Meet One Of Australia's Market Gardening Leaders Longley Farm Tour With James Hutchinson

When you're building small farms, you want them to be beautiful, you know, you want them, they should be aesthetically pleasing. I mean it's going to do a job on your fungi, but your fungi is going to come back. I rent this equipment out as well, you know, so someone might hire this equipment off me and they'll go and build a micro farm within a week. These things work seriously well. I've sold one to a guy, he had a hectare of garlic, so he rang me up the day after he got it and he said, I did my hectare of garlic in a day by myself with this machine, it's just incredible. So this area here, this is our original market garden area and you can see the packing shed here. When we were increasing the size of the market garden across here, there was a couple of Tassie blue gums, so just the forestry Tassie blue gums, fast growing. We cut those down to make a bit of space, there's just two of them, they're only 24 years old, but they were able to mill up timber with the Lucas mill to make the packing shed, make our tool shed, make some of the other areas that we use around here. So that's how we did that, so we'll go in now and have a look at, well, we can have a look at the packing shed first if you like, it's very quaint and it's undersized and really I would prefer if it was larger. So the packing shed is based on us being able to move a lot of produce in here in a day and move it through and get it out in the same day. So really it's not a long, we only want things in here literally for the day. So we've got a cool room in here, we've got a signage board, we use that signage board for the restaurants that we work with or for CSA bags or whatever and we'd write down all the produce and the totes and that sort of thing. And then if it's for CSA, then we put together the veggie boxes actually outside here, then we put them in the cool room in here and then customers would come down at the end of, on the Friday afternoon or whatever and they'd get their CSA boxes from the front of the cool room. You can come in and have a look at it if you want, so it's literally just this. And again, we just made this building out of recycled, the whole building's made out of recycled materials, yeah, it does the job. That's all we need for the volume of what we're doing in a day. Yes, it is very cute building, yeah. Yeah, and that's the thing when you're building small farms, you want them to be beautiful, you want them, they should be aesthetically pleasing and that's right for everyone involved and that's really taking us back to a deeper human culture, you know. Okay, so let's go into the market garden now and have a look. So we use a standardised bed system and we refer to this as perma beds because we're not going to plough through them or ever change them. The idea of them is, you know, we do the agronomy on them, we set them, we're feeding the soil with solid, we're feeding the bacteria, we're feeding the microbia in the soil with solid fertiliser and, you know, and nutrients. So just naturally sourced nutrient, you know. So we actually use Tasmanian canola milk as a slow release nitrogen on these, you know, so which will give us six weeks slow release nitrogen. Canola meal, yeah, yeah. So just like the powdered canola meal, you know. Yeah, local, yeah. So, and so that's really, I mean, we've got our agronomy right in these. We put a lot of biochar in them as well which is just because we make the biochar here on site, you know. Attention Australian farmers, I have really good news here. As of now, the Market Gardeners Masterclass, the course that I teach with all the expertise that's there for you is fully fundable through the FHA. So that's great. It's an amazing resource. You guys can take advantage of that. Just click on the link here, fill out the form to see if you're eligible and if you are, this might be the game changer that you've been waiting for. So this block here in particular is what we refer to as a light feeding block. So we would have, so all the crops here are light feeding crops. The next season, this will be a heavy feeding block. We do this rotation that way. That's part of our rotation. We do a five-year rotation, which is like, because we have grown some onions and some alliums. So really in Southern Tasmania or in Tasmania, we really should be doing a five-year rotation if we're using alliums in our mix, you know. And of course, they're a heavy feeding crop. So the difference between a heavy feeding crop and a light feeding crop is really, you know, how long the crop takes to mature. So with light feeding crops, the crops that we're going to get, you know, two or three or four or five crops in a season out of. So that's what will happen in these beds. Whereas the heavy feeding crops would be, you know, crops like zucchini or, you know, a large brassica or something like that, or an onion. And then they're in there for generally, you know, the whole season. So we allocate those beds prior to the planting. So we know what's going to be in there, how long, you know, what we're going to get out of those crops, you know, what can go in there next and all that sort of thing. So it's pretty obvious. So with our light feeding crops, we want to plant them as dense as possible. So we use this concept of biointensive growing, which is a John Jeavons concept. And that is, you know, you can grow more, have more life in the soil to increase the soil's health and this sort of thing for organic growing, you know. And you can increase crop yield. So things like carrots, you can have more rows of carrots than you would in conventional agriculture. And you have a high