Where Robots go to Weed

A lot of hours are spent weeding on an organic farm. If weeds are not removed they steal soil fertility and moisture from the crop. That means smaller, less nutritious crop and less profit for the farmer. For organic raised farm products the farmer has access to a very limited arsenal of herbicides to selectively kill or hinder the growth of weeds. Many hours are spent physically removing weeds by hand, handheld tools or human driven machine (See my Sept 20, 2010 post on weeding). A potential solution from the field of machine robotics is a machine that can distinguish weeds and either remove them or spray them with a targeted quantity of herbicide. A machine that can physically remove weeds  would greatly reduce the cost of production for organic farmers. And for conventional farms that use herbicides the machine could reduce the quantity of herbicide required by applying it directly on the weeds and not in the surrounding area. This is an instance where robots can and will make small-scale farming easier and more profitable.

Weeding with a wheel hoe

I managed to weed the garlic about 4x faster, and with less back ache, using a wheel hoe I borrowed from Johann. I still have to come back to hand weed between the garlic plants, but with the hoe I made quick work of the area between the rows of garlic.

Major weeding with the farmall

The farmall is a tractor with tines - metal teeth - that dig just below the soil surface and uproot weeds. My sister Cathy helped me out.

FARMERS’ MARKET VENDOR SALES TIPS

I created this list of sales tips for the recent Greenbelt Farmers' Market Newsletter.

FARMERS’ MARKET VENDOR SALES TIPS

By Peter McClusky

The sales tips below will both enhance your sales and help your customers to better appreciate
the superior value of your products.
YOUR TABLE
Create a visually cohesive display - Make it easy for passing customers to understand what you sell. Place like products together.
Abundance – Continually re-stock your table to give the impression of abundance. If you're
running low on products, transfer them to smaller containers, so they look full.
Packaging and display – rustic or fancy? When planning your packaging and display,
consider the market where you sell and who your customers are. Selling vegetables out of
cardboard boxes works well, but prepared food products, such as baked goods, may sell better in formal packaging and displays.
Different levels – use inverted baskets or risers to create graduated levels on your table. This
is a better use of your table space, and brings your products closer to your customers' eye level.
Colours – use vibrant colours in different parts of your display to draw the eye to less popular
items. For example, if you sell vegetables, use red bell peppers and tomatoes.
Samples – providing free samples is a great way to acquaint new customers with your products or introduce your current customers to a new product.

EFFECTIVE SIGNAGE AND LABELS
Prices – Show your prices. Customers are more likely to buy if they see a price.
Discourage price comparing - Charge prices that can't easily be compared to the weights and
measures used by supermarkets. For example, sell 200 grams of garlic by the bag, not by
weight. In any case, always keep prices clearly marked.
Product name and info - Providing information adds to the perceived value of your products.
For example, if you sell three types of potatoes, indicate how best to cook each type: boiled,
baked, etc. If your products are from heirloom seed or are particularly high in nutrients, etc, add
this valuable information to the display.
Other signage ideas – use phrases that remind customers that you're local, and give
interesting information, such as “harvested yesterday” or “delicious in salads.”
Take-home info – Remind your customers where they bought your products. For example, if
you're selling frozen chicken, label each package with the farm name and a description of your
farm. When your customer later cooks the chicken they'll have a reminder where this delicious
bird came from.
Recipes – display printed recipes, to encourage customers to buy something new.

MARKET RELATIONS
Partner with other vendors – create free samples that combine ingredients from other stalls in
your market. For example, if you sell cheese, ask the nearby bread vendor to give away
samples of their bread with your cheese. If there is a prepared food vendor in the market,
suggest how they could use your products in their menu.
Your market manager – Provide content for their market newsletter. Offer recipes that use your
products, and tell them about new produce you'll have for the next market day. Your manager
will appreciate it – you're making their job easier, and you'll bring more customers to your stall.
Ask your manager what else you can do to help to further improve the market.

YOUR PRODUCTS; YOUR STORY!
A 2012 farmers' market survey suggests that once customers know their farmer and better
appreciate the hard work that goes into producing local food, their concerns about prices tend to disappear.

YOUR CUSTOMERS
Start a conversation - Find ways to tell your story to your customers: Why do you farm?
What's special about your products? What challenges do you have? When was each item
harvested? What farm methods do you use? How many hours a week do you spend weeding?
Clearly indicate any certifications or affiliations. Show pictures of your farm, including images of you and your colleagues working in the field. If they're looking at your stall but seem unsure, ask them what they're planning to cook. Are they cooking for children? Are they an adventurous eater? With this information you can suggest recipes that include your products and the products of other vendors in the market.

