2019 - The Farm

TrentL · Apr 27, 2019

Plants on the store. Shipping begins may 9.

https://lawrenceproduce.com/collections/live-plants

Use GLOG2019 if you want a break (valid between now and May 9). Just posting that little bit here, not in general forum, because you all been with me since the beginning

Mildfruit · Apr 27, 2019

TrentL said:
Plants on the store. Shipping begins may 9.

https://lawrenceproduce.com/collections/live-plants

Use GLOG2019 if you want a break (valid between now and May 9). Just posting that little bit here, not in general forum, because you all been with me since the beginning

I wish you good luck with the sales, I live in europe so I unfortunately can't order any, but im sure you'll sell plenty without my order

TrentL · Apr 27, 2019

Mildfruit said:
I wish you good luck with the sales, I live in europe so I unfortunately can't order any, but im sure you'll sell plenty without my order

Thanks. My cost of goods worked out to $6.26 per plant so the GLOG pricing is pretty damn close to what it cost me. Roughly 1/2 the cost is labor over the last 4.5 months tending to them. Seeding, watering, transplanting, hauling them around, etc. It took 10 hours of just driving, just to get all the starter trays out to the farm to transplant (could only fit 12 in an SUV). A week of transplanting. Another couple days to haul them all out of the indoor grow room to the greenhouse. 8 hours of mixing soil (took 4 cubic yards). Not to mention 45 separate watering runs before the plants went outside and drip line was set up out in the greenhouse. (roughly 30 watering runs at home, another 15 upstairs, two more in the greenhouse.

Materials cost, pots, $1750 in electricity, $730 in LP gas, seed, media, perlite, 1/2 ton of worm castings (about $400 worth), couple hundred pounds of dry fert (blood meal, fish bone meal, rock phosphate, kelp meal, azomite) which came out to a few hundred bucks, and 32 ounces of mycorrhizae (which costs $160).

I totalled up all the costs and divided by 3200 to arrive at a price per plant for chinense. Depending on the individual seed price cost of goods was anywhere from 6.06 to 6.46 so I just tossed a dart and used 6.26 for my per plant cost. (Yes, I've spent $20k to make these, not counting any of the infrastructure; lights, greenhouse, tables, starter trays, irrigation stuff, etc; figure some of that can get eaten by the other produce). Factored labor at $12.50 / hr for me and wife.

podz · Apr 27, 2019

TrentL said:
Thanks. My cost of goods worked out to $6.26 per plant so the GLOG pricing is pretty damn close to what it cost me. Roughly 1/2 the cost is labor over the last 4.5 months tending to them. Seeding, watering, transplanting, hauling them around, etc. It took 10 hours of just driving, just to get all the starter trays out to the farm to transplant (could only fit 12 in an SUV). A week of transplanting. Another couple days to haul them all out of the indoor grow room to the greenhouse. 8 hours of mixing soil (took 4 cubic yards). Not to mention 45 separate watering runs before the plants went outside and drip line was set up out in the greenhouse. (roughly 30 watering runs at home, another 15 upstairs, two more in the greenhouse.

Materials cost, pots, $1750 in electricity, $730 in LP gas, seed, media, perlite, 1/2 ton of worm castings (about $400 worth), couple hundred pounds of dry fert (blood meal, fish bone meal, rock phosphate, kelp meal, azomite) which came out to a few hundred bucks, and 32 ounces of mycorrhizae (which costs $160).

I totalled up all the costs and divided by 3200 to arrive at a price per plant for chinense. Depending on the individual seed price cost of goods was anywhere from 6.06 to 6.46 so I just tossed a dart and used 6.26 for my per plant cost. (Yes, I've spent $20k to make these, not counting any of the infrastructure; lights, greenhouse, tables, starter trays, irrigation stuff, etc; figure some of that can get eaten by the other produce). Factored labor at $12.50 / hr for me and wife.

You, Sir, are the stuff from which legends are made.

