Hurting

One of the hardest questions to answer these days is, “How are you?” We pride ourselves on not being whiny farmers, but it’s been a hard year, and the floods of late August didn’t make it any easier. And, frankly, we are hurting here at Rock Spring Farm.

It’s hard to remember back now, but the spring actually started off extraordinarily wet. Every thirty percent chance of rain materialized into a significant rain event on the farm, and we struggled to get crops in and weeded. And one day in June the rain stopped, and didn’t come back for almost two months. We dragged irrigation around the farm and sweated a lot.

The drought broke in the first week of August before things turned ugly with the southeast Minnesota flooding on August 18. While we didn’t have the same level of devastation seen in Rushford or southwest Wisconsin, that weekend’s rainfall came on top of already saturated soils, and did a fine job of making a mess of things. But it was the four inches of rain on Monday that truly ravaged our farm. Continuing wet weather caused many issues with, both of root crops in the soil and leaf and fruit crops above the soil.

We also lost our entire crop of transplanted late fall greens – lettuces, radicchio, and endives – because the transplants rotted and bolted in the greenhouse when we couldn’t get into the field to transplant them out. The endive and escarole that we did have outside rotted entirely, and we lost more than half of our radicchio in the field to rot. Salad mix and fall turnips simply languished in the saturated soils.

Perhaps the most emotionally devastating crop loss for us was in the flooding of our fall storage carrots (we are estimating a 75 percent loss there) and the rot in our early fall carrots, which claimed about half of that crop.

Our driveway has mostly washed out, with much of it ending up in the greenhouse. The seasonal flow that ran for the better part of three weeks overflowed into another greenhouse, leaving a layer of mud throughout.

The house and packing shed, we are pleased to relate, are fine, although our landscaping efforts have been severely hampered.

We are estimating total losses and damage of approximately $40,000. On a farm where the overall income from crops that we grow hovers around $200,000, this is a significant loss, especially since it comes at a time of year when we are actually making our profit for the year – and as a sole proprietorship, that profit is our salary.

We have had several people ask how they can help. Our longest CSA member, Nancy Adams, has insisted for weeks that we need to quit acting like everything’s okay, because she knows it’s not. And Nancy would know.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of creative options for helping out. We need a bulldozer for driveway repairs and putting some pieces of the landscape back together. We need a few extra hours of daylight when the soil is dry enough to work so that we can make up for a month’s worth of lost field work. And we need to make up for the lost income from the damage from the flood.

So, we have two ways that people can help out.

First, if you are able to help us out financially, please consider a cash donation to the farm using the button below. This is perhaps our most pressing need to be able to keep the farm moving forward in a responsible, growing manner.

Second, we will be having a community work day on Saturday, September 29, from 10 to 5, with a potluck lunch at 1. Planned activities at this time (depending on the weather) include carrot harvest, beet harvest, greenhouse cleanup, and herb plant maintenance. We are not planning a full-out farm tour as part of this event, but we will talk at everybody a lot and you will get a chance to see the farm. Please RSVP to csa (at sign) rsfarm.com.