PART 2: Learning as we grow on Sweet Beet Farm
Check out Part I of the Growing Farmers series to learn about why it’s so important to grow farmers!
In the spring of 2015, some very new, bright eyed farmers started eagerly digging into the dirt. A field covered in grass, that used to be a farm many moons ago, now returning to that purpose with a handful of novices at the helm - the cofounders of the Kearsarge Food Hub and this initial pilot project, creating Sweet Beet Farm and Sweet Beet Farm Stand.
Year one on Sweet Beet Farm: Digging in the dirt -planting onions!
We dug gratefully, having been lent the land by a supportive community member and friend, a special place to learn how to grow our own food on Greenhouse Lane in Bradford, NH. We turned over the field with hand tools like a pickaxe and a shovel, as well as with the conventional tractor method, not yet having learned lower impact methods that help maintain more vibrant soil. Occasionally we dug up some old relics of the fields’ former lives - nails, pieces of tools, bits of glass bottles, and indistinct twists of metal.
We’d all touched upon farming in one way or another, having briefly worked on a farm, experimented through school internships, or perhaps from working in fine dining and taking particular interest in fresh, local ingredients. While our hearts were big and beaming with joy to be learning all we could about actually growing our own food, we had little to no clue about what we were doing.
Onion Farmers (but we grow other stuff too!)
And the onions. Ohhh the onions. Have you ever planted onions? You start by seeding them indoors, so they grow into little adolescents before you transplant them into the ground, though still quite tiny and wispy. About some time in late April, if you’re growing hundreds of onions and you’re planting them by hand (like we were), be sure to block out a couple weeks with a couple bodies to get the job done from start to finish.
That’s what we did on Sweet Beet Farm, and by the end of what felt like forever only planting onions, we took on a new identity: Onion Farmers (but we grow other stuff, too).
And that’s how we did it for several years, until we discovered a remarkable tool in the spring of 2020 - the Paper Pot Transplanter.
The paper pot transplanter is a simple, low impact tool that starts with seeding the onions (and other things) into a special paper rubric. Once they are big enough to transplant, the paper grid fits snuggly into the transplanter that then digs into the soil, methodically unfolds the paper grid, and plants the onions as you simply roll the machine down the field. A job that used to take two weeks now takes two hours, and you have 800 onions in the ground, with no gasoline or electricity used in the process.
Here’s the paper pot transplanter doing its thing!
It’s this kind of technology that we’ve been diligently hunting for over the past 6 years of growing Sweet Beet Farm from the ground up. As a program of the Kearsarge Food Hub, the mission of the farm is to explore and implement regenerative farming practices that care for the land while producing delicious, nutrient dense foods to help feed our community.
Our influences on the farm range from local partners like Kearsarge Gore Farm, Greenhill Collective, and NOFA-NH, to strategic market gardeners like Jean-Martin Fortier, Ben Hartman, and Curtis Stone, to traditions and mindsets embodied by Indige nous cultures that actively revere and restore the natural world to balance while recognizing humans place within it.
We acknowledge that our work takes place on N’dakinna, which is the traditional ancestral homeland of the Abenaki, Pennacook and Wabanaki Peoples past and present. We acknowledge and honor with gratitude the land and waterways and the Alnobak (people) who have stewarded N’dakinna throughout the generations. The roots of this place are an everlasting reservoir of inspiration for us, and our relationship with the local Native community continues to grow.
Learning from these sources, we’ve gratefully implemented key systems like cover cropping and crop rotation to build and feed soils, utilizing low impact tools that help get the job done with less energy, labor, and waste, and generally exploring how to produce quality, organic foods that are ready for market.
And as we’ve been learning, testing, digesting, and refining our systems on Sweet Beet Farm, we’ve been experimenting with ways to include more people in this journey, believing that knowledge about growing food leads to not only food security, but food sovereignty.
1st Graders help weed and feed the soils of our raised beds at Sweet Beet Farm’s original farm stand location.
Learning as we grow, the farm is an educational center for sharing and expanding our collective knowledge base around restorative agriculture. As such, we welcome students of all ages - from 1st grade to college level to lifelong learners - to feed their curiosity around where food comes from and how to grow it in harmony with Nature (rather than the extractive and destructive methods that unfortunately characterize much of the industrial food system that stocks the supermarkets).
And since the very beginning, a goal of ours has always been to not only grow food, but to grow farmers.
Over the past handful of years, we’ve been learning more and more about the tragic loss of small farms and how farmers are aging out of the profession with fewer and fewer people taking it on (as documented in Part I of this blog series). As a nonprofit organization working to strengthen the local food system, we knew we had to do something about this. Yet, it wasn’t until recently, this year in fact, that we felt like we had a solid foundation from which we could actually train new and beginning farmers (an entirely different ball game than simply welcoming people to come dig in the dirt with us).
With five years of enthusiastic trial and error running Sweet Beet Farm under our belts, the Kearsarge Food Hub crew finally felt equipped to pass down the knowledge gleaned from extensive research and development in the field onto aspiring farmers as they consider starting their own real life venture.
In fact, we felt more than equipped - we approach it as a sacred duty to help a new generation of farmers step into this profession with the right knowhow to make it both viable and fulfilling. If we are to fulfill our mission of reinvigorating our community within a restorative local food system, then actively inspiring and equipping the next generation of farmers is a critical pursuit.
And it’s not just about learning how to plant onions, either. It’s business development, budgeting, crop planning, and so much more that goes into developing and managing a successful small farm. In fact, when you look at the analysis of why we need more farmers in Part I of this series, a lack of business planning is a leading barrier reported by new and beginning farmers. This might be the most fundamental area to train our new farmers in, and it’s connected to the tools and methods you employ on the farm. As we’ve learned, certain tools and systems can not only support soil health and environmental vibrancy, but can also save you time and money, like the paper pot transplanter saving you dozens of hours planting onions. When developing a viable farm business, this is key.
Taking all of this into account, it was quite serendipitous that in the Spring of 2021, two fantastic candidates - Cassie and Jake - had just graduated from Colby-Sawyer College and were thinking about trying farming as a career. They were ready to absorb all they could about running a small farm, and we were ready to teach them all that we’ve learned so far.
Cassie and Jake just starting out with the first ever KFH Farmer Apprentice Program!
Together, we were about to embark on something new, exciting, and, as far as we were all concerned, completely necessary: the first ever KFH Farmer Apprentice Program.
YOU can support this important work with a donation to our nonprofit today! Help your gift go the extra mile - make it monthly!
Check out Part III of this series: A spotlight on Cassie and Jake and the KFH Farmer Apprentice Program!