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Sister’s Hill Farm: SYSTEMS-MECHANICAL CULTIVATION and INFRASTRUCTUR

127 Sister Hill Rd, Stanfordville, NY 12581

The key to making a good living in farming is to develop effective systems. On my farm tour I will show you the tools and infrastructure that I have designed and created that make running a farm manageable, pleasant, fun, and efficient.

 

Our farm tour focus will be on two systems; mechanical cultivation and infrastructure. With regard to weed control I’ll share how we plant precisely without a transplanter.  How we mark a grid on our beds with a IH Cub tractor; how we transplant and direct seed into those beds by hand, and how we cultivate them with a Buddingh Basket Weeder. I’ll also show you how we tackle in-row cultivation using our Planet Jr two wheel tractor and homemade three row finger weeders.  

 

With regard to infrastructure you'll see our loading dock and produce washing station, including our root washer and our pressure washer-based set-up for cleaning harvest bins and bunched roots.  I’ll also demonstrate how we use our mini pallets and macrobins, electronic pallet scale, ergonomic height adjustable wash tank, and our cooler. To give you a sense of our size and scale; we grow strictly for CSA, I train three full season apprentices, and we grow about 250 full weekly shares on 5 acres with no double cropping. Most years we harvest around 90,000 pounds of veggies for our members.