yield back from it. These crops have obviously just been planted out. This is the start of our season. Our season's very late this year. And we weren't doing any overwintering. This is a brand new crop, you know. Brand new sorted out block of produce. So then really one of the main aspects for us to make profitability is the ability to reduce labour in weeding and bed management. So we would want to ensure that we've got the right weeding equipment or the right spaces are going to fit in with our weeding equipment. Now things like the mizuna here and these baby leaf lettuces, we're using a whole lot of rows. So none of the wire we use and the styrofoam will fit in there. So we use, for this we'd use a thing called a tie and harrow rake. So this is a tie and harrow rake here. So I'll give you a demo here. I'll just start over the top of that rake for the sake of this. I'll get on the right side of it. I'll take that piece of crap out of there. And you can see there's two rows and we're going to keep both rows down on the ground. So really we would just brush through here twice a week. Now I'm training new growers at the moment and so we've been so busy setting up for this event that this really should have been weed managed about a week ago and it hasn't. So you can see the weeds have got slightly bigger. Now all of our weed management stuff is designed to be used timely. So really that would need to be used once a week before the weeds got to this size and then that would just brush them out. And we could do this on this crop up until it's probably double or triple the size of the weeds at the end. So I'll just run this through now to give you a bit of an idea. And we've got to keep both rows of those tines in the soil and we just come through like that. Are you aiming? Not really. A little bit, a little bit. And we would go through, I mean you can see that it's scratching so it makes this beautiful, you know, minimal cultivation that'll allow moisture to get through. Any newly germinated weed it's going to sort of kick it. So we would also come back. So I'm not going to do the whole bed I'm just going to show you here. So we would also just come back the other way. So we'll do it past either way. And you can see it doesn't really do any, it doesn't do any damage to the plants that are in there. Just like a rough comb really. But it'll take out any little seedlings, you know. So any little newly germinated weed seedlings so we start once the, once our crop is sort of up a couple of centimetres then we can start using it, you know. So yeah. So, you know, it's really important that we use these in a timely manner. So that really like cultivation is taking care of any, you know, weed at a monofilament level when they've only just got one, you know, really fine taproot going down. It's just going to break that. That's the end of the thing. So we would also use other techniques before the crop goes in at the start of the season, which would be to even heat up the soil, try to germinate the weed seed by heating up the soil. So we run a flame weeder over the top of it or you could put something down to add a little bit of heat into it to try to germinate any weed seed that's on the top. And so that's called stale seed bedding. And then we would go over it with a flame weeder. So we could use a flame weeder or a silage tap to heat up the soil to get the weed seed to germinate. But then we can go wait 10 days after it's germinated or for it to germinate, then go over it again with a flame weeder or with styropos or something like that to kill any of that sort of emerging weed seed. And then we can do it again, this is at the start of the season. If we do those two times, maybe it's going to take us 20 days, but with the assistance of adding heat to it because it's early in the season, then we can remove like, you know, upwards of 90% of the weed yield that's going to be affecting the beds. So at that stage, we're not about to turn the soil again, we're just going to seed into it. And then it means that we'll have really minimal weeding requirements. Now, weeding is where all that's going to take up wages. So we want to absolutely minimise that part of it. So anyway, these are the sort of tools that we would use. If it was a crop that had say 100 millimetres spacing or 150 millimetres spacing, then we would use a styrofoam or a wire weeder, and which I don't have right here now, but they're further down, and that would do the same job. Or we could move to something else, like I'll just put this down for a second. We can move to something like this, which is great for like crops like garlic or onions or even, you know, baby kale plants. And I can probably give you a bit of an idea Well, just to give you a real thing, I've just sacrificed a couple of plants. So the idea of this is it's going to flick up the soil on either side of those plants. You want to move a little bit faster than that, but you'd go straight down that road, and that's going to flick up those plants and just clean, and you can see what happens. So it cultivates all that soil. So the front part of it undercuts the soil, the back part of it flicks it out. So these things work seriously well. One example would be, I've sold one to a guy who had a hectare of garlic, and he's like, oh, I've just planted a hectare of garlic. I've got these issues. I want to try one of these things. And he rang me up the day after he got it, and he said, I did my hectare of garlic in a day by myself with this machine. It's just incredible, you know? So this really powerful machine, low cost, you know, human scale machine, you know? But I would suggest, you know, for the crops that you need to, and really, I would be