Demonstrating a Quick-Start Process to Help Small Blueberry Farmers Begin Transition To Organic Practices

Demonstrating a Quick-Start Process to Help Small Blueberry Farmers Begin Transition To Organic Practices

Summary

Progress Report, December 16, 2014

Summary

Hands-on work with farmer-partners for this demonstration project helped them gain confidence as they left the relative predictability of conventional blueberry farming and began to utilize organic practices in production of their crops.

Yields during Year 1 of the project remained consistent or improved compared with previous years, while participating farmers saw incomes rise (from $.65/lb to $1/lb) through purchase of their crops for a value-added frozen market created by the project manager team.

Despite less than hoped for involvement by Michigan State Extension scientists and some turnover in participants, results were promising. During April and May, five additional farmers were recruited to participate in the project, thus expanding its reach in the Michigan Fruit Belt.

Other outcomes of the first year included a first ever presentation on going organic for blueberry production at the 2014 Great Lakes Fruit Expo in December in Grand Rapids. The presentation generated inquiries, attention and even a major sale. In addition, Moss Funnel Farm recently became the first farm in Michigan history to submit a Conservation Activity Plan for Organic Transition thru NRCS. It is expected to be approved shortly. In addition, we helped two of these farmers to become MAEAP (Michigan Agricultural Enviromental Assurance Program) verified for their farms and growing systems. This is an excellent first step on the road to certification. Next season, we also intend to strongly encourage our partners to go thru the MAEAP as well as the Michigan Safe Food Assessment, a version of the GAP program for small farmers.

Objectives/Performance Targets

• Incent small farmers to join the project
• Gather base line data
• Establish and implement organic practices with participating farmers
• Involve MSU blueberry crop specialists
• Monitor and tweak processes
• Document results
• Find markets for the yield from these transitional farms
• Use innovative communication methods to tell the story to under-served audiences

Accomplishments/Milestones

In the first year of this project we accomplished many of our key objectives:

• Reached out and involved other small farms (Attachment: SARE/Recruit growers023)
• Gathered baseline data (Attachment: Growers Baseline SARE)
• Worked with farmers to implement organic practices (Attachment: Naturally Grown timetable)
• Working on finding markets for 18,750 pounds of IQF’d yield (appx 3,000 lbs /18,750 lbs sold to date)
• Innovative communications 2014 –first time presentation at Great Lakes Fruit Expo, 12/10/14 Session on Blueberry production (Attachment: GLEXPO14 ppt pdf, photo)
• Alerted MSU plant specialists to program (Attachment: MSU/PDF)

Impacts/Outcomes

Broadly speaking, this demonstration grant has generated a new level of discussion in the blueberry grower community about organic practices. As we have worked with other farmers in this first year, we are becoming more confident that this way of growing can be de-mystified and made more accessible, especially to small farmers.

Our emphasis for the first year was mainly on pest control. This coming second year, we will concentrate more on building soil health. We have already received help on this from a Technical Service Provider (TSP) who has developed Michigan’s first organic transition plan under NRCS for our 4.5 A farm. We plan to use insights from this plan in that soil quality focus, especially thru more comprehensive testing with our farmer partners in 2015 and hopefully move them to get NRCS funding for a Technical Service Provider (TSP) to develop an organic transition plan.

In addition to a field day in September of 2015, we will be developing an illustrated booklet in Spanish and English for wide distribution.

Another major result in this first year has been the creation by Moss Funnel Farms of a market for these “naturally grown” (non-certified organic) frozen blueberries produced by us and our partners. While we continue to seek federal and state funding to support this value-added initiative, at present we are self-funding this initiative which is targeting retail, wholesale and institutional markets in the Midwest.

We have faced some challenges in getting attention in year 1 from the very busy crop specialists at MSU but we are hoping for increased involvement by them in 2015. Also, the initial list of farm partners changed from our initial application for the SARE grant, and now one of the current two partners does not want to continue in Year 2. Since we added five other partners, we don’t believe we have lost anything with this change because these farmers are up to speed and we have their data.

We remain very excited about the potential of this SARE grant for helping the blueberry industry begin responding to consumer desires for blueberries – and other fruits – grown in a healthy way.

• Grower baseline data
• MSU correspondence
• Joe Corrado at GLXPO
• Grower baseline data
• Timetable for Grower actions
• Recruit Growers
• GLXPO power point

Collaborators: