I usually pass up attending agricultural conferences in order to attend to the endless tasks on the farm. While I feel guilty for not reseeding the arugula this past weekend, I chose to attend the 4^th Homegrown Food Retreat. I must admit, one of the main reasons I took in the conference was to enjoy the salad provided by Adobe House Farm (25 pounds worth!) Though I didn’t receive the standing ovation I had envisioned for the salad, one speaker in particular made up for the lost time on the farm. Janine Fitzgerald (sociology professor and life-long farmer) was inspiring, informative, funny, and energetic. She spoke of peak oil production and its relation to agriculture. Most energy analysts agree that we are currently at peak oil and even the most optimistic estimations are that peak production will occur by 2020. Whether or not we are at peak oil now does not seem important when considering the fact that our current form of agriculture (and way of life) depends on a finite resource. Deny it all we want, at some point we will run out of oil in the near future (estimations are between 150-300 years). Some predictions involve the end of globalization and widespread anarchy. My husband and I laugh that if oil shortages occur during our lifetime we may need to figure out a way to defend the farm!

I choose to believe in an optimistic post peak oil society and that we will get there with good science, foresight, and preparation. Ideally, increasing scarcity and rising prices will promote renewable energy long before we run out of oil. This begs the question: how will we be feeding ourselves in the future considering about 10% of the energy in the United States is used by the food industry? My vision includes many more farmers doing things we do at Adobe House Farm, like heating greenhouses with solar panels, composting instead of applying synthetic fertilizers, and using our bodies instead of tractors (who needs the gym?).The biggest guzzler of fossil fuels in modern agriculture is the Haber-Bosch process that produces synthetic fertilizers. A little known fact is that about half the protein within humans is made of nitrogen that was fixed by this process (the other half was fixed the old fashioned way by bacteria). It is said that synthetic fertilizers feed our planets growing population and prevent mass starvation. Synthetic fertilizers are also responsible for eutrophication or “dead zones” in our waterways and contamination of our drinking water. As Ben Harper sings, “I believe in a better way.” I believe we are smart. I also believe that though science is the reason we are in this situation, it is also the only thing that will get us out of it.

Janine Fitzgerald closed her speech with Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” I felt like my life had come full circle; it was the poem that I chose to read at my high school graduation. Check the poem out if you’ve never read it. Wendell Berry also said, “only when you have an understanding of limits is elegance possible and elegance is limitlessly interesting.” That is a future I want to believe in.

It’s not easy for me to sit down and write a blog. When I’m on the farm, I’m inspired to write about everything I’m doing and thinking. But between working the farm and loving my 2-year-old daughter I always leave blogging to the evenings, when all I want to do is curl up on the couch (or in bed). The seemingly brilliant ideas I had that day at the farm are long gone. But tonight I moved the couch by a roaring fire and poured myself some wine. After dealing with a sick fussy child all evening it seems so civilized!

Many have said that Adobe House Farm’s success growing this winter may just be due to a milder year. “Have you tried growing through a REAL winter?” the skeptics ask. I would argue that this winter may be tougher than snowier winters. The snow is an excellent insulator and seals the edges of our plastic tunnels. Without it, the cold air finds its way through the gaps between the plastic and soil. It’s very exciting to me that we have lettuce, spinach, arugula, dill and cilantro for sale right now in the middle of January even without snow through most of the winter. In fact, this year we planted spinach outside at the beginning of September, covered it with low hoops and 6 ml plastic by October, and we are still harvesting from those beds today!

I have spent many hours crawling through those 3 foot high tunnels harvesting spinach leaf by leaf. With growing space so limited in the winter, I choose to harvest it this way so that next week I can harvest again (rather than cutting the entire spinach plant back, tilling the bed under, and then waiting 2 months to harvest again). Sometimes I think about the life I left behind in academia and wonder how I could be satisfied picking spinach leaves one by one, day after day. I think the challenge of small scale, diverse, organic farming is part of the reason. I still haven’t figured out how to do anything to perfection, and probably never will. While picking spinach, I may ponder over the optimum seeding density given the soil and our growing and harvesting strategies (which are constantly changing too). Should I change the seeding density this summer when the conditions are different and beds are harvested all at once rather than leaf by leaf? Probably.

There are millions of questions like this on a farm and farmers are natural scientists conducting experiments all the time, often not deliberately. Maybe the tomato leaves are curling here and not there; was it that extra bit of compost that was dumped there? Or maybe the mulch is thicker and as a result the soil moisture is more constant here. When plants are doing well, we try to remember what we did so we can do it again. When plants aren’t doing well, we note the symptoms and think back on what might have gone wrong. Either way, we’re there every day observing the changes good or bad and making adjustments the next time. Farming is a game and I enjoy figuring out how to be successful at it. And, you get to start fresh bed after bed, year after year.