As they leave, say, “Next week tell me how your dinner went”. Are they on a budget? One vendor says she watches for customers that reach into their pocket to check their change, as they may not have enough money to make a purchase; she's willing to offer a lower price.

Finally, talking about the weather or other issues with Mother Nature and your farm is not only a
great way to start a conversation, but it allows your customers to better appreciate the
connection between nature and farming. Hearing that your spinach crop is diminished because
of heat or the kale tastes sweeter because of an early frost helps to build a picture of your farm
in the customer's mind.

Build a customer email List - Send out a weekly email newsletter. Phrases like, “next week at
the market get the first greens of the season,” teach your customers about seasonality and
encourage customers to hold off on their weekly shopping until they can visit your table.


Learn to engage and disengage - Much as we like to chat with market customers, and it's the
social experience that makes the farmers' market a special place, it can hurt sales if other
would-be customers are intimidated into feeling that they're interrupting. Most customers
understand this, but some require a gentle nudge. If customers walk past your stall while you're
already busy with another customer, make brief eye contact and smile. You might tell them, “be
with you in a minute,” and point to a tray of samples. They'll be more likely to wait their turn than
to drift away. This also sends a tactful message to your current customer that someone else is
waiting.

Be friendly – People come to farmers' markets because they want to interact. Stand, don't sit,
keep your hands out of your pockets, smile, and say “thank you.” These are simple rules, but
they'll help to create a more welcoming atmosphere. Get a friend to take a candid picture of your stall so you can see how you appear interacting with customers.

Stay Off the Smartphone - Focus on your customers.

Guarantee your products – if a customer complains about a product, offer to replace it or to
give their money back.

Offer a discount – Reward frequent customers or big purchasers with an occasional extra. This
is another great way to create customer loyalty and it's a chance for them to try something new.

Provide a basket for customers to place your products into - Offer to hold the basket for
them. If they don't know how heavy it is, they're more likely to buy additional items!

Take emailed orders – Taking a customer's emailed order ahead of market day saves them
from getting to the market early and creates customer loyalty. If you're not able to show up on
market day be sure to call the customer so they can make alternate plans.

Be encouraging, not pushy - If a customer asks for a small package of an item, ask “Would
you like two?” If they're buying items for a salad, suggest complementary items that they haven't
tried. But don't badger customers who're just looking.

Dress the part – If you're selling farm produce, farm clothes are appropriate. But for some
value-add food products, customers may be more responsive if you dress the part. For example, if you're selling ready-to-eat food, consider wearing an apron or chef whites. Take a look at successful vendors who sell products similar to yours.

Be hygienic – This is especially important with recent food scares. In addition to the importance of adhering to applicable health regulations, take extra care to follow sensible hygienic practices. Your customers will appreciate it.

LEARN FROM OTHERS

Watch other successful vendors - including their dress, display and signage, how they
interact with customers, and their manners. Also, pay attention to any business that leaves you
with a good impression, including your mechanic, local bank teller or your favorite waiter.

Perhaps they're doing something you can adopt for your business.

ENGAGE YOUR TEAM

Get your colleagues to participate - Discuss what you all can do to create a better customer
experience. Role play. Ask them to share constructive criticism of your sales techniques and
table display.

So many new things to do! Start with just a few suggestions, and make them part of your
routine. By adopting a few new sales methods, your customers, new and old, will have a better
appreciation of your hard work and the superior value of your products.

I'd appreciate hearing any comments or feedback on these suggestions. I can be reached at
Peterm@torontogarlicfestival.ca.

Peter McClusky has worked as a farm intern, farmers' market manager, and market vendor, at various times selling pancakes, and vegetables and meat. He serves on the board of the Aberfoyle Farmers' Market. He grows heirloom garlic and manages the Toronto Garlic Festival. Prior to getting into farming and local food he ran the international sales department of a digital media company in NY.

Picking the scapes

I picked about 2,000 scapes. I also removed some of the mulch and did some weeding.

"Stop and Smell the Soil"

BY PETER MCCLUSKY  Summer 2011 issue of Edible Toronto

“Hey, check out this advertisement for farm interns,” I said to my partner Deborah between bites of spinach salad.

Whole Circle Farm offers an eight month farm internship… spring begins with tapping for maple syrup and work on the garden starts in the greenhouse, followed by raising of livestock, working the field, selling produce, making compost and biodynamic preps, food preservation, building and tractor maintenance; plus field trips and in-field and inclass education. Weekly stipend of $50 comes with room and board and access to vehicles. We promise long back-breaking days starting at 6 am.