A few hundred years ago and more in the feudal system of Europe, kings would grant land to those men who they saw as being educated, civil, logistically capable and possessing a solid work ethic as well as being able to pull their dependent peasants into military units and defend the kingdom when needed. This class of men was granted large swaths of prime land and called The Landed Gentry aka Gentlemen aka Lords aka LandLords. Had I been a king back during those times, I most definitely would have elevated you into the class of the landed gentry. A lot of people believe that the landed gentry didn't lift anything heavier than money, but of course that is not true - some did and some did not. Financially successful ones often did.

I personally have no desire to be or become a farmer as I am easily able to earn 6 times per hour what you mentioned just by sitting at my air-conditioned office desk, yet I still find it entirely fascinating and captivating to read your documentation of what is an epic venture for a couple without staff. If you don't have a degree in agriculture and business, you should be granted honorary titles by esteemed universities and allowed to give do speaking gigs on their campuses for half a million per day. Your insights into business and logistics are a valuable education to any and everyone with which they are shared.

That said, I hope that you eventually hit the cash pile and gain even more freedom to do what you love doing. Your solid work ethic, attention to detail, logistical capabilities, teaching skills and business acumen are outstanding. Your willingness to share that knowledge for free with your fellows is golden and puts you into the category of being highly respected by your peers.

Your ability to manage your relationship and hold onto your wife through all of that shit also puts you into the class of being a better man than most. I'd gladly buy you a beer if you were ever in my neck of the woods.

TrentL · Apr 27, 2019

podz said:
I personally have no desire to be or become a farmer as I am easily able to earn 6 times per hour what you mentioned just by sitting at my air-conditioned office desk, yet I still find it entirely fascinating and captivating to read your documentation of what is an epic venture for a couple without staff. If you don't have a degree in agriculture and business, you should be granted honorary titles by esteemed universities and allowed to give do speaking gigs on their campuses for half a million per day. Your insights into business and logistics are a valuable education to any and everyone with which they are shared.

That said, I hope that you eventually hit the cash pile and gain even more freedom to do what you love doing. Your solid work ethic, attention to detail, logistical capabilities, teaching skills and business acumen are outstanding. Your willingness to share that knowledge for free with your fellows is golden and puts you into the category of being highly respected by your peers.

Your ability to manage your relationship and hold onto your wife through all of that shit also puts you into the class of being a better man than most. I'd gladly buy you a beer if you were ever in my neck of the woods.

Oh I'm not doing it for the money.

I am coming off of a career, semi-retired now, but still (solely) own a technology company with a lot of servers in a couple of datacenters hosting North American dealership business systems for a Fortune 100. I started out 20+ years ago as a programmer, went on to be a lead systems designer, got in to network architecture, and in 2008 started building high performance computer clusters on Intel supercompute architecture. My company is an Intel gold partner, for high performance compute clustering, and the highly available realtime replication architecture I built to span servers across datacenters for realtime fault tolerance and redundancy has worked flawlessly for the last decade.

Money isn't a problem.

Becoming jaded with technology, that was the problem. I needed a change of pace. Everything I ever built, everything I ever wrote, everything I ever designed, rapidly becomes obsolete and it leaves and emptiness, looking back over a lengthy career in tech, knowing that in another few years everything you have built will join the rest of everything you've ever built in a big graveyard of forgotten old shit.

So took up farming.

It's the polar opposite of what I've done my entire adult life. Physically active, outdoors vs. indoors, moving vs. stationary, etc. I'm particularly fond of the indoor grow phase as absolutely everything is under my direct control. In that regards, I do very well - once things go outside, Mother Nature has more say than I do, and I can only watchfully wait. It's a different kind of stress, and a different kind of satisfaction to "win" against the elements. Or at least gain insight so that "next year is better"

It also had given me insight in to aspects of life I was oblivious to, previously,

And physically? I'm a damn tank now compared to that skinny desk jockey I was a few years ago. Farming is hard work.

Humbling too, to know that you are laboring your ass off for a few bucks worth of product, and still have to work your ass off to even make that, because selling is tough work too!

More than anything else, it has given me new respect for people who do hard work for a living, and has helped build depth of character, that I lacked previously.

