Designing a Farm for Long-Term Crop Rotations (FSFS263)

FSFS263 � Chad Gard

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[00:00:49] For today's episode, we're talking with Farmer Chad Gard at Hole in the Woods Farm. Chad's gonna cover a lot on this one, ranging from his approach to farming to specific techniques he uses. One of the techniques that Chad talks about in this podcast is the alternative row system that he uses on his farm to better integrate the paperpot transplanter.

[00:01:11] Because paper chains aren't designed for American bed lengths, it's coming from an Asian system. So when you have a two inch chain that's 50 feet, that works. But when you have a four-inch chain, it's 93 feet long, and when you have a six-inch chain, it's 139 feet long. Those don't match up with a hundred-foot bed units like most people have.

[00:01:31] So one thing that Chad did on his farm was shorten down the length of his bed to make it easier to integrate paper chains into his crop planning, so you're not resulting in things like, I need 150 feet, but I only have 139 feet. So, shortening the bet a little more is one thing that he did to make that work.

[00:01:54] He's gonna talk a lot more about that in some of the advantages of it, along with all the other things that he's doing at Hole in the Woods Farms. So let's get into it. It's Chad Gard on farming.

[00:02:08] So Chad, just to give people some background on who you are, your farm, you know, what was it that drew you into farming?

[00:02:18] Chard Gard: Well probably not the normal route of most people. It was mostly because I was a foodie, and I was teaching at a boarding school, which about takes every minute you have and it gives you free food, but it wasn't very high quality. And then I read Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and but you know, I like personality and I like local businesses, local people.

[00:02:42] So I tried to hear to either grow or barter everything I ate, and it just sort of fell in love with that. And then from there, started doing a little bit at the farmer's market. And then my wife and I, she wasn't my wife yet. We did everything backwards in order, but we ended up buying the land that is now our farm and started the farm from there. So I kinda, a lot of farmers, at least in my experience, get into food because they like farming. I got into farming because I like food.

[00:03:11] Diego Footer: Love it. So your first experience growing was growing food for yourself, or did you work on any other farms?

[00:03:20] Chard Gard: No, I just growing food for myself. And then once we decided to make it a business, I visited a lot of, spoke with a lot of farmers, read all the books, that approach. So I didn't, didn't do beyond Workday here and there much terms.

[00:03:38] Diego Footer: And as we're talking here, you're Hole in the Woods Farm. So I picture a hole in the woods. Is that actually what you're farming in?

[00:03:47] Chard Gard: Pretty much. It's a very descriptive name is you're driving down the road, you just, you're in the woods. There's a river on the other side, and there's just this little hole with a bumpy driveway going through it, and that leads back to our farm. And you get about a quarter mile from the road, and it opens up and that's where the farm is. So it's just literally a hole in the woods, like a hole in the wall, but in the woods.

[00:04:12] Diego Footer: Right on. Today as we speak. It's October 2022, what's the land you're farming on now in terms of size?

[00:04:21] Chard Gard: So we have 35 acres total. The vegetable production is on about two and a half acres, and then we've got some lamb. And so the sheep rotationally graze on about seven acres of permanent pasture. And then sometimes then they're grazing, they get out and about some of the other areas.

[00:04:43] And we also have about a three-acre pond and about 12 acres of it is swampy woods. So that's, that's kind base. And then it was kind of a land restoration project as well. So it's very, very sandy here, so the hole that is our pond is actually the source for the beach of our town park. Um, so we had 0.02% organic matter and very coarse sand when we started.

[00:05:12] Diego Footer: You know, one thing I know just from talking to a lot of people on the livestock side, when you're dealing with a lot of acreage, rotational grazing can help build that organic matter over time. When you're dealing on the vegetable side of things though, a lot of people, they don't wanna take that time to wait for the same time scale as it would take on larger acreage to get organic matter up.

[00:05:37] How was it initially farming on that land in terms of veg and did you have to do some strategies to try and increase that organic matter out of the gate?

[00:05:47] Chard Gard: Yeah, so I mean, the shortest way to describe it is it sucked. Um, with that low organic matter, we had to really aggressively work on it and we're still not where we need to be.

[00:05:59] We're approaching 2% so it's not great, but obviously a lot of irrigation. Most of it's overhead because drip just goes straight down or doesn't spread much. But we do a fair bit of cover cropping, a lot of rye over the winter, buckwheat in the summer as well as some mixes and such. And then getting to the sheep was a little bit of a journey.

[00:06:25] We started with alpacas. There's no way to make money with alpacas, but you know, we've rotated from a plot point level animals through the veg, so wouldn't be in the same year, you know, food safety reasons and whatnot. But we would have, say, rye instead of just mowing the rye, we would graze the rye and then now we would tarp it back then we would till it a few times.

[00:06:54] So we also brought in manure. The boarding school I worked with, it has a large equestrian program. And in addition to teaching music, I did ceremonial bands and worked closely with the horsemanship program. So, I got several dump truck loads of composted manure brought in. You know, pretty much everything I could find to build up to where we're at now. And it's still an ongoing process.

[00:07:21] Diego Footer: What type of luck did you have with the horse manure in terms of latent or persistent herbicides in them? I've done a lot of videos on that in the past. The horse manure I acquired locally seemed to be okay. I wasn't seeing a lot of signs of persistent herbicide in it, but this is a big problem with Grayson and stuff being in the residue and that stuff takes forever to break down.

[00:07:45] So when you bring in large truckloads of horse manure, I think it's a great resource to have if it's clean. But if you're not careful, you could import a huge problem to your farm. What was it like for you?

[00:07:58] Chard Gard: Yeah, I guess I should've been a little more clear. The horse manure I brought in was over a hundred years old.

[00:08:04] Okay. So they, for over a hundred years, they basically just piled a manure out by what used to be their airport. They used to have a flight training program, so I was able to bring that. Unfortunately, they ended up selling that to a commercial composting company, so I no longer have that resource, and I would not use the manure currently because of persistent herbicide issue.

