Regenerative

Conservation and rehabilitation of ecosystem services are core to our method of farming. We follow a few principles that are outlined by conservation agricultural:

• Keep the soil covered as much as possible with organic mulches, compost, and living plant roots. This protects the earth from leaching nutrients, water, and carbon. 
• Disturb the soil as little as possible through strategic tillage and the eventual elimination of tillage in our farming system. 
• Keep the soil planted as much as possible. Living plant roots have the ability to restore and sustain the microbiology in our native soils. We use intensive, high rotation plant schedules to insure that no bed is left without plant roots for 10 days or less. 

Cover cropping in the off season allows us to maximize photosynthetic activity during our off season so our beds are teaming with microbial activity throughout the year. 

• Lastly, increasing biodiversity both below ground and above enables our land be highly productive and resilient to our constantly changing climate. 

We believe, that by using these regenerative methods we can produce high quality, nutrient dense foods to feed us, our community, and our local non-human inhabitants along the way. 

No-Till, No Tractor

We say No-Till, a term that we are not fond of due to its negative connotation. The term is best seen with a no-dogma approach to soil health. 

Each of our garden beds has gone through an initial tillage because tillage is NOT inherently bad. Using tillage strategically, to open up the heavy clay soils of the Rogue Valley, allows us access to the soil’s microbiology. 

After this initial tillage, these garden beds then become permanent no-till garden beds. Enabling us to create and conserve an environment for soil biology and mycorrhiza fungi to thrive forever.

Excessive tillage can oxidize the carbon in your soil, leaching CO2 into the atmosphere. Too much over long periods of time can kill off the beneficial mycorrhiza fungi, create a greater environment for plant pathogens and weed seeds, and actually increase the level of compaction on your soils. 

When we use a broadfork we are not chopping up soil biology, we are just allowing for some gas exchange and breaking up of compaction. 

Because we do not disturb the soil with heavy equipment, we see on our farm, the ploiferation of fungal and bacterial communities that exist as nutrient and water pathways. Cycling nutrients throughout the surrounding ecosystem and that is rare to exist in a heavy tillage based system. 

Chemical & Synthetic Fertilizer Free

We farm without the use of chemical sprays and synthetic, in-organic fertilizers. 

These fertilizers are detrimental to the soil food web and to our human microbiome. Yes, the plant’s root tips have the ability to absorb these fertilizers, but the surrounding microbial populations get nothing in return.

These solutions cannot physically bind to the humus and clays that exist in our soil. Once the plants are done uptaking these false nutrients, there is no work left for the microbial and fungal communities, and populations drastically decline. Along with the productivity of your soil. 

By using organic, natural, and slow release fertilizers like kelp, alfalfa, humic acids, and fish bone meal we are merely feeding the soil microbiology which are then digesting those nutrients in a plant available form. 

On top of this we feed the soil after each rotation with a solid amount of compost in order to return whatever carbon was oxidized to the atmosphere by our disturbance and to feed microbial communities.

These practices enhance our soil’s ability to be productive, allowing us to do less work and provide less inputs, all while also increasing the populations of fungi, bacteria, nematodes, earthworms, arthropods, and more.