MICRO ECO BUSINESS: Besides the organic apple-a-day, The Center for the Micro Eco-Farming Movement is working on a report on quality and affordable health care insurance for small business farms — urban to rural.
We welcome legitimate information from real farmers or small business owners. We don’t welcome ads for insurance disguised as articles by real farmers or real small business owners.
TRENDS: Micro farming can look towards trends that will effect other small businesses to guide their way.
This quote is from the Trends Research Institute, which accurately predicted many events, including the current growth in micro farming:
“Craftspeople and small manufacturers that can establish a reputation for quality products will be able to build thriving micro-brands, while marketers who can amalgamate micro-cooperatives into true local commerce organizations will carve a solid niche for themselves……”
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO: Those involved in small-scale dairy farming may have known all along that cows in natural conditions without the stress of fearing the humans who regularly handle them produce better milk yields. The Ig Nobel prizes are awards given to legitimate scientific research that can’t help but make one laugh at first, but then make one really think after the laugh is over.
Such an award was given to scientists at Newcastle University in a study that involved 516 dairy farmers in the UK which found that cows with owners who named them yielded more pints of milk. Some dairy farmers who were part of the study were noted as agreeing with the findings, with comments such as that when cows are treated as individuals, their milk production increases. It can’t help make one laugh, but the owners of family cows and small scale dairy farming of long ago must have been following some smart instincts when they went out to milk Petunia, Daisy, Bossy, Maribelle, Buttercup, and Ruby. Small dairy farming has many advantages over mega dairy factories, but here’s yet another one. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO: Many of those involved in small scale farming and micro farming utilize various organic mulches. If you own a farm dog or cat, you may want to avoid cocoa mulch, an otherwise excellent mulch widely available.
It’s made from the shell waste caused by the extraction of chocolate from cocoa beans. It contains the same lethal pet ingredient called ‘theobromine’ that chocolate contains, which can cause sometimes deadly cardiac complications, including a racing or irregular heartbeat. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MARKETING: Here’s a link to receive a free brochure on the problems of GMOs, courtesy of the Organic Trade Association, for small scale farmers and micro farmers who would like to hand them out to their customers.
The brochure can be put in with CSA shares, given out at roadside stands and farmers’ markets, and even linked to online from your farm’s website. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MICRO ECO BUSINESS: Farming grants are now being offered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). They have several categories which may apply to some involved in small scale farming.
Below are just a couple of past farming grants NRCS has funded, to give you an idea. Their site (link above) gives all the information you need as well as more examples of past farming grants. Be sure to also see our article at the Center for the Micro Eco-Farming Movement on farm loans and grants for more farming grant opportunities. – www.MicroEcoFarming.com
From NRCS:
California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance (CA)
$590,048
Driving Conservation Innovation and Sustainable Winegrowing Adoption through Performance Benchmarking, Tools and Resources
The purpose is to develop, implement and evaluate a comprehensive system of industry-wide performance benchmarking, tools and resources in order to drive conservation innovation and speed adoption of sustainable practices in California wine community and other wine region and agricultural sectors to address national natural resource concerns such as water, atmospheric and soil resources, and wildlife habitat.
Pollinator Partnership (CA)
$183,953.96
Evaluating and communicating the ecological and economic costs and benefits of incorporating pollinator and other beneficial insect floral resource strips into vegetable production system
The purpose of this project is to compare the costs of installing and maintaining single-species annual and multi-species perennial floral strips in vegetable production systems with the ecological and economic benefits gained, and to translate this information for use by vegetable growers in diverse agricultural regions.
MARKETING: As small-scale farming and micro eco-farming – urban to rural – continue to grow across the country, so must local food distribution systems. The local small farming and backyard farming communities need places to sell their food and fiber. Sometimes the best methods come from very good community models already in process. Here’s a link to the Agriculture Resources Committee (ARC) of the beautiful San Juan Islands of Washington State. They work to preserve farmland and create and support events that provide marketing outlets for their local farmers, including a springtime “Islands Farm and Feast.” Their model may have ideas and inspiration other communities can gain from. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
VALUE ADDED: The micro farm and small scale farming community – from blueberry u-picks to lavender farms, are integrating farm art as a value-added product. Some are selling farm images or farm logos on t-shirts, caps and totes. Others are actually turning walls of their farm markets or barns into mini rural art galleries with quality wall hangings for sale. You can join in if you own a camera.
Rural and nature scenes as art are often highly desirable products, so don’t take your veggie gardens, fields and blossoming fruit trees for granted. If you have good high resolution photos of your micro farming scenes, services such as Personal Canvas Art, one of our affiliates, that can turn your photography into quality canvas “oil paintings” to hang on the walls of your farm store or farmers’ market to beautify it, along with a price tag for customers who may want to order a copy. You mark up the price beyond your cost to earn a profit and don’t order a duplicate until you have payment from a customer. You can also offer farm art on your website.