I’d just come off my first summer growing vegetables part time in a small patch provided by a friend at FarmStart’s McVean Farm in Brampton. A small part-time patch it was, and a farmer I wasn’t. My “harvest” consisted of one gourd, an epic failure. Frozen dinners were looking better and better.

After ten years of running the international department of a digital stock photo agency in midtown Manhattan (selling things like airbrushed photos of tomatoes), I no longer wanted to sit in an office where the closest thing to a vegetable garden was the mould blossoming in the overhead air vents. Could farming be the change I was looking for? Or was it merely something to occupy my daydreams while I rode the elevator each morning? I’d soon find out after quitting my job and returning to Ontario.

“Well, Peter, this is as good a time as any for you to work on a farm. Call them.”

I choked on my limp spinach.

“No, no, no! It’s not healthy to wake up so early...$50 a week?” I sputtered. “What year is this? 1934? If you think it’s such a good idea, Deborah, why don’t you go?”

It was a cold grey day in March when I showed up at Whole Circle Farm in Acton, Ontario with too much luggage. I stashed my suitcases under my narrow bed, the handles facing out. The first month was hellish, mornings in particular. Prior to being fully awake, I sometimes thought I was back in my Brooklyn apartment – until I’d hear the cock-a-doodle-doo of roosters outside my window. I’d half fall out of bed, briefly stretch my battered bones, and feel my way down the stairs to the kitchen. Gazing at the snowcovered fields from inside the farmhouse common room, heated by a wood stove, there was no inkling of the verdant fields I’d imagined. Already some of the interns were complaining: “I can’t take it.” “Why do we have to do things this way?” “This is slave labour.”

My concerns were graver. My back hurt, I was waking up with headaches, and I found it hard to relate to most things. At office jobs there were familiar features, like staplers, water coolers, power point presentations and swivel chairs. On the farm I listened with knitted brow to talks about three-point hitches, green manure, and how to tamp seeds. While the other interns worried about making it to November, I was thinking each morning that I wouldn’t even make it to noon, when I’d be sent away on a Medevac with my ten suitcases. I buried my car keys deep in my sock drawer and swore to myself that I would make it to November.

The drip, drip of the icicles at the entrance to the vegetable wash shed harkened the arrival of spring. We began to see the fruits of our labours, including the thousands of sprouting seeds we’d planted in the greenhouse. I started to keep meticulous notes so I could later remember the concepts I’d learned.

From the beginning we were exposed to some amazing things. Staring into the mist-shrouded vat of a maple syrup evaporator, we got a lesson from an 80-year-old sugar-shack operator on the subtleties of making maple syrup. Heather and I visited a local butcher who explained, cut by cut, the major parts of a cow. Nitya and I built a thermophilic compost pile (and I suffered minor burns when I excitedly plunged my hand into it). And Monique helped me prep a bio-intensive bed using a broadfork.

Some things brought us closer to understanding the ebb and flow of life on a farm. We watched 400-pound Greta give birth to seven piglets. A few days later she rolled over them, killing them all. Greta would no longer be useful for breeding, and the next week I thought of her while grilling pork chops marinated in crushed sage and minced Rocambole garlic.

Being on an organic farm with no herbicides, we spent many hours hunched in the field, weeding by hand, hoe and Farmall. I had an affinity for the Farmall, a tractor with steel discs that knock out weeds alongside a vegetable row. It’s mundane and unforgiving work. One moment of distraction and twenty feet of spinach becomes coleslaw.

The greatest revelation for me was to smell and taste the farm food. Breakfasts included hot oatmeal from oats we’d ground the day before and soaked overnight in creamy homemade yogurt, and eggs from the pasture-raised chickens. The bacon tasted like… bacon and superbly complemented the pancakes that were made from our own red fife wheat. Cooked in sweet butter from a neighbour’s farm, they slid off the griddle and onto our plates, which overflowed with chocolate-brown-coloured maple syrup distilled from the thousand gallons of sap we’d carried from a maple bush. At night the frenetic whoosh-whoosh of the slippered footsteps of interns Andrew and Heather in the kitchen meant that yet another couple of loaves of fresh-baked bread were on the way. No five-star hotel could match the quality ingredients from Whole Circle or the culinary passion of the interns. Complaints about the workload and the “hundred miles of weeds” were muted at mealtimes when we ecstatically gorged our way through another brilliantly prepared meal.

