MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

Yeah, I'm Ben Phillips. I work in southwest Michigan. I'm a vegetable specialist down here. I've been at MSU for about ten years. I used to work over on the thumb and bay area of the state. Work with a lot of direct market growers, new and old. I was asked to share some things about beginning vegetable farming today. I'm going to do that. I first want to let it be known that all these programs that we put on for MSU are open for everybody. I'm glad that you're here to join us. The direction we're going with this program today is basically three major topics. We'll spend the most time probably on the first one and the third one. First we're going to talk about if you're set to be a vegetable farmer. Then we're going to talk a little bit about what you can grow here. And then spend quite a bit of time on different levels of opportunity and investment and where to apply yourself. Try to link some things together. A lot of it hinges on this philosophy that I've come to rely on when talking with people who are interested in farming vegetables for money. It really just comes down to there's three finite resources in the world. There's space, energy, and time. You can spend them however you want. Sometimes you're blessed or you get inherited with certain amounts of space or types of space, or you just find yourselves in different situations. Everyone's in a different situation and you have to work with what you got. Et stands for Set. And when I consult with new growers, I usually try to walk through a series of questions to understand where they're coming from, what are their assets, some things they may not recognize that they have and what they can work with, and where they might need to generate some more opportunities for themselves. Let's start with, let's start with space. There's a lot about farming that is related to land, okay? Sometimes just right about now, going into March, like tax season is on everyone's mind. Some people are sitting on land that they've inherited somehow and they're wondering how to make it pay. Well, there's a lot that goes into working land and making it pay. But the first question is, do you have any do you have land available? If you do? Are there any stipulations for how it can be used? If it's tied up in some family politics or with lease agreements that may affect how you can use it or how you can't use it as it relates to good vegetable production. Are there rocks all over the place? Old? Has it been fallow? If it's been fallow, are there trees growing in it? If you go out around now, is there water settled anywhere? This is a good time to go look for where water settles during the spring thaw. If you've got buildings on the property, what are they all about? What have they been used for? What's their condition? If you have a water source, what do you know about it? What capacity does it have? How far is it from where we plan to produce vegetables? Maybe you need to consider what's on the surrounding properties as well for food safety risks. For example, large livestock farms or a creek running through many of you who are going down this path or thinking of selling vegetables, the proximity to your market would be another important factor as another space component. If your fields that you do have access to have been in production recently, it might be helpful to know what that cropping history looked like in the soil condition as you're receiving it. Maybe there are some improvements that need to be made. I try to go through these questions related to space. Those conversations can go a lot of directions. Then we start talking about energy. There's a lot that goes in here as well that doesn't perfectly fit what you might think of as energy. A lot of equipment level stuff, a lot of motivations. Let's go through a few of these questions. There's a lot of work to be done on a farm. Any farm, vegetable farms require quite a bit as well. Who or what is going to be doing the work? Is it just you or is the family involved or friends? Business partners. Do you have any machines that are going to be assisting those people? If you do, how old are they? Are they maintained or have they been gathering dust and mouse nests for 20 years? Maybe you need new equipment. How do you identify what would be the best way to move forward with new equipment? What's going to serve you best? If you don't have friends or family working for you as grunt labor or something else, who is? There's going to be some weeding to be done and a lot of hand picking in a lot of cases. Do you have another source of labor outside of the immediate friends and family circle? If you're looking to reach outside of the friend and family circle and look into migrant labor, do you have housing? It's got to be inspected. There's a lot that goes into that. Can you offer competitive wages? Are you a people, person or not? Some people really aren't. People. People, they don't want to manage people. They don't even want to deal with people in like a market sales setting. And that can really affect some of your direction as a vegetable farmers. Helpful to think about those things and question your own motivations and what you're into then a time, there's a ton of time that goes into this. In the summertime in particular, things get really hot and heavy in July and August. Everything ramps up to those months and then it cools off after those months. But depending on what you want to get involved with, you can be busy all season. It's important to recognize that if you have another job, you need to come up with some threshold when that job, when that job is out and you're fully focused on a farm, or somehow balance the two, because it's going to be hard to go 100% on both. How much time can others work for you? There are a lot of other people who also have day jobs or other jobs and they might want to be interested in this thing, but they've got to spend some time as well with their own families. Or they have a job that provides health insurance perhaps, and maybe you can't afford that. There are a lot of these things to think about. If you're going for a four season market with hoop houses or high tunnels, then that's your winter as well. That's not going to Florida essentially. Along with proximity to market is the time it takes to get there. If you're going, like in southwest Michigan where I'm based, a lot of people go to Chicago in the summertimes, that's quite a hal. They're leaving at like 03:00 A.M. and they're coming back. Rush hour traffic. You've got to think about what it's worth to you. That may be a lucrative market, but if you want to spend your time doing other things, there may be other avenues. Then also when you want to stop for good, some of you are coming into this as a second