Hey nerds, Farmer Jesse here.Welcome to Growers Daily, your daily dose of ecological farming insight.It is Wednesday, October 30th, 2024, also known popularly as Halloween Eve, probably.
And so on the show today, we are going to discuss competition in farming.I'm going to over answer a question about where my farm is and offer some more lessons in jungle pruning.So let's do it. All right, happy Wednesday, everyone.
As they say, I'm feeling pretty good.
My Brighton & Hove Albion Seagulls play Liverpool twice this week, once today and once on Saturday, so I'm excited about that, even though Liverpool is obnoxiously good this season and it could be a mood-crushing few days.
My wife and eldest child are Liverpool supporters, while me and my youngest are Brighton supporters, so it could be an interesting week in the farmhouse.I'll bet I've got at least a few other divided households out there in the audience.
How do you all get through it? Anyway, you all definitely tune in to hear me talk about the different soccer teams I follow in various leagues, but I will have to disappoint you on this Wednesday and talk a little farming stuff.
Today, I thought I would update you for a minute on my jungle pruning lessons.
A few weeks back, I talked about how in the middle of the summer, I just flat out ran out of time and capacity for our tunnel cherry tomatoes and decided to just let them kind of do their thing, which I affectionately dubbed jungle pruning.
Well, earlier this week, because I'd like to start getting those beds ready for winter slash spring, I went ahead and took those beasts down.And let me tell you, jungles are going to jungle.
With the clipper pruning system we use, it is not very easy to break those clips off the plants once they have really swelled there for a few months.
And in case that sentence sounded like complete nonsense, the Clipper Q-L-I-P-R system is basically a metal rod with a special clip that you can use to hang or trellis your tomatoes.I will link a video I did on that system and all tomato trellising.
If you're interested, I like that system.But man, if you let that stuff get out of hand, those clips definitely lose their advantage.
Not that any trellis system would be easy to deal with in a jungle of tomato vines, but those clips make it especially challenging.Also, just to reiterate, I'm not suggesting anyone let their tomatoes go like this.Like I did, it's a mess.
And if you're watching on YouTube, you can get an idea of how brutal these things were to deal with. Next year, I do not plan to grow tomatoes at all in this tunnel, so I decided to try something a little different, something I wouldn't normally do.
I just mowed the tomato vines in place, which again, if you're watching on the No-Till Growers YouTube channel, you can see went totally smoothly, and I totally did not mow up one of the lost clipper hooks or anything.
Now, I would normally haul the tomato vines off to the compost, but honestly, I don't love that either because what happens is that those vines don't break down very quickly or quickly enough or thoroughly enough for me to use that compost around tomatoes again and trust that any potential disease was managed.
And also just having tomato vines around can promote the spread of any tomato diseases that were there, especially late and early plight.Those vines also make it really difficult to hand turn or move all of those piles.
They just tie everything together.But I have also avoided leaving the vines in place for the same reason.
Next season, however, I have another tunnel space where I can grow tomatoes so I can rest this tunnel entirely from any sort of nightshades, which is nice.I hadn't had that opportunity for many years.
So I chopped up those remaining vines and then covered them with compost and replaced the irrigation to start getting them wet and broken down.
The other factor that I did not really account for with the jungle pruning is that I'm going to have a thick mat of tomato plants in the spring from all the missed cherry tomatoes.
So I am hopeful the compost will help germinate some or most of that before the spring.Because of the disease issue, some folks will burn their tomato vines, which I think is fine too.Maybe some biochar potential in there, I don't know.
But because tomatoes are so labor intensive through the season, I am always trying to find ways to reduce the workload and clean up because that also costs against their profitability. And they're fun.
It's hard to want to grow something that's that difficult to clean up.Jungle pruning, which to be clear, again, is not a thing, is not a recommendation, but more of a description?
Anyway, letting them run wild was not great for yielder cleanup, but worked in a pinch, I guess.We will see if the chop and drop and cover with compost method will help me to remedy that mistake and make it a little bit easier.
