Early spring plowing has begun on the farm. This year we are mostly growing in the backfield (still transitional under organic standards).
One of the long-term issues of farm stewardship, especially in New England, is maintenance of fields that are surrounded by forests. When a forest bumps up against a field, the field will always lose out without human intervention and management. Pictured above is a particularly bad example of what happens when the forest along the edge of a field is not periodically reduced. Notice the canopy growing over the field, and notice how the tractor can only get to the edge of the tillage area with great difficulty. Also, as the understory grows into this shady space, its physical presence pushes the road farther in toward the field (as people and vehicles veer toward the field to avoid the brush, causing the field to become smaller and allowing the forest to take more field). And of couse, you can’t grow vegetables in the shade.
Several years ago, I was at a land trust annual meeting in Waltham where the speaker was a past president of Mass Audubon. He talked about how 65 years ago, species of field birds were common while species of forest birds were uncommon. That has now completely reversed. Fields are disappearing all over New England, either to development, invasive weeds, or forest, which is what the completely mature, undisrupted ecosystem of this region looks like. Fields only existed in this area in nature because of periodic disruptions—fire, hurricane or other natural disaster. The species that live in the field ecosystem niche rely on normal disruptions for their environment to exist. Human intervention has mitigated the primary cause of disruption (forest fire), and now the creatures that inhabit field environments are at risk.
So in order to maintain the field we need to intervene, and we’ve begun that process this spring by removing trees adjacent to the field that are crowding and shading it, which essentially transforms the field into forest floor by hogging up the sunlight.