[00:08:33] Diego Footer: Got it, got it. One thing I think you have in your story evokes is this romanticism that people have of 35 acres, right? There's a pond, there's livestock, there's a vegetable farm. Like that's, that's the dream scenario for a lot of families and a lot of individuals looking to, you know, back-to-the-land it. In terms of a business, that can be tough if you have too much going on.

[00:09:03] There's only so much time, and unless you start adding more employees, only so much can get done. If you look at the livestock side, the veg side, are they both businesses that standalone is one more of the focal point? How do you manage the two?

[00:09:20] Chard Gard: Yeah, so the veg side is definitely the focal point. The livestock side was basically because we needed it from a land management standpoint. You know, we want it to be a valid enterprise on the farm, but it's not the real focus, at least currently. So, and this is our first year where we're probably going to actually make a profit on the livestock side. It's been a money loser up until recently, but I'm gonna rough figure it probably 5% of the profit.

[00:10:00] Diego Footer: Okay. So small and terms of revenue or income contribution and small in terms of importance. Like you need it, it's a tool that you guys have to do. It's almost kind of a hobby thing. And also, it fills some other needs that aren't necessarily business related. It mows the pasture down, helps build that organic matter over time, that type of thing.

[00:10:22] Chard Gard: Yeah, basically it takes less time to raise sheep than it does to, you know, run the bush hog to keep things at bay. And then they do generate a little bit of income as well.

[00:10:33] Diego Footer: So with the veg side being the majority of the farm in terms of income production, what's your model there?

[00:10:44] Chard Gard: So we sort of run two different models simultaneously. So we do kind of the typical market garden intensive production, 30 inch beds, you know, with high rotation, doing lots of salad, greens, root vegetables, things like that. But then we also have, and I call that kind of the intensive side, and then we also have what I call the extensive side, which are things like the cover crops, potatoes.

[00:11:14] You know, winter storage crops, things like that, that are lower profit per unit and take up a little more space. And we manage those more on a tractor scale so the spacing isn't as tight. They're in the, you know, it's one thing in a, in a bed per year, I use a cultivator on my four-wheel tractor instead of wire weeders with people.

[00:11:38] So we kinda run those two systems, but the crop rotation goes across the same land on both. So, you know, what was salad Greens this year will be Buckwheat next summer and potatoes the summer after that. It's just how we manage it is different. So each sort of plot is the same size, if that makes sense.

[00:12:01] Diego Footer: So it's a three year rotation?

[00:12:04] Chard Gard: No, it's, it's a 12-year rotation, that was just three years out of it.

[00:12:08] Diego Footer: So 12 year rota�so how, three total blocks.

[00:12:12] Chard Gard: No 12 blocks.

[00:12:14] Diego Footer: Oh, so 12 total blocks. And then it's essentially just moving down the line each year. What was in one goes to two the next year, then to three, then to four.

[00:12:16] Chard Gard: Exactly.

[00:12:27] Diego Footer: So 12 blocks. Are any of those similar, like are is say vegetable crops, 1, 4, 8, and 11 and cover crop is, you know, whatever, 2, 5, 7, 12, Or are each one of those different? I imagine there's gotta be some groupings in there.

[00:12:47] Chard Gard: Yeah. So I do it by crop family. So I'll do nightshades as one block, and so that'll be peppers, tomato, you know, outdoor tomatoes, you know, eggplant tomatillo.

[00:13:02] I'll do a block of, and I have two blocks that are salad crops, so it'll be both greens and baby root vegetables. And you'll, you know, you'll look at it and you'll see there's a bed of lettuce, there's a bed of carrots, there's a bed of scallions, there's another bed of lettuce, there's a bed of radish within that plot.

[00:13:25] So there's different crop families, but they're all kind of managed the same way. And then I'll have a plot of brassicas. So it's, you know, mostly broccoli and things like that. And I do all my sort of viney crops with mostly I trellis, but squash and melons and cucumbers, because they're managed the same way.

[00:13:49] They end up in one of the, one of the blocks. How big is each block? So each block is it's got two sub blocks that are each 96 feet long with a 12 foot aisle that goes between them and an 18 foot aisle on either end of the two of them together. And they are seven 30 inch beds or five tractor beds wide. Does that describe it clearly?

[00:14:21] Diego Footer: It does. So we'll get back to the 96 foot length later. That's strategically there for a reason. 30-inch beds, people got that. No problem. Tractor beds, describe that for people.

[00:14:35] Chard Gard: So that's based on my cultivator and my tractor. So I have a Williams tool, tool system cultivator. Not that I would necessarily recommend that to others, but you'll learn as you go. So that has to be 52 inches to the inside of the tire path and the tractor. So I made my tires as wide as they could go on my tractor. They're about a foot wide, so you end up with approximately 68 inch from one to the next.

[00:15:05] And it fits in the same physical space as the seven 30-inch beds. And then the plan is to do per, you know, I got permaculture hedge roads in between each plot. So, so there's enough space there that I can probably do nine instead of seven, but I wanna leave myself room for the hazelnuts and stuff to get wider and not feel current cramped.

[00:15:30] Diego Footer: Okay. So each block has two sub blocks. One is 30 inch beds, one is tractor blocks, correct?

[00:15:38] Chard Gard: No. So both those sub blocks would be the same in any given year, so, Okay. So the sub blocks are just so that I don't end up with 192 foot long rows. I can pull a truck down that center so that when we're harvesting we can just move things to a truck or a cart or a trailer depending on what we're harvesting.

[00:16:00] So both of those sub blocks would be the same crop family, they might be different things. So like peppers will be a whole sub block of just peppers, and then on the other sub block in that plot will be eggplant and tomatillos and whatever tomatoes I'm growing outside of the high tunnel.

[00:16:25] Diego Footer: Got it. What crops, when do you use the tractor bed system, when do you use the 30-inch bed system? What are the, What's the factor, or the factors that dictate one over the other?

[00:16:38] Chard Gard: Mostly it's the income per bed foot, if that makes sense. So if it's a high enough income per bed foot, which usually means it's gonna be multiple successions in the same year, so it's gonna be scallion, carrots, lettuce, something like that.

