THE HONEY HARVEST

At the Howell Farm honey harvest today, I learned how beekeepers make it happen.

First, the beekeepers open their hives and remove the honeycomb-filled frames. They use smoke to keep the bees docile. This works because when bees sense smoke, they think their house is burning down. They react to this by gorging themselves with as much honey as possible, fearing they might not be seeing another good meal for a while. And the result of this is that they feel so fat they won’t even bother to sting you.

Once the beekeepers have the frames, their task is to get the honey out of the honeycombs. This process involves a centrifuge.

First, take your frame and gently scrape the surface of the honeycomb with a scraper, which grants access to the honey on the inside. Then, take your frame and insert it into a holder inside your centrifuge. Start cranking the centrifuge handle. This sends the frame spinning and your honey splatting toward the outside of the centrifuge container. The honey will slowly drip down the sides until it reaches the bottom, where it is collected in a honey bucket.

Basically, the process is exactly the same as harvesting weapons-grade uranium from uranium gas, except easier.

THE BEAN BEAR

Farmer Rob believes he has discovered a bear’s claw marks in the Market Garden. The alleged track was found among the beans.

I’ve never heard of a bear liking beans, but other evidence also points to a bear:

-Rob also found what he believes to be bear droppings under a nearby cherry tree.

-In the past, black bears have been spotted in the farm vicinity.

I, ever one to question the official story, suggested an alternative: Perhaps a smaller animal with one claw scratched five parallel marks into the dirt.

Now, however, after analyzing the photographic evidence and running it through my crime-solving computer, I believe that Rob is correct. It’s hard to argue with this:

BIO-GAS AND FARM ENGINES

The fodder-chopper churned outside the barn yesterday. Cornstalk grinding has a special place in my heart because it was one of the first jobs I did at Howell Farm when I visited back in January. You can read about that experience here:

http://farmbedded.blogspot.com/2008/01/sheep-and-cornhusks.html

In the pictures below, you can see that a belt connects the chopper to a stationary hit-and-miss engine, which provides the power. The engine runs off gasoline.

Farmer Rob (who is also a trained physicist) says that on the sustainable farm of the future, he thinks stationary engines will still have a place – for jobs like threshing and corn shelling. The difference, from a sustainability standpoint, is that these engines will run off bio-gas processed on the farm from the release of methane from manure.

My first thought on this was, if you’re going to run a stationary engine off bio-gas, why not just run a tractor with a PTO off bio-gas? Rob says that the problem with gas is that it’s diffuse – hard to store in a reasonably sized tank on a vehicle that needs to be mobile such as a tractor.

All true, but I’m still pulling for do-it-all, bio-gas powered tractors. By the time bio-gas engines are ready for primetime, maybe the technology of methane gas compression and storage will also have hit its golden age.

According to Wikipedia:

“If concentrated and compressed, [biogas] can also be used in vehicle transportation. Compressed biogas is becoming widely used in Sweden, Switzerland and Germany. A biogas-powered train has been in service in Sweden since 2005.”

TOM'S FARM

Ramchandra, Peter, myself, and my friend Erin traveled to Kimberton CSA yesterday to visit Former-Intern Tom, who has ascended in the world to the position of Kimberton Farm Manager.

I last blogged about Tom and Kimberton here:

http://farmbedded.blogspot.com/2008/05/departure-of-intern-tom.html

Kimberton is located near Phoenixville, Pa., about an hour and a half from Howell Farm. We listened the whole way to Ram’s CD of Nepali pop music, which is distinctive in that many songs run longer than 20 minutes. (Think Green Day’s “Jesus of Suburbia” times two, or, for older generation readers, significantly longer than "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.")

Tom’s farm is about ten acres, seven of which are under cultivation for vegetable and fruit production. This year the CSA has about 200 members, with an average share price of $750. (At a yearly pledge meeting, some returning CSA members pledge more than $750 in order to subsidize lower share prices for other members.)

