Annie Farrell, Guru Organic Farmer

Millstone Farm

Lower C.R.A.F.T.

Tuesday, 29 June, 2010

Annie Farrell - guru organic farmer - carries a life time of experience in every facet of raising and marketing organic food. These days she runs Millstone Farm located on estate property in Wilton, CT.

There are rare breed laying hens, meat turkeys and pigs, llama and sheep - an evolved symbiotic duo, high-value greenhouse salad greens, permaculture display, a CSA diversified vegetable garden, U-Pick berries, on-site composting, fourteen Wilton Pony Club boarded horses, even a wetland boardwalk, all on just twenty-acres of land. How does she do it? Could it be her lifetime of experience, her meticulous and efficient use of space, obsession with data collection and extensive management plans, or her personal assistant - a charming young gentleman - whose sole responsibility is to keep Annie on schedule?

After momentarily seating us, welcoming our attendance with a bright smile and offered fennel-maple syrup tea she quickly sprang into the details of her story. Guru Annie grew up in up-state New York spending twenty years learning how to farm by the “old-timers” before post-War industrial farming consumed agricultural communities.

Her first entrepreneual venture was a small operation self titled Annie’s Farm. More recently she has been farming in our region for some time now having worked at Rainbeau Ridge (Bedford Hills, NY), Cabbage Hill Farm (Mount Kisco, NY), Ryder Farm (Brewster, NY), etc… many farms who interns now attend C.R.A.F.T. The property her current operation resides on is a historic dairy farm she has revived into Millstone Farm.

Farmers in the NYC watershed are encouraged, sometimes mandated, to follow Best Management Practices for their agricultural operation. The Watershed Agricultural Council in conjunction with the DEC and other governmental bodies helps NYC watershed farmers identify best management practices sometimes even providing opportunities to pay farmers to use such practices. Even though Millstone does not lie within the NYC watershed she has developed a Best Management Plan for her farm.

Annie may be part of my generation’s “old-timers” but she is right on point with the importance of record keeping and the ease of utilizing computer programs, like Microsoft Excel, as a management tool for both farming and marketing. Data! Data! Data! Each garden is mapped and pre-planned using excel, an intensive grazing rotation plan for the horses, chicken, pigs, and turkey are all on Excel; every hour labored in the fields, every input used is all kept track of using Excel.

Millstone Farm is a for-profit business, which barely makes much of a profit. Referencing the data compiled in Excel Annie prices her products at what they cost to produce. Meaning even with selling her eggs $5.99 per dozen (wholesale to resturants priced at $7.00 per dozen) Anne just breaks even. She emphasized that the market is tough these days. Despite serving high-end restaurants and dozens of CSA members she warns it is difficult to be a profitable small-scale farmer and make a living or support a family. Such a career choice means a personal life of thrifty spending.

I learned quite an amazing amount of interesting facts and techniques that evening:

The turkey and chicken are housed separately. Chicken are carries of blackhead disease and turkey are susceptible to it. Organic certified grain is twice the price of conventional feed grain; therefore, her chickens lay twice as expensive eggs. It is proper to keep one rooster for every twelve hens. Laying hens are usually kept at the job for one year before being sent off for slaughter, but Annie gets two years out of her lady hens.

According to Guru Annie heirloom pig breeds have greater birthing success when allowed to nest and rear their brood in the woods. It is very common for barned pig mothers to roll over their piglets killing them. Consumers preference can change the fate of entire breeds of livestock. Consumers no longer wanted to see hairs on their slabs of pork at market and in the stores so pink and white flesh pigs became more popular threatening colored breeds. To revive heirloom breeds consumers need to start eating them again so farmers will rear them.

The hoop houses are lined with 18” tall raised beds. With only 2” of soil on this bedrock landscape she had no choice but to build upward. More importantly, her design is meant to protect her back and ensure efficient use of space incorporating bio-intensive principles of French Farmer John Jeavon. She believes the raised beds produce a 3-4x higher yield than ground rows.

There is an obvious trend I see. To make a profit as a small-scale organic grower in the tri-state area, one means is to grow high-value salad greens and sell to high-end restaurants and chefs. Guru Annie has perfected the practice by growing her lettuce mixes in two four-season green houses. Shade cloth covers the hoop houses to prevent the lettuce from bolting during summer and one greenhouse is warmed during winter with a biodiesel-fueled heater. Soil is filled right to the brim of the beds for best air circulation, and perfect blades and heads of lettuce are harvested and replaced by transplants each week. A well-organized system that, decades into it, still amazes Annie, “We put in a few milligrams of seed and hundreds of pounds of food is produced. It’s a miracle!”

In fear of Late Blight and again losing 400 tomatoes - quite a dent in the purse - Annie has been spraying her tomatoes from their start. All tomatoes sit on red plastic mulch which is said to increase yields by 20%. It seems there is a whole array of plastic mulch colors to choose from that each uniquely influence the growth and yield of the plants.

Cucurbits are also highly susceptible to disease. She has prescribed a regular spraying of diatomaceous earth about the ground of all the cucumbers, squash, melons, etc. which is suppose to kill the larvae of pest species with it the materials microscopic spines (however, it also kills beneficial insects too), and the foliage is coated with a clay-based pesticide, like Surround, that protects the leaves and fruits from feeding pests.