TrentL · Apr 27, 2019

That being said when you get about $600k deep in to a project, like this, at some point you gotta climb out of the red.

I ran the numbers and there's a steep hill to climb to get out of the red. Need to really hit a few thousand a week in produce sales for most of the season to cover costs this year.

Last year I barely covered property tax bill, and didn't make a scratch in mortgage, equipment, infrastructure, etc.

TrentL · Apr 29, 2019

Drone survey of our wheat crop loss; roughly 11 acres gone.

Shade cloth off

5200 peppers hardened off with no sunburn. Well, very little sunburn. A few off in a corner which got too much post 2PM light had a couple leaves slightly burned, but nothing severe.

Letting the sun do the work with increasing size apertures in the shade cloth worked flawlessly, sooooo much easier than dragging all those plants around.

DWB · Apr 30, 2019

Hey Trent, I remember last year you got some 2,4-D damage and maybe several instances. How far did the vapor travel to get your plants?

Devv · Apr 30, 2019

Army worms get the wheat?

BTW Podz nailed it!

TrentL · Apr 30, 2019

DWB said:
Hey Trent, I remember last year you got some 2,4-D damage and maybe several instances. How far did the vapor travel to get your plants?

The last of the plants which hadn't been planted out were still sitting about 50' from the road when a spray truck drove by on a return trip from spraying, lost about 25% of them within 2 weeks and the rest had stupid crazy growth. Ended up destroying many of them.

I had a couple instances where tomato leaves curled under briefly, which was probably from off target dicamba (could have been anywhere within several miles; very light effect, didn't hurt production or growth to speak of). Some of the plants nearest the road had stunting. We didn't harvest any peppers from the last 10' or so of the easternmost rows. This year I'm planting everything with a bigger buffer. Spray trucks which go out in high wind and spray, make their return trips still soaking wet with the stuff and get every damn thing they drive past.

The north field had bad symptoms of herbicide damage but the inspector said it was probably still residual herbicide from years of being rowcropped. By the time our audit came, there were no symptoms whatsoever of damage; but plants noticeably lagged behind their organic counterparts all year.

Anyway to answer your question, 2,4-D can travel a half mile or so, maybe a little further, depends on how windy it is, moisture content in air, and whether you're experiencing a thermal inversion. I was hit at home from a field 1/2 mile away one year, badly enough it knocked out about half my pepper and tomato plants.

TrentL · Apr 30, 2019

Also, that shit *can* and *will* get in to the ground water table. There's been greenhouses hit by 2,4-D and glyphosphate which were totally sealed off from outside.

There is widespread contamination of water supplies across the country by both atrazine and glyphosphate.

Contamination levels can get very bad after pre-emergent spray in spring followed by heavy rains.

TrentL · Apr 30, 2019

Devv said:
Army worms get the wheat?

BTW Podz nailed it!

Oh no, the drainage ditch along the road is clogged to hell and gone and the road commissioner won't lift a finger to fix it. That situation might very well become a legal one if he doesn't get on it soon. I lost 11 acres of wheat this year to flooding because the culverts in the drainage ditch have collapsed. By IL law being on higher ground and having other farmers drain tile run across my land in to the highway ditch, I have "right of way" - which means if the road commissioner doesn't act, I can file a suit for damages. Won't talk more about it on a public forum though, if / when legal stuff starts. That's never a good idea.

TrentL · Apr 30, 2019

Picture time.

Been hand-pollinating some peppers for isolated seed. Not particularly hard and they are taking well.

Jemez Pueblo

Two days after hand pollination

Some others (these are tepin x lemon drop)

The wind sent a lot of my straw off to Logan County.

Bare root strawberry plants took well.

So did most of the bare root raspberry plants.

Looks like I managed to avoid killing the onions with the flamethrower.

Garlic is doing fantastic. Waterlogged, so showing a little N deficiency. I spread about 10 lbs of blood meal on that patch a few days ago, let the rain wash it down in to the soil thru the straw. Hopefully that'll give it a good boost when it dries back out.

Pretty healthy looking garlic, anyway. Our soil is the stuff of magic and fairytales.

