Environmentally Positive Farming
Easy Bean Farm is a 120 acre spread in the Chippewa River Valley near Montevideo. In addition to the 46 acres of grass pasture for rotational grazing of beef cattle, there are 12 acres of mixed and certified organic vegetables.
Easy Bean markets most of its vegetable to 109 community supported agriculture (CSA) subscribers in western Minnesota and the Twin Cities. The farm also sells to some stores in the Twin Cities. The wholesale markets have been developed in cooperation with other western Minnesota farmers, including another vegetable farmer and a flower farmer. In time, it is hoped, the western Minnesota market will be strengthened to the point where Twin Cities markets can be dropped.
Mike Jacobs, who comes from the stony lands of Vermont, says Easy Bean was organic before it actually existed. “We started being committed to organics and then went into farming,” says Mike, who started Easy Bean in 1997. “I studied biochemistry in college and saw agriculture as something that could actually have a positive effect on the environment. Some industries are inherently negative but farming doesn’t have to be.”
Mike plants annual cover crops, such as oats and field peas, in beds between his melons and squash. Vetch and rye are Mike’s principle cover crop workhorses. “In the fall, I plant everything into fall cover crops except things that have late crops on them,” Mike says. “My cover crops are typically a rye and vetch mix but if something is going to have an early crop, I’ll leave an annual cover in there. This year, the fall was too dry to get the cover crops started well so they may not have overwintered.”
Mike follows the same tillage pattern each year. That keeps his tractor wheels out of his 120’ long by 6’ wide non-raised beds. Because market garden crops are heavily imbalanced towards three or four plant families, he’s found crop rotations within the garden to be difficult. He tries to plant families all in blocs. Solanaceous crops – tomatoes, pepper, eggplant, potatoes – for instance, are planted in one bed or beds immediately adjacent to each other.
“I try and avoid having crops from the same family in the same spot over a three year period. No family would follow itself on the same bed but with the sheer number of crops and with such an imbalance toward the solanaceous family of crops it’s just a huge challenge,” he says. “I’ve done a couple of different rotations and I haven’t found one that I exactly like. I have crops broken up into heavy feeders, light feeders, and medium feeders. I always try and follow heavy feeders with a legume cover crop and a legume field crop if I can.”
Innovative Pest Management
Like most vegetable farmers, Mike struggles with the Colorado potato beetle. It is, however, a somewhat new pest at Easy Bean. “We hadn’t seen any Colorado potato beetles before fall of 2000,” Mike says. Mike hand picks egg clusters, larva, and adults. He also uses Bt applied with a hand sprayer. “What I try to do is catch the first generation of insects,” he says. “If you don’t get that first generation, you really struggle uphill. Some people say to only use Bt when there’s a big problem. I think it’s better to head it off at the pass.”
“In the larval stage sometimes you can shake them (from the plants) pretty good and then do a really fast pass with a hand held sprayer,” Mike continued. “They’re not that good a holding on. That gave 
a pretty decent control. But then if the weather is just right for them another hatching will come through pretty quick.”
“The second generation can really devastate a crop,” he says. “I end up monitoring really closely for the first generation. This year we’re going to set out some more yellow sticky tabs. I had been just walking the fields to monitor the plants but these might allow us to find out earlier in the season if we have a problem.” Mike thinks there may be a temperature relationship that causes the first beetle hatch.
“I transplant all my cucurbits and I think that helps protect them during the seedling period when they are vulnerable to cucumber beetles,” says Mike, who grows all of his own transplants in greenhouses.
“I’ve had disagreements with the organic certifiers. They think you shouldn’t spray until you have a problem but my approach is to spray a little bit as a preventative measure and I tell them it’s better to spray a little now than a huge amount when a serious problem develops.”
Water and fertility can give a transplant the reserves to protect itself from beetles. “I use a water wheel transplanter and when I set them out, I drench all my transplants with a kelp based organic fertilizer to give them a boost,” Mike says.
There is no single solution to a problem in organic production, according to Mike. The results of some new practice are difficult to measure and they vary from season to season. His experiment with red plastic mulch under tomatoes, combined with buckwheat in the aisles, was one such experiment. The plastic sort of worked. The buckwheat, which was intended to attract predatory insects, may or may not have worked. Mike thinks the buckwheat could have created a microclimate favorable to blight.
The plastic did hold back the weeds and cut weeding time down. It doesn’t appear to have cut back on the incidence of blight which Mike hoped would happen. Mike will not use the copper based fungicide that is approved for organic blight control. “There were too many precautions on the label,” he says. “We do a pretty serious pruning regimen to increase airflow among the plants and to concentrate growth into the fruiting part of the plant,” Mike says.
Another weed control strategy Mike is experimenting with is flame weeding. “We used flame cultivating on carrots this year. That definitely shows good prospects,” Mike says. Mike is also using his cover crops for weed control. Allelopathy, from the rye plough down, inhibits early weed germination. “We have a huge seed bank and we’re working with cover crops more and more to try and crowd out the weeds,” he says. “Our biggest weed problem is Canadian thistle but we’re getting them under control by pulling them by hand when they are young. With the annuals we just want to keep working down that seed bank.”
Whether he’s dealing with weeds, insects, or disease pests, Mike sees his garden as a whole rather than just focusing on the specific pest of concern. As a result, it’s hard to measure the results of a specific pest control strategy or attempted control. He views his efforts to control pests as sort of a guerilla campaign against an adversary that will always be there. “You’re just going to have pests,” he says.
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This article is one in a series which can be found in “A Bountiful Harvest: Minnesota Fruit and Vegetable Growers Manage Pests,” Sept., 2002. The publication was produced by the Minnesota Department of
Agriculture (MDA) with funding provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 5, Chicago, IL. For the entire article please go to the MDA’s web site at:
http://www.mda.state.mn.us/ipm/fandvipm.html