Chicken Quotas

Yesterday I started the Farmer's Growing Farmers program through Everdale Farm. They offer several courses and I'm taking the Farm Planner where you develop a farm business plan with the mentorship of some experienced local farmers.

We visited Magda Farm & Trout Lily Nursary in Rockwood, ON. Vera Top used to work at FoodShare Toronto and now farms beef, chicken, pigs and eggs as well as running an organic seedling business. Lots of her seedlings are sold at Urban Harvest in Toronto. Which means I have grown many of her plants in the past few years in our Toronto garden. Neat!

Vera gave us a great tour of her farm. At the end we talked about chicken quotas in Ontario. Currently, chickens are a supply managed commodity - in attempt to provide stability for chicken farmers, the production of chickens is regulated through a quota system. This is to keep prices steady over time, to ensure supply matches demand, and to make sure consumers can obtain a consistent supply. To be able to produce chickens, you have to buy quota which is sort of like buying a license to produce and sell chicken - getting a piece of the overall chicken pie.

The tricky part is that buying into the quota system is expensive. The minimum entry point in Ontario right now is 14,000 birds. With 7 cycles in a year, you would produce 90,000 birds which Vera says at current prices would cost about 1.4 million. Just to enter the market! This, for sure, is incredibly cost prohibitive for farmers that are just starting out and farmers that are not interested in running a large operation.

(Side note: I tried to do that math on my own to double check that super high number and just about lost my mind trying to calculate it - you need 14,000 units of quota at $74/quota unit at one unit being 13 kg/year - very challenging to actually find the right information and then calculate that many birds. That alone is a challenge for new farmers.)

The good news, there is an exemption! The bad news, the exemption is tiny! Currently, without quota you can only produce 300 birds per year. This would provide a small scale farmer with maybe a few thousand dollars in sales. Not much in terms of growing an economically sustainable farm business.

This small flock exemption is a lot different in other provinces - 2,000 in Alberta, 999 in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Other provinces also do not have minimum quota holdings as an entrance point such as BC and Alberta.

Currently, the small flock exemption makes it a real challenge for small scale diversified farmers to make any sort of living off of their chicken production. Which means folks that are doing it sustainably are restricted and, as consumers, we don't have a lot of good birds to choose from with an overwhelming supply of factory farmed chickens.

For more info you can check out the Small Flock Campaign from the Practical Farmers of Ontario, The Chicken Farmers of Ontario who manage the quota system and also this Metcalf report prepared by FarmStart that talks about the challenges and possible alternative solutions to the restrictive supply management system.

Four Row Pinpoint Seeder

Seeding radishes.

Using the seeder is the job that makes me feel most like a farmer! It is maybe my favourite job on the farm. I’m definitely still learning how to best use this tool, but here is what I have learned.

We use a four row pinpoint seeder from Johnny’s. You can check it out here. The seeder works really well for us – we are planting in soil that is really loose and flat, no big clumps, rocks or bumpy ground. I imagine it would be much more of a challenge to use when seeding into real ground. The seeder is great for planting lots of seeds rather densely, which is how we grow most of our crops.

Axel with four seed hole options.

The seeder has a few parts – the axle has four seed hole sizes that work for small-medium sized seeds. You can adjust the axel to line up the right seed hole size with the centre of the hoppers. There are four hoppers allowing you to plant four rows that are 2 ¼ “ apart. You could also skip hoppers, or just fill seeds in the outside two hoppers to have wider rose.

Each hopper has a brush that adjusts how often the seeds fall out of the hopper. Adjusting the height of the brush is how you can adjust the spacing of your seeds. If the brush is really close to the axel, the seed will fall out less often, if the brush is high and away from the axel, the seed will fall out more often and your seeds will be closer together. If you want your seeds to be close, you could also use the large seed hole with small seeds – more seeds will come out with each turn.

It’s really difficult to actually see how high your brushes are or if your four hoppers are all set to the same height. It’s also a real challenge to remember what you set your brushes too in a previous seeding to get the same results. You kind of have to guess to start and then watch the seeds fall out and adjust your spacing accordingly. If you want, you can roll your seeder on a piece of white paper to be able to see clearly what their spacing will be. I usually just go really slow to start and watch the spacing of the seeds in the front and then adjust the brushes. As you continue to seed, you can watch the seeds fall out of the hopper and onto the axel through the back. Try to watch that the seeds are falling regularly and shift your attention from each hopper to make sure they are all working.

Adjustable brushes.

Line up the seed hole with the hopper.

