When John and I defined our vision for Yellow Stonehouse Farm, we had these goals:

• Work together and for ourselves doing enjoyable work in a beautiful, low stress environment.
• Improve the farm and bring it to its full potential.
• Be good stewards of the land. Cherish the natural beauty, resources & wildlife of the farm.
• Enjoy a healthy, outdoor lifestyle on the farm.

A big goal was to be healthier, which meant farming and growing vegetables organically, as we didn’t want to use and expose ourselves to anything toxic.  We figured that if something can kill insects and weeds then it probably isn’t very good for us either!

John and I are risk averse and believe in prevention.  We don’t take unnecessary chances – especially with something as important as our health and the health of others.  Here’s our rationale: if we can eliminate a risk and still obtain a satisfactory result, go ahead and eliminate the risk!  We also don’t think enough testing is done on herbicides & pesticides and we aren’t willing to take chances with insufficiently tested products. Bottom line –  we don’t use herbicides or insecticides.

Insecticides are an obvious hazard (they are poisons) but there is increasing scientific evidence that herbicides are hazardous to human health on a cellular level.  Researchers have found evidence of impacts on the brain, nervous systems and blood of humans, and it is the youngest among us that are the most vulnerable.  It’s one reason we are pleased to have many families as members – plus it’s fun teaching children about where their food comes from.

It’s a big effort to wage our annual organic battle against the weeds and pests.  We use lots of ground cloth and transplant thousands of seedlings to win the race against weeds and use torches to kill the weeds that survive. We rotate vegetables and plant cover crops to interrupt the life cycles of pests. We employ natural predators like Lady Bugs and Praying Mantis against unwanted insects such as aphids, and hand pick some pests like Tomato worms.  We use plants to encourage beneficial insects and also to repel unwanted ones.  We also hand weed and cultivate many, many rows of vegetables!

Being organic isn’t easier but it’s worth it for our health and that of our shareholders!  Next time I’ll talk about how we became Westfield’s first USDA Certified Organic farm.

This week’s topic is Yellow Stonehouse Farm’s embrace of Organic Farming as Westfield’s first organically certified Farm.  Farming Organically while maintaining the land sustainably is an integral piece of our approach to farming, food, and stewardship of the land, and it’s been our way of life for many years.

Why?  The answer is cumulative and begins with learning to grow vegetables as children – when (and yes this ages us) there wasn’t an array of insecticides, herbicides or weed killers, chemical fertilizers and the like.  Instead we weeded rows of vegetables, picked off tomato worms and Japanese beetles, used grass clippings and newspaper to suppress weeds and our neighbor’s horse or cow manure as fertilizer.

Coincidentally, we enjoyed an abundance of bees, birds, butterflies, wild flowers and animals.

You see, the problem with the insecticides is they kill ALL the bugs not just the bad ones.  So you may be getting rid of the Japanese beetles but you’re also killing the lady bugs, praying mantises, lace wings and butterflies.  When you use herbicides, you kill every plant – not just the weeds (what is a weed anyway?) but the Milkweed, wild flowers, and other native plants.

Indiscriminately killing off swaths of plants and insects deprive other plants, insects, birds and animals the food they need to survive.  A recent example is the Monarch Butterfly:  current farming and landscaping practices promote killing all weeds in a field, lawn or golf course, but this also kills off Milkweed.  As a result, Monarch butterfly larvae don’t have a food source which is directly contributing to the population crash of Eastern Monarchs in recent years – though paving over many of the green spaces in Northeast metropolitan areas is also a critical factor.  One of the saddest things I have ever seen was a lone Monarch butterfly flying through the concrete jungle in NYC – without a nectar source or flower in sight.

A huge benefit of organic farming are healthy ecosystems.  At Yellow Stonehouse Farm, we enjoy a robust ecosystem where bats feast on and control mosquitoes, ladybugs eat aphids and other plant eating pests, birds eat beetles and other predatory insects, and the wild flowers including Milkweed attract and support bees, butterflies and other beneficial insects.  Our vegetables are amazingly pest free!

Spring is when nature comes roaring back to life – and we get to enjoy it’s exuberant blossoming because we don’t interfere in the natural cycle.  Next time, we’ll write about Organic Farming’s health benefits for humans and why our organic vegetable CSA is so popular.