I was curious to see what a weekly share at Kimberton gets you, and by my estimation it’s quite a haul. Here is the fresh produce members will receive in their box this week, in addition to U-pick blackberries, beans, and cucumbers:

- 4 tomatoes
- 1 garlic
- 1 cabbage
- 1 eggplant
- 3 beets
- 1 lettuce
- A whole lot of edamame
- 1 cantaloupe
- 1 watermelon
- 2 bell peppers
- 3 zucchini
- 3 yellow summer squash
- 1 rosemary sprig
- 1 lb. of onions
- 2 cucumbers

I asked Tom what are some of his standouts this summer. He said it’s all good, before adding, “The garlic is freaking huge.” He also highlighted his “really good” seedless European cucumbers.

Tom is the guy who first got me really thinking about why someone would prefer to use horses on his farm instead of a labor-demolishing tractor, so I was interested to hear how its been for him using the tractors at Kimberton. Apparently, he broke the first tractor he touched by running it out of fuel and clogging the fuel injectors. I was about to tell him, “Well, your last mistake is your best teacher,” but instead I just let it go.

Tom said he hopes to eventually bring a team of horses to Kimberton, so I also asked him if he thought he’d have the time and ability to accomplish with 4 draft horses all the same work he’s been getting done with the tractor. He sounded optimistic, while realizing the tractor would still have some special duties. More precisely, he said:

“Mostly yeah, except without a front-end loader it would be difficult to do some compositing and stuff. Stuff like moving around dirt when you need to.”

Here are some photos from the visit:

4-H FAIR PHOTOS PART 1

The Mercer County 4-H Fair came to Howell Farm this past weekend. Here are some photos:

4-H FAIR PHOTOS PART 2

WORLD PREMEIR: HOWELL FARM SLIDESHOW

PEST WARS: BT AND WORMWOOD

Farmer Rob and the interns gathered in the Market Garden today to deploy some organic pest control.

In the first photo below, Intern Peter is spraying cabbage with a mixture of water and Bt, a bacteria that will make cabbage-eating caterpillars shrivel up and die. I blogged about Bt previously, here and here.

In the second photo, Intern Ramchandra is spreading a native plant called wormwood around the base of our tomatoes, in the hope that it will keep away insect larvae. After comparing some photos on the Internet, I believe the particular species of wormwood Ram found is Artemisia alba. (Interesting to note: Artemisia absinthium is the ingredient reputed to give absinthe its hallucinogenic kick.)

In picture three, you can see the farm employed some cheap labor to help weed the black beans. This lasted about 10 minutes.

HOWELL FARM PHOTOS: THE FORGE

HOW TO EAT

Some people don’t care about the global warming implications of what they eat, but more and more people do. For the latter group, several core ideas about sustainability have taken hold in the past several years:

- It’s better to eat locally.

- It’s better to eat organic.

- The widespread use of nitrogen fertilizer and genetically engineered crops is something we should move away from.

An email from a friend showed up in my inbox the other day linking to a recent study commissioned by the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. The study attempts to make a scientific accounting of how valuable these practices truly are. It was an interesting read, because many of the findings were surprising and counterintuitive.

Check it out:

http://www.conbio.org/CIP/article30813.cfm

As my own editorial comment, I’d add that I’m usually skeptical of number crunching scientific reports that discover everything we think we know is wrong. In May, for example, Wired magazine ran a number-crunching cover story titled “Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green,” that made statements like “Crank up the A/C! Kill the Spotted Owl! Keep the SUV!”

Here’s the story:

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_intro

And here’s the story being ripped to shreds:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/wired-magazines-incoherent-truths/

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong or misleading about this U.K. study, but I’m still taking it with a grain of salt. For example, one part of the study compares the energy requirements of shipping orange juice from Brazil to Europe to the energy requirements of buying apple juice from a local juice squeezer:

“Take the carbon footprint of your morning glass of orange juice. One 2003 study looked at the energy requirements of orange juice produced on a large scale in Brazil, and shipped as concentrate to Europe, versus apple juice processed on a small scale in Europe. A local juice-squeezer driving his car only 10 kilometers each way to sell 100 liters of fruit juice carries an energy burden equivalent to that needed to send fruit concentrate from factory operations in Brazil to Germany.”