Be sure to put a dated copyright notice on each piece of art sold. Cafepress.com is another popular service for uploading your images to turn them into posters, t-shirts and other products. You can even sell those products directly via your own Cafepress store online, and they handle the financial transactions. – www.MicroEcoFarming.com
SEED/ANIMAL SOURCES: Here’s an intriguing herb garden seed source herb farmers may be interested in. The Center for the Micro Eco-Farming Movement is compiling a major database of seed and plant sources that may be of interest to the eco-friendly and unique niche farming many readers are involved in. As sources come in, we’ll publish some of them in this e-magazine until we have the entire listing complete. At that point, we’ll publish a permanent page at the main site for the Center. We have no business affiliation with these companies. Recommendations are welcome not only for herb garden seed, but seeds and plants for open-pollinated vegetables, fruits, greenhouse crops, orchards and vineyards.
Peter Borchard Companion Plants
7247 N. Coolville Ridge Road
Athens, Ohio 45701
(740)592-4643
(740)593-3092 (fax)
Sell over 600 varieties of common and exotic herb plants and seeds
using environmentally friendly methods. Ship plants nation-wide;
seeds world-wide.
MICRO-FARMING HOW-TO: Native orchard mason bees are an increasingly popular alternative or addition to honeybees for pollination, especially for early spring blossoming crops. They generally need temperate winters to complete their life cycles, but winter temperatures below 30 F. can kill them if their winter nests aren’t protected enough from the elements. They don’t make honey or wax. They usually come out earlier in spring than honeybees, being the most active from March through June, after which the bees complete their egg laying duties and die, so other pollinators need to take over.
Attract them in March and April with mason bee homes near areas you need pollination. Though solitary, mason bees like their homes to be in groups (aka apartment mason bee homes).
They seek multiple long thin tubes with mud nearby to make nesting plugs inside the tubes (photo of the mason bee nesting box here links to our Gardens Alive affiliate where it can be purchased). Homemade mason bee homes can be made by filling a clean recycled coffee can with plastic straws (gluing them to the bottom) and mounting it horizontally. Or, drill untreated softwood 4×6” blocks with ¼-inch to 3/8-inch diameter holes close to four to six inches deep without drilling all the way through. ATTRA reports that Brain Griffin, an experienced mason beekeeper, drills the holes on ¾ inch centers and protects the finished blocks with cedar shingle overhangs. Each year they’re cleaned with a bleach solution. The mason bee homes should be placed where they get at least morning sunshine. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO: Here’s a video on an interesting tool getting good reviews for helping you know if you have full sun, partial sun, partial shade, or shade. (The Center for the Micro Eco-Farming Movement has no business affiliation). This knowledge is very important when choosing the crops and location of crops, especially for backyard farming, micro farming and even some small scale farming operations that grow a diversification of different crops in various micro spaces.
MARKETING: Using fliers for farm marketing? Perhaps you’re announcing the opening of your roadside stand or soliciting customers for an on-farm festival or u-pick season. Here are some tips to help your fliers benefit your farm marketing campaign:
People in general don’t stop to read lengthy text-book looking fliers with lots of small type or clutter. Put the main benefit to the passersby in clean bold print: “Local Blueberry U-Pick Now Open.”
Use light paper with dark print. Professionally made fliers and posters can sometimes get away with white print on dark paper, but avoid this unless a professional is doing it for you.
In smaller but clean, easy-to-read print or graphics, make sure the five Ws and one H are included once people stop to read. If any of the following information is already in your main headline, no need to repeat: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. Who are the farm owners & their contact information, What is the farm’s name and what crops or experiences are being offered that’s not already in your headline (type of blueberries, pony rides or free blueberry recipes for u-pickers), When is the u-pick open, Where is it located, Why would customers want to participate, and How do customers participate (make appointment a day in advance, just drop by during open hours with your own containers… thanks for leaving pets at home…)
Avoid cluttering the flier with lots of little bits of graphics or fluff. A single attractive largish graphic can do the trick, such as a luscious photo of your blueberries.
Sketch out a rough design then put it up on a wall and stand back to see if you can read the main headline from six feet away, and if it looks balanced and neat.
Have another person with fresh eyes look over the final flier for typos before printing copies. Farm marketing with fliers is effective when done intelligently. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
AGRITOURISM — It’s not just young and newbie small-scale farmers who embrace agritourism to help their farm’s profit. The long-time small-scale farming community is also restoring its rural livelihood with agritourism as well.