TrentL · Apr 30, 2019

Did I mention it's wet? This was NOT tilled ground, on the border of our tilled ground. No way I'm stepping foot in the field for a while. I'd lose a leg. Or at least a boot.

Sprouts in the greenhouse doing well in my latest "I" mix media. All trays were covered by a layer of coir, seeds between the coir and our soil mix.

TrentL · Apr 30, 2019

So uhh, yeah I still have peppers.

These have had zero liquid fertilizer now for 2.5 months (depending on type, started potting up in mid Feb)

Safe to say I got that soil mix dialed in perfect for peppers.

This was the total extent of our sunburn damage; happened the very first day I opened up the shade cloth a smidge. After that everything went perfect.

Very perfect.

Tomatoes are loving the stuff too. When I potted these up in to 3 gal containers, the plants were buried so deep in them there was hardly any leaf sticking out the soil. They've since rooted strong and are growing very strong for the last few days. Already started on flower nodes in some cases.

Soon, I'll be starting some cannabis.

TrentL · Apr 30, 2019

We're also going to pursue a recreational marijuana grow license when the IL bill is submitted and rules go through JCAR.

The reason for this is for CBD cultivar genetics development. In the industrial hemp program anything over 0.3% THC has to be destroyed. Which has a side effect of making any CBD genetics development impossible, as all of the CBD plants started out with a high THC maternal lineage. (E.g. the famous Neville's Haze marijuana strain begat the high CBD variety Suver Haze, etc).

Anyway, I can't develop my own CBD varieties if I can't first cultivate high THC varieties and selectively breed them to swap the THC:CBD ratios around.

So .. we'll see. The latest I heard is there will be a tiered licensing system for recreational marijuana, with "craft grower" sized licenses that'd probably be about perfect for what we need for genetics development.

Orekoc · May 1, 2019

Trent, I don't know how you do it all. Just potting up a couple of dozen seedlings runs me down. You are awesome in all you do.

DWB · May 1, 2019

TrentL said:
Anyway to answer your question, 2,4-D can travel a half mile or so, maybe a little further, depends on how windy it is, moisture content in air, and whether you're experiencing a thermal inversion. I was hit at home from a field 1/2 mile away one year, badly enough it knocked out about half my pepper and tomato plants.

Thanks Trent. That's what I was thought I remembered reading. The shit is so volatile. The farmer who uses it around me says you can open a jug and leave it sit on the upwind side of a cotton field and it will kill a wedge of crop all the way across the field. This is an example what he did to some my pepper plants with 2,4-DB in 2017 at a distance of up to 35 yards inside my property.

This year my main pepper patch is 75 yards north of my property line but I still don't feel safe. His guy hosed my land with round up early last month spraying in a 20 mph wind right out of the south. He earned a visit with the Dept of AG inspector about that one. He's definitely being more conscientious now by leaving an acre of buffer strip across the back of my property.

He sprayed again a week ago and I'm finding some weird stuff. I didn't see it happen but if he sprayed when he said he sprayed, he didn't get me because the wind was good. If it was a few hours later it was with a bad wind. I just found out he sprayed 2 oz of Valor and 16 oz of Dual Magnum per acre. Not sure about the volatility of that stuff.

I'm bringing some plants into the lab this week to find out what's going on. I'm losing three peppers to what I'm afraid is fusarium but this "sentinel" Amish Paste tomato tip looks an awful lot like herbicide damage without other outwardly visible characteristics of fusarium. We'll see.

TrentL · May 1, 2019

You got hit again. You can send in tissue and soil tests to a state university for confirmation if you act fast.

Once it's confirmed you can go after him.

Spraying during favorable wind does no good if it volatizes a few hours later and an unfavorable wind shift happens. For safe application the sprayer needs to make sure there is #1 no thermal inversion (increasing temps) and #2 no wind shift during first 24 hours towards a vulnerable site.

TrentL · May 1, 2019

Also dual magnum (s-metolachlor) readily invades ground water, EPA has an advisory on it here; https://www3.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/reg_actions/reregistration/fs_PC-108801_1-Apr-95.pdf