The seeder works by the wheels turning the axel that drops the seeds. You want to make sure that as you walk backwards with the seeder, you aren’t just dragging the wheels in the soil but that they are in fact turning – otherwise you won’t actually drop any seed.

Seeded rows!

You want your ground to be flat, clear of any roots or leaves and also dry. Any moisture will cause the soil to clog at the bottom of the hopper and all of the seeds that have been dropping will just stay in that soil clump instead of falling into place in the row. Roots or other plant matter can also sometimes clog the bottom of the hopper so just check often. If I find that it has been clogged, I just go over the last foot or so again to ensure it is seeded.

After I finish one pass with the seeder, I walk back to the beginning to start again. Be sure to place the wheel in the seeded furrow of the last pass, rather than putting it back in the wheel rut. That way you make sure you don’t leave any rows without seed.

After the whole row is seeded, go back over with your hands or the back of a rake to gently cover the seeds with soil. Generally, you want a seed depth to be 3x the diameter of the seed, so small seeds like lettuce and radish really only need a shallow covering of soil. Once the seeds are all covered up we usually give them a watering with the sprinkler.

Any unused seed left in the seeder and go back in your seed package. This is perhaps the biggest downfall of this seeder – it’s so hard to get any unused seed out and safely pack in the package without spilling at least half of the seed on the ground. We’ve recently talked about getting some sort of funnel, but there has to be a better way! Update: I just read that Elliott Coleman uses this seeder and he tips all the seed over into a baking pan and then tips that into the seed package. Smart.

Finished bed, seeds being covered before watering.

Blanching Endive

Frisee endive 

The endive we grow at the farm is the frisee variety - a leafy green that gets harvested and added to our lettuce mix. It bulks up the mix and adds an interesting bitter taste. Endive can get quite bitter though. A cool weather plant, it does well in the spring and the fall but gets a lot of stress in the hot summer.

One way to avoid the bitterness in the leaves is to blanch the centre of the plant. Gather the outside leaves and wrap them around the centre heart of the plant. Secure them with a rubber band or a soft string. This will protect the centre from getting direct sunlight, keeping the inner leaves from being bitter and also turning them an attractive white colour. This blanching is also done with cauliflower - tying up the outer leaves to keep the head inside a white colour. 

Ready for blanching!

This article over at Vegetable Gardener has some really great information

Tomatoes!

This season we built four high tunnels on an urban brownfield – a former gas station on Vernon Drive. The first two houses are growing some luscious tomatoes.

Sweet Sungolds!

So many delicious varieties - Indigo Rose, Moskovich, Big Beef, Black Cherry, New Girl, Striped German, Green Zebra, Yellow Pear, Pink Beauty, Tomatoberry, Yellow Mini, Favorita and Sungolds. Oh goodness, the Sungolds. These are the Farmer’s Market secret weapon – rarely does someone taste a sweet Sungold and make it far from the tent before purchasing a half pint. They are like candy, straight from the sun.

We were super late with the construction of the green houses – like two months late – which meant by the time we were able to get our tomato plants in the ground they were pretty hurting. The plants were leggy, wilted and purple in colour as they were so deprived of space and nutrients. We weren’t sure if any of them would make it but discovered that tomatoes are truly resilient plants.

We planted them fairly deep in the soil, partly to give them stability in their weakened-stem state, and to help with strong root growth. We loosened the roots of each plant to ensure that they weren’t root bound or tightly coiled. Root bound plants rarely make it.

Each of our planter boxes had two staggered rows of plants, 12 inches apart. Because the plants were so weak, we also picked off any flowers that the plants had at this point to ensure the plant focused its energy on producing strong roots and stems. Once the plant was better established, it could begin to flower. We also foliar fed our plants with a kelp fertilizer to help them make it through the transition.

Determinate vs. Indeterminate:

Tomato plants are classified as either determinate or indeterminate. Determinate plants will bloom and set fruit once in a season. They are often more compact which makes them great for container gardening. They do not continue to grow throughout the whole season – they fruit quick and then begin to diminish. This also makes them great if you want a large volume of tomatoes at one time for making sauce or canning. Determinate tomato plants do not get pruned, as they get need to be able to support lots of heavy fruit at one time.

Indeterminate plants continually bloom and set fruit throughout the whole season. They are vining plants, continuing to grow until they meet frost. These plants are the ones that get regularly pruned of suckers and require some vine support such as staking, or in our case, trellising. The tomatoes we grow at the farm are indeterminate varieties. We are able to trellis them neatly in our greenhouses and are able to have a steady, continual supply of tomatoes through the season for our markets.

Trellising drawing from my notebook.

