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CSA Farm experiments to minimize inputs, mechanization and soil disturbance in their market-scale potato growing operation. By Bob Tuori, Ryan Maher, and Michael Salzl A major concern on our highly intensive organic farm is how to grow potatoes on a scale that supplies our diverse and abundant CSA shares yet in way that minimizes labor…
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Pass the time waiting for winter to turn to spring with new educational videos. Recordings from the 2022 Empire State Producers Expo are now available on the Cornell School of Integrative Plant Science’s YouTube page. The annual conference is organized by the New York State Vegetable Growers Association and Cornell Cooperative Extension and, due to…
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Are you curious about how tarps work? Want to learn from successful practices as well as the challenges and shortcomings? Our Reduced Tillage project is happy to share a new publication, “Tarping in the Northeast: A Guide for Small Farms,” that provides comprehensive information on the emerging practice of tarping — applying reusable tarps to…
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The Empire State Producers EXPO has announced plans for a virtual conference with educational sessions offered from February 21 to March 11, 2022. The in-person event, initially scheduled for January 11-13 at the Syracuse OnCenter, was postponed due to the spike in COVID cases. Sessions are now being offered virtually, spread out over a three-week…
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The Cornell Small Farms Program continues to document our on-farm trials on tarping practices for organic vegetables. What’s happening under tarps? How are weeds and soils changing? How do they fit in a vegetable rotation with less tillage? And how do we handle and troubleshoot the shortcomings? The current work of the Cornell Small Farms…
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Tarps are clearly a multifunctional tool for small farmers and are being sized, sourced, and applied to fit the farm. How much can we ask of tarps, how are they changing our tillage and weeds, and how do we handle and troubleshoot the shortcomings? We hosted a series of lunchtime webinars in partnership with the…
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Join us on January 12, 2021, to hear farmer experiences and research on cover cropping and no-till practices from around the region during the Soil Health Sessions at the virtual 2021 Empire State Producers Expo. Our own Ryan Maher, the coordinator of our Reduced Tillage project, organized these sessions on soil health, cover crops and…
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The Cornell Small Farms Program is happy to share the news that Brian Caldwell has been appointed to the USDA National Organic Standards Board, beginning a five-year term in 2021. Brian was a major contributor to the Reduced Tillage project for five years before retiring from Cornell in the spring of 2019. Brian brought decades…
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One farmer shared with us in early summer: “If we didn’t have a tarp down before our mixed greens this spring, we would have been in big trouble with our CSA. In our untarped plantings, we lost the crop to weeds. We’re not going to do that again.” Tarps are becoming a versatile tool to…
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Reduced tillage practices and weed suppression management are common goals of small-scale organic farmers. A lesser-known method is deep-composting, which was presented by the Reduced Tillage Project and a team of Cornell University researchers at the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) Winter Conference as a solution to weed suppression in a reduced tillage system. …
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