Tachinid flies and their larvae parasitize some orchard pests. English photo By C.J. Walke The term “threshold” is used in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategies to describe the level at which pest pressure and crop damage have reached the point where plant health will start to decline and/or crop damage will result in reduced yields.
Toki Oshima drawing By Jaco Schravesande-Gardei MOFGA Certification Services LLC Organic, natural, sustainable, local, responsibly grown … When shopping at farmers’ markets or grocery stores, consumers face a barrage of enticing labels. What do they mean … if anything? Only the term “organic” has specific, legal, federal standards that farmers must follow and relates to
Vegetables ready for storage – some fermented, some as harvested. We store carrots, beets, rutabagas and celeriac in wooden boxes with damp spruce wood shavings. The uniform boxes stack and keep out rodents. The boxes also were sized to hold Mason jars. How we store our year-round supply of produce By Anneli Carter-Sundqvist Photos by
Toki Oshima drawing By Roberta Bailey Every spring, along with the usual house cleaning, I sort out the freezers and the canned goods in the pantry, making room for the first bags of spinach and fiddleheads, and for the new jars of strawberry jam and pickled snap peas. Nothing makes last year’s canned goods look
Nick Zandstra By Nick Zandstra One of the underlying premises of MOFGA, I think, is relationships: apprentices with mentors, interest groups with politicians, people with their food, people with the state of Maine. Relationships of all sorts that bring people together, that form connections, that create community. When MOFGA purchased its site in 1996, the
Cocoons of a wasp that parasitized a tomato hornworm. Eric Sideman photo Beneficial insects are part of complicated relationships in ecosystems, and we are just beginning to understand those relationships, said Kathy Murray, Ph.D., an entomologist and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program coordinator with the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. Murray is also
By Heather Omand Four MOFGA-certified organic Maine farms – three machinery-powered and one horse-powered – participated in 2015 in a carrot enterprise budget project. Results are presented here, with the horse-powered farm enterprise budget separate due to substantial differences in costs versus the machinery-powered farms. Some farms tracked certain pieces of information more successfully than
Organic Seed Alliance Seed Internship Program Micaela Colley, executive director of Organic Seed Alliance, spoke of seeds as a “public, natural resource that we all know demands careful stewardship.” Photo courtesy of OSA The eighth Organic Seed Growers Conference was convened in February 2016 by Organic Seed Alliance (OSA) in Corvallis, Oregon. Micaela Colley, executive
The Rusted Rooster Farm family, left to right (with ages as of Oct. 2017): Sean, Chloe (3), Jackson (5), Sandra, Lacey (17 months) and Shannon (6). Photo by Lily Piel Mowing a cover crop of peas and oats for cattle feed with an 826 International. Photo by Sean O’Donnell Sean at work in his John
David Rocque. English photo MOFGA’s 2016 Spring Growth Conference addressed soils, with experts from the state of Maine, from two state universities and from three MOFGA-certified organic farms. David Rocque, Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry soil scientist, defined “soils,” talked about soil-forming factors – especially parent materials – and about identifying soil types
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