[00:16:57] We're gonna hand cultivate that with mostly with wire weeders, we're gonna be in there working by hand because it can justify that and there's a return. If it's something like potatoes, which we do pretty well on potatoes actually, but you know, it's one crop for the whole year and it's a lower profit margin. It's not worth the time to have people in there hand, hand cultivating it. That'll be done with the track.

[00:17:27] Diego Footer: What do you determine, do you have like a bar of what's high value per bed foot and what's, where, where's that line?

[00:17:38] Chard Gard: I haven't really quantified that as like a specific dollar amount.

[00:17:41] Diego Footer: You just know it by crop, like salanova's high value per bed foot and potatoes are low?

[00:17:46] Chard Gard: Yeah. I mean, if I had my spreadsheet in front of me, I could tell you what our average per bed foot is on any given crop. I can't off the top of my head say Okay. Was break point. But a lot of it too is where there's a like a logical reason to manage it by hand.

[00:18:06] Diego Footer: Yeah, I, I gotcha. Yeah. So say you had potatoes in block one and block one's done. We're going into next year, you're gonna rotate that. I'll make this up. That's gonna go into high rotation crops. And would you just reform all the beds then to 30 inch?

[00:18:26] Chard Gard: Yeah, so potatoes is a bad example because you help them. And so that's our most intensively tilled crop. But yeah, so something going from the tractor scale to the hand scale. We're just gonna reform the beds, but because of our sand, we're not doing big, raised beds. We have to keep everything from drying out as it is. So those 30-inch beds forming them is basically run the tilter down.

[00:18:55] And where your feet went is the walk path. I mean, we, it's staked out, so it's always the same, but, you know, we're not actively raising the bed or anything. I see. You know, you're walking in the walk path, you're adding compost and, and other amendments to the bed itself and raking it, and you're good to go.

[00:19:18] Diego Footer: Yeah. So it's more just changing where the pathways are. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. If you were gonna cover, if you're gonna follow potatoes with cover crop, which probably makes more sense than lettuce, then would you, do you just plant the whole block out? Like there's no PAs, we just direct seed at all? Yes.

[00:19:35] Chard Gard: So we follow potatoes with oats that winter kill. So as soon as we dig all the potatoes that I have to till fairly deeply cause of all the bridging from the hills, and then I'll broadcast seed oats over the whole block. They'll winter kill. And then we plant peas into that the following spring. So the peas being large seeded, we paperpot transplant the early peas that they can handle a little bit of that oat debris and a little bit of undulation in the soil. And so by the time it gets to a fine seated crop, it's, it's been in hand for a little while

[00:20:16] Diego Footer: With 12 bed blocks in rotation, on average, how many of those are in a cover crop at any given time?

[00:20:27] Chard Gard: Oh, probably three at any given time. But each, I would say about eight of them will have a cover crop at some point in a given season because we do some summer cover and winter cover.

[00:20:42] Diego Footer: Okay. So it's about a third-ish of the blocks are in cover crop at any given time. I know you going through the bed sizes, I can't do that math in my head on the fly here with 12 blocks, approximately how many acres does that take up? Is that, is that your two and a quarter right there? Yeah, two and a half.

[00:21:02] Chard Gard: About two and a half. Now, that includes the blocks themselves and the the space in between them that will in the future be perennial hedge row, and a small high tunnel and a large high tunnel.

[00:21:18] Diego Footer: Okay, so if you weren't cover cropping, you'd lose about a third of the size. You could go about a third smaller. Is that a fair way to think about that?

[00:21:28] Chard Gard: Probably, but it probably wouldn't be wise on our sand.

[00:21:31] Diego Footer: Sure, sure. I get, I know I get the reasons why. I'm just trying to give people some visualization of all, Oh, if I wanted to do that, how much land does it take and what's the give and take of doing this?

[00:21:41] Chard Gard: Since we have 35 acres, we've got plenty of space. If we were more of peri-urban or urban setting, it wouldn't make sense to do what we do.

[00:21:53] Diego Footer: People understand the basics of crop rotation. What's your methodology, reasoning, theory behind this 12-block system? Like why did you come up with this? Is this something you mimicked from somebody else or is this something that's, this is a Chad idea and this is why Chad decided to do it.

[00:22:15] Chard Gard: So the 12 came from because of this, the space on our farm, the way things are laid out, while we have a fairly large amount of land between the soil types, the way the water flows, and the kind of the shape of the lot, it's not the most efficient layout. And so, in the area where it would be efficient to do your walking and your, you know, that doesn't waste a lot of time and travel, what fit there was 12 blocks.

[00:22:45] The seven, like the width of the individual blocks came actually because of the tractor width. If you go up, down, up, down, up, down, you end up on the same end of the plot that you started on. So you're not going back and forth. And there is, like I said, those perennial hedgerows, some of those might become more trees.

[00:23:08] And so I don't want canopy closure like you would do on a typical alley cropping system. I want there to be light in there forever because we'll want some, an annual production forever, even if it might become fewer. So that's why we came up with 12. And then the theory of what rotates where is I think, pretty conventional with what a lot of farms do.

[00:23:32] I started with Elliot Coleman's kind of crop rotation suggestions and then expanded it out. So I wanted to have at least four years between any nightshades. And so we've got the, what I call the nightshades, which are peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, et cetera, and potatoes, which are also a nightshade family crop.

[00:23:54] So I needed at least four years between them. I wanted to grow something nitrogen fixing before brassicas. So that's, you know, peas and dry beans are there. Our soil's very calcium-poor. So I grow buckwheat before the potatoes and also before the tomatoes to help with blossom man rot and just sort of eventually built it out. A lot of index cards on the kitchen table.

[00:24:20] Diego Footer: Yeah, I love it. It's like a little mix and match game. Probably the farmer garden, like dream game right there, like layout. Layout, my farm and then I actually get to make it. Yeah. How long have you been doing this?

[00:24:33] Chard Gard: So this is our 13th year for the farm. It's my third year of the farm is my only income source and first year having more than one employee.