career. Perhaps you're finished with another career or you're looking for a change. But in any case, when you get into farming, you can stink a lot of capital into things that are tied up. It's not liquid anymore, it's not like cash. You've got tractors, buildings, land. It's helpful to think about when you want to roll back, when you want to slow down and start divesting because there are some tax implications to that. So think about when you want to quit for good as well. What about money? People say that. How come you haven't talked about money? That seems like a finite resource too. Yeah, yeah, it is technically a finite resource, but I left it out of the finite resource list because really, it's just a way to transfer between those finite resources. It's like the cartilage between your bones. You can trade something we've agreed upon that has value for space, energy, and time. You can trade space for time and energy for space, or you can use money to do all that in between work. And that's fine. Everything is worth something. It's helpful to be cognizant of how in debt you currently are and how much farther in debt you want to go. Farming is inherently a debt building enterprise. Most people spend all their money in the spring or they get a loan in the spring because they don't have enough to get all the input supplies that they need. They spend all that money, they try to recoup it in the fall and winter, summer, fall and winter. That's the way the system works in most cases. So how do you get start up cash? How do you get money into a business that hasn't actually earned anything yet if you're just starting? There's a few ways if you're coming at this from a second career, you can cede yourself some money to start things up. You can get loans from Greenstone, which is a banking institution that caters to farmers, lower interest loans and things. You can get grant, there are a variety of government grants that you can convince investors to help you out, go in, in a partnership or something like that or some percentage donations are another popular way to get things going. Then the last two are interesting to me. Rotational Lending Club is a way to generate cash flow on a monthly basis or a semi monthly basis by going in with a group of people and contributing money into a pot every month. And then on a rotation, each one of you draws from that pot. Each one of you gets a slug of cash after so many months because everybody's contributing and then it rotates around next month somebody else gets a slug of cash and it's outside the banking institutions no interest applied thing. It's very common in other parts of the world. In the last one is community supported agriculture, which is a way to get your money up front for the farming that you're going to be doing in the season. It's a real popular way to start when you're little and just getting going. You need a few seasons under your belt to really know your system before you can probably charge and know that you're going to be able to deliver. But the idea here is that you collect money from subscribers in March to April, as early as February sometimes, And then you have all your cash up front that you can use to produce crops all season long. And then the people who paid you in the beginning get basically a subscription box with vegetables for the remainder of the season. There's a lot of flexibility there, but that's just the basics. I want to also let you know that especially when it comes to something like grants and loans, probably more grants than anything else. It's helpful to remember that you need to focus on building your skills as a producer. And efficiencies that come with that, writing grants is its own entire skill set that is really not farming. It can detract from how you spend your time honing your skill. It's essentially another income stream that isn't related to the growing or the sale of vegetables and it can get in the way. In a lot of cases, people look for it for certain discrete goals. Like I want to wash pack line for this particular vegetable and I want to grant that. I can just set it all up and I already know how to grow that vegetable. This is just going to make me even more successful. That's the thing you might want to write grants for. Writing grants just to get a general farm thing going isn't something that is highly fundable and it really detracts from your focus. Okay. Now we're going to move on to what you can grow here. Michigan is a pretty sweet state. We've got a lot of soil types, which is the map on the left. We are a state that was glaciated. And what that means for us here today is that we have several different types of soils across the state and a fairly level topography. Over here in the thumb, you get a lot more clays. Over here on the west side you get a lot more sands and that's not entirely solid, like there's mixtures everywhere, but that's the general feel of things in Michigan. Then we also have a variety of growing zones that are moderated by our lakes. The further inland you get, the less of a benefit you get from lake effect. When I say benefit the big body of water to our wet acts like a heat battery. And it can moderate our temperatures more so than in the states to the west of us. Then all along the coastlines, all around, you can't see it very well. In this picture we've got growing zone six B, which is pretty high, meaning our winters aren't as long in these, like narrow areas along the lake shore. What can you grow in these environments? I'm going to go through it in three categories. We've got easy stuff. These are plants that I really love to live. They usually provide multiple harvests with one investment in seeding or transplanting. You get several picks. They are expressive when they're not feeling good or something's up with them. It's really easy to tell. You may not know exactly what's happening, but you can tell something's up, something's not right. And then you can go from there and figure some things out. There's a lot of vegetables in this category. A lot of them are fruiting vegetables, which means they go from seed all the way to flowering and then setting a fruit. And others are just leafing vegetables. We'll go to the medium ones now. These are vegetables that are a little more picky about certain things. They tend to like certain soils, for example, or the harvest can be a little tougher to figure out and time it. Or they have weird seasons. For example, asparagus, that's one that has a weird season and a picking schedule that's strange when you first start them. You need to wait a couple of years before you can start to pick them and you got to manage weeds and everything. Brussel sprouts are weird too. They set their little sprouts up and down the stalk throughout the summer, but they're really