addition to pollinators like honey bees, flowering plants attract ladybugs to combat aphids, syrphid flies to attack thrips, and lacewings for pesky caterpillars! We like to let some of our fennel, parsley and arugula crops go to seed to help feed the good bugs as well. Finally, we installed bat houses on the farm earlier this year, a unique Austin solution to combating crop-eating bugs!
• Natural compounds: sometimes, in order to save a crop, we have to attack the pests ourselves. If you remember earlier this year, Temo injected a mix of rosemary oil and other natural herbal oils to our drip system to save our potatoes after a cool, damp Spring season! We use this method of organic-approved compounds as a last resort, since we don't want to hurt those beneficial insects as well.
• Physical methods: Our Head Grower, Temo, also came up with the great idea to vacuum bugs off of the crops this year! Have I mentioned how great Temo is at his job? Another physical method we use is our crop rotation - by growing a crop in a different area of the farm each year, we try to keep pests from finding it - like a grower's game of hide and seek. Our big plans for the future are to grow alternating years between two different farm locations, both to help break the pest cycle and increase soil fertility. This is also how we manage weeds on the farm -- lots and lots of physical labor. While we do use tractors to help us weed, a large majority is done by hand, by our hard working field crews!

Scott captures a pollinator on one of our zinnias. Photo by Scott David Gordon

3. Biodiversity on the Farm and Surrounding Ecosystem

As a general rule, ecosystems that have more biodiversity - number of different plants, animals, insects, etc - are inherently more stable and healthy without additional inputs. We strive to achieve this at JBG in a number of ways:

• Diverse mix of crops: did you know that we grew over 250 different varieties of crops last year? While this leads to a lot of record-keeping, it also provides you and your family with a plethora of options in your CSA boxes!
• Farmscaping: Our flowering plants attract a huge variety of beneficial insects and pollinators to the farm, which also helps with pest management!
• Buffer zones and riparian areas: We maintain a 40 ft zone around the entire farm to avoid material drift, and to provide habitat for native plants and animals. In addition, we have a buffer around the waterways that run around and through our farm, which are host to a number of birds, bees, animals, reptiles, and more!

...I could go on and on about this topic! If you've made it this far into my post, I hope that you've gained some insight about how we grow your food here at JBG. We're always looking to improve our systems to grow the highest-quality organic produce for our customers - this is something I'm really passionate about, and I am grateful to the USDA for developing a system that my customers can trust to help them make decisions about how they eat. Recently, I've also been researching biodynamic agriculture and how we could incorporate it at JBG. Biodynamics is a system of organic agriculture that goes even further than organic standards, taking into account later ecological systems and how subtle influences, including astrological movement, can play a role in growing healthy plants. We'll be sure to keep you in the loop!

I've probably put some of you to sleep by now, too, but that's okay too. Either way, I hope to see you at one of our farmers markets this weekend!

Brenton on a field walk. Photo by Scott David Gordon