[00:24:45] Diego Footer: Have you been in this rotation all 13 years?

[00:24:51] Chard Gard: Yes. Although at first, it was 12 plots, but they were only a hundred feet long. It wasn't too any two subplots. So we doubled the size about six years ago, I think, by sort of going the next chunk to the north and mirroring what we already had.

[00:25:14] Diego Footer: And cover cropping since day one?

[00:25:17] Chard Gard: Not as intensively as I am now, but yes.

[00:25:21] Diego Footer: What's been your observational results of cover cropping over the years?

[00:25:27] Chard Gard: I think it's really been critical to making our farm work. Like I said, we started with such poor soil and the land was at one point a sand pit, and it was overgrazed with cows. It was row crop, it was overgrazed with horses.

[00:25:45] So lots of annoying weeds and very low organic matter and low nutrient levels. So without the cover crops, I don't think we could have afforded to grow vegetables on any kind of intense way anyway. But in addition to the, just the, your typical soil improvement, there's a lot of things, like we have a lot of running grasses that are hard to deal with, buckwheat smothers them out, you know, we have a lot of, it's very windy here, so having that winter killed oats or rye over the, you know, on the soil over the winter keeps everything from blowing away.

[00:26:23] Um, unless we get good snow, which isn't reliable anymore. So, you know, those sort of things really do make the cover crops critical to what we're doing.

[00:26:34] Diego Footer: What have you been your winners and losers with cover crops in your situation?

[00:26:40] Chard Gard: Biggest winner, I think would be buckwheat. And I guess I should mention that I also, we don't produce honey anymore, but I am still a beekeeper, mostly just for pollination services.

[00:26:51] I'd like to get back in honey production, but it takes a lot of time that I don't have. But, so the bees love that buckwheat too. So Buckwheat definitely, rye for the organic matter production that it, there's, it's hard to beat winter rye. Cow peas have been a really good one because they fix so much nitrogen.

[00:27:10] It's crazy. But I think those three are probably our biggest winners. I haven't done a whole lot of cover crop mixes typically do just a single cover crop species at a time, not that there's any particular reason for that, but it's kinda cycle I fell into.

[00:27:27] Diego Footer: Any that have not worked? Poor germination, poor growth, tough to terminate, whatever?

[00:27:35] Chard Gard: Yeah, so rye can be tough to terminate. Key for me has just been, wherever it is, is not something used to go in the ground early in the spring. If I had a crimper roller, it probably wouldn't be as big a challenge. Sunflower did not do well for us. It just did not germinate. It didn't really produce the kind of biomass that a lot of other farms have.

[00:28:00] Tillage radish is pretty much pointless because of our sand. A lot of people east of us do a lot of tillage radish. They'll actually aerial seed it even because they're in clay, but it didn't really do a whole lot for us. So I think that that's kind of been the winners, losers there.

[00:28:18] Diego Footer: In terms of termination, what's been your go to? You've mentioned oats, which winter kill, That's easy. And can you touch on where you are in the tillage spectrum and you know, I'm not dogmatic here, so if you till, that's fine. If you don't till, that's fine too.

[00:28:35] Chard Gard: So it put us somewhere between low and minimal till. So after the potatoes we till pretty deep because it's the easiest way to level the plot back out.

[00:28:47] For the potatoes, we're planting in a big furrow, so that's sort of a form of tillage. We use the tilther a lot, which some people say is tillage and some isn't, you know, but that's tilling a half inch deep. But try to avoid turning over things much. Try to avoid tilling deep other than, again, other than after the potatoes, because again, our soil organic matter is so low. I don't wanna do anything. I'm going to just burn out what I'm working on putting in.

[00:29:19] Diego Footer: Do you have any issues with above ground residue after terminating any of these crops, whether that's the buckwheat, the cow pea, you've mentioned tarping. Is this go-to strategy for now? Do you have any problems getting dealing with that above ground biomass?

[00:29:38] Chard Gard: Generally not, because I've sort of worked my rotation around it. So for example, the peas, they winter kill or the peas, the oats, they winter kill. I'm gonna plant peas in there pretty early, so there's gonna be some residue, but I can pretty much just break it about eight or 10 inches o over and run the paperpot down for that first planting.

[00:30:05] By the time I get the second planting, they've started to break down enough that I can just rake the bed like normal. Rye can be a challenge because there's just so much of it. But I'm not gonna grow rye anywhere where I'll need to plant something in that plot more than about a month after, you know, till about a month after I terminated it.

[00:30:25] So I can tarp it and it'll break down quite a lot and I should be good to go. The buckwheat, I just I mow it down with, I've got a flail mower for the tractor as well, and so it just becomes a pretty much a little composing, spreading mulch, so it doesn't have any big chunks in its root system as such that it's not really a problem either.

[00:30:48] Diego Footer: If you have a block that's a cover crop block. Well, let's just look at now, like you've probably, if you're going winter oats, right, that you've probably planted it by now, it's growing, it's gonna winter kill, would that block stay cover cropped through the rest of the year? Like would you transition to a more of a summer crop cow pea, buckwheat and then, you know, finish it up with something else at the end of the year?

[00:31:13] Or do you, I guess, is, is a part of your rotation when it's a cover crop? Are you using the full calendar year and just stacking successions of cover crops?

[00:31:24] Chard Gard: As much as possible, I'm trying to use that full year in stack. So the oats, for example, that are, I'm actually not doing too well right now because we're still two weeks before our average first frost, and we've already had three freezes.

[00:31:38] So in the spring, where the oats are now, which will then be dead oats in the pace of the oat straw, I'm actually gonna plant a cash crop. It's gonna be sugar snap peas, snow peas, and green beans. And when the peas are finished, I do three plantings of peas in the spring. There's about two weeks when I finish off the last planting of peas.

[00:32:00] And then I try another planting of peas for the fall, which the way our season is, only succeeds about 20% of the time, but everybody loves peas. So I'll transition that right away.

[00:32:13] Diego Footer: On crops like peas, given that you have the flail mower and stuff, do you just flail all that down just to keep the biomass right there?