uneven. You've got large ones on the bottom and little ones at the top. And you want them to all even up, so you have to trim them. You have to top the tops around September and let them keep going so that the little ones at the top start getting big. These little tips and tricks these little vegetables have to train you on how to get the best results from them. Then the difficult ones are here in our state. The more difficult vegetables to grow tend to be due to temperatures like they don't like when it gets cold in the fall or the spring. Or they have a hard time starting from seeds like seedless watermelon for example. Cucumbers are fairly easy to grow, but we get the same disease every year. You can just count on it right after 4 July, called downy mildew, and it just kills plants. And unless you're ready to protect them with fungicides, cucumbers are essentially very hard to grow in Michigan. They never used to be, but for about the last ten years they have been. Let's see here celery as well, really tough cauliflower, hard to get high quality product out of those unless you'd like super invest in specializing in that sweetcorn you may think should be easy. But the main problem with sweetcorn that people run into when they get in started is having enough area to get a block so that they wind pollinate effectively. And you get a nice solid ear that's full all the way to the tip with kernels, nice plump kernels that comes with having enough land and enough area to assure that they can cross pollinate through the wind like that. Then beyond that, raccoons and birds are a big problem. The little caterpillars that get in the ear, they can be hard to avoid. All right, let's get into a little bit of site selection. You want to try to avoid slopes and low spots. Vegetables really don't like having wet feet. They need a lot of light. I think probably the most important thing for vegetables is that your people have to be able to get to them easily. The more barriers you put between yourself and the vegetables themselves, the harder it's going to be to manage them. Well, if you're looking at new property and you want to figure out what is the best soil type or what are the best things in my soil right now, What do I have to amend the basic soil conditions that treat your vegetables well? Or a ph of 6.5 Phosphorus at 5075 parts per million, Potassium at 135 to 150. I don't expect you to remember these numbers. If you want to write them down, please do. But these are the basic needs of a soil that you're going to be growing vegetables on. A soil test would show you this. Be sure to do a soil test if you've got property and you're looking to grow on it. We can also grow some things inside everything. I just mentioned, stuff you can grow outside here in Michigan. You can grow things inside too. By inside I mean like a hoop house or a high tunnel, something that you might be able to heat in addition to having the passive heat from the sun. You can grow everything that I already mentioned in a hoop house. But some things are especially worth it if you're thinking commercially and in how you spend your time, energy, space, and money. There are a select few that have the biggest payout. Those are tomatoes and cucumbers. These are multi pick crops. They last a long time and you can pick them for a long time. We've got leaf, lettuce and greens which you can, you can harvest them quickly and plant them in high densities, and you can plant something again soon after. Then we've got carrots, beets, and radishes. These are also relatively fast turnover crops, but they can also be integrated into a trellis system like tomatoes and cucumbers, where you can start with some fast root crops. At the same time that you transplant tomatoes or cucumbers. Then by the time your tomatoes and cucumbers are getting tall and starting to shade light, you can remove the root crops from the bases of those plants, and you get basically two crops in one row, two different kinds. In addition, with frost tolerant greens and even root crops like radishes, you can do a winter cycle with them as well. That opens up a whole other season for you that you wouldn't normally have with a high tunnel with frost tolerant greens. There's a couple of vegetables that are special cases. We can do sweet potatoes here. Outside the season is like just barely long enough, but we can do them. If you put sweet potatoes in a greenhouse, they go crazy. It's really the environment they love, and some growers like to put in sweet potatoes as a rotational crop between their hoop houses, because they just blood the entire hoop house with their vines and outcompete everything. Then two other crops that are niche crops are ginger and turmeric. You can't grow here at all in Michigan unless you put them into a hoop house. Even then, the season is almost not long enough to get much of a harvest off them. You won't get like the full cured root. You would get something they call like a new root or a baby root. It's a lot fleshier and the shelf life isn't as long. But in a Hoophouses, the only way you can do them here. Then finally, I think I got the wrong title on this, but I wanted to focus on what you can do with hydroponics and pots. The title should be something related to that. With hydroponics, you can do those just fine here in Michigan. You can use almost all the other crops I mentioned. Except root crops really don't work well in pots. And in hydroponics you can do a little bit, but it doesn't seem to make sense in a large scale system the way you have to think in a pot culture system, it's all plumbing and chemistry, essentially. If you're doing tall stuff or long stuff, you need to be able to have a nice big bag or pot for them to stay in because the root systems are large too. This is a picture of a grower down here named Beth Hubbard in her greenhouse, where she's growing in bags, and she's got tomatoes. You can't see them, but she's also got cucumbers. You put them in bags so that they have enough room for their roots and you grow them straight up. Then for the short stuff, you can put those in rails or towers or float systems. There's a lot of different hydroponic systems out there, but basically with these systems, you can put plants closer together. You're giving them everything they need. They don't really have soil. You have to think a lot more about the nutrient mixes. You're putting in a liquid so that they get everything they need throughout the whole season. The more you take a plant out of the soil, the more you have to be thinking about what is being supplied to them. Because the soil is a ton of work for you that you don't even think about when you're putting plants directly in the ground. When you take that out, you have to be much more applied to keep your plants happy. Okay, now