I'd love to hear what you all do in terms of tomato cleanup and what you found to be helpful.Uh, Clearing tomatoes out of the tunnel is just one of those jobs that you have to do, but I dread it every season.
But usually the tomato vines are still pretty orderly when I have to do this.This year, given that I was just stretched way too thin in the middle of the summer and had to let them go, that managed to make that job profoundly more difficult.
Otherwise, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, Kentucky gets its 15 minutes in the sun.Probably it'll be more like nine, maybe seven, I don't know, BRB. Today's episode is brought to you by Rimmel Greenhouses.
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If you, the listener, are enjoying this podcast and want to support it, you can do so at patreon.com slash no-till growers.I will try to get to questions from everywhere that questions come from, but I will always get to those Patreon questions.
Today's question comes from Patreon member Ellen Best, who simply asked, Where's your farm?That's it, that's the whole question.
And I'm not sure if it was going to be part of a follow-up question, but I actually love that they asked that specific question because I thought it could be a perfect opportunity for me to brag on my home state of Kentucky and discuss what my growing climate is like here a bit so you all have some context when I'm rambling about jungle pruning.
And because we have a lot of listeners from dry regions and other countries and all over the place who may not really know what Kentucky is all about. So allow me.
If it is known at all as a state, I find that Kentucky is known for two things internationally.Kentucky fried chicken and the Kentucky Derby, with KFC being arguably the more popular of the two.
But what you probably didn't know about my beloved home state is that we are also home to the largest cave in the world, appropriately named Mammoth Cave, which is one of my favorite places to visit.
Every time I go, I leave there dreaming of one day actually having a cave on my property. In fact, there are all these cave houses in Spain that I sometimes daydream about buying because they cost less than a used car in some cases.But I digress.
Caves are just amazing.They stay basically the same temperature year round. I could live in a cave, I would happily store my vegetables in a cave.Caves for the win.And then also for the summer.
In Kentucky we also have the Red River Gorge, which hikers and climbers will likely confirm is really awesome.
Another interesting thing about Kentucky is much like Tennessee, I suppose, we're very long states, so topographically we start in the east in the Appalachian Mountains and end in the west in what looks like and bumps up right against the sort of flat Illinois with a little bit of a roll to it.
We even can claim a sliver of the Mississippi River our farm is in the middle of the state so which is also somewhat in the middle of those two top topographies it's kind of bumpy so it's not exactly mountainous it's not exactly flat it's more like.
In fact, I describe our farm like a mogul's course, that skiing event where they run into a bunch of bumps and then do tricks off jumps.It's kind of how I farm also, like bumps, backflips, points for air, speed, difficulty, all that.
Like many states, we have a wide range of soils.Our last farm was a nice silty loam with loads of rocks, which was kind of annoying, but the soil was nice, where our new farm is a less nice clay-y clay. just clay on clay.
Interestingly, those two farms are only 15 minutes apart and couldn't be much different.And that's kind of how much of the state is.
You drive just a few minutes and you're gonna get into an entirely different microclimate because of all the moundy, hilly things going on, but also because of the soil differences.
Now, in terms of weather, we are considered semi-subtropical, which is a hilarious phrase that I'm not convinced anyone would actually use.So I guess basically that means we're almost subtropical or maybe even less tropical than not tropical places.
Seems like a good description meaning we get a decent amount of rain but also a decent amount of cold in terms of heat we average in the mid to high 80s in the summer which would be like what like 2931 degrees Celsius somewhere there during the summer and then during the winter.
We usually have a day or two where we get down to the single digits, which would be closer to negative 15 or negative 17-ish Celsius, but average in the mid to low 40s in Fahrenheit or around seven degrees Celsius.
I'm sure that's very fun to listen to all those numbers, but my hardiness zone is 6B slash 7A.Especially now that those zones have been updated, we are really close to that 7A line.
