Organically Grown

This page documents our growing practices at Begin Family Farm. All of our produce is grown using standard organic growing practices.

Pest Management

Our Integrated Pest Management strategy prioritizes prevention of pests first, such as timing and trap crops. Second, we use physical barriers to prevent pest damage, such as netting. As a last resort, we will use certified organic biopesticides to control pests when all else fails or is not possible, and apply those pesticides as little as possible.

For example, there's simply no way to raise a corn crop in New England without some biological controls; the worms will decimate the crop and netting is impractical.

  1. Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt, is a bacteria that's naturally found in soil and is certified for use in organic production. We use it primarily to control caterpillars that destroy brassicas like cabbage and broccoli. It's also used on our solanaceae crops, mainly tomato and eggplant, as well as corn to control a handful of pests.
  2. Bacillus Mycoides Isolate J (BmJ), is a common and ubiquitous soil organism that was originally isolated from sugar beet leaves. We use this on foliage of tomato plants to delay the onset of late blight.
  3. Chromobacterium subtsugae, a natural soil-borne bacteria that is used to control corn earworm and the European corn borer on corn.

These are all biological controls, also known as biopesticides, as opposed to man-made chemical pesticides. Biopesticides are safer for use around people and pets than man-made pesticides because, for example, they can be easily washed away from fruits and vegetables. (Source) Biopesticides almost always need to be ingested by the target pest to have their desired effect and have short residual effects (they quickly break down and become inert in the sun, for example).

Fertilizer

We use only certified organic fertilizers.  What's available to us and is cost effective changes from year to year, but generally we use some combination of pelleted and composted chicken manure, fish fertilizer, feather meal as a nitrogen source and potash for potassium.  We may apply other organic products to amend our soil based on what our soil tests tell us.

Weed control

We do not use chemical weed control methods (herbicides). Weed control is achieved by the use of tillage, mechanical cultivation, crop rotation, terminated cover crop residue and plastic mulch.  We also make use of silage tarps to germinate then kill any weed seeds prior to sowing the desired crop leaving a clean, stale seedbed.


Crop selection

We choose varieties that have high disease resistance whenever we can.  This helps us minimize our use of fungicides.  These are typically F1 types that have been bred specifically for their resilience. We do not use GMO seeds.

Covers

We use row covers to create a physical barrier to keep pests out.  This isn't foolproof, but it can be used to reduce how many times we apply Bt to our brassica crops, for example.

Heirloom tomatoes, which we grow a lot of, have poor disease resistance when compared with modern strains, since they're open pollinated old varieties.  To allow these plants to thrive, all of our heirloom tomatoes are grown in high tunnels, where we can control the climate.  This keeps the foliage dry and doesn't allow blight to spread as easily.

Come see for yourself

Want to actually come see for yourself?  Farmer Jeff would be thrilled to show you around our farm and tell you everything you want to know.

Just use our contact page to request a farm visit and we'll get something scheduled.

Updates to this page

We strive to keep this page as up to date as possible. However, product availability, weather conditions and pest activity can change rapidly during the growing season. As such we cannot guarantee that this page is at all times accurate and may not always reflect our current growing practices.