I'm going to talk about some of those things, those energy and equipment things, and I'll go through a few phases. You may consider as you grow, you may be starting small and getting bigger. Or you may be thinking about just a different, like vegetable system if you're already doing one style. But I'll talk about it as if you're starting from almost nothing and then getting bigger. Phase one would be very basic stuff. About a half acre is what this stuff would be good for. We're talking mostly hand equipment here. Very little power equipment. You've got hose and rakes and shovels, tillers, a push planter or two, and then maybe some spreader for fertilizer or cover crop seed. The types of hose that you're looking for, I would recommend things that you can have an upright posture for, Like this picture of this fellow here. He's the owner of a company called Never Sink Farms and he makes this hole right here with interchangeable heads. And he's showing good hoeing posture here. You want to be up, right? These hose have a little bit of a different approach to what you may be thinking. Then here, this is a stirrup. Ho, which has quite a different approach as well. We pushing and pulling it back and forth across the soil surface. Good, hot. When you go into the tiller market, you may be looking at getting something that only tills. Or you may be looking at like a two wheeled tractor with the opportunity to swap out the things on the back with different implements. Almost like a big four wheel tractor, but just on two wheels. They've also got some little guys, these little mini tillers here that actually don't have wheels at all and the times themselves are what drive them around. Those are nice for getting between narrow rows and things like that for planting seeds. There's a few makes and models of push planters out there. This one right here is called an Earthway. It's the cheapest and it works really well. I would recommend you get one. If you're going to start farming vegetables with a half acre, get a push planter. Earthway is the most economical solution and they have a really high performance. You'd be surprised it feels really light and chinsy and plasticy, but it works super well. The next level up from this would be a product called A Jang. It has almost all the same dimensions. These plates here are different. They don't use plates, they use rollers. And it's hard to really explain that without pictures. But they do about the same thing and they cost at least twice as much. The Earthway does a great job, if you're just getting started, focus on trying to find yourself an Earthway. Then in order to spread fertilizer effectively, it could be helpful to have something that is designed for spreading instead of just like throwing it out with your hands. That's what these are, these are pretty cheap from hardware stores. You can get different styles as well. They're like bags, but they all do the same thing. They spread in a pattern and you can calibrate that pattern. Then for irrigation, you could go one of two ways. You could go with sprinklers or drip irrigation. And I'm talking about sprinklers in this bit. This is called a wobbler. It sprays water in a 360 degree pattern around the base. You set them up with hoses connecting them. There's another one over here on a stand, a PVC pipe. You connect it with a hose and it comes up here. You set them up so that their patterns just barely overlap. They do a great job. The trade off with the overhead is that they get water all over the leaves. Sometimes that's great. If you're doing leafy greens and it's a hot day, that can really improve your quality. But it can also increase disease potential for foliar diseases if you keep the leaves. In those cases, drip irrigation is no, we'll talk about drip a little bit later. I tried to do my best to try to figure out what all these things cost to try to give you some idea for a start up for each of these phases. For this starter phase, if you are trying to ramp up with some equipment to make these things happen, we're talking about $2,200 That doesn't include an annual cost of something like seed or fertilizer. This is just for the equipment that you could spread the costs across many years. That's very rough guys. Very rough about, okay? If you want a quick number, 2,500 bucks, that might be a good way to think about it. 2,500 bucks. Nice round number, phase two is increasing in size, but maybe not, maybe you're staying at the half acre size, but you're trying to expand your capacity for some things like seed starting, for example, or building some drip tape. We'll talk about these in a slide show here. You may start your own seeds and there are some advantages. This because you can choose all the varieties you want at this point, instead of relying on store bought things, you offer some more control over the timing of it. Because you can contract this out too. You can get a local greenhouse grower to grow your seed for you. You have the same variety selection that you would if you did it yourself. But in terms of timing, things are tough sometimes when you're working through a contractor. But you may want to do that because it's a lot of work, they're babies, and that's a whole lot of special stuff that you may not have to invest in if you can get someone else to do it for you. Here's a picture of something Beth Hubbard put together. She was a grower down here. I showed a picture of her in her tomatoes earlier. These are the tomatoes when they're babies. In a laundry room, if you have a lot of laundry to do, but your laundry room is the only place you can start your vegetables. There's a trade off if you want to actually start your own vegetables. You may also be looking to upgrade your power equipment tractor wise. Going from a tiller or a two wheeled tractor, you may be looking at something that can do some towing. A two wheeled tractor can do that too. It can do some towing. It'll pull some things. You can get a little seat for it and everything. But at this level you're looking to tow, you're looking to pull things that are going to be moving the dirt. That eight to 20 horse power is good. Lawn tractors can do this. However, if you're looking to grow bigger, I think getting a lawn tractor for this may not be the best investment because they don't have a lot of action going on in the back. When you're looking for a tractor, you want to be looking at the back because that's where all the fun stuff is happening. You can look at the horse power and stuff. But if it doesn't have a way to pull or transfer power out of the back or hydraulics or something like that, then it's pretty limited for a vegetable farm where you want to get a lot out of one piece of equipment. With these little garden tractors, you almost always have to get some adapter