Family Farming in a pandemic (plus, potatoes!)
Olly “helping” while Teresa works from home
Our shipment from Fedco arrived this week, with 1,100 pounds of potatoes! That’s about twice what we planted in 2019; as I said in my last post, we received a grant through the Monadnock Co-Op’s Farm Fund to purchase a planter and digger to speed up our potato ‘process’. John’s been spending a lot of time on Craigslist (tractor fever!) and he came across some antique potato equipment down in Hadley, so we packed up the three wains in the truck and headed down. One thing I’ve learned from parenting at work (and in public generally) is that with three kids you get Noticed- when we’re lucky its generally folks smiling and reminiscing about when their own kids were little.
We were so fortunate that the lady we went to see let the kids ramble and explore her old tobacco barn, gather chesnut husks and birds nests and other ‘treasures’ while we loaded her grandmother’s potato grading table and cutter into our truck. She patiently explained why her barn had so many “holes” in it and a dozen other silly questions.
I spent the next few afternoons cleaning and rebuilding the cutter, cleaning and oiling the grading table (which is beautiful!!) before putting the cutter into action: last year it took us 18 hours (combined work crew hours) to cut and plant 450 pounds; this year, with just “the family” we cut and planted 300 pounds in just 6 hours! We were able to cut our labor in HALF! Since one of the biggest costs in farming is labor, this kind of investment in efficiency will help us keep our prices low and let us move on to other tasks (there is just SO much to do this time of year).
We spent a beautiful Saturday playing in the dirt, throwing potatoes around, exploring the pond behind the field (lots of frog eggs), and still managed to get our work done (shout out to Diamond Pizza for feeding us, because we were all completely worn out by the end of the day!)
Our “new” hundred year old potato grading table after a few coats of linseed oil
The potato cutter in action, I can cut a 50 pound bag in 15 minutes!
