There are those that will call organic farming an ethos; a committment; a belief. To some one that has a conventional farm I see it as a move that needs to be taken in determined but considered steps. Farming is a business and has to make profit to survive. I saw last year the impact of disease in my seabuckthorn and my committment to going organic has to be in the understanding that I can produce a viable and quality crop. The desire to go organic is driven by a recognition that our soil is precious and that a healthy soil is one of the principle keys to sustainable farming in the future.
Seabuckthorn is a fruit crop. Potentially it is also a leaf crop and both of these will be used in food products. As seabuckthorn is a new product to the UK fresh market I believe that offering it in an organic form offers the consumer the reassurance that as a natural product it is naturally produced. It is a simple and unambiguous message. Seabuckthorn – the natural European superfruit.
So my first step into the process has not been to register as organic but to have the soil tested with a biological analysis. My soil, as I have often said is heavy clay. Being close to the sea the water table in winter is often quite high which makes working difficult and not very suitable for seabuckthorn. Temperature and water logging will alter the results of these analyses so i am proposing to have three tests done this year and build up an idea of how health my soil is and how to improve it.
The first tests have come back with bacterial activity above average with a good bacterial diversity. Conversely fungal activity is low, but the samples were taken in February so maybe this may be a seasonal issue. There is a good fungal biomass. Amoebae and ciliates came out high, but low in total flagellates. Nematodes also recorded as low. Now I have to admit to being new to this form of analysis. What I do like however is that it provides a definition of my soil health and how the actions that I take are improving it.
The process will require continued doses of compost that will gradually wash into the soil and feed the bacteria and fungi improving the nutrient release into the soil that the seabuckthorn plants can take up. Added to this the use of compost tea and foliar feeds of seaweed. Compost tea is low in NPK, along with the seaweed there is a provision for a broader range of trace elements that are absent from conventional fertilisers.
Seabuckthorn is a nitrogen fixer. That is fine for a wild plant but when I am expecting my plants to produce 10-15kg of berries they must have sufficent nutrients for the plant to grow, be healthy and produce the yield. Going organic is not just going organic. In my view it is more important to focus on creating a form of agronomy that is sustainable. By sustianable I mean having little reliance upon importing inputs to grow and manage the crop. So far my plants are growing on three doses of 200gm of chicken pellets with an analysis of 4.5;3.5;2.5. They then have seaweed for trace elements and a thick compost mulch. It has had its flaws in that this winter-having been so wet has seen some plants emerge looking a little lean. In particular Elizaveta, which is the fastest growing variety here has a lack of colour in the leaf.
The compost tea maker has now arrived. All the Siberian plants are in partial leaf and have had a dose of seaweed. This seems to be a characteristic of Siuberian varieties here. They start to show leaf in january, then gradually come into leaf over the next ten weeks. Whereas my German/Finnish /Latvian varieties do not break bud until mid-March and I expect by next week will be well covered with new leaf. So these European varieties will have a dose of seaweed next week, while I get the compost tea maker working.
As a trial farm I will keep an area for varied fertiliser applications. This programme i will have to work out in the next couple of weeks.
I am well aware that I have not blogged for a while. The last month has been intense with planting. Priority then was to mow the whole site both between the rows and between the plants. This will become less of an operation once i have composted all the plants. Having been such a wet winter the composting has fallen behind as a job because lorries delivering the compost could not tip near enough to the field to be practical. I am hoping that in another two weeks the ground will be hard enough for this to change.
On a final note, I have been watching the Linkedin Sustainable farming network. One of the questions in the last couple of weeks was “how do you attract the next generation into farming?”.
It is an interesting question because the world needs food and the average age of farmers seems to be going up and up. Food has to be affordable for consumers, but income has to be attractive to make farming sustainable. Hours are long, but then so they can be in industry/finance/professional jobs. The environment one works in I feel is an important factor. But actually it has to come back to reward for the work you put it. Reward that keeps your family and the bank manager content. That is why I feel seabuckthorn has attractions. Grown as a commodity it is little different to any other crop. Developed with on-farm/co-operative processing to provide a short supply chain to the end consumer then there is an opportunity for the work input to be rewarded with the income that balances the risks and the long term investment needed.