set to actually convert them into something that's going to tow and not just mow the lawn. And I tried to share some pictures here of that. There are a variety of different hitching mechanisms that you're going to have to get as like an aftermarket thing for these. You may want to upgrade to a larger spreader. Outside of just a hand spread or a hand crank, you may be looking at something that's going to run on a tractor. Or run by being pulled and turning the wheel. That then drives the spinner or the dropping mechanism. There's really two types. You've got a spreader that spins it out and throws it really far. And then you've got a drop spreader which just drops it directly underneath the unit. There are pros and cons to both. Incidentally, there are two animals that spread their fertilizer this way to hippos are like a broadcast spreader. If you didn't know that steer clear hippos because they spread their manure just like a rotary broadcast spreader. Whereas rhinos in the vast majority of all these other animals we deal with, just drop it right under. If that helps you remember it, I'm happy. Okay. Then you can also lay plastic. That's a way to fight weeds. It's a way to warm the soil. Get your season started early. In some cases, it actually raises the bed into like a crown so that you can get better soil drainage. This is a small unit that can run off. There's no power needed for this. You just pull it and it doesn't look like it's gathering much soil. It can run on a lower, it can run on a low horsepower tractor. If you're looking for something that will bed the soil and pull it up, then you're going to need a higher horsepower tractor. Something like in the 45 horse or higher range, depending on how big the beds are going to be once the plastic is laid. If you choose to do plastic, you've got to poke holes in it somehow, and for that you can use a dibbler. They come in all sapion sizes. It's basically a wheel with some pokers on it. You can make them out of bicycle wheels. There's all sorts of ways to do it. You don't have to pull them like this. You can make them as hand push units too. But in some way, shape, or form, you got to poke holes in there. And that's something you're going to have to do if you go with the plastic. You can also do hand tools for this as well with something like a planter here that has a spring action opener, so you don't have to be squeezing your hand all the time. That won't pass transplants though. If you want to actually use a transplant, then you're going to need something that's wide all the way down and you have to be able to open it somehow. I see your question here. I'm going to be getting to implements in a little bit and I hope to answer your question there, okay? It's going to be in another phase, but you can mix and match when you start building up these different pieces of equipment. If you go with the plastic mulch route, they're harder to overhead to irrigate because you have these little holes where the water would have to get in. If you're using a plastic bed and you're on a sandy soil where irrigation is important, you're going to need to try to get that in drip tape that's under the plastic actually in this picture. This cardboard roll here is drip tape and you can just barely see it coming down here. And this thing actually rolls out the plastic over top of the drip tape. If you go with plastic, usually the drip tape just comes with the deal. But then you got to get fertilizer there. For that, you need some injection unit. There's two styles that are common. There's a diaphragm pump, which is typically a big cone or cylinder shape unit here, that pulls concentrated fertilizer out of a bucket or something and it puts it into the lines and then out. Then there's a much cheaper option called a Venturi injector with no moving parts at all. It's a lot more stable. It does the same thing but it's a heck of a lot cheaper. All right. Emily asked, in what situations would you recommend laying plastic versus tilling? Plastic works well for plants that have a lot of space between them and that are long season, if they're plants that like it warm too. Tomatoes, peppers, egg plants, those are warm season crops. You put at least 12 " between each plant, and there's some space between there that's just going to become weeds. Plastic gets in the way of that and it warms the soil and the plants really dig it for something that's really high density or direct seeded, like carrots or beets or onions. It's a little harder to make a plastic system work. A lot of the cars, they need bare soil to work if you're going to push a cedar. Otherwise you got to poke each hole to plant each seed. There are some good systems though that people will use for plastic culture, onions or even sweet corn which are fairly densely planted. I think a lot of it has to do with how much weeding that you personally want to do because there's quite a lot involved and vegetable farming. Vegetable farming should really just be called weeding really because that's almost the biggest labor investment outside of picking the crop. Plastic really helps with that. This is another phase potential where you start getting more volumes of vegetables that need some more specific attention. Trellising is one thing that you can do to use your space more effectively and also help out a crop that may be a little folopsy or top heavy. They'll produce just fine without a trellis. But a trellis can really make picking easier and you get a higher quality product in a lot of cases if you can keep the plant upright. Here's an example of that in peppers, A net style trellis, in this case, growing cucumbers that are dying from downy mildew. They're not looking so hot, but they're using a net trellis to get them up and they're tying them with these little pieces of tape. Most of our vegetables will not climb all by themselves. The exception are beans and peas. They'll climb up without any training. But everything else you actually have to tie it and guide it. Again, this is a basic load out for some of these phase two items. As I shared with Kate, none of this is a law or a rule book. You can acquire different things however you decide. But these are approximate costs for the things I just discussed. And it's about 4,500 bucks for the next phase of equipment on top of the previous phase. All right, let's move on to a third phase. This is where we start talking more about implements Kate and things to pair with a tractor. This phase is also considering perhaps a larger tractor. Here's some close up of some features of larger tractors that can be useful. This picture on the left shows a three point hitch. It has this top link here, and then it has these two side links. There's another one on this side that's hooked up. You can't see it very