The Red Baron Project year three

[Redbaron]

I am starting year three today! YEAH!

For those following the project, the first year can be found here: The Red Baron Project year one
The second year can be found here: The Red Baron Project year two

For my project I am using these 10 principles:

Principle 1: No till and/or minimal till with mulches used for weed control
Principle 2: Minimal external inputs
Principle 3: Living mulches between rows to maintain biodiversity
Principle 4: Companion planting
Principle 6: The ability to integrate carefully controlled modern animal husbandry (optional)
Principle 5: Capability to be mechanized for large scale or low labor for smaller scale
Principle 7: As organic as possible, while maintaining flexibility to allow non-organic growers to use the methods
Principle 8: Portable and flexible enough to be used on a wide variety of crops in many areas of the world
Principle 9: Sustainable ie. beneficial to the ecology and wildlife
Principle 10: Profitable

I am still asking humbly that anyone else interested in helping to try it out themselves, even in a small test plot, and welcome them to post their results good and bad here.

"When farmers view soil health not as an abstract virtue, but as a real asset, it revolutionizes the way they farm and radically reduces their dependence on inputs to produce food and fiber." -USDA

New and exciting things this year:
I managed to work a deal for a third field. This will give me an extra 1/2 acre and could potentially be expandable to up to 40 acres in the undetermined future. That's the good news. The bad news is that it is an old abandoned farm and not only is the soil in sad shape, it is overgrown with scrub juniper. So this may take a whole lot of work to say the least. I got my foot in the door though. Now it will be up to me to make it work. Good test for the system though. If it can be made to work in old abandoned farm scrubland, it should work almost anywhere.

Also I managed to get approved as a cooperator with the Nobel Foundation Agriculture Consultation Program. My consultation manager is Steve Upson. He has been advising me how to run this project like a case study, to obtain more usable scientific data. Thanks for all your help so far Steve.

I also managed to get approved as a cooperator with Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies! This really is the cutting edge in biotech. I am so excited about these trials I will run. It will be peppers, tomatoes and sweet corn. Suppose to add drought resistance and yield increases for dryland farmers. I will be posting pictures here of the test plots. Let you all be the judge.

Last but not least I planted my spring cover crops today. I went with rye and cool season peas. Of course inoculated with the good stuff like mycorrhizal fungi and rhizobia.

Looks like this just might end up being a very exciting year!