What I’ve Learned About Trellising:

We ran wire along the length of our greenhouses. We then cut baling twine so that it was twice the length of the height between the plant and the top wire. Tie a loose slipknot around the base of the tomato plant with one end of the twine. Toss the other end of the twine up over the top wire and pull it down to tie another slipknot with that end around the twine. You can then tighten the length of twine using that top slipknot. Begin to gently wind the main stem around the twine as you tighten. Be sure to loosen the bottom knot as the plant grows and the stem gets larger. You can tighten or loosen the top slipknot to adjust the tension of the twine if needed. Check out my charming drawing if the explanation isn't too clear.

What I’ve Learned About Pruning:

When the plant is fairly well established you can begin to prune. First, start at the base of the plant and follow the main stem all the way to the tip – this will help you identify your leader, leaf branches and suckers. That main stem running from the base of the plant to the very tip is your leader.

I find it’s easier to start pruning from the bottom. Hold on to the main stem and look at the first leaf branch – check out the elbow between those two, if there is a new branch in the elbow where they meet, you’ve got a sucker! When they are small, just pinch them off with your fingers close to the elbow. When the suckers get big you will want to prune them with a small knife to ensure you don’t damage the stem or leave an open wound close to the main stem – leaving it more vulnerable to disease. Suckers will draw energy from the plant, so removing them removes the energy demand and helps the plant focus energy on fruit production. Also, removing suckers allows for better airflow around the plant which helps with disease prevention. You can also remove any new growth below the leaf branch, or even a few bottom leaf branches to ensure that the leaves are not touching the soil – again this helps with airflow and deters the spread of disease.

Pruned and soon-to-be trellised.

When you get to the top, it may be difficult to discern which is the leader and which may be a sucker – its ok to wait a few days to see how these develop. If you have two branches though, know that the flowers always form on the leader first, and then on the sucker. So if you are holding onto a branch that you think may be a sucker – look at the branch above it, if that one has flowers, you most likely are holding onto the sucker.

Always be careful of the growth tip of the tomato plant – you never want to prune that or damage it, as that is where new growth happens. If you top the plant and remove that growth tip, your plants won’t continue to grow.

Pruning also leaves your hands smelling delicious and turns them a darker colour that is hard to wash off. 

Hot and Dry:

Mixed cherry tomatoes.

The high tunnels are unheated poly tunnels with roll up sides. They get mondo hot during the day, and tomatoes love hot and dry climates. We aren’t dry farming, a technique where irrigation is cut off after plants begin to fruit, but we are keeping the watering to a minimum (partly due to not having a water source from the city for a few months and having to haul water from the fish plant across the street). Dry farming causes the plant stress out, send roots deep to look for water and focus on fruit production to ensure its survival in the form of seeds. The result is tasty fruit. Some critics say this also can lead to blossom end rot and cracked tomatoes if you aren’t able to successfully control the watering (ie. rain) and there are drastic fluctuations in water availability. The relatively warm dry microclimate of the high tunnel does mean our tomatoes taste fantastic! 

Sole Food Farm

The farm I am apprenticing at here in Vancouver is called Sole Food. Originally a project of the organization United We Can, Sole Food started as a way to provide employment for residents of the downtown eastside - folks that are often working through addictions and mental health challenges. Seann Dory was the Manager of Sustainability at United We Can and he recruited Michael Ableman to help him start this project. The first farm was built on a half acre parking lot beside the Astoria hotel, an SRO (single room occupancy) hotel on East Hastings.

Farm site at the Astoria Hotel

The downtown eastside neighborhood is an interesting place. There are disproportionately high levels of homelessness, material poverty, drug use, Hep C, HIV and diabetes. It is an incredibly food insecure place. Housing is mainly SRO units, transitional housing and BC social housing. Most folks do not have access to a kitchen and there is one grocery store in the entire DTES. If interested, this report from the DTES Kitchen Tables Project has lots of good info on the food security of the DTES.

The neighborhood is also a warm place full of people that care about their community and care about their neighbours. They say hi on the streets and check in with each other. It's been a fulfilling place to farm. I'll share more thoughts about the complexities of this place in another post. 

With only a half acre parking lot to work with, the farm was able to accomplish a lot. They grew year round, crops of delicious veggies - kale, rainbow chard, beans, peas, melons, tomatoes, beets, herbs, strawberries, lettuce, arugula, spinach. They sold at Farmer's Markets and to some restuarants, genereting over $60,000 in sales in year 3. An impressive feat for a small scale urban operation.

