We finished digging carrots at Joes Brook Farm on Nov. 8, 2024. The crop yielded well – a full cooler – enough to keep carrot lovers across Vermont supplied deep into winter. The harvest complete, we loaded trucks and returned to the barn for the wash, leaving the last of the empty field carpeted with still green carrot tops. It was the same field where, four months prior, Mary sat on a freshly deposited driftwood log, days after the first flood, ripples of sandy loam soil spreading out around her. It looked like low tide at an ocean beach: barren yet restored.
Our farm occupies a strange space on the spectrum of flood impact and recovery. On one hand, we faced a staggering financial loss, prominent in acreage and visible to anyone driving through Passumpsic and also visible in the immediate absence of seasonal favorites, now gone from the market shelves they had occupied just days before. On the other hand, our soil was intact and improved. Something taken, but something given in return.
We owe our recovery this year to so many factors: our ironic floodplain soil, the commitment of our customers, and the generosity of our community. Thank you so much to the 700+ donors, volunteers, STJ Academy students, neighbors, our farming peers, and our rock solid crew who helped us get through the worst of the season.
It was truly moving to be bolstered up by our community (financially and mentally), but our goal is to be self-sustained.
2024 was a year that inspired change. For us, farming comes down to making the best use of the land we have access to, and supplying the best markets we have access to in our community. Here are some of our plans and strategies for future resiliency.
Land We have prime growing soil. We have had 4 floods of varying destruction in the last 16 months, and our soils are better than ever. Moving forward, we believe we can allocate our acreage between cash and cover crops, spreading out our harvests throughout the season to reduce the risk of losing everything all at once.
Additionally, we are actively pursuing land leases and are starting to curate some smaller scattered meadows outside the valley. Because of soil type, traveling time and variable access to irrigation this process must be taken slow, and we plan to develop one to two acres a year of soils with a low flood risk for some of our longest season crops.
Growing Technique There are many, many choices we can make here. This is just a quick list of some of the more major considerations that we’re making as we plan for the coming year:
Planting shorter-season crops in our high-risk areas.
Having extra transplants on hand so we can replant quickly, if the need arises.
Using less plastic mulch, tarps, and row covers. These techniques are a huge assistance to organic growing, but their presence makes cleaning up a real bummer.
Maximizing greenhouse growing by planting additional crops on the shoulder season.
Cultivating a core crop mix for the CSA and our farm stand in a low flood risk area to ensure season-long reliability for our most important customers.
Being Prepared Often we only get a day's notice (or less) that a chance of rain might turn into a monsoon. Generally we harvest as needed for orders, but we do have significant storage capacity. Crops like carrots, cabbage, potatoes, beets, and a few others can all be harvested and safely stored for longer periods of time, so we have lots of food on hand. The minute we become aware of a threat of flood, we can call in a crowd to help us harvest as many of these types of crops as possible.
We have also learned that after a flood, we should move quickly to buy in product from other local farms to supplement our CSA and farmstand. We did not do this until the fall in 2024, but once we started doing so we quickly realized that it has been a wonderful way to support other farms in the area while keeping our customers happy.
Recovery We have been able to set aside some of the donations from this year to start an emergency relief fund. The intent is to draw from this reserve during a future disaster to pay employees, buy products for our CSA and Farmstand, and cover replanting costs.
CSA Subscription Model In 2025, we are also planning to add a weekly subscription model option to the CSA. This will allow families to pay weekly throughout the season, take weeks off, and start and stop at any time. We hope this will offer a worry-free option for our amazing customers and community to continue to support us, knowing you've got your own private lifeboat if we ever lose a majority of our crops again. Stay tuned for more details about this system, and send us an email at [email protected] if you’d like to be notified once this system is live!
We’re so grateful for all the support our community provided in 2024, and we’re looking forward to another year of growing on some of the best soils in the state to supply wonderful customers like you.