We are also very humid so our summers are pretty brutal and it is exceedingly hard to grow certain fruits here for the disease and the dramatic shift in temperatures from summer to winter.
According to Google's AI we are similar climates to central Japan, Ireland, Scotland, Bosnia and Romania. I did not fact check any of that, so that could be completely wrong.We could be closer to, I don't know, Mars or something.I have no idea.
But being of largely Irish and Scottish descent, maybe that's partly why I like it here so much.
In terms of rainfall, we get anywhere from 30 to 70 inches of rain, with the average being obviously closer to 45 inches or so, which I think for you metric folks would be like 114 or so centimeters of rain.
Is that how you would even measure rain in metric?I have no idea.I feel like I'm never 100% sure on how you all do that, and I feel like I'm just using some random measurements. Maybe it's more fun that way.
Most importantly, as it pertains to farming in my region, here is a short list of notable people from Kentucky.Muhammad Ali, Hunter S. Thompson, Jennifer Lawrence, Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson, George Clooney, Bill Monroe, Wendell Berry,
Reed Shepard, Carrie Nation, who went around during the pre-prohibition temperance movement smashing up bars with a hatchet, which, little known fact, was the first iteration of Yelp.
Also Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln were born in Kentucky, but of course, most importantly, part owner of Loose City FC and the professional women's soccer team of No-Till Market Gardeners racing Louisville, Mr. Jack Harlow. He's a Kentuckian as well.
Beyond soccer, we don't have a single professional sports team in the state of Kentucky and at least in the big four sports.
So we obsess over college sports, go cats, and then pick whatever professional sports teams we want to follow, which is a gift really, unlike folks born in, I don't know, Northern Ohio and are often forced to suffer the incredible hope crushing talents of the Cleveland Browns.
year after year.There's honestly a lot more I could brag on in terms of my state from the fact that we live on a massive limestone deposit that creates extraordinary farmland where we basically just raise thoroughbred horses.
So that's a cool way we waste good farmland.Also, it should be said that the indigenous history of Kentucky is incredibly rich and diverse, and that definitely deserves its own segment or segments at some point.
But for now, for the moment, thank you for the question, Ellen.That was fun, at least for me.Up next, competition the right way? Be right back.Hey, you all, Farmer Jesse here.
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Thanks y'all.Enjoy the show.Okay, so starting this segment, I'm still not sure how I feel about the idea I'm about to talk about, but that's kind of how segment three goes.But I thought we could sort of collaborate on this one.
What I mean is that for my Coach Jesse segment that I do on Wednesdays, or I try to do on Wednesdays, I want to investigate the role of competitiveness in farming and how it manifests itself in ways that aren't
what we think of when we think of competition always, we don't tend to think of farming as very competitive necessarily, even in marketing sense.And I'll get to that.
But when I look out over my career, there are several places I can see competition playing an important role in my actions, both as a farmer and as an apprentice for good and for ill sometimes, but ultimately I think for good.
Take my early years, for instance.When I was an apprentice, I wanted to be the fastest cultivator.I wanted to be the fastest soil blocker.
I would not have even noticed or recognized it at the time, but when I look back on that experience, everything we did, I wanted to be the best at it. Part of that was that I was there to learn.
I think a lot of people who woof or intern or whatever on farms, they do it for the experience.I was there to learn how to be a farmer.So I took everything very seriously.
But the other part of that is just that I wanted to be the best for no other reason than that's my personality. And in fact, that drive humbled me a few times when I was out cultivating, uh, this farm use tillage.
So a lot of our time was spent cultivating weeds.Uh, for instance, when we were cultivating, I was always the first one done with my rows.
But one day my mentor went through my rows and brushed around in the soil and found a bunch of weeds I had missed. So I had to go back and do that row again.I wanted to be done fast, but in doing so, I was not getting the job done properly.
