Last week we had a shareholder visit the farm who has been working on a project that involves taking detailed aerial images of the fields and comparing them to each other (in lay-person’s speak). His visit last week was a follow-up to one earlier in the year, and it made me stop and reflect on just how much our fields change over the course of a single season. Not only have the micro-scale patterns on the soil surface changed since his last set of images, but whole sections of the field have been flipped. The garlic field, for example, where tiny green shoots were just starting to poke through in the first images, has grown to 3 feet tall, sent out scapes, died back, been harvested, the field was planted with a cover crop of oats, it grew up to 3 feet tall again, and I mowed it just before his visit last week. If he had waited until this week there would be pigs roaming around in it! Between succession plantings, crop rotation, new fields bring brought into production, and old fields rested and rejuvenated with cover crops, our farm an ever-changing landscape, and that is what keeps our soil healthy and the pests at bay. But good luck making a static map of it all!
Now, onto this week’s harvest.