At the Mercy of the Weather
The Relentless Gamble of Farming
By Melane Kinney Hoffmann
The future of farming cannot be discussed without focusing on climate change, and how farmers must adjust their overall farming practices to address it. At the same time, farmers face the challenges of the day-today weather, which has become more unpredictable and extreme with climate change. If climate change is the big picture that requires shifts in long-term crop scheduling, planting and harvesting practices, day-to-day weather is what keeps farmers constantly checking 10-day and 30-day forecasts for temperatures, precipitation, frost, and wind. They often are forced to scramble to prevent a storm from unraveling months and years of work in brief moments of nature’ s fury.
Early Lessons at The Farm at Our House
Marc Grossman, who founded The Farm at Our House in Brookeville in 2007 with John Brill and now partners with Anh
Top: The Farm at Our House promotes their CSA year-round; above: Marc Grossman and Anh Doan manage to produce leafy greens and root vegetables inside high tunnels, protected from even the coldest weather at The Farm at Our House.
Doan, grows 10 acres of organic table food crops, from tomatoes, peppers, carrots, radishes, and herbs, to potatoes, green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choi, mustard greens, and ginger. The Farm at Our House sells at yearround farmers markets including Silver Spring, Bethesda, and Dupont Circle, sells wholesale to restaurants and area food banks, and provides food to hundreds of CSA customers( CSA means Community Supported Agriculture, in which customers pay up front for a subscription to receive farm products for a selected time period.).
Marc and his team grow in four large high tunnels or hoophouses( unheated structures that take advantage of passive solar energy with plastic roofing supported by aluminum trusses) which help manage the challenges of extreme weather such as hail, heavy rain, and late freezes.
The farm team has developed a range of strategies to learn from some of their earliest weather crises. They are careful to plant particular varieties of vegetables that can withstand extreme temperatures and are more resistant to pests that now thrive as weather norms have changed. In their earlier years they succumbed to the temptation to grow popular items such as sweet corn, but had to drop it because it can’ t be grown successfully using organic methods. They no longer grow certain types of peas that need a long, extended cool spring, which now is rare as warm weather usually comes on earlier.
When they started their farm they tended to use long plastic row“ mulch” that was common in veg-
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