[00:32:20] Yes. The crop rotations themselves, I know a lot of the stuff's generally accepted and from everything from U S D A down to farmer level. What's been your experience in terms of, again, observable benefits of crop rotation? Do you think that the crops you have have benefited by being on a, every fourth year they're hitting a new, or that land isn't seeing that same crop for, I forget the number now, sorry, X years? Has that been a net positive?

[00:32:56] Chard Gard: Yeah, I think so. Now, I mean, being our 13th year, we're only just now getting around, or anything's been in the same place as it was, and since I did it from the beginning, I don't really have, you know, definite, Oh yeah, I did this when we didn't rotate. But looking at soil tests and such, I, I test.

[00:33:17] A quarter of the plots every year, and they're staying pretty similar from plot to plot. Whereas if I think if I had just grown the same thing in a given plot, that crop is going to be removing and adding the same stuff, and so the soil chemistry is going to change pretty drastically, whereas everything is improving pretty much on an even keel every plot about the same way.

[00:33:48] I think that's helped with disease on some of the soil borne disease, on some of the insect pests, I don't think it helps quite so much because our plots aren't far enough apart. So like our worst insect pest is Colorado potato beetles. We're surrounded by a thousand-acre commercial potato fields, and they crop dust them three times a week.

[00:34:09] We're certified naturally grown. We can't do that. Because the plots are so close together. There's not enough space that those beetles are gonna get lost from one year to the next. So I can't say that's been a major win, but they're also coming in from all the crop dusted fields, so.

[00:34:27] Diego Footer: Thinking about this, I imagine you could justify it as saying, Hey, we have the space. There's no harm in doing this. If you have the labor, the seed costs for, you know, the cover cropping leg, guess you could even put those plots fallow, like just to do the rotation. If you have the space, there's no additional cost. Why not? If there's any benefit, like what's the downside to doing it if you have the room?

[00:34:53] Chard Gard: Yeah. And I think because all of my plots are the same size, I don't have to do any thinking about, I've visited a lot of farms where they'll have seven or eight plots, but one's an acre and the next is a quarter of an acre. And I think that makes it harder to do a rotation like that when everything's the same size, you know, you're, you've got this much space for these crops every year, regardless of where they're at in the rotation, so I think that helps a lot.

[00:35:20] Diego Footer: I agree. I think that's huge. I mean, just from everything else too, tarps, row cover, irrigation line, you know, you name it. If everything's the same, everything's the same. What works on block one works on block 12, and you're good to go.

[00:35:37] Chard Gard: Yes. And of course, that block width is also partially determined by my irrigation. So the little Senegal wobbler, they cover the whole width of the bed of the plot in one line.

[00:35:48] Diego Footer: Going over to your bed lengths and circling back. You mentioned before they're 96 feet long and that's a little bit unique. When a lot of people are on a hundred-foot units or some division of that 50, a hundred, why 96 feet?

[00:36:11] Chard Gard: Well, so historically, we started with a hundred feet. No real reason other than that's what everybody does. When we changed, actually, is when I started using the paperpot system. Basically, the length of the paperpot chains really divides well into 96 feet as well as 48 feet and 32 feet.

[00:36:36] So if I wanna use the paperpot, I can very easily use whole chains, doing a whole bed, a half bed, or a third of a bed, and the paperpot was just game changing for our farm, so we use it a lot. So it became worth it to do that. Also, our trellis for all those squash crops, and vining crops, we use 16-foot cattle panels, so they come a lot closer, a 96 foot bed than they do a hundred foot bed.

[00:37:11] And then the high tunnel, we're really windy here, so most people do either three-foot or four-foot spacing on their bows, which means very common high tunnel sizes are 48 and 96 feet, so that means our inside space, our productive space is the same size outside space, so I don't need to think about it. Everything's kind of consistent that way.

[00:37:36] Diego Footer: Yeah, I like reorienting that, especially as into the paperpot system as you are, because I mean, in the email you sent me, there's a little chart and it works out real nice. So three rows of six inch means it's two trays, four rows of four inches, four trays, four rows of two is eight trays, six rows of two inches, 12 trays.

[00:37:57] And so that makes the math easy because unfortunately we're dealing with a system that was designed in Asia, going off metric units, and they're really long rows. So when you try and have a six inch paper chain that's 139 feet long and apply that to a hundred foot bed system, like the math just doesn't work out as easy as you'd want it to.

[00:38:22] So shifting your bed length to match the chains, and also having all those other benefits, I think is, is really crafty. And I know Ben Hartman mentioned doing that potentially one time in the past, but I haven't heard a lot of other farms changing that around. Just with the paperpot, how much is that simplified things?

[00:38:44] Chard Gard: Yeah. It's actually interesting you mentioned Ben. I should see if he's actually done that. He's only about an hour away from me, but it's really simplified things a lot for us. Initially, I tried what I, well what you guys posted on your Instagram where you just leave off a few rows of the, a few columns on the paperpot chains.

[00:39:08] And if you fill those with soil, with seed starting mix, you end up with that's a pretty expensive input, at least where we are, that you're not using. And the paper chains themselves are not a trivial cost. And then when you, like, a lot of times we'll carry trays. I have a tendency to just grab the short end of the tray and carry one in each hand and I'm carrying about a 45 degree angle.

[00:39:33] And if they're full, they handle that just fine. But if you've got some empty chains in there and somebody asks you a question, you turn to answer the question, you've got uncoiled chains all over the ground. So, using whole trays was pretty important to me. Also, just during the crunch time of the year, when the�our germination greenhouse is only 13 by 40, we can only fit so many trays in the germination chamber.

[00:40:00] I wanna make sure I'm using all of that space because, you know, like when we're putting trays on the aisles of the propagation house, you know, we wanna make sure we're using them all the whole thing. So, you know, I think that's been a lot easier than trying to fit the system on the ground to the chains rather than trying to squish the chains into a different size bed.

