Turning on-farm plants into fermented inputs helps reduce chemical dependence while improving cranberry health and ecosystem balance
I am fortunate to have traveled throughout North America observing conventional farming operations as well as alternative operations. On the surface, these farms may seem disorganized, lacking technology, or misguided. However, this is not the case. The reality is that farming was successful before the introduction of better life though chemistry — otherwise none of us would be here.
I have also realized that the world around us is filled with nutrition and answers to many of the pest and pathogen problems we have on the farm. Finding solutions using these resources, rather than buying products at the store, has been a fascinating conversion for our 80-acre cranberry farm in South Middleboro, Massachusetts.
Making Fermented Plant Juices
I have had many influences over the years, but Nigel Palmer’s book The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments has one of the best first chapters on how plants interact with the world around them and how they actually consume, or create nutrition, from their surrounding environments. Remember — plants can’t walk away, so they must make the environment around them work.
Nigel visited me one day at the farm. It was a quick tour, but he suggested that I not use a smorgasbord of weeds to create fermented plant juices (FPJ), like I had done with my first batch, but instead focus on one plant per batch to better understand what each plant is producing for fertility. Different plants are associated with different soil mineral deficiencies. He also mentioned to be aware of what stage the plant is in when harvesting — vegetative, early growth, flowering or maturing — as plant hormones will differ as they’re transferred into the ferment; depending on what I am aiming for, I may want different plant stages. This was great advice — things I had not considered.
I began to make single fermented plant juices with plants around the farm. Horsetail grows naturally in patches on the cranberry bogs. It is known to be good for plant health and disease pressure. My poor father spent his life spraying and trying to kill horsetail — with success … until the next year, when it would reappear. Now here I am taking this “weed” and making batches of it to ferment and reapply back to the bogs!
The next plant for my FPJ collection was stinging nettle. It doesn’t grow on or near the cranberry bogs. In fact, I had never heard of it. But stinging nettle does seem to love to grow around grazing beef. Back at the house we had some pretty impressive patches of it. I would harvest it when the nettle is in its growth stage — not too small, but not beyond ripe. I usually fill a 55-gallon barrel of nettle material — roots, shoots, and leaves — and top it off with water and a biological inoculant. I have been using EM-1, but you can also gather fungi from the environment, ferment it a month or so, and decant. This process is quite impressive. Only a little over a bucket of plant material is left after decanting — it’s quite surprising how much of this plant is dissolved into the FPJ.
There is a commercially available bio-fungicide that is extracted from Japanese knotweed. Maybe I could recreate this product myself, I thought, to apply during cranberry bloom. I filled two totes with blooming knotweed — roots, shoots and leaves — plus my biological inoculant, and topped it off with water. I let it ferment all winter for use the following year. After decanting, I had a little over 150 gallons per tote of liquid FPJ. While I do not lab-test the bio-fungicide properties of this FPJ, I do get a nutritional analysis.
I also recently made a fermented juice with kelp and got both mineral and biological lab analyses. A fellow farmer wanted to aerate kelp using a commercial product called Rise and Thrive, from Fishbrew, to act as an inoculant. I was hesitant — I had tried aerating FPJ and it didn’t seem to work well, but perhaps that was because I used land plants, not water plants. So, we put 40 pounds of kelp into 100 gallons of water with 1 quart of Rise and Thrive. After two weeks, I didn’t see much activity; by the third week, I could see the kelp starting to break down; after four weeks, the only thing left was the thick kelp stock — everything else had dissolved. I used the kelp extract as a pre-flower nutrition additive.
Finally, I got into fermented fruit juice (FFJ). My farm does agriculture tourism; being an hour south of Boston with a picturesque cranberry bog, we’ve become a popular destination for tours and events. We sell limited fresh fruit, but during cleaning, any discards or poor-quality fruits get removed. We usually throw them into the woods or supplement the beef. I was able to fill two totes of discarded fruit to make a fermented fruit juice.
I let this FFJ cook for about eight or nine months before decanting, and I was worried that using discarded fruit may potentially create a pathogen haven. I had the local cranberry station and my cranberry handler scientists test it. They looked at the FFJ under the microscope to try to determine if I was creating a potential disaster. They reported there were some bad pathogens, however they were a small proportion of the overall biological life. They felt confident that it shouldn’t be an issue. I was still a bit nervous, so I used the FFJ as fruit-fill nutrition. It provided some great overall nutrition and did not create a fruit rot issue.
Something to note regarding FFJ is that the fruit being fermented must be reapplied to the same fruit — apples to apples, oranges to oranges, and cranberries to cranberries.
Benefits
The farm ecosystem began to change as I’ve incorporated more on-farm amendments. I began to eliminate all nasty broad-spectrum pesticides — knowing what a lot of these do to all living creatures — and to reduce salt-based fertilizers. Overall, I have so far reduced chemical inputs to a half to two-thirds of what was applied in the past.
I have begun to see more life on the farm. The birds chirp more, there are bats at night, and I’m even beginning to see worms! This is something that is certainly not common on a chemical farm. Even more interesting is that the cranberry bogs get flooded for harvest in the fall and for winter protection. How do these worms survive? I’m not sure they either hold their breath or come back on the beds once the water is drained.
During harvest flooding, we use a floating corralling boom to collect the fruit for pumping off and cleaning. I have noticed over the years that this is a great time to see what pests were missed during the year. Usually, I would find cranberry weevils and flea beetles. Now I am seeing ladybugs, fireflies, spiders, and praying mantises.
The cranberry health is also noticeably better. My farm does run on the wetter side and would be a good candidate for phytophthora. However, this is not an issue. While my neighbors deal with outbreaks, I have none on-site. The cranberry roots have beautiful nodules, and the soil sticks to the roots when shaken. The weeds that do live within the canopy have bare roots, indicating that the soil is not helping them.
All transitioning farms have to pay for their past sins. The trick is to slowly pull the rug out over a few years rather than all at once — unless you can handle falling on your face. It’s taken me five to six years to really see a difference in the balance of life on the farm. Yes, I do get pests, they tend to be more manageable.
Farming practices are like driving a car: sometimes you need to use the brake, and sometimes you need to use the gas. If you use just one or the other, things will go poorly!
