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 Guests at the Soil Stewards' organic farm tour gather around an African drum ensemble while sampling food grown on the farm just East of Moscow on September 11, 2007. File Photo
The setting of the sun in the west, swarms of woolly aphids and rapidly falling temperatures set a natural fall scene for the Soil Stewards’ Farm Day on Friday.
For six years, the Soil Stewards club has rented three acres of land on the University of Idaho’s 150-acre Parker Research Farm, which is located east of Moscow on the Troy Highway.
Lydia Clayton, Soil Stewards’ farm manager, is working on a year-long green manure study aimed at increasing soil nutrition, decreasing the amount of soil degradation caused by erosion and tilling and improving the movement of water vertically through the soil.
A large hole dug on a different part of the farm shows a white, horizontal band of soil rich in clay. When water filters through the soil to this layer, it spreads out and pools horizontally instead of working its way down the soil profile. Clayton said the farm floods easily, so the goal is to increase soil drainage.
Across from Clayton’s research plot is the club’s produce and flower garden. Scarecrows guard the pumpkin and squash patch. The club members joked they were put up a little late and were serving as Halloween decorations.
Planted next to the flower garden is a small patch of flax, which Clayton said “does well on the Palouse as a dry land crop … it also makes good bouquets” since not much of the plant is edible.
Other crops include broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale, swiss chard and herbs such as mint, oregano and chives. The club is growing asparagus for the first time, and the members kept a strawberry patch that began as someone’s research project.
The hoop house, new this year, provides an indoor, greenhouse-like setting for frost-susceptible crops to grow. An early freeze killed the club’s tomatoes and sweet potatoes, but this didn’t discourage members.
They have plans to install a solar-powered vent opener that will regulate ventilation in the hoop house when wax inside the opener is heated to 70-80 degrees. On a summer day when it’s 90 degrees outside, the members said it’s likely to be 150 degrees inside the hoop house.
Freezing temperatures bring other problems to the farm. Once temperatures drop to 27 degrees or lower, the farm’s irrigation system shuts off to prevent the freezing of pipes. Since the shutoff has already happened this year, members are forced to irrigate by manually hauling water to crops or by waiting for rain.
“We’re sort of at the mercy of natural precipitation from then on,” Clayton said.
Insects are another hurdle on the farm. Since no synthetic pesticides are allowed, members must use creative, natural solutions to control pests.
For example, row cover, a meshy, white material, is placed over crops to allow in air and water but not insects.
This year the farm had a large flea beetle infestation. The bugs feed on crops grown around the Palouse, but when the fields have been harvested, they look elsewhere for food and find the Soil Stewards’ garden.
“The first time we got them, it was like overnight,” said Claudia Pine, the founding president of Soil Stewards and a Ph.D. candidate studying environmental science. “You’re like the last bar left open at night.”
Dan Murphy, the current Soil Stewards president, is working on a composting project at the farm to “maintain high amounts of organic matter in the soil” and “create more of a closed-loop system,” he said.
A closed-loop composting system would involve plant material produced on the farm being broken down into organic fertilizer for later generations of crops. However, since the Soil Stewards farm does not produce enough material on its own, Murphy sometimes collects food scraps from the Wallace Residence Center’s kitchen and adds it to what the farm produces.
“Using their waste, seeing what we can do with it out here...” Murphy said. “Stuff’s not going to the landfill.”
The Soil Stewards’ lifeblood are their Community Supported Agriculture shareholders. In the spring, interested students and community members pay $300 up front for pecks (enough produce for one to two people) or $400 up front for bushels (enough for three to four people).
The Soil Stewards use this money to buy seeds and operate the farm. Once the students harvest the produce they have grown, they distribute it at their weekly farmstand June through November, where CSA shareholders come to pick up the food they helped pay for.
The club has been holding its recent farmstands Thursday afternoons in front of the Student Union Building and will be selling pumpkins through the rest of October.
Clayton said the pecks and bushels given to shareholders contain assortments of whatever produce is in season.
She said not every shareholder claims his or her bounty each week, so surplus food is first sold to non-CSA shareholders at the farmstand.
The leftovers from these sales are then donated to Backyard Harvest. CSA shares are sold on a first-come, first-served basis. Clayton said there are 27 shareholders this season in addition to a handful of students who work on the farm in exchange for shares.
While no more shares will be sold this year, Clayton said the club will begin publicizing the availability of shares for next year in March. Pine and Jodi Johnson-Maynard, the Soil Stewards’ faculty advisers, said they wish club members had more resources and more time to promote their work so more students could take advantage of what the farm offers.
They said students of all majors, not just agricultural and environmental ones, could benefit from what’s learned and grown there.
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