Organic Farm Production Pointers

The Family Garden organic farm in Bell, FL, recently hosted an organic production workshop to offer tips and advice for managing organic vegetable production systems. American Vegetable Grower caught up with the farm’s owner, Jordan Brown, prior to the event to get some of his thoughts on topics like crop rotation, pest management, and fertilization. Here’s what he had to say:

Q1: How do you address crop rotation? What are some of the challenges and solutions you’ve found?

Brown: I would like to start off by saying that Florida is the hardest place that I know of in the U.S. to grow organic vegetables. I’ve seen a couple people who have farmed or gardened in other parts of the country organically come here and just fail. We have challenges that other people don’t have. We’re in north Florida, so our harvest season is from October until early July, so it’s almost year-round.

As far as crop rotation, I try to pay attention to it quite a bit. Our farm is about 22 to 23 acres of vegetables and about an acre and a half of fruit trees, so crop rotation is pretty important because the disease and pest populations can build up really fast. I try to keep everything in the [crop] family, and I have all the fields delineated with a map on paper so that we can keep families together. We’ve got a lot of problems with tomatoes. It’s one of the harder things to do here. I planted tomatoes in a field where I never planted tomatoes before, and no one else before me, and they still got the same diseases that they did everywhere else.

Q2: What are your practices when it comes to cover crops?

Brown: In the summertime, I use cover crops whenever we have a vacant field. The organic matter helps suppress the weeds. In the winter, sometimes we use oats for a shorter period, but if it’s going to be sitting all winter, we’ll use rye.

Q3: What do you do to maintain the fertility of your soil?

Brown: We spend a lot of money on organic fertilizers. That’s the simplest thing. The cover crops help to put organic matter back into the soil, too. We’ve got different soil types — everything between sand and clay right there in a really small area, and sand and clay have to be managed differently. But as far as nutrients, we buy chicken litter. We have to time it because it has to be down 120 days before harvest. That’s hard this time of year, because we can put it down and wait that period of time, and ammonia can run off. Or, if we get a tropical storm, it leaches out, so that’s more difficult this time of year. We use the chicken litter more in the winter because it has less opportunity to leach.

Here, because of the heat and humidity, things mineralize a lot faster. The cost of the fertilizer is about $1,000 an acre — a lot more than conventional, but if you try to be cheap with the fertilizers, you’ll have problems.

Q4: How do you handle pest and disease management?

Brown: The biggest thing is timing what you plant and having an understanding of the area and what pests come at what time. When I first got here, I just planted tomatoes in the fall because in Florida we can, and we got whiteflies really bad. So we have to work around that. Right now I have a little patch of tomatoes, but it’s a new virus-resistant type, so knowing what to plant and having a good disease resistance package, that’s more important for organic growers than anything else. The best approach, I think, is planting the right thing at the right time. Not spraying all the time is a big help, too, having cover crops, and having places for the good bugs to hide out is a good thing.

Q5: Have you had any challenges when it comes to organic certification?

Brown: Not really. You just have to keep fairly simple records. It’s not super in-depth. Other than that, you just fill out the papers, and if there are any problems, just put in the application and talk to [the certifying agency]. You might have to get someone on the phone, but it’s not as bad, I don’t think, as I’ve heard people making it out to be.

Q6: Do you have any advice for growers who are not currently growing organically but are considering it?

Brown: I think if there’s any way they could spend time either working for or learning directly from somebody who’s doing it in their area, that would be the best benefit, because just jumping into it you can lose all your money. For vegetable growers, if you’re just trying to substitute this fertilizer for organic fertilizer, or this spray for that spray, it usually doesn’t work out.