[00:40:28] Diego Footer: Yeah. And it's not as though you're short bed space, so cutting off that four feet by 30 inches on every bed, you know, you're not losing a ton. You have more than enough room. So not, not a problem there. And if it just simplifies things, you know, you mentioned, hey, it's easier to train people, which I agree.

[00:40:46] If you're always filling every chain, that's, that's great. Just always fill every chain. If some are partially seeded, it's just something, somebody can tend to screw up, they plant it all and you didn't want it all planted. Now you've just kind of wasted the seed. So it does eliminate that waste. I think it's a smart idea.

[00:41:04] One thing you talked about earlier, and I think I caught it in passing, did you mention using a two-wheel tractor for doing some of your cultivation?

[00:41:13] Chard Gard: No. We, have a four wheel tractor that will do that Williams tool system cultivator on. So I currently don't have a two wheel tractor. Curley's AG has their electric cl day that they just finally released to the us. I'd kinda love try one of those out, but yeah, we don't currently have a two-wheel tractor.

[00:41:34] Diego Footer: The four-wheel system you have set up, so you have a weeding set up. Is that a, I'm not familiar with that tractor. So I forgive my ignorance here. Is that like a belly mount? Is it something you'd pull behind it?

[00:41:47] Chard Gard: No, it's the Williams tool system is a, it's a three-point rear mount, so it's got, it sort of looks like a bed spring on a toolbar. So it's got a tine rake where you move the individual tines. Then it's got two toolbar that you can attach different implements to. So I've got healing discs for the potatoes.

[00:42:09] I've got three different size side knives. But it has the typical challenges of a rear mounted cultivator. You know, it's six feet behind me, so if you miss something and you get a couple inches off, you just wiped out 15 feet of your crop. So it's not perfect. But mostly, I blind rake with that tine rake.

[00:42:35] Diego Footer: Do you plant any of your paperpot crops in these tractor beds?

[00:42:40] Chard Gard: I have, but it mostly things that I don't paperpot anymore. So when I was first playing with the paperpot, when I first got it, I tried a couple different things. I tried tomatoes.

[00:42:54] Diego Footer: How'd that work by the way?

[00:42:55] Chard Gard: It worked. But it, in our season, our season's so short that I really need a larger transplant and you know, I also usually do a 18-inch spacing on them.

[00:43:07] So it didn't work too well in our system. I think if I had a longer growing season, it would work well. But the cultivating with the paperpot is not really a problem, you know, tractor cultivating because you're not going to actually run like one of those knives into the chain and snag the chain or something. It's just as things turned out, you know, those crops that I do with the tractor, I don't paperpot anymore.

[00:43:35] Diego Footer: And then everything that you do paperpot, higher value crops, that stuff is all wire weeded, just using like a hand tool?

[00:43:47] Chard Gard: Yeah, we do well, at Neversink, they�re interchangeable. They've got silly names for tools.

[00:43:53] Right, Right. Well, wire readers, those work extremely well with the paperpot system because they're not sharp on the corners. So you can just go like a fast walking pace down your bed and just let it bounce off the paper chain and get, you know, in tight to everything. So that's what we do on the, the hand side.

[00:44:14] If things get away from us a little bit, we'll go to um, you know, the also call a wire weeder, but it's the, my employees call it the putter Johnny�s sells. That has a little bit wider, it's, I don't know, about a three eighths of an inch wide flattened metal thing. And if we really fail then we might have to do a colinear hoe, but that gets really slow.

[00:44:35] Diego Footer: With the crops you grow, one you list on here that you grow in six-inch paper chain pots is broccoli rabe. Haven't seen anybody talk about that before. How has that worked?

[00:44:48] Chard Gard: That's worked pretty well. Now it depends on the time of season, so I'm paperpotting it in the spring because I want to get it to where I can get a harvest or two before it gets too hot. When the weather gets hot, broccoli rabe, not so great. In the fall where I'm planning broccoli, rob in the tunnel. I just direct seed that with the Jang.

[00:45:11] Diego Footer: What about carrots? I've talked to Dean at Cabbage Throw. He's had a lot of good luck with carrots. Ray Tyler, he�s had luck with carrots. You list carrots here as something you grow in two-inch chains. What's been your experience growing those?

[00:45:26] Chard Gard: So anytime we plant carrots outdoors, we're using the paperpot. In the high tunnel, I've got good enough irrigation control that I can germinate direct seeded, but outdoors, with the way our sand is, I just can't do it. So mostly that's Mokum, and we do pelleted seed, one seed per pot, five days, 75 degrees in the germination chamber, you're transplanting what it looks like an empty chain, and then it'll germinate one or two days later, depending on the soil temperature, you know, with between the weed pressure and trying to keep the sand moist enough to germinate, germinating direct seated carrots outdoors here. Maybe one, one time a year you might get it to work. Whereas I do carrots every other week, all season long with the paperpot, and it's really, it's made it work.

[00:46:18] Diego Footer: Overall, 13 years in, what are the best farming lessons you have to share with people?

[00:46:26] Chard Gard: So I think the biggest one is really pay attention to your context, what your land, what your market is doing. Like a lot of people, you know, I started out kind of following what all the books said, and a lot of that didn't work in our context either because of the market we have or because of the soil we have or the climate we have.

[00:46:54] Each farm is really unique. So I can even actually visit some of my friends farms that are five minutes away and things that don't work for us do great for them and vice versa. So you really want to pay attention, just observe, take time to observe what works well on your farm and in your markets.

[00:47:14] That I think's the biggest one, I think the very common one of don't do too much too soon, which I fail miserably at. But one of the things I think a lot of people don't take into account when it's don't do too much too soon is a lot of times, you'll get a small segment of your market that really loves that thing that doesn't make economic sense for you to keep doing, but it's hard to drop because those are some of your most valuable, you know, lifetime customer value customers.

[00:47:46] Whereas if you never started growing that thing, it might not have mattered. So sort of take that into account too, as you're getting started.

