Planting "naked" oats

Over the last 3 days we planted about 48 acres of "naked" or hull-less oats. Oats are a huge staple and are in high demand locally. Most oats have a hull that must be removed before rolling. Once the hull is removed the oats begin to go rancid unless they are toasted or steamed. The de-hulling and toasting of the oats requires specialized machinery that only a few companies in Oregon possess. One company is Grain Millers out of Eugene. They are very large and can handle lots of volume, unfortunately they can't process "on spec." Basically that means they can't contract process. Once we deliver the oats that's it, they are mixed in with their other oats and we get the standard price per ton, which at 160-170 dollars is pretty low. We started looking around for other options and heard about hull-less oats from another grower. The advantage of hull-less oats is that they have no hull, so require less processing. They do not go rancid once rolled, or so I'm told. This eliminates a lot of steps in the processing chain. We know a small processor that can handle the rolling of the oats, which is great because that allows us to market them locally for a better price. We started looking around for the seed stock and found that hull-less oats are hard to find in quantity. We ordered about 10,000 pounds and split them with another grower. We think this variety, being from another region, will need a season or two of acclimatizing before we get decent yields. We planted our 48 acres at around 115 pounds per acre. We have no idea what they will yield. These oats have a lot of potential, and we are looking forward to watching them grow.

More photos of crop progress

These are pictures of the flax fields and one of the hard red wheat fields. The flax is sprouting already after only being in the ground for 3 days. Michael is standing in the middle of one of our flax fields. Behind him the green hill is one of the hard red wheat fields. I am standing at the top of the hill in the hard red wheat with the flax fields at the bottom of the hill behind me. The hard red is about one month old.

Pictures of the crops' progress

Here are photos of the crops and their progress. The soft white winter wheat planted last october/november is doing excellent. It is almost chest high and the seed heads are coming up quickly. It is surprising how well it is doing considering it has had no chemicals of any kind applied to it. There are very few weeds in the field, only some orchardgrass, ryegrass, and a little brome. The sunflowers I planted last Sunday have sprouted and look like they will do very well. Michael is kneeling between the rows in the field.

Flax planting.

Last week we planted 35 acres of brown flax. We are growing it transitionally, and will also have another 15 acres of organic flax that is going in soon. Much of the flax is being sold as whole seed for food. Some flax is grown for oil, some for fiber, but the variety we are growing is an excellent food seed. The organic seed stock arrived from California last month, and we have been waiting until the wheat and oats were in before we planted the flax. Hopefully it will yield around 1500 pounds per acre. Organic flax is fairly valuable, but the transitional must be marketed properly to find a good price. There are buyers out there willing to pay a premium for locally grown flax, even if its not organic. Since there are very few flax growers in the Willamette Valley its hard for local bakeries to find local flax. I think that we will be the second largest flax grower in the valley after Shawn Caid's Shekina Farm, which is growing around 50-60 acres of brown flax I believe. Flax has so many potential uses that we are excited about seeing how well it does on our farm.

Planting sunflowers

Yesterday I planted 1 acre of mammoth grey stripe sunflowers. The area I planted is right by a few of the houses on the farm. They should look great once they start getting tall. I planted about 20-25 pounds of seed in rows about 2 feet apart. I used a small push-planter that my friend Jason Bradford lent me. It can hold about a pound of seed. It drops the seed in a row at around one seed every inch, and about half an inch deep. Once they get about a foot tall I will start to thin them out. If we don't thin them they will compete with each other pretty heavily. This variety can get up to around 10-12 feet tall! The heads are tremendous and should yield lots of seed. We have been told by several people that birds will be a huge problem, so we plan to put up a large amount of netting to keep them off. I'll keep posting photos of the sunflowers as they grow. The photo I'm posting here of the sunflower is what they look like once fully grown. The other photos are of the planter I used and the field I planted in.

The first day of applying compost tea

We had our first delivery of organic compost tea today. Shepard Smith from Soilsmith Services brought 1000 gallons of tea and 100 gallons of organic fish fertilizer, as well as 10-15 gallons of liquid kelp. The tea is a kind of all-in-one amendment that restores nutrients to the soil. The fish fertilizer will help the crop enormously as well. The kelp aids in disease resistance. A few applications of the tea a year, at around 10-15 gallons an acre, should help restore good biology to the soil. Hopefully after a few years of tea and good crop rotation, we will have immense yields of healthy organic crops. The cost savings as compared to conventional chemicals is pretty amazing too. We are paying close to 30-35 dollars an acre for the tea, fish, and kelp. That is about half the cost of conventional fertilizer, although we will have to do several applications of tea a year.

Here is a link to Soilsmith's website. They are only about 10 minutes from us.

http://www.soilsmith.com/

We've secured some federal funding through the NRCS

We applied for federal funding through the NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service). They pay farmers a financial incentive to adopt certain agricultural practices such as farming organically, conserving water through more efficient irrigation, managing pests without conventional chemicals, etc. The areas we applied for include: Organic cover crops, organic nutrient management, organic pest management, and crop residue incorporation. Organic cover crops are things like clover that you plant in the fall and allow to grow during the winter. They fix the nitrogen in the soil, meaning we use less fertilizer. We plan to grow crimson clover. Organic nutrient management is a plan that involves use of organic fertilizers. We are using organic compost tea instead of conventional fertilizer on a few hundred acres. Organic pest management is similar to the nutrient management that just means we will use organic pesticide where needed instead of conventional. And finally crops residue incorporation means we will plow less and incorporate the wheat and grass stubble into the soil instead of taking off straw. It helps the soil recover faster. The NRCS is paying us a significant amount of money to adopt these practices on about 10 percent of our acreage. We qualified for close to the maximum amount, which is why the payout is only for a small amount of acres. It's great that the government is doing things like this to help growers like us transition to organic. The funding program is called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program.