June and Our NOFA Inspection

This is the chilliest first day of June in my recent recollection. The sun has been in and out all day and luckily it has not rained a drop. We started our hay baleage on Saturday. John and Michelle Reid, whose maple syrup we help to distribute, come to the farm with their 3 tractors, a mowing machine called a diskbine, a round baler that makes bigger bales than ours and a bale wrapper that seals the hay inside a white plastic wrap that ferments the hay like sauerkraut and keeps more nutrients in it than dry hay. We end up making half our hay in baleage, which look like great big marshmallows along the edge of the fields and half in dry big round bales we store in the barn shed at the Waite Farm. That way the cows have a mix of the two kinds to eat all winter and seem generally healthier and happier looking than all dry hay years. The baleage just seems more luscious and they come running when you open up a bale to carry it out to the fields in the winter. So with their snazzy new tractors and fancy equipment, they make half our hay in 4 days!! Thee is no waiting and drying for this type of hay and you can mow it down, rake in into windrows and bale it and wrap it all in one day. They are doing 7 fields in the time it takes us to do 2!! Weather permitting! There are also 3 people operating all at once in circles around the fields, they just need a small head start on each other and it's amazing how fast it all goes. The quickness is a real boon to the cows too who get to eat in these fields the rest of the year. When our haying would take a month between rainstorms and other activities, these fields had to be limits until all finished. Only then could the cows go in and eat all around the edges where the tractors do not reach. Once the field was finished it could go back into the rotational path they follow all summer. More paddocks of eating means each one has a longer recovery and regrowth period to be lush again.

In the midst of all this activity, the NOFA-NY inspector for our organic certification came today to visit, look around, and check up on our activities and record keeping compliance. Dave was from Brattleboro VT and is actually a full time inspector for 3 different certification groups in NY, VT and MA. He says the number of organic farms is growing and so inpsectors are in demand to keep up with the once per year visits to each farm to check on their methods of operation. our farm is quite easy to be organic since we are really just certifying our pastures, hayfields and forests. Once we filled out all the forms for each of our fields we realized just how "safe" we are from close proximity to any conventional farming. We are more surrounded by forest than any other ecology which provides a perfect buffer zone from fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides used conventionally. Being at the top of the hill as we are, even all our water from the mountain does not run through any other area but forest. So after an hour of question and answer describing what we do and filling out the inspection forms we took Dave for a driving tour of the farm and the off farm fields that we hay in our neighborhood. Luckily we have the 4 wheel drive Subaru to go cruising around some of the farm lanes and it was a lot less muddy since the 2.5 inches of rain we had last week. But with the size of the farm it takes about 45 minutes to do a decent job of a tour. Then he was off to the Slack Hollow Farm nearby where they grow vegetables and who'll probably have a lot more questions to answer.