using this on, if weeds got out of hand a little bit, so if weeds are, say, over two weeks old or something like that, and I've got a crop like fennel or something like that, and I'm having some weed issues, then I'd go over it with this. Otherwise, really, we should be doing our weekly weed management, just with a Styrofoam or a wire weeder, passing every row once a week, and then we don't need to do something, you know, a little bit heavier or more intrusive like this, you know? Not that it's that intrusive, you know, compared to other stuff, but yeah, so. All right, so we can talk about the tractor, if you like, for a minute. So this is our go-to tractor for, this is a petrol version. I've also got a diesel version. We hire this out as well. So, and normally, it doesn't have the plastic cover on it. Normally, we leave the plastic cover off it. That's my bed of flower moss. We've been using that for just land management. You know, we cut bracken with it. We cut, I use it in my blueberry farm. Every year, we have tea tree that grows up between the blueberries to, you know, my chest height, and I just cut it back down with that flower mower before the fruit starts to set, sort of thing, you know? So in fact, we cut it down in winter, and then I get my crew to go in and do the pruning, you know? So, or they'll do it at the same time, and I'll try to cut up the prunings with it as well. So this, I could not do without the tractor because I can't do it without that machine. I can't do it without the power harrow or the rotary plough, you know? So these are really our three go-to tools for market gardening, for micro-farming. So like I said, we do five rotations. After the fifth row, like, so like after I grow an onion crop, something like this, often that's like the last rotation. And that, like our beds need rebuilding at that stage. So that's once every five years, I rebuild 20% of my beds because 20% of my beds are Allium beds. So we use this on 20% of the beds every year. And what we do is we dig up the soil from the paths with this machine here, with a birder plough, a rotary plough, and we throw the soil back onto the beds and then we'll go over it with the power harrow, with this one here, and to reform the bed, you know? And we'll add, maybe we'll add some compost in or something like that to incorporate with this one here. Now, the beauty of using these is this one here, when it throws the soil, it's not pulverising the soil. It just, it chips it, it's like an auger. It chips it and it throws it under the bed. So we don't end up with a silt or anything like that. We end up with clumpy soil and the same with this. So with this one here, we can control the depth that we want it to work to and incorporate stuff with, but it uses, it's got these five sets of double tines here. And so instead of doing this, like a rototiller clay panning and smashing up and pulverising the soil, this does nothing of the sort. I'll show you, I'll just lift that up. You can have a look here, if you want to have a look around here. So these just turn around and it just, it mixes in and it's got that point on it. So it doesn't clay pan. All the microbial glues are still, like you'll see within the soil, you can still feel that there's, you know, you've still got particles stuck together, you know, so you haven't got silt, you've still got microbial glues intact. So, I mean, it's going to do a job on your fungi, but your fungi is going to come back. So we do this, like I said, once every five years. So every year we're doing 20% of our crop. So, you know, for the crop, we'll only get this treatment once every five years. That's what we do on this property. Other people would do it differently, you know, but that's what works for us. So, yeah, so, and it makes really beautiful beds. If we've got to bring a bed back to a standard, this will do it, you know. So it'll do it quickly. So I can, you know, I could rebuild essentially half of my beds easily in a day using those two tools, you know. So, yeah, so it's just, it's a game changer. I rent this equipment out as well, you know, so someone might hire this equipment off me and they'll go and build a micro farm within a week, you know, using this equipment. So, and if they're going to do that, then I actually, you know, I have some other techniques. So to be able to incorporate the, using this equipment to incorporate their initial amendments to get their systems underway, using this equipment, you know, to get any, you know, zinc or copper or, you know, or, you know, potassium or whatever the, you know, soft rock phosphate, whatever they're adding to get the lime, to get that in to depth to 150 millimetres using this equipment. So, so that's a really powerful, quick tool to help us set these systems up quickly. And I think if we've got local shops that can hire these things out, then we're looking at, and this is one of the keys, then we're looking at, you know, someone being able to, for a grand or so, they're building, they're doing all that bed work by themselves and not paying wages, you know, and they're controlling the quality of what they're getting out of it, you know, so. That's a super important piece of equipment. So this is our broad fork. We're using it down to 30 centimetres depth, you know, and when we, I don't know if it's going to go in here, but let's try it. When we use it, we try to get the tines to go straight down, which I didn't do so well there. And we just lift it back until we see the soil in front of it lift. And you can see that soil lift. And that's, so it's done its job. All we're trying to do is get oxygen down there and lift it up a little bit. And then we pull it out, move it back the same