There is a routine in the farming calendar and my seabuckthorn is no different.
The year from January to harvest will be a rotation of foliar/soil feed and weed control.
My aim is to create a viable agronomy for a small seabuckthorn orchard unit that can be worked as a high value additional enterprise on a family farm.
It is easy to go out and spend money on capital equipment – or to lease, but with a crop that takes several years to establish I see it as essential to keep outgoings to a minimum. With no income on a crop for five years, any spend needs to focus on plant establishment and make use of whatever existing facilities are available without having to buy in special equipment.
Having said that time is money and if your time has to be spread over other enterprises it is easy to allow the “new baby” enterprise to take preference. If the rest of the farm is the core business then it has to be an equal or more important priority in order to keep providing surplus investment funds to develop the new enterprise.
I am not good at that.
It is becoming clear that especially the regular three week foliar feed is an essential.
After that, maintaining some measure of control on weed growth is also necessary. You will notice I say some measure, because mulching should provide this.
This year has been the year of establishing confidence in the use of compost for mulching and compost tea for foliar feed. The combination of these two has provided me with healthy seabuckthorn plants.
Next year I need to mechanise the application processes to allow more timely applications and provide more time for other priorities ( such as marketing/harvesting/processing ).
A visit this week has set part of this development in motion. There probably are mulch applicators on the market. There definately are sprayers. Harvesting tools are a real need – and this year has shown that bird control is a factor.
But I return to my original aim – finding a viable agronomy process. So a visit last week by an engineer to start to develop technical solutions was a milestone.
The first issue was a mulch applicator. The brief for such a machine is simplicity. A tractor pto driven rear mounted hopper which is either self filling or fitted with quick release fittings on the rear arms of the tractor. The mechanism demonstrated last week was robust, powerful and directional in applying the material to rows.
This may take six months to perfect – but a solution to removing manual shoveling from heap to trailer to row.
The second tool was a first prototype for a hand tong to strip berries with speed and minimal damage to the plant. Leaves will still end up in the harvested berries, so the next stage of thought is a vibrating table to seperate the berries from the branch-lets that will contaminate the sample. Again, this will develop over the next 12 months.
The third issue was an means of scaring birds – the Norfolk rook expeller. I will not explain what it is until I have proven that it works, but it is very cheap. Requires managing regularly, but has been tried and tested for years.
Having said that capital spending should be kept to a minimum I need to find a more efficient solution to weeding. Cutting between the rows with my garden ride-on mower works fine. The compost mulch keeps down the weeds between plants but they still keep coming. 100% no-weed tidiness comes at a cost. Since using the compost tea, it seems that the youngest plants are thriving even with competing weeds surrounding their mulched area. So 100% is both costly and not totally necessary. But I need an efficient tool to allow for a rapid cut between weeds.
I am looking for solutions that are electric based that can be recharged with solar.
I am an enthusiast for Husqvarna equipment, having found it reliable, well made and designed.
So my next investment is in a battery system Husqvarna strimmer. It is light, affordable (£400 for the system including two sets of batteries) and is well recommeded.
So that’s the development topic update – now another comment about quality.
This last week there has been more news about the National Health Service plans to try to solve some of the rising issue of diabetes linked to obesity. The option targeting a proportion of the 850,000 people as risk from the disease linked to diet issues.
It occurred to me that one of the problems we have with a culture that demands cheap food is that it has devalued the whole concept of what food is and its importance to our overall health. Food and health are divorced from each other. You eat food because it is provides the energy you need to do what you want to do. On-the-go food outlets have taken over high Streets forcing out grocers, butchers, fishmongers and sellings of raw food ingredients. Food is something that is fitted into a lifestyle and taste is as, if not more important than nutritional quality. Cost is a prime consideration, and there is a concept which says that “you pay peanuts and you get monkeys”: The lower the cost, the lower the perceived value.
Until we start to value food properly the health of populations will decline and that is what the NHS is having to face now. If we produce good quality food and the cost of that food reflects its value, then consumers will start to take food seriously. Good health allows for a quality life style.
Food should be valued as a key ingredient and and appreciated as a means to lifestyle.
Its cost should reflect and reward the effort that goes to ensure that natural quality transmits right through from field to plate.