[00:47:54] Diego Footer: I love the point about just not following�or not everything is gonna work for everybody. Like, there are ways to read books. One is to say, Hey, here's an idea. Try it. And maybe you can adapt it to your specific context. But

[00:48:16] some people read it and they try it exactly as it's written. They kind of forget the part about having to adapt it to their situation, and it doesn't work. And then they say, Well, you know, this is rubbish, this technique, this person, whoever, it's all, they're missing the part about what do I have to work with?

[00:48:36] What's the principle behind this technique? And how can I get those two things to come together in harmony? And can you think of any specific examples of something that�s really successful in books, and you tried it, and like it just didn't work and you either had to adapt it or abandon it?

[00:48:56] Chard Gard: I'm sure there's a bajillion things. Florida weave tomatoes, so much labor for so little return and then late blight came in. That just does not work for us. Honestly, I think the big thing is a lot of people buy into a whole system and so they'll read, you know, something from JM or from Elliot Coleman or whatever, and they'll try to do everything like that system and then not pay attention to the feedback that they're getting on their farm.

[00:49:25] So, well, this is how it's supposed to work because it worked in the book or on the YouTube or wherever their source was. And they'll keep trying the same thing over and over, expecting a different result until they go out of business. So, you know, I think that's the big thing. I'm trying to think of examples.

[00:49:43] Well, well, carrots I was told, you know, you can't transplant carrots and then with the paperpot, oh wow. Now I can grow carrots and actually not lose all my money on carrots. So I guess that's just in general, the big thing is you pay attention to the feedback that your farm is giving you.

[00:50:00] Diego Footer: Sure. That's circling back as you, you got me triggered on something that I wanted to follow up on later. The high tunnels, you don't have 12 high tunnels, and your high tunnel's not moving. How do you manage crop rotation or deal with the effects of not rotating crops when you have a static piece of land under a high tunnel?

[00:50:26] Chard Gard: So right now, we have two high tunnels. One started out as a Farmer's Friend, you know, gothic pro, and I upgraded it to make it more of a true high tunnel. And then the other one we just built this year. So some of that I'm still needing to learn, but a lot of it, so the new big one, I'm doing a lot of half and quarter beds to get a lot of diversity in it.

[00:50:55] It's mostly focused on winter greens and winter roots, so I'm hoping between just the diversity of plant families and bringing in lots of compost that is from as diverse background as I can, and I'll do soil tests to make sure nothing gets outta whack. The smaller one is actually kind of becoming just tomato, tomato, tomato, and a lot of that's because I have a tomato trellising system in there.

[00:51:23] So all of the kinda infrastructure for tomatoes is in there. And honestly, I am a little worried about it, but so far, I have not had major problems with it. My eventual plan is I would like to have four of the 22 and a half by 96 tunnels and probably 6 48-foot. You know, I'd like to do 22 and a half by 48 cause that 22 and a half is pretty much the same size as my outdoor plots.

[00:51:54] It's one bed less wide because of the, where the walls come down, but the outset, exterior footprint's about the same. So when I get more of them, I can rotate crops a little bit better.

[00:52:07] Diego Footer: It makes sense. And I love your approach to what you're doing with things. At the end of the day, is all of this profitable? I think people hear permaculture hedges, crop rotation, cover crops, and they can think, whoa, this is like some experimental farm. Is this a legit income making business?

[00:52:30] Chard Gard: So, there are a lot of different ways to answer that question, and I have to temper this by saying this year has been kind of a disaster.

[00:52:41] So this year, I can't say for certain, but I think the farm is probably gonna end up around break even or maybe a slight net loss. In our first several years, it was a loss, but it wasn't my full-time job. We started the farm, like our farm capital when we started the farm was an $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit.

[00:53:03] And everything we've built has been reinvesting what the farm has produced. So you know, you have to temper it with what you're trying to accomplish. And when I say the farm will make a small loss, it's still paying me as an employee. It's just not gonna pay me as the business owner. I think a lot of times people look at that not, I guess correctly by my way of, of thinking.

[00:53:30] So you should be paid for your labor, but you should also be paid, you know, a dividend for your share of ownership of the business just like you would any other business. And so we're still working on that second part. Last year wasn't so bad this year.

[00:53:46] Diego Footer: Yeah, I mean, like what's, what's the biggest barrier to profitability or increasing that at this point? I think this something a lot of farms could struggle with, and I'm not sure I've ever talked about this on a podcast ironically, is you're doing all these things to improve the land, to build for the long term.

[00:54:06] You're working your way there, profitability, like what's the roadblock or what's the challenge? Why couldn't this be making, you know, on some other, what two and half acre farms make, I don't know, $250,000 gross or something? Why are you not there? What's the limiting factor?

[00:54:24] Chard Gard: So I think the first part is, okay, if you make $250,000 gross, what did you net? I think there's a little bit of a kind of a cop out with so many farms talking about what they gross. I honestly don't care how much I gross. I care how much I net. So my growth is sort of based on how the percentages work out to what I need to net. But you know, the challenge is unique to our context.

[00:54:53] We're in the middle of nowhere. Our location made sense when we were both teaching at a boarding school, and my wife still is. But it means we don't have ready access to large markets. The year-round population of our nearest town and our main market is less than 1100 people. Now in the summer, it's kind of a resort town, so it goes much higher, but it's hard to maintain that cash flow through the winter because there's not as many people to sell to.

[00:55:22] So, you know, we do home delivery, but where a farm in a more urban area could very easily wrap up, you know, a hundred customers within a 10-minute drive. You know, we may have a half hour drive to the first drop off. Our secondary market is an hour drive each way. So that adds both fuel cost and labor cost.

[00:55:46] So that's unique to our context that may or may not be a problem for a farm in a different context. I think, like I said, we started with only $8,000 in capital for the farm as a business. Now the farm's renting the land from us as individuals for a dollar. So you know that land cost isn't part of it, but it's $8,000 is not a lot of capital to start a farm or any business really.

[00:56:14] So we've always been under capitalized and reinvesting so much of the income that farm derives as being reinvested into building out infrastructure. You know, I think a lot of farms, 13 years in, have most of our infrastructure built and you know, I'm still looking at wanting to build three more high tunnels, and I need power to the northwest side of the farm and you know, on and on and on. So that's part of it as well.