The farm has always relied on community grants to operate and to be able to employ folks from the neighborhood. This winter, they dreamed up a plan to expand their acreage to be able to grow enough to become commercially viable. With lots of hard work and serious planning, the farm worked out a model that would see expansion into a network of small farm sites (totalling 4 acres,) that would allow the farm to be completely self financing within four years. This is big, folks. Lots of urban farming projects in North America still rely heavily on grant money or private funders. They are often symbolic demonstration sites or teaching gardens (and these are good!) But this here is a real honest-to-goodness farm with high production levels.

This season we have worked so hard - dragging 3,000 pallets across a 2 acre site to set up growing boxes, building 4 greenhouses in a month of pouring rain, setting up 1.5 acres of farm on contaminated brownfields, growing massive amounts of produce that had to be cooled in fridge space located on the second floor of an historic building with a broken elevator. But! It has been so wonderful and I have learned massive amounts. More stories to follow.

Pallets being laid out - soon to become growing boxes.

Sugar Rolls

I’ve been taking a Community Hive beekeeping course through the Environmental Youth Alliance here in Vancouver. They are able to offer the course free of charge (amazing!) to train youth how to keep bees in a sustainable way. The class size is small and the teacher, Brian Campbell of Blessed Bee Farms is an absolute fountain of knowledge about bees. He also has a sweet sense of humour!

Can you spot the queen?

We’ve been able to open up the hives each session and I have successfully (without a veil!) opened up a hive and examined the frames for brood and honey. It helps that Brian and the other students are there to look over each frame alongside me to try and identify healthy bee habits or any possible pests, diseases or other colony problems.

Today we did a hive inspection and checked for Varroa mites. Now I am no expert but I'll share what I know. The mites enter the brood cells before they are capped and feed off the bee’s food, and then the bee itself while it is pupating. They prefer drone cells as they stay capped for longer and therefore more mites can develop in the cell. 2-5 Varroa mites can emerge from one drone cell! They either hang onto an adult bee and feed off of their blood, or drift into another cell to reproduce again. Bees that were fed upon emerge smaller and have shorter life spans. They can also develop deformed wings while pupating with mites in their cell. An untreated Varroa infestation will lead to decreased bee population in the hive and eventually the death of the colony. So, Varroa mites = bad news.

The Varroa mites are large enough to be seen, especially if you are checking out a white larva. They are a reddish brown colour. In our hive inspection today I noticed one walking on the frame and someone else spotted a mite riding on one of the bees, so a Varroa mite count was in order.

Introducing the Sugar Roll.

Equipment needed: a 1 cup measuring cup, a soft bee brush, a small mason jar with a screened lid, a few tablespoons of powdered sugar and a large bowl.

Rolling bees.

Choose a frame that has lots of bees on it, some honey and some brood. Make sure that the queen is not on this frame and not part of the roll. With short, downward brush strokes you brush one cup of bees into the measuring cup. This is a hilarious thing to do. They will buzz around a whole bunch but I have yet to be stung during this process (although, I’ve only done it twice – third time’s a charm?) Tap the cup on the hive or ground to knock the bees gently down into the cup to be able to fill it up some more.

Pour your one cup of bees into the mason jar. Put on your screened lid and start to add some powdered sugar over the top. I had to break up the clumps and sort of push the sugar in through the mesh. The bees will be loud and sugar will blow out the top and you will laugh because it is so mesmerizing!

Roll the bees gently by turning the jar over and over in your hands. Do this for a few minutes.

Bees returned to the hive after the roll.

The sugar knocks the Varroa mites off of the bees. Some say it’s just the gentle abrasion that does it, some say it removes the charge that is helping to hold the mite on. Either way, it works.

Now, turn your jar upside down and “salt and pepper shake” (a technical term) the sugar out of the jar. The mites will all fall out of the jar along with the powdered sugar. Start counting mites. Remembering that there are approximately 300 bees in a cup, you need to see what ratio of mites to bees you have in your hive. Anything higher than 1% or 3 mites to 300 bees should be acted upon.

In today’s test we found 10 mites for only ½ cup of bees. Which is around 6%, which is high. So we treated our hive with a formic acid treatment. Here’s hoping we get the mite population down before the hives go into winter mode.

You can return your sugared bees to the hive where their bee friends will never believe what happened. 

Tell me what you know about Varroa mites! So fascinating.

It begins!

city farm food! A place for me to collect and share all the bits and pieces I am learning about being an urban farmer.

I am currently apprenticing at an urban farm in Vancouver, taking a community hive beekeeping course, reading lots of books about farming, learning to prepare and preserve the harvest, dreaming about chickens and bees of my own and getting back to my farm family roots. There is so much to learn! 

Tomatoes from our 2011 summer garden in Toronto.