More about our growing practices

We love taking care of this little corner of land and working to build soil health while we grow nutritious food! We believe healthy food creates healthy people, and healthy people create healthy communities.

Here's a little more about how we do what we do (and why):

A focus on soil health

We pay attention to the principles of soil health management systems:

• Minimize soil disturbance — low-till or no-till operations help maintain soil organic matter and structure. Tillage can cause soil compaction, reducing water infiltration, and disrupt the natural biological cycle and structure of the soil.
• Living roots in the soil — We utilize cover crops throughout the winter so that living roots remain in the soil, even when we're not growing food crops. Roots help keep soil in place to prevent erosion, fix nutrients in the soil, and crowd out undesirable plants. We commonly use a mixture of peas, to help fix nitrogen in the soil, and rye grasses, which grow quickly to outcompete weeds, and others sourced from nearby North 40 Ag.
• Maximize Soil Cover — Having soil covered, e.g. via plants or mulch, helps protect soil from wind and water erosion. When our ground isn't full of crops during the growing season, we plant cover crops.
• Maximize Biodiversity — biodiversity includes the variety of plants, animals and microorganisms in our ecosystem. Every year, we typically grow over 40 types of vegetables, flowers and herbs, rotating where they're grown year over year.

We also add nutrients and organic matter to our soils by incorporating compost. Our compost is made onsite and created from a mix of wood shavings from Montana Block Company, other "browns" like leaves, and local food scraps collected from around Billings by our friends at Swift Buckets. We also use Big Sky Bio, a liquid soil conditioner made by Swift Buckets fermenting food scraps. These soil conditioners are full of micro-nutrients that feed beneficial bacteria and boost the micro biology in soil. Healthy living soil retains water more efficiently.

How about organic?

We follow practices that would qualify us to be an organic farm, but are not yet certified organic by the USDA. (The process for formal organic certification takes several years and can be expensive.)

There are no synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides in our operation.

To add nutrients to the soil, we use compost and plant cover crops. To help control pests, we cover plants most prone to flea beetle-predation with insect netting and use neem oil. To "manage" weeds, we employ a mix of tactics, including hand weeding, hoeing, tarping, planting cover crops, cussing, and hoping for the darn best!

Being a hyper-local operation, we also enjoy talking about our practices with our customers directly.