well. That's a very stable way of holding a piece of equipment so that you can raise it and lower it. Going right up the middle here, this plastic shaft is the power takeoff or the PTO. That's a way to take power from the engine and transfer it to whatever you're pulling power is out there. Now usually that makes things like till like spin really fast, it's basically just a bunch of spinning. They're a dangerous thing, you have to be careful around. Pto's, This plastic pipe here is actually a safety mechanism so that you're not going to touch the spinning axle, but that's an important feature to consider in investing in a larger tractor. In addition, what you can see in this picture here are a series of hydraulic hoses that can be helpful for running certain types of equipment as well. It can help lift and lower things off of a wheelbase. Or it can extend booms and row markers and things like that. That may be on a planter or something. If you're into the homesteading life, then these same tools can be used to run a power splitter for chopping wood and stuff too. It's right there on a tractor. You can move the tractor wherever you need it and you've got hydraulic power. Wherever the tractor is, it can run pumps, water pumps, and all stuff. As you're looking, the upgrade, these are, I would say, three important features of a tractor to consider. The three point hitch, the PTO, and what they call hydraulic remotes. If you're looking to pull bigger equipment in the vegetable world, then the 25 to 35 horsepower range is good, higher than that, and you can start moving some dirt in a serious way. But for a smaller grower, I think this is appropriate. The types of tools you might want to pair with the tractor that can really move dirt. I'm going to start on the left here. A moldboard plow is one way to move a lot of soil and to flip it over it makes a really rough finish. That's not like the only thing you have to do. You have to follow that up with something to smooth it out. For that, you would use a field cultivator. To bust up some of the hills and ridges that a moldboard plow creates. Then you may go a third pass with something called a disc. Which flattens it even further and makes it a nice level surface. A disc is also nice at the end of the season when you want to incorporate residue from the crop as well. Those work well for that too. Those are three things that I think are important for a tractor, and here's a few more at this point is you're getting to larger than an acre, maybe two to three acres here. Push planter may not be the best option anymore and you may want multiple rows seated at the same time and more rows altogether. For that, you might want something that attaches to the back of a tractor that does more than one row. The picture on the left is a very old style that still works really well. It's called a Planet J. You can find them, you can find them with all manners of rust, or you can get them new. They're still making them through a company called Cole C, O, L E. Then on the right is a jang. We talked about a jang as a push sater earlier. Well, this is a Jang that's mounted to a tool bar on the back of a. It's much more expensive than a Planet Junior. Yeah, you've got some different finishes there. The metal, mostly metal with limited adjustment and then the got some metal and some plastic and basically infinite adjustment. You're paying more for the adjustability. Essentially, if you're planting multiple rows, you might want to find ways to kill weeds in multiple rows too. There are a variety of implements for that that you can mount detractors Depending on the tractor, this would be something you put behind you, like in the top photo. This is the receiver for a three point hitch. You can see the three points there. You pull that behind you and you drive it so that your rows of vegetables go between these slots where all the tools are. My mouse keeps disappearing, but I was trying to show that to the, in these slots. You want your crops to flow through these gaps while these pieces of metal disturb the soil on all sides. If you have a tractor where you can mount tools underneath it, then there are other tools. The sky is the limit with a tractor like that and a lot of vegetable growers, like these kinds of tractors, you sit offset so you can look down between your legs and see the rows. And then you can mount tools under the belly of the tractor that can work multiple rows. This is a picture of a basket and it looks like it's on a farm cub tractor. Along with increasing your capacity to seed, you may be looking to increase your capacity to transplant. It is hard to beat the adaptability of a water wheel transplanter. That's what I have pictured here. I believe that this manufacturer is called Buckeye. That looks like their color, a bluish green color. It's called Buckeye. Buckeye. Just Google Buckeye Transplanter. And you'll find it. The cool thing about this transplanters, you can use it on the bare soil and also on plastic. You can use it in any of the situations you may find yourself in. You have two people or one, depending on what you want to do. Sitting back here, you have all your vegetable transplant trays on these racks. And they're at an angle so that when you take one tray off, they all slide down. In the center, you have your dibble that marks where each plant is going to go. That pokes through the plastic, and it pokes through the soil. Inside of this dibble wheel is a spigot for a hose. The hose connects to the tank as you're driving, it's poking holes and actually it's more than at, it puts a healthy dollop of water in that hole. Then you go by that hole, riding on the seat, and you plop your plant in that hole and you cover it up. It's a really great tool. The only thing that you have to be aware of is that your driver has got to be really keen on what your transplanters are saying in the back. Because if they're going too fast, then you're going to end up with a lot of gaps in your stand. They have to drive pretty slow in some cases. Another popular style, a transplanter that I see is called a finger style. It's one of the oldest ones and they're still making them. Maybe that's why I see them so much. But this only works on bare soil. It doesn't work on plastic. It would slice a hole. It would slice a line right through the plastic. You put your trays in these red baskets here, and you take out your plants and you lay them inside the rubber fingers, and they pinch it. They swing it around like a ferris wheel, and they plop it into the soil. They're one of the more affordable types of transplanters. But again, it only works in bare soil and it's a little more comfortable seating position and that matters to some people. More things in this phase may include season extension, where you're trying to