Farm Market Pick up @Henway!

Can’t Wait til Spring for Cider Donuts?  Order online and pick up Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays at Henway Hard Cider this winter! 
I want Donuts! 

What’s Ripe and Ready for Picking?

Sign up for free U-Pick Alerts! You'll always be the first to know what's ripe and ready for picking at Great Country Farms.

Thanks for signing up!

By submitting this form, you are granting: Great Country Farms permission to email you. You may unsubscribe via the link found at the bottom of every email. (See our Email Privacy Policy for details.) Emails are serviced by Constant Contact.
Close

Great Country Farms

Community Supported Agriculture, CSA, Produce Farm, U-Pick, Field Trips in Loudoun County, VA

Farm Market & Bakery Winter Pick up @Henway

Farm Play Area is CLOSED for the season
Shop Online Farm Market
Get U-Pick Alerts
  • Home
    • About
    • Blog
  • PLAY
    • Field Trips
      • School Field Trips
        • Strawberry Tour
        • Gem Mining Tour
        • Garden Tour
        • Pollinator Tour
        • Apple Tour
        • Pumpkin- Fall Tour
      • Summer Camps
    • Birthdays
      • Barnyard Bash
      • Evening Bonfire
      • Gem Mining Adventure
  • U-Pick
    • Pick your own: Now Picking…
    • Crops By Season
    • U-Pick Tips and FAQs
  • Bakery
    • EATs on the Farm
  • Market
  • Produce Box
    • GCF Harvest Produce Box Membership
      • 2021 CSA Membership Agreement
    • Fan of the Farm Season Pass
    • Neighborhood Farming Since 1993
  • Picnics
    • Company Picnic Ideas
    • Meetings & Team Building
    • Barn Wedding Venue
    • Family Celebrations
    • Picnic Venues
  • Festivals
    • Raising Chicks with Great Country Farms’ Spring Chick Program
    • Easter Egg Hunt & Marshmallow Harvest
    • Adult Easter Egg Hunt
    • Strawberry Jubilee Fest
    • Honeybee Heroes Day
    • Father’s Day Fish-a-Rama
    • Pup Play Day
    • Peach Daze @Bluemont Vineyard & Henway Hard Cider
    • The Big Dig Potato Harvest
    • Corn Maze & Apple Harvest
    • Fall Pumpkin Harvest Festival
    • Pumpkin Chunkin’
  • Henway Hard Cider
  • Contact
    • Farmhand Central
    • Donations
    • Employment Opportunities
  • COVID
  • Blog

No-Till Saves Time

April 27, 2020 by Mark Dewey

In the last post, we talked about switching to no-till in order to preserve the soil’s micro-biome, which is crucial for bringing crops to their full nutritional capacity. This post focuses on another reason not to till: weeds.

If you’ve ever grown a garden yourself, you’ve probably found that when you come out with your seeds in the spring, your garden plot is covered with debris, including plants you didn’t put there. The easiest way to get rid of that mess is to rent a Roto-tiller, which turns the surface of the soil under and brings a lower layer to the top. It looks great: loose and clean and ready for your spinach seeds. But three weeks later, your row of spinach is engulfed by thousands of invaders. Where did they come from? You planted spinach, not chickweed!

They came from that lower layer, which is full of dormant seeds that pop to life when you turn the soil and expose them to the warmth of the sun.

That same process takes place on a much larger scale when you till a 40-acre field with a tractor. Industrial farming solves the problem by spraying the field with Round-up, which kills everything but plants genetically engineered to tolerate it. Well, we don’t use Round-up, so we had to pull those weeds by hand, which takes a long time.

But when we stopped tilling the soil, we stopped bringing those seeds to the surface, so they stopped germinating.

There’s a trade-off: it’s hard to sow seeds directly onto un-tilled soil because of all that debris, including left-over weeds. So instead of turning under that debris, we cover it with compost. After a couple of years, most of the weed seeds are pretty well buried. And as long as we don’t turn over the soil, they stay that way.

Filed Under: Big Pictures, On Foggy Bottom Road Tagged With: industrial farming, no-till planting, Round-up, weed control

Are We Round-up Ready?

November 19, 2014 by Mark Dewey

The other day my sister-in-law, who’s a nuclear physicist, overheard me talking to her daughter about the corn we grow at Great Country Farms.