It's one of those moments that you realize you cannot actually compete if you don't do the job correctly.Part of competition is not getting done first, it's getting it done right and first.You can only fake it so long before the weeds poke through.
Of course, that tension between competitiveness and accuracy continued throughout my time, where I would be eager to be the first one done or get the most done only to realize that I'd done whatever it was incorrectly.
I remember one time Eric, again the farmer, gave everyone a specific row to plant, and I had the cucumbers because they were the most difficult given their sensitive roots, and he trusted me to handle it.
But I still went ahead and planted them as fast as I could.When he came back, he showed me how I had planted the row two feet off of where he had asked me to plant them, which would make it impossible to cultivate with the tractor.
And so we all, as a team, had to carefully go through and dig them all up and then replant them. Not my finest farming moment.In that way, competitiveness with the other workers was harming my work.
Another place competition and farming collide is the farmer's market, even when we don't view it as a competition.
Or perhaps more accurately, using the word competition in regards to the farmer's market tends to evoke an image of one like sly farmer scrambling to undercut another or talk bad about their work or farm or practices or whatever.
you know, playing dirty, as we'd call it in sports.Of course, that has and does happen sometimes, but that's not always how competitiveness presents itself.There are positive versions of this.At the market, it's the booth design.It's the display.
It's the quality of the produce. that you bring every week.
Competition gets the bad rep for being what makes grown adults yell at each other over a youth soccer game, which, fair, is a thing, but actions like undercutting and sabotaging are all basic, non-sustainable, non-helpful competition.
That's the finish the row faster form of competition.That's the kind of competition that wins by losing.The best competitors play within the rules and actually finish on top, unlike price cutting, which
You may sell more tomatoes, of course, but you will make less money.Real competitors compete respectfully.They compete on quantity, sure, but they do so by focusing on quality.They cultivate the row well and fast.They grow better produce.
They stack the produce like art at the market, and they outsell people not by selling it for less money, but by doing it better. and by having a better product.In soccer coaching, it's kind of the same thing.
The best coaches are not having their teams play dirty just to win.They're putting more energy into training their teams to play a complete game, creating a team culture and increasing their kids' skill and effort.
Oftentimes, you wouldn't know it watching the game, but the best coaches are often friends with the other coaches and focus on their team and what their team is doing, as opposed to yelling at the refs or yelling at the other coach or having their team do things that aren't necessarily within the laws of the game.
Anyway, I think even people who don't view themselves as competitive can find ways in which their lives or farms or activities are, in some way, some small way at least, driven by competition in good ways, positive ways, ways that benefit themselves and their customers, but also the people who they are competing against.
Makes them better. So I guess I'm saying that maybe we should embrace a little competition and dial it in, and that way everyone wins, which is a super corny way to finish it, but no going back now.Anyway, I'm gonna wrap it up there.
Let me know how you have found competition affect your life for good or for bad.Make sure you are liked and subscribed and following wherever you are hearing or watching this.
Huge shout out to Willie Breeding for the theme music and to the gang over there at No-Till Growers for all of their support. I have been absolutely blown away by all of the support from you all for this show.
It had nearly like 100,000 downloads or something this first month of shows, which for a brand new show is a lot.
If you'd like to join the party or ask questions or just show us some love for all the work this show takes, join up over at patreon.com slash no-till growers where at a certain level, or if you just bump up from one level to another,
Or if you just sign up in the month of October, which is a whole nother day left, we'll shout you out on the show.So big shout outs today to Robert C.H.Harvey, Diane Witten, and Wish I Started 20 Years Ago.
Yeah, that's exactly how you do a Patreon name.Wish I'd started 20 years ago.That's probably my Patreon name, and also would be a good name for a pet, like a lizard.Thank you to everyone who supports us in whatever way that you can.
Appreciate every single one of you.Love that you're sharing it.Love that I'm seeing it on the internets, which is cool.Otherwise, we'll see you tomorrow.Thanks for watching.
