Northeast Organic Farming Association Organic Practices Handbook Series

The project was created to fill the need for information about up-to-date practices in organic farming and to help the organic farming movement “bootstrap” itself further in the Northeast. Our region lacks high levels of farmer-to-son/daughter knowledge transition, intense tax, real estate and urbanization pressures bear down on farmers—and best practices have changed, in any case. For all these reasons, the Manuals Project Committee believed clearly-presented, best cultural (and business) practices and principles would benefit the adaptation, growth and health of farmers and farming in our region.

The project grew out of an earlier endeavor of the Massachusetts chapter, the beginning of a smaller series of organic practices manuals. Two were published—one on weeds and another on soil fertility—when the Interstate Council took over the series.
This later phase brought together a team of 31 farmers and scientists with skills in writing, art, and manuscript review and editing and produced eight new Handbooks in eight additional aspects of farming. Each book runs approximately 100 pages and includes illustrations and informational graphics, resources and references and a complete table of contents. The books are sold at conferences and, both retail and wholesale, through the NOFA websites.

Members of the project team came from seven Northeast states, from Pennsylvania to Maine. They included the farmers and scientists who are some of the key players in the development of organic farming in the region.

The eight titles produced, and their authors:

Vegetable Crop Health
Helping Nature Control Diseases and Pests Organically
Brian Caldwell

Whole Farm Planning
Ecological Imperatives, Personal Values and Economics
Elizabeth Henderson and Karl North

Soil Resiliency and Health
Crop Rotation and Cover Cropping on the Organic Farm
Seth Kroek

Compost, Vermicompost & Compost Tea
Feeding the Soil on the Organic Farm
Grace Gershuny

The Organic Farmer’s Guide to
Marketing and Community Relations
Rebecca Bosch

Humane and Healthy Poultry Production
A Manual for Organic Growers
Karm Glos

Organic Dairy Production
Sarah Flack

The Wisdom of Plant Heritage:
Organic Seed Production and Saving
Bryan Connelly

Introduction:

Through the focus and quality of the information in the books, the project’s designers desired to offer farmers best cultural practices and help with the planning and business side of farming. We also realized that many of the Handbooks would be well suited to the needs of experienced gardeners and of those in ancillary organic enterprises.

The information in the eight volumes is of course vast. Here are four brief excerpts to get a sense of what some of it is and how it’s presented:

In the early part of Whole Farm Planning, Liz Henderson and Karl North lay out the “four fundamental ecosystem processes” that function on a farm: 1) The water cycle, 2) The mineral cycle, 3) The dynamics of the biological community, 4) The energy flow. “These processes,” they write, “are all at work on your farm either for or against each other, depending on how you manage them. The weakest one will be the limiting factor that determines the health of the whole ecosystem. We discuss them separately here only to help you learn them as windows into the system.”

In Organic Farmer’s Guide to Marketing and Community Relations, Rebecca Bosch says about effective communications with staff and customers: “To some or extent we all fall into the trap of assuming that ‘everyone is like me’; it is easy to develop an image of a ‘right’ or ‘normal’ way of being as we rely on our own experience to understand others and their motivations. The hard truth is that people really are different; wearing different filters of experience and armed with different tools of assessment. We do not see the world as the world is, but as we are—while believing we see things objectively. Embracing the limits of our own views requires modesty. It is the radical first step in successful communication and conflict negotiation [with employees and customers].”

In writing about properly fermented compost tea in Compost, Vermicompost and Compost Tea, Grace Gershuny explains: “The concept behind compost tea and other beneficial microbial cultures is to provide a high level of these organisms directly to plant leaves and roots, where they will colonize and not allow pathogens to gain a foothold. [Dr. Elaine] Ingham states that, when the tea has a sufficient concentration of diverse microbial species, ‘the disease organisms have no place to grow, no way to infect the plant, no foods to eat because the beneficials already ate them before the disease had a chance, and you build soil structure so that anaerobic conditions do not occur in your soils’.”

Finally, in Organic Dairy Production, Sarah Flack writes on the matter of feeding cows forage: “Forages offer the cheapest form of nutrients available to feed dairy cows. In organic dairy production, generally the most expensive purchased concentrate is protein (often in the form of soybeans or another legume grain). Energy concentrates tend to be less expensive (corn, barley). Thus it pays to grow high-protein forages, but with attention to the quality, not just the quantity, of protein in the plants. Too much protein in the ration, particularly highly soluble or ‘nonprotein nitrogen,’ can be a problem, particularly in forages grown in soils fertilized with liquid manure or other soluble fertilizers. Low-quality forages due to late harvest or poor weather conditions are another potential feed quality problem, resulting in a high-fiber forage that is not easily digested.”

Besides improving farming practices, getting these Handbooks into circulation would, the Project Committee thought, strengthen the spirit, connectedness and sense of identity of the region’s organic farming community. That effect began even during the work on the project. The Manuals Project Committee reached out to farmers in seven states and drew reviewers from eight. In most cases the authors in their research, besides using printed resources, tapped other farmers—further extending the network and the project’s communal effect. The project certainly strengthened connections between the participants as familiarity grew.