length as the tines, essentially, go in again, all the way down, bring it back. All right, so that's oxygenated our soil and decompacted it. Now, if we were doing a heavier crop or we were trying to, we're trying to, if we wanted to, so say we're working with tomatoes or eggplants or something like that, so we've got like a heavier duty root system, we would use something like this, a roebuck fork to get us that extra depth and extra workability in the soil, tilt from the soil, you know. So you can see the tines are closer together. And the way Jodie would show people to use this is to push it down to the hill, bring it back to about there, slide it out and only bring it back, you know, 10 centimetres, if that, maybe less, and then go in again, you know. So he's used this soil. He's used this to make absolute depth on all of his soils and his beds. And his soils are incredible. You know, Jodie worked with John Jeavons for many years in doing biointensive growing and this sort of thing. You know, and from that knowledge, he's created this device, you know. So I think this is a wonderful device. I don't use it exactly the same way Jodie would, but we definitely use it in our greenhouses for, you know, for heavier production. And again, you know, if you're growing carrots and you want really good carrots, this is a great way to work the soil and that sort of thing, you know. So I think it's, I can see a lot of farmers needing this tool in the future, you know. So this is one of the tums that we're running experiments with. We've got a mixture of, we're growing all these tomatoes indeterminately, which means we're growing them up one litre and we're taking out the laterals. That allows us to grow them a lot closer than you normally would if they're bushing tomatoes. And the idea of growing them indeterminately is to be able to stagger the harvest. So we'll be harvesting, you know, at ground level as soon as the first lot of fruit set has happened and we harvest them before they fully colour up. So we colour them up in the shade, in the pack shed, but we, and then as soon as we've harvested a fruit spur, we'll then take off the leaves up to the next fruit spur. So we do that right the way down the line and that'll give us, you know, it means we'll be able to harvest tomatoes once or twice a week for a whole bunch of months for our CSA, you know. So rather than growing them and then harvesting them all at once, it gives us this ongoing harvest, you know. We do the same thing with our cucumbers. And again, so this will be, these have only been in the ground about three to four weeks now and they were tiny when they went in. So this is a really late crop. But, you know, in say a month, they'll be up around here. Then in two months, you know, they'll be right up to the top there and this will just be walls of ripening tomatoes. So essentially what we have in the ground is we have one massive root ball, you know. So if you can think, if you had a bushing tomato, you would only have the one root system there. But because we've got just all these single lines of tomatoes, we've got this massive root system running the whole way down. So it just gives us this increased ability to produce over that time, you know. So, and we're doing it, we've got, you know, baby roamers and cherry tomatoes here, grapes on this side and then larger tomatoes. So there's some full-size roamers and some beef steaks and that sort of thing in here as well, you know. And again, we're doing this experiment with the pectin on one end of it with, well, I think each half of it has got three different varieties in it. And so we're just gonna see how they play out with reduced water quantities, reduced watering on the non-pectin end and on the end it's got this water-saving crystal pectin in it. Now there's a number of different trellising systems that can be used. The reason we're choosing to use this one is because it's not cost-effective to start off with, but you can manage six plants. So a member of our crew can manage six plants to lower it, to take out any laterals and to make the adjustments they need. They can do six plants in a minute. So again, it comes down to wages. So, you know, we could use a tomato hook which would cost like a dollar per unit instead of this thing that's costing us about five or six dollars per unit. But it would take longer time. So then the wages come into it. So we just think about the long-term. Well, yeah, so yeah, we can lower this without someone having to stand on a milk crate or something like that or a ladder which can be dangerous, you know? So yeah, yeah. So with this tunnel in particular, we've gone to 210 UM film just to stabilise the temperature a bit more which will increase our tomato yield. You know, especially, you know, we're in Southern Tasmania, the back of Mount Wellington, on the South side of Mount Wellington. Cold air coming down off the mountain, it's a real issue for us, you know? So that will absolutely help with that. And still, this is low-tech. It's just one skin. And to be able to control the temperature, any increased volume in a tunnel is gonna give us a little bit more control over temperature variation. So having that top does two things. It allows us to grow the tomatoes slightly higher and it allows us to keep the increased temperature off the top of the tomatoes. And so that's why I've chosen the tomatoes to go in this tunnel. And we've got capsicums and eggplants in lower tunnels. Yeah, so it can have the height and also the volume. So this is the most voluminous tunnel there. So that's why it's the tomatoes. Guys, I'm so excited. Today, I'm bringing you to the most amazing place you'll ever go to. We're going here on earth.