When I first flipped through Compact Farms: 15 Proven Plans for Market Farms on 5 Acres or less, I thought it was just a pretty book. Compact Farms is full of beautiful pictures, colourful charts and lovely diagrams of farm layouts. I thought it was a book that would appeal to people dreaming of farming, but not actual farmers.
I was wrong.
Josh Volk writes like he farms — with great efficiency. Just as he managed to run a farm on a
New and ‘wannabe’ farmers may be motivated and educated by Compact Farms, while experienced farmers can glean a number of valuable tips from the profiles of these successful small farmers
0.15-acre piece of land, he has squeezed an incredible amount of valuable information into 226 pages. The writing isn’t flowery or poetic — just detailed information on how to run a small farm.
Most of the book consists of 15 farm profiles; one is Canadian and the others are American (including an urban rooftop garden). A couple may be familiar to many readers such as Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Farm and Les Jardins de la Grelinette of Jean-Martin Fortier. They grow vegetables, and a few also have flowers or livestock.
Each profile describes a farm’s market, labour, tools and infrastructure, including irrigation, trellising, post-harvest techniques (such as washing stations) and record-keeping methods and software. I appreciated the descriptions of equipment. For example, many farmers explain which seeders they use for which crops and why. Many of the farms have tillers, and the make is specified. A few use only hand tools; several have small tractors. One has “an Allis-Chalmers Model G converted to electric that runs on golf-cart batteries.” Another uses a “Bullitt cargo bike” equipped with “BionX electric assist” to deliver CSA shares.
The author and several other farmers say they were inspired by John Jeavons 1974 book How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Can Imagine. Many farmers do use modern techniques, such as flame weeding. One farm uses organic no-till by using the roller on the back of a flail mower to crimp stalks of rye and vetch, and then cutting slits into the cover crop using coulters mounted on the tractor toolbar.
For pest control, many growers use floating row cover. The author uses Agribon AG-19, which is held in place with “6-inch ground staples and old barn boards.” Other methods include dipping cucurbit seedings into kaolin clay before transplanting to deter cucumber beetles. Another farmer plants Hubbard squash as a trap crop and later sprays it with pyrethrum or leaves it to be consumed by the beetles.
Trellising is described in detail, as is post-harvest methods. For example, the author describes packing his CSA shares into “organic cotton bags, washed the night before and left damp. The moisture helped keep the produce hydrated and cool.” To pack them, he hangs the bags on two-by-twos supported by saw horses.
The book is inspiring with the stories of how much can be grown on a small piece of land. New and ‘wannabe’ farmers may be motivated and educated by the book, while experienced farmers can glean a number of valuable tips from the profiles of these successful small farmers.