make the most of the spring and the fall by trying to make your spring and fall longer by protecting from frost. You can do this with floating row cover like we see here. This isn't supported by anything. The plants are underneath it, directly under it, touching it. The other way that you can do it is with supports. In this case, this grower is over in Chessening Michigan, and they're using some conduit that's been bent. They can put the fabric over it and then hold it in place with bungee cords so they can hold it down or they can hold it up. I've got a question in the chat here from memory. How would you recommend keeping animals like raccoons and deer out of crops in larger plots like one to three plus acres, where fencing may not be possible. Is that something you just have to deal with or are there other ways to deter them? Wow, that's a great question. I didn't put anything about wildlife in. This is really the for a one to three acre plot, there are fencing options. They're not permanent. They would be stepping posts. Well, what's the word I'm looking for? There'd be wire. There'd be like the woven stuff that you can put. Yeah, like a woven style electric net thing. Gosh, my brain's farting on what that's called, but it's like a band. Those work well. Electronet. Thanks Kate. Yeah, you can put all stuff on step in posts and leave it there for a season. And you can move it fairly easily too. I would recommend you post hole dig some solid supports in the corners and actually lean them out a little bit so you have a slight three dimensional effect. Your fence is essentially an angling outwards any three dimension you can get really helps for deer. Raccoons don't like electricity. Having the bottom line hot is important for raccoons. Then the top line or the medium line would need to be hot for deer who are sniffing around. Another thing you might want to think about at this phase is a saleswagon to start moving some product off of your own farm. All these things put together, a lot of these implements, are the bulk of these costs. And perhaps a new tractor, of course as well. If you're getting a new tractor, even if it's used, that's going to be the predominant cost in this bracket altogether. It's about ten grand at this level, one to three acre level. I think the last phase that I wanted to talk about, and it's very brief, it's like is hoop houses. Because your season drastically reshapes a farm and what they're capable of doing. It shouldn't be taken lightly this step, But there's so much you can do with a hoop house. The things you'd have to invest in, in addition to the hoop house itself, would be some way to heat it. It's not a necessary thing. You can do passive heating, but if you want to get like full on tomatoes by June, then you need to heat your hoop house now and have your plants in the ground now. That's only something you can do if you're heating. You may also want some automated fence vents or fans, and various pieces of equipment for that electric and plumbing and all that jazz altogether. If you wanted to do a hoop house, I'd say 11 grand is the low end and it goes up from there. For a standard 30 by 90, I would say 11 is dirt cheap, unless you're getting it used and you're taking it down and rebuilding it yourself. But if you're getting a new 130 by 90, I would say 11 is the absolute bottom and it goes up from there. Okay, The last piece I wanted to talk about is how you spend your time. Remember, we started out talking about space and then energy and equipment. Now some time, let's talk about time to be how I finish this up. You can get your focus divided so easily on a farm. I wanted to share some of the other things you can do on a far, I don't think are a bad way to spend your time. They certainly detract from the basics, which are farming, but they can add value to your operation and your business as a whole. Here are some ideas. Once you've got six years under a belt, write a book. A lot of people have done it. You'd be surprised how many growers get six years under the belt and they start writing a book. Not everyone's a writer, but I'm just throwing it out there as a revenue stream that you may not have thought of. You can teach classes. Those classes have value. You can do that on your property or you can do it elsewhere. There are some benefits to doing free classes for the public. It's branding for yourself. You can get people to your place, you can decorate storefronts. You can offer in the Halloween time, very popular season for decoration. Decorate storefronts for businesses in your town. And get your name out there for that, judge job fairs for your local high school. One grower over in La Pier that I used to know would do that. He would judge their job fairs and that kids would practice interviews with a team of people from the community. He would hear good interviews, give them honest feedback, but then also essentially have a first interview with this kid and have a step up in hiring them for summer help. Hi, home schoolers, you may home school yourself if you don't. And you know home schoolers, they have an entirely different work ethic that comes out of the difference, I think, in how they spend their time. It's by no means a rule, but many home schoolers have larger families. If you get in with a home schooling family and you make a good impression on some of the kids, the whole family coming to work for you over the years, make food for people. Heck, Agri Tourism is probably the largest growing part of farming right now. The crop really isn't what's being sold. It's the experience and it's some of the added value things. Make a pizza, charge people to steal, have them come out and pick the crop and take a little more, or better yet, charge them to come and get lost. This is the 110 acre corn maze, the largest in the world. All right, I got a few questions here. Came in. Would a hoop house be the only way to successfully grow lupa gods in our state or climate? Ooh. Emily, it sounds like you've been working from experience here. That's a crop that you may be able to get away with in the very southern counties in particular seasons that end up just being lucky and long. But otherwise, I think you probably would need some season extension on that, and it might not be a hoop house. All you may need is row cover to get it started early or outside. You started as a transplant inside your house for four weeks. You already got four weeks there. Then put it outside before frosts are over, but cover it up with row cover so that it's protected from frosts. You get an even bigger jump on the season then. And then when it's warm enough to take the row cover off, let it grow as normal. And that should get you through. The other question is from clay, how many reasonably sized shares can one acre provide