[00:56:43] And some of it is just a personal risk aversion. You know, I have two employees now. There's enough work that I could probably have six, I'm just not a hundred percent sure my marketing, you know, skills are up to the task to sell everything we would produce with six people so that I could actually make payroll and, you know, so it's, you gotta balance sales and production and investment and profit and all those things together.

[00:57:12] Diego Footer: So if you look ahead over the next year or two, what is the focus? Is it to, I mean, I like your approach, you're doing what works both for the land, both for your own situation, for the farm. One goal could be, hey, well let's just focus on expanding sales, however that might look in your region and growing that way.

[00:57:34] But is it just to keep. The sales going enough to fund the development of the farm. Like cuz where's the end game in this, you know, I guess if you looked five years down the line and at that point is everything built or are you still in the building phase of, you know, just adding more stuff? Because at some point, potentially all the infrastructure you'd ever need is there and then like that expense goes dramatically down and net income goes up. What's your plan over the next few years here?

[00:58:14] Chard Gard: Okay, so I guess you need to kind of temper things with the fact that I'm 47 and I think I've aged 10 years in the last three years there. There you go. Right. So a lot of things that used to be easy for me to do are no longer easy for me to do, kind of a physical workload that I thought I would be able to do well into my late sixties.

[00:58:36] I'm finding I physically can't do because of orthopedic problems. So that skews things, and it's one of those things where when we started the farm, our long term goal was to have a pretty significant portion of it in perennial crops. But because we started so under-capitalized, we needed the cash flow thing so quickly that we started, you know, with a real heavy focus on annual crops.

[00:59:03] And so now here we are 13 years in and some of our most profitable crops are perennial crops, but there's just not that many of them yet. So I mean, asparagus is very profitable for us. Almonds are actually not doing too badly and nobody in Indiana grows almonds. Peach is in a good year to ok, but we just don't have that much of it.

[00:59:24] So we kind of held off on a lot of what we should have invested in earlier because of that need for immediate cash flow. So what, in an ideal world, I would like to shift more of the annual production day to day work onto employees so that I can focus more on the perennial stuff and the business side of things.

[00:59:51] And then there's also, okay, I'm 47. In five years, I'll be 52. I don't know if I would ever want to retire retire, but there's gonna come a time when I'm not gonna want to my, have my full-time job being vegetable farmer, but I still want the business to be there. So that's, I alluded to that earlier when I said there's two ways that you should get paid from your farm as a business.

[01:00:18] If you're farming and doing actual work, you should be getting paid for that labor. So as any other employee would, so. Right now, I'm paying myself as a farm manager. At some point I'd like to hire a farm manager. The amount I'm paying myself now is, should be what that farm manager would cost to be hired.

[01:00:41] It's not quite there, but it's getting closer. But then as a business owner, I've got the risk of the investment. I've got all the effort and everything put into building the business. Our farm's structured as an LLC so that hopefully it can exist beyond our lifetimes, but I should get dividends from our profit.

[01:01:02] So I also wanna make sure the farm profit increases so that I can actually give myself a larger dividend so that the salary from working the farm is a smaller portion of my income than it currently is. Does that sort of make sense?

[01:01:19] Diego Footer: I think it does. And yeah, I could tell you put a lot of thought into it and that's what's important at the end of the day, I think.

[01:01:28] Or I hope what podcasts like this do and what I've tried to do here recently is really show that everybody has their own definition of what success is. And you can't just say it's a dollar amount of gross sales or net sales. Or net income, sorry, or what the farm looks like or any of that. It's does this whole thing, the business, the infrastructure, the land, the day to activity fit within the life that I wanna live.

[01:02:07] And if it doesn't, then the, the best numbers or the most customers or the prettiest farm, none of that matters. So I think you found what matters for you. And to sum this up and, and start to close it out here, at the end of the day, what success, like, how do you define that?

[01:02:28] Chard Gard: Yeah, so I think there's multiple facets that are important to me and and my family as far as how the farm fits in. So the end point of success would be I want to have a farm where the business can run without a whole lot of key man risk. So if I have an employee that needs to go for maternity leave or whatever, there's enough capacity there to fill that in. If I get hit by a bus, the farm will keep going while providing a comfortable, realistic living wage for everybody who's working at the farm, and sufficient profit that the farm owners are getting rewarded for their investment work in building the business.

[01:03:18] So that's sort of the business side. And then on the sort of physical side, I also live on the farm. I want it to be filled with things that are nice to look at and things that are fun to do and people that are fun to be around. So, you know, we have those two things working together, and then I want it to be a valuable and valued part of the surrounding community.

[01:03:43] So all the different ways that it interacts with the community around us, and really communities, plural, because we're serving a little more than a four-county area. It's not just one little town because of where we're at, so.

[01:03:58] Diego Footer: I love what you're doing, Chad, and I love the process behind it. For people that wanna fall along from afar, check out your farm. Where's the best place to go?

[01:04:09] Chard Gard: So probably Instagram at Hole in the Woods Farm or Facebook at Hole in the Woods Farm, or HoleintheWoodsfarm.com is our website and we do have a, a weekly ish newsletter which is more. About what's happening around the farm in seasonal eating than it is a sales newsletter. So people may or may not enjoy that.

[01:04:35] Diego Footer: Perfect, and that was awesome. Thanks for sharing all that.

[01:04:38] Chard Gard: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:04:41] Diego Footer: There you have it. Chad Gard of Hole in the Woods Farm. I hope you got a lot out of this one.

[01:04:46] Diego Footer: If you wanna learn more about everything that Chad's doing, be sure to follow him online using the link below.

[01:04:52] If you enjoyed this episode of Farm Small Farm Smart, can you do me a favor? Go on iTunes and leave a review. It helps. The algorithm wants your reviews. I'm asking for your reviews, so if you enjoyed it, you do me a favor and leave me a hopefully positive review. That's all for this one. Thanks for listening.

[01:05:11] Until next time, be nice, be thankful, and do the work.