Here’s Farmer Bob Ricci in his own words about his journey back to full time farming:
My great-grandpa homesteaded our farm in 1888. My father planted a small strip of sweet corn for me in 1982. I was nine years old. I sold the corn on the side of our country road much like that of a lemonade stand. This little business of mine slowly grew over the years until the time came for me to go off to college in Pullman. I drove home every weekend during the fall (with the exception of home Cougar football games!) After graduation, I returned home and expanded to wholesaling my corn to Safeway. This was a great deal of work on top of running the dairy with my dad. We were a dairy farm until 2001 when my father made the tough decision to sell our cows. This turned into a blessing in disguise.
I added a pumpkin patch and a corn maze that year. The biggest addition that year was turning our calf barn built in 1898 into a country store. This was a fantastic improvement over our little corn stand we used for the previous 15 years. However without the dairy, I had to get a full time job off the farm to support my new family. I figured I would only have to work both jobs for maybe 2-3 years until our farm operation could support us. A funny thing happened during those next few years, my wife Sarah and I kept having one daughter after another. Each time we had a new baby girl, I would tell my employer that they had me for at least another year. I dare not leave a good job with full medical and dental! Well nearly 8 years and 5 daughters later, I finally was able to leave my job April 30, 2009.
This was my first season completely focused on the farm, and what a difference it made. We increased our revenue by 35% even with a soggy October. I could not have done it without the blessing of the Good Lord, the help of my amazing wife Sarah and my parents and our dedicated group of volunteers. The Snohomish Festival of Pumpkins and the NABC (Northwest Agriculture Business Center) have also played a major part in this story as well. I am absolutely living my dream.
Our goals for this next year include traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania for the North American Farm Direct Marketing Association conference to get new ideas for our farm. We would like to add more attractions to entertain our visitors.
TRENDS: The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association reported that organic beef sales had a steady rise and peaked in the 2008 recession, and have again rebounded, hitting levels at 14 percent higher at mid-2009 than they were a couple of years previous. One farmer noted that people buying her grass-fed beef weren’t “elite,” nor buying it because of health scares. Rather, it appears many buyers were middle and lower class, and just wanted to be ecologically responsible.
For the small scale farming community following the threat to enforce expensive control devises on every farm animal in the country (making it easier for farm factories and more difficult for micro farming and small scale farming), that idea has been successfully opposed and has been suspended.
As consumers get more sophisticated in regenerative small scale farming, they’re understanding the differences between free-range, grass-fed, and grass-finished, and appreciating the latter over the other two choices. Expect this trend to grow.
For those interested in grass-fed cattle for beef or dairy on small scale farming or micro farming plots, our article on mini cattle breeds at the Center for the Micro Eco-Farming Movement under the animal profile library may be of interest.
— www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO – TRENDS – VALUE-ADDED: A micro-sized woodlot can be a valuable business asset for the eco-micro farm and those involved in small scale farming. ATTRA – National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, PO Box 3657, Fayetteville, AR 72702; Phone: 1-800-346-9140 — FAX: (479) 442-9842, http://attra.ncat.org offers a publication entitled “Woodlot Enterprises.”
“Backyard Woods,” from the Arbor Day Foundation is a small guide showing how to plant a safe, earth enhancing forest for owners of one to 10 acres. The Foundation states that 49 percent of the earth’s forests are in private ownership, and those that own backyard sized woods make up 60 percent of all USA private forest landowners. Smaller parcels of wooded areas individually and collectively make a big impact on the planet.
Then learn to coppice: Coppicing is an old European method of harvesting firewood without killing the trees, and while maintaining the health of a diversified forest. Various information is appearing on the web, you’ll have to search in your area.
Backyard firepits are extremely popular, but so is “going green” and saving trees. A micro farm’s ecologically stewarded woodlot can provide eco-friendly firewood (dense hardwoods properly cured produce the least pollution), along with being a carbon bank and wildlife habitat which helps attract customer loyalty. A woodlot can also be an agritourism draw for birdwatchers or for workshops – teach coppicing workshops – a rare and valuable skill. Plant “U-choose” tree seedlings around the edges as another crop for sale, and if you’re in the USA, plant native mountain mint in the sunnier edges for honeybees. Value-added products such as natural bug repellent and carpet freshener have been made from this plant, and deer don’t care for it. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO: Researchers at West Virginia University created a natural bee source of supplemental food that appears to interrupt the reproduction cycle of varroa bee mites without harming bees if done correctly.
It was fed at the entrance and broodnest. It’s believed the nurse bees feed it to the larvae, and it eventually gets into all the communal food supply and then to the mites. Experiments that seemed to do the best at this writing used 25 drops of wintergreen, spearmint, rosemary or peppermint essential oils mixed into a pint of honey put into a quart jar, then filling the jar with very warm water (too hot evaporates the oils), and mixing well. More experiments are underway.