for a CSA? That is unfair. Clay, I know, I don't. I've got a guy around me here that has close to two acres in production right now, is not devoting all of that to CSA, but his CSA has got to be at least 45 people. Then he does a lot of restaurant sales too. Yeah, that's a really tough one to answer. It really depends on the crops you're focused on because certain ones take a lot more space. Emily says, I know that you mentioned vegetables don't like wet feet are the crops you'd recommend being more tolerant to wet soil or fruit trees. I would like to make use of a large open space near my pond. The short answer is no. No vegetables really don't like it. The closest plant that I can think of that really enjoys that situation is celery and blueberries. Those are both crops that are adapted to a higher water table. Celery, we don't often grow them that way. We give them water. One of the biggest waters. Okay, let's see. I may have more slides but I think I'm mostly done. Yeah. Okay. Who's who? If you want to talk to more people about vegetable farming, you may be a gardener now, but tomorrow you're going to make some money at it and you want to talk to somebody. Here are people you can reach out to that work for MSU. I'm in the bottom left corner of the state. There's another Ben, who works north of me named Ben Whirling. Then Salta, who's on this call? I think I saw her on the call. She's over in the bay and thumb area of the state. And then Chris is down in the southeast part of the state. Chris Galbraith, and we all work for MSU as vegetable advice givers. If you're looking for some, feel free to reach out to any of us. That's all I've got. If you want to stick around for some questions, I'm happy to stay with you. I have a hard stop at 02:30 but we can spend some time together now if you would like. Question from Christine about sesame seeds, can they be grown in Michigan? I don't know enough about sesame seeds to answer that. Well, we can grow a lot of things here, but there are something we just can't. I don't know if that's one of them. Thank you all for coming. Like I said, I'll stick around until the questions are done or 230 comes, Whatever sooner Emily says would you would you say an ideal place or setting for things like potatoes, onions, beets and carrots? It's a long question. Let me see if I can read it quickly here. Sunlight, shade and soil quality, Root crops, what's the best soil and light condition for them? As much light as possible is always helpful for vegetable crops. Soil quality, you've got some very different crops there. Carrots are probably the ones that are the pickiest of the group that you mentioned. They're a long rooted crop. They don't really do that great in rocky soils or very compacted soils. They don't even do that hot in, like a clay soil that's even a little tough for them, they'll do okay, but you really got to work the soil ahead of planting quite well so that they've got some place to go. Otherwise, it's kind of a tight squeeze in the heavy clay soil. Potatoes, onions, and beets. I would say that they're all fairly similar in the soils that they like. They're very adaptable, they can work in many different soils. And onions are shallower rooted crops. They do quite well in like a clay soil soil hold moisture really well. You don't have to irrigate as much, but they do just fine in sands, you just got to irrigate them a lot. Potatoes do well in all soils, but you have to be careful about how you work with them. They need you plant them at a certain depth and then you keep healing soil on top of them. If you're working with like a clay soil, you work it when it's wet you really shouldn't do. But if you work it when it's wet, then it'll basically become like a cement after that. Then it doesn't really make that effective of a hill, if it's basically made of cement. Question about using straw as a cover from Paul as well. If you're talking like you would use row cover or something like that, it works for a very limited amount of time. It would work well for overwintering a crop like garlic because it's going to be tiny when it starts, and then you put the straw on it to get it through the winter. Strawberries are the same way if you're using it in the spring to keep vegetables from freezing. I don't think it's going to work that great. I would use something that you can assure will stay on top of the plants, especially if it's a plant that's frost sensitive. Garlic and strawberries can handle a certain amount of frost already. But if you've got tomatoes out there and you just want to pile straw on it, I'm not sure if that's the best choice. Clades asking why my site slide disfavored slopes. Slopes are good but slopes always have a bottom. And to be aware of what that means, top going to be really dry in the bottom is going to be wet and cold during the shoulder seasons when you get more frosts, growing on a slope is just fine. But with the slope comes the caveat that there's a top and there's a bottom. And there's advantages and disadvantages to those tops and bottoms. And a nice flat surface fairly equal. What type of garlic would grow best in Michigan? Question from Emily. There's really three main kind of garlic. There's hard neck garlic, soft neck garlic, and elephant garlic. Elephant garlic is actually like a leak, it grows a bit like a soft neck garlic. Let's just put those two together. Soft neck and hard neck are they can handle our winters better. The most common variety of hard neck that I see is called. Music The other question is, any recommendations on where to get some to plant? Well, that's a tough one. The season for buying garlic to plant is like July. I'm sure you've got several other things to do in July, but that's really when the garlic market is hopping. It's one of those more difficult vegetables to grow because it has a different season than all the rest. It's one that you plant in the fall and you harvest in July. Then at that point, people who harvest garlic will save for selling, to eat, and then save some for selling a seed. And then they try to sell all that seed garlic between July and the end of September. That's when you really want to be shopping for it. If you're looking online for seed garlic right now, you're mostly going to see a lot of sellouts because they don't sell at this time of year, really. If you can get ahold of some though, you can transplant. It doesn't make the most sense because it takes a lot of space. They're large cloves, so they need a large cell, but you can put them into like a 32 cell tray or a 50 cell tray and they'll sprout, they'll jump up and then you can transplant them out. But it's just going to take a lot of space. Okay, questions seem to have dried up a bit. I'm going to take that as my cue the meeting. Thank you all for coming.