Borough Mayor Luke Hopkins gave the opening remarks and welcome, followed by the featured guest speaker, Chris Blanchard of Rock Spring Farm. Blanchard gave some very practical business advice, drawing on his success and failures when he was beginning his own farm in Iowa. The modern farmer, he said, must be entrepeneur, executive, manager, and technician all rolled into one. He provide several operational insights into the business of running a farm. For example, he described how he tries to avoid having more than 15% of his income dependent on any single product or account, and showed what he called a Segment-Location grid, a way of viewing one's marketing distribution. Below is a chart based on his example:
This way, Blanchard explained, the farmer doesn't put all his eggs in one basket, so to speak. He also advised that the business should be set up so there are systems that drive the business, rather than people to drive the business. The latter requires far more work and time from the farmer; the former he called conducive to the "have-a-life schedule".
Next, Doug Warner of the Alaska Division of Agriculture gave a presentation on the Alaska Organic Certification Program and labeling requirements for eggs in the shell. (USDA organic certification requires an independent party's inspection; the state of Washington cooperates with Alaska to provide inspections, but any certified group may inspect a farm; for example, Oregon Tilth is an authorized organization for organic certification of farms.)
The next presentation was made by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Farm Service Agency, on EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) financial assistance.
Alberto Pantoja of the Agricultural Research Service gave an update on insects both beneficial (such as bumblebees) and malign (such as leafhoppers) associated with agricultural production in Alaska.
Charlotte Jewell of Jewell Gardens gave an overview of how she set up agricultural tours with the cruise line industry in Skagway. Jewell Gardens occupies about 5.8 acres and features cooking tours, glassblowing tours, and garden tours, and operates dining rooms, a G-scale model railroad, and a CSA that will serve 25 members in summer 2010. The cruise lines, she said, are looking for entertainment for their passengers. She advised that if a farmer wishes to market to tourists, a good resource is the local visitors' & convention bureau.
Paul Apfelbeck was the next speaker, and gave an animated talk on the agricultural challenges and developments in the village of Galena, population approximately 600. Galena has a community garden and an agricultural fair, and because it is off the road system, the people there must find alternative ways to build things from material already there (or they must pay to have it shipped in, which can render many items unaffordable: Apfelbeck gave the example of a $1,200 greenhouse kit that would have cost him better than $3,000 to ship in). He described pre-warming his garden soil by sprinkling manure on the snow in the spring (he tested ash, manure, and soil, but manure worked best), using homemade coldframes on raised beds filled with "lasagne soil"—layers of soil, fish scraps, and compost—with a nod to Heidi Rader, a graduate of SNRAS, and filling clear plastic bottles (collected for him by local kids) with water to act as a thermal mass in his home-built greenhouse.
Mike Emers of Rosie Creek Farm described experiments in 2008 and 2009 on weed supression he undertook with a SARE grant on his 4-acre certified organic farm (his CSA feeds 100 families and he estimated that, with sales to farmers' markets and local restaurants, the farm probably feeds another 25 to 50 families each summer). Emers tested bare-fallow and partial-season cover cropping methods to control chickweed, shepherd's purse, and lambsquarter infestations, determining that barley as a cover crop was more effective than field peas (or that the field peas should have been sown at twice the recommended density), but that bare-fallow tilling for the full season was more effective than cover cropping for part of the season. His main concern was for the health and fertility of the soil with the bare-fallow method, and he did discover that some soil fertility was lost. However, the full soil tests were not yet back from the lab, so this data was not yet available.
The conference took a lunch break, and then reconvened. (More in the next post.)
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