My weekly turn to cook became known as Spaghetti Tuesday, with a recipe that’d shrunk to four ingredients: olive oil, tomatoes, thyme, and a whole bulb of garlic. I was growing my own garlic, from twenty rare strains, at FarmStart, and was gradually discovering the range and subtlety of each.

One day in late September, I led tours for about twenty separate groups visiting the farm. I explained how soil fertility connected the components of the farm – the cows, chickens, pigs and vegetable garden – to the great-tasting meals they produce. I felt like a revivalist preacher as I walked and pointed and asked children and adults to reach down and smell a handful of soil. I had finally grasped why I was there and later thanked Deborah for helping me take the leap. And I would never have been as impassioned and informed about farming as I was that day if not for the guidance of Johann and Maggie Kleinsasser, the farm stewards at Whole Circle Farm. Their farm internship program is a blend of hard work, education, and plenty of humour.

I also learned many things that were applicable outside of Whole Circle Farm. I went to monthly board meetings in Aberfoyle with a group of community members keen on starting a market centered around farmers, and I was happy to contribute the marketing skills I’d acquired in New York. Now, a year later, farmers and customers meet every Saturday in the new pavilion at the Aberfoyle Farmers’ Market, which includes a market café to showcase the local produce. I was also inspired to initiate the First Annual Toronto Garlic Festival, featuring Ontario garlic and food prepared with garlic, which will take place this fall.

Everything on the farm seemed beyond my ken when I arrived. After my eight-month internship, it’s supermarkets that seem peculiar, with their photos of farm scenes plastered above the fruit and vegetable aisles. On a recent trip to the grocery store I looked up at those images, including those of airbrushed tomatoes, and wondered which stock photo agency they’d come from. In my former life I might have sold the rights to those digital photos; now I grow the tomatoes.

Peter McClusky, garlic farmer, is the manager of the Aberfoyle Farmers’ Market (Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.) and director of the First Annual Toronto Garlic Festival to be held September 25 at Evergreen Brick Works. Visit his personal farming blog at www.PeterOnTheFarm.blogspot.com.

Weeding and More Weeding

Hundreds of thousands of weed seeds exist below the soil surface in every acre of most every farm. They can remain in the soil for decades, until the right conditions arise for them to germinate.

Farmers have an ongoing battle with weeds, to keep them from stealing soil nutrients and crowding out crops.

As an organic farm we don't use chemical herbicides or pesticides. We remove weeds by mechanical methods, including hand, hoe, wheeled hoe, farm-all, Einboch, and sometimes, propane torch.

The Einboch is used, pre-seeding, to tickle the soil and expose the roots of any newly sprouted weeds. Sometimes the Einboch can pass the over the same area every few days, to destroy successive phases of newly germinated weed seeds. The idea is to deplete the huge bank of weed seeds which reside in the soil.

A propane flame works only in the days before seeds have sprouted above the soil surface. This is a critical moment when any sprouting weed seeds can be burnt with a very brief sweep of the torch, but without the heat getting past the soil surface where the crop seeds still reside. For example, we might walk over a 50 metre bed in about 90 seconds.

The farm-all is perhaps the most potent tool. It consists of five tines which deploy from a tractor and scrape 1 to 3 inches below the soil surface. The tines are arranged to run between each row of vegetable.

The wheel hoe is the best piece of equipment. It consists of a hoe attached to a wheel. A large area can be covered with a wheel hoe, as much as two to three acres. Beyond that, the farm-all will be appropriate, but it's a much more expensive piece of machinery.



The hand-held hoe is best used to reach close to plants, where you can't reach with the farm-all or the wheel hoe. It could also be used in the space between rows, but there will be a point where the wheel hoe is a better use of time than the hand held hoe.

The human hand is the best weeder. But it's connected to the body and mind of us humans, who're always looking for better and faster ways of doing things.

Our Last Farm Tour

For our monthly farm tour we visited St Ignatious farm. 600 acres managed by Jesuit priests.

An hour of every farm tour is spent weeding. We hi-fived after weeding several strawberry beds.

Nine Days Later

Have had a few moments where I wondered, what the hell am I doing here? And it wasn't easy to leave Deborah behind in Toronto. But reminding myself why I decided to take this path helps to remove any doubt. And every day I'm here I like it more and more, including the daily clearing of manure from the barn, forking hay to the cows, feeding the chickens, seeding trays and weeding in the greenhouse, collecting sap and repairing the outhouses. On top of it all the other interns and intern manager are great, and Johann and Maggie, the farmers are very gracious and knowledgeable.