As farmers, our responsibility is to figure out how to grow and harvest food without taking more energy from our land than we can restore. We are constantly evaluating systems on the farm to ensure that our practices are in line with our goal to keep our land thriving and arable for generations to come.

We keep the soil covered. We work hard to ensure that each bed on the farm is covered with living plants, cover crops, straw mulch, or silage tarps at all times. Soil biology requires interaction from plant life and crop residues, so we avoid having bare soil on the farm.

We limit mechanical tillage. Mechanical tillage can be a useful tool on the farm. We use a walk-behind tractor with a rototiller to reshape beds on the farm and to establish cover crops. That said, tillage can be very taxing on soil life and often leads to compaction and a loss of stored carbon and organic matter in the soil, so we are very conservative with use of the tractor on the farm, opting to use hand tools to flip our beds whenever we can.

We take care of our bodies. Sustainability applies to the farmers too! Growing in Maine, we have to pack a LOT of production into a relatively short season. Farming at the height of summer can be quite mentally and physically taxing, and we set boundaries around work on the farm to keep ourselves and our workers healthy during the wild ride that is summer in Maine.