“Most of the corn in America comes from seeds that have been genetically engineered to produce a protein known as Bt, which kills the worms that like to eat sweet corn,” I said. “We don’t use that kind of seed, so some of our corn has worms under the husk at the top of the ear. But you just cut off the part the worms have eaten, and you eat the rest.”

biohazardcorn

“The results of a comparison of GM and non-GM corn from adjacent Midwest fields in the US that first appeared on the Moms Across America March website [1] are reproduced in Table 1.”

“I didn’t hear the beginning of that conversation,” my sister-in-law said later, “but you must have said you’re opposed to using GE seeds. Why is that?”

Knowing that I’m temperamentally inclined to subvert powerful conglomerates that pretend my welfare motivates their business models, and believing that such temperamental inclination is a sorry excuse for indoctrinating twelve-year-olds, I told the physicist that I don’t yet understand the issue as well as I’d like, and that I’m trying to learn the benefits of genetic engineering, but the downsides I’m aware of now are these:

1. Genetically engineered crops haven’t existed long enough for anyone to have a clear sense of how they might affect the human body over time.

2. One company, Monsanto, makes both the herbicide that allows for greater corn yields and the GE seeds that tolerate heavier doses of that herbicide, and I distrust that kind of profit-driven harmonious interest, especially when it controls 90% of the American corn market.

“I thought genetic engineering was supposed to reduce pesticide use,” she said.

“I think Monsanto’s corn has one added gene that makes Bt and another that tolerates glyphosate, which is the toxin in Round-up.”

“So why is the glyphosate necessarily worse than the problem it prevents?” she asked. “Isn’t glyphosate actually less toxic than pesticides farmers used before there was Round-up?”

“I think that’s true,” I said, “but Round-up is used so heavily now that its cumulative effect may be worse than the pesticides it replaced.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but it’s also possible that the adverse effects are a reasonable trade-off for a lot more food.”

That seemed unlikely to me, but without any evidence to the contrary, I had to admit that it was possible. Two days later, Mark Zurschmeide sent me a link to this article, which provides a lot of specific information that makes glyphosate look like a bad idea. The argument in favor of glyphosate has always been that it doesn’t hurt people because it works by disrupting production of amino acids that are crucial to plants but not to people, so it kills them but not us.USDA-pesticides-applied-to-wheat

But Doctors Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Sennef of MIT recently published a paper pointing out that the microbial cultures in our intestines need to produce those same amino acids, and that glyphosate effects those cultures the same way it effects broadleaf cultures in a cornfield. So glyphosate may not in fact directly damage human tissues, but by killing off our inner flora, it undermines our health substantially.

“Roundup significantly disrupts the functioning of beneficial bacteria in the gut and contributes to permeability of the intestinal wall and consequent expression of autoimmune disease symptoms.” says Sarah Pope, the Healthy Home Economist.

I still consider myself relatively uninformed about these matters, and I realize that everyone who takes a stand on the issue has a bias of some kind — I’m trying to neutralize mine by copping to it — but it makes sense that glyphosate, a pesticide, would trounce my inner flora.

That can’t be good.

 

 

Filed Under: Big Pictures, On Foggy Bottom Road Tagged With: genetic engineering, glyphosate, GMOs, Monsanto, Round-up, seed patents

Give the Gift of Family Fun on the Farm!

Purchase a Fan of the Farm Season Pass & enjoy unlimited farm visits!

Get Details and Buy a Season Pass!

Produce Box Shares Go on Sale Mid-January

Get fresh, ecoganic produce delivered to your door or pick up site each week from June-October. Re-generatively grown in our rich, chemical free soils, picked a the peak of perfection. Know your food source and your farmer! Tell Me More

Shop our Online Market

Sign up for U-Pick alerts

Upcoming Events

There are no upcoming events.

View Calendar
Add
  • Add to Timely Calendar
  • Add to Google
  • Add to Outlook
  • Add to Apple Calendar
  • Add to other calendar
  • Export to XML

Latest from the Farm Blog

Whole-life Nutrition for Life-long Wellness

Your Vote Matters More than Ever!

Our Pledge, Your Pledge

CSA Delivery Days 2020

9 Tips For Strawberry Picking in Light of COVID-19

Connect With Us

Follow us on Social Media and stay up-to-date with all the wonderful happenings and fun events at our farm!
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

© Copyright 2020 Great Country Farms - All Rights Reserved
18780 Foggy Bottom Road Bluemont, Virginia 20135
540-554-2073

Small Business Websites by 5.12 Design Lab · Admin

▲