| Horse-Powered Market Garden by Anne and Eric Nordell Patterning a market garden after traditional field crop rotations is a natural way to create a rhythm for working horses over the course of the growing season. Sowing produce in single rows, in the manner of farm crops, readily allows horse-drawn implements to be used from planting through harvest. When we started farming in the early 1980s, horse-powered market gardens were few and far between. Most of the organic growers we knew planted their crops in multiple-row beds or on black plastic. They had successfully adapted organic gardening techniques to a commercial scale. To prepare a seedbed they used tractor-powered rotovators and bed formers. For weed control they used plastic mulch layers, belly-mounted cultivators, or specialized hand tools. Thinking that these intensive systems, no matter how productive or efficient, did not provide many opportunities for working a horse, we decided to take the opposite approach. Instead of adapting organic gardening practices to a farm scale, we seized on the diversified farm as a model and tried to adapt traditional farm practices to the market garden. We felt our approach would be the best way to realize the full potential of work horses in vegetable production. Take, for example, the traditional 4-year rotation of corn, oats, wheat, and sod. Popularly known as COWS, the system was developed at a time when most farmers worked horses. Each crop was planted and harvested at a different point in the growing season, making it possible for farm families to do all the work with draft animals. Why not apply the same principle to the market garden? We soon learned that steady work, spread over the whole year, was an advantage when starting a young team in harness. Year-around employment also gave us a good return on their feed. We suspected that using the traditional diversified farm as a model might benefit the market garden as much as the horses. The staggered planting/harvest dates of the four farm crops in the COWS rotation, for example, prevented any one family of weeds from getting permanently established. Annual weed pressure was further reduced by rotating cultivated row crops with solid-seeded small grains and mowed hay. For controlling perennial weeds, such as the quackgrass that infested our farm, the bare fallow period between the oat harvest and the fall seeding of winter wheat proved effective. Applying livestock manure, liberally bedded with oats and wheat straw, to the grass-legume sod improved soil structure and fertility for heavy-feeding crops like corn. To make these farm principles work for our market garden, we alternate the fields between cash crops and fallow lands. Organizing our 12 one-half acre strips in this way gives us a lot more time and space for working the horses than we would have with an intensively planted garden. Strip farming also allows us to integrate into vegetable production such traditional cultural practices as soil-building sods, small grain covers, and summer fallow. Our next step was to group together in the same fields those cash crops having similar planting/harvest dates, so we can alternate between early and late crops, just like the old-time rotations. The result is a 4-year rotation bearing similarities to the traditional field crop rotation known as COWS:
As we see it, designing the market garden with work horses in mind has led to a hybrid approach combining the long-term biological efficiencies of traditional field crop rotations with the short-term profitability of direct marketed produce. Our land-extensive system has virtually eliminated hand weeding and the need for off-farm inputs other than seed, feed, and rock phosphate. Many dairy farmers in our area still practice the traditional field crop rotation of corn, oats, and hay, which is just a throwback to generations when horses were a farm's only source of power. Compared to an intensively planted garden, alternating our half-acre strips between cash crops and fallow lands gives us a lot more time and space to work the horses. And, using the composted manure from just four work horses, we are able to maintain good growing conditions on our six acres under cultivation.
Ann and Eric Nordell operate their market garden in Trout Run, Pennsylvania. The above article appeared in the Autumn 1998 issue of Rural Heritage. |
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PO Box 2067, Cedar Rapids IA 52406-2067
Phone: 319-362-3027 Fax: 319-362-3046 E-Mail: |
26 April 2012 last revision