Problems for the honey bees occurred when the essential oils at the bottom of the feeder which hadn’t completely dispersed were eaten. True essential oils (vs. culinary or fragrance oils, which can kill bees), must be used. Straight essential oils can also kill and are too strong for the bees. Timing is critical and other ways of killing mites directly with essential oils for highly infested hives are being experimented with, and some results were reported. This url leads to further information: http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/varroa/varroa2.htm#Revised. – www.microecofarming.com
Got a mobile app in the works that you’re just dying to demo? Unleash it at this happy hour mingle, hosted by Mobile Monday, MassMobile, and Drinks on Tap, groups that regularly bring together developers in the area.
Registration is free, so sign up on this event page.
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO — SEEDS/ANIMAL SOURCES
For a bee source from your own neighborhood, here’s an old beekeepers’ folk method for attracting a new swarm of local honeybees to the bee skep or hive. Rub lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) on the inside of the skep or hive you’ve built for honeybees right before the summer honeybee swarming time. This has been known to attract your own new colony of local wild honeybees. An essential oil in the herb mimics a bee pheromone that attracts them. Nurseries usually sell this herb in springtime. Grow it in a pot or a spot in the garden until needed to attract the bees.
Contact your local cooperative extension service for a local beekeepers’ association to get information on the precise summertime date bees tend to swarm in your area. Most beekeepers agree that local acclimated bees are the best honeybees you can get. You can also purchase the pheromone from a beekeeping supply company to attract local honeybees. A second choice would be purchasing a queen and colony from a local or regional bee supplier. Third choice would be ordering from a distant bee supplier. Before ordering, read up on the different types of honeybees you can purchase to make an informed choice (we’ll be uploading an article on that topic soon), and purchase from a reputable bee supplier that screens for disease. – www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO: Micro eco-farmers can become sustainable beekeepers far easier and sometimes for free by using an alternative simple and natural beehive called the top-bar beehive (see video below).
The top-bar honeybee hive’s benefits to small scale farming:
– Build this uncomplicated hive with simple tools, free downloadable plans and recycled materials, possibly building a hive for nearly no cost. Free plans available here. These plans come through the online publisher “LuLu.” We have no affiliate with them but to get the free plans you first “register” with them for free. I always like to have a secondary e-mail address for situations like this, such as a free yahoo e-mail address.
– There’s no heavy lifting when beekeepers harvest honey and work with this hive so you can more easily add a small honey crop to your small scale farming crop menu.
– Multiply your crop yields with the pollination that comes with owning your own beehive.
– Experiment safely before going deeper into becoming a beekeeper. This low-cost, low-tech hive for honeybees allows you to experiment with whether you like working with bees and honey without a large loss of time and expense. You can then later add more top-bar hives or attempt to operate conventional hives in a natural way. The conventional hives take more honey from the bees, and therefore produce more honey for humans if you can keep the colony healthy. Here’s an affiliate instant downloadable book for conventional beehives and beekeeping with a natural twist – Beekeeping for Beginners. We especially like it because it discusses watering the bee colony, urban beekeeping, best nectar plants and other tidbits sometimes underused even by long-time apiaries. But it does focus on conventional hives. And one warning: When you go the page, it talks out loud for a few seconds. I’m still not quite used to that happening when I go to a web site.
– Have another environmental attribute to brand your farm. Many people know the honeybee population is suffering. If your small scale farming operation provides a natural and healthy home and habitat for honeybees, let your customers know, even if you’re not selling the honey to them yet.
– Create an agritourism draw. Micro farms often like to use agritourism – attracting customers directly to the farm – as a way to add revenue, attract direct on-farm purchases, and promote the farm’s name. An unusual and accessible “backyard beehive” can be a very attractive agritourism draw, either as a quick tour and discussion on natural beekeeping, or by putting on a longer workshop on building this type of beehive. Here’s an affiliate link to The Barefoot Beekeeper book, a downloadable, illustrated, latest edition written by the guy who offers the free beehive plans mentioned above, which really gets into sustainable beekeeping, top-bar hives, how to harvest honey and care for the colony in a natural way. –www.MicroEcoFarming.com
TRENDS: Please enjoy the video below on a 10-acre micro eco-farm in Jordan – and note how it became self-sustained and in fact continues to make itself more abundant even when left on its own. And for even more on this topic, please see our friend and colleague’s article on Greening the Deserts. We don’t need GMOs to solve our drought issues. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MICRO ECO BUSINESS: Besides the organic apple-a-day, The Center for the Micro Eco-Farming Movement is working on a report on quality and affordable health care insurance for small business farms — urban to rural. 
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO: Micro eco-farmers can become sustainable beekeepers far easier and sometimes for free by using an alternative simple and natural beehive called the top-bar beehive (see video below).