So the argument here is that buying local juice doesn’t save any energy compared to buying juice shipped from far away continents. The local food movement is a fraud!

But not really. What I think is that the study compares a mature economy (the super-commercial, highly efficient orange juice shipping operation) to a developing economy (the highly inefficient operation of one guy driving to town to sell his apple juice.) The study, literally and figuratively speaking, compares apples to oranges.

Imagine instead if all Europe truly embraces local eating and a few years down the road most everybody is buying local apple juice instead of foreign orange juice. No longer would the apple juice guy need to drive to town with just a few liters to sell because a mature, highly efficient local distribution system would be in place that brings larger quantities of his goods and the goods of all his farming neighbor to market in the back of a big food truck, probably running off biodiesel.

Crunch those numbers, and I bet they’ll stack up favorably to the orange juice from Brazil. And the point is, if people don’t start buying locally now, this day will never come.

A Historical Pilgrimage

This past weekend, Howell Farm’s three interns and I made our pilgrimage to the Vatican of American living history, Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.

The instigator of our journey was Intern Matt. He heard through the grapevine that a historical farming apprenticeship is opening at Great Hopes Plantation (Colonial Williamsburg’s farm) and he wanted to put some boots on the ground in order investigate the career opportunity.

I volunteered to drive for some reason, and the other interns soon decided they wanted to go, so on Friday afternoon we set off in my 1993 Toyota Camry that has no air-conditioning and only three windows that will open.

The drive down was a windy yet hot affair, as the temperature on Friday topped out at 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Driving on Interstate 95 for six hours with the windows down also exposes one to a significant dose of fumes. After a couple hundred miles of travel, the conversation in the car finally reached its peak absurdity, culminating in a debate over “If zombies attacked Howell Farm, who would you want to be stuck with as you tried to survive?” I said Blaze, the ancient horse, because he already moves like a zombie and I’d be able to ride away on his back unnoticed.

Things I enjoyed in Williamsburg:

- Watching “The Story of a Patriot,” the 36-minute video screened regularly in the air-conditioned visitors center. According to our guide, it’s the longest running motion picture in motion picture history, shown daily since 1957. The film was produced way back then by Paramount Pictures, and it was well done in the way that old movies often are. After viewing the film, I can report that I was both much more eager to visit town and much more sympathetic to the British Loyalist viewpoint. I was reminded of Howard Zinn’s claim in “A People’s History of The United States” that the average standard of living in the American colonies before the Revolution was the best in the world.

- Visiting Great Hopes Plantation, where they farm like it’s still 1770. This is the place where Matt is considering applying for an apprenticeship, so we all got a behind-the-scenes tour from Ed, one of the farmers. At Great Hopes, the most important crop is tobacco, just as it would have been during the 1700s. Tiny green tobacco worms are a big threat, and each of hundreds of tobacco plants must be hand-inspected, since they didn’t use pesticides during that era. Each crop must also be cultivated and hilled with a simple hoe. This visit made farming with horses feel like a futuristic luxury.

Something Ed said that I thought was interesting was that Williamsburg in the 1700s was already a mature economy, meaning that its inhabitants imported many of the goods they needed rather than spend the time and effort to produce them at home. The value of self-sufficiency is a frequent topic of conversation at Howell Farm, and I was interested to learn that even Americans in the 18th-century found that it made more sense to buy on the world markets than weave their own clothes. Ed said that with enough money and time, a person in 1770s Williamsburg could get any product in the entire world shipped to them.

- Talking with the tradesmen. I’m not totally enthralled with old-time wagon wheel making and brick firing in quite the same way interns Matt and Peter are, but it was still impressive to hear the masters of these bygone trades talk with great knowledge and passion about their vocations.

- Eating at The King’s Arms Tavern. I recommend the Tavern Sampler, $12.95. If you get a beer at Chowning’s Tavern, go with the Liebotschaner Cream Ale.

- Visiting the Governor’s Palace, one-time home of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. It’s a huge building with lots of cool stuff inside, including hundreds of swords and rifles hanging on the entrance room walls.