Real Food Growing at Sunset Farms

 

WELLSVILLE  If there is a place in Wellsville where science and nature hold hands and move brightly toward the future, it is at Sunset Farms on South Hill. The bioshelter/henhouse/experiment is, just for now, an unproven construction of rock, compost and calculations but over the next few months it will become a producing farm. The farm – one that will produce vegetables year round - is being created by Andrew Harris.      

        You might know Andrew Harris as the owner of Better Days Pub and Eatery. He owned and managed the business from the kitchen with a menu featuring as much local food as possible.

        After selling the business, Harris looked for a new career, one that would teach him more, help him spread knowledge, include the gentle use of his land and promote both local foods and a plant based diet.

        That led him to Sunset Farm, his own venture into growing food year round on a solar powered farm with help from RenewableRochester.com.

        Approaching the farm, the first view is of a clean, modern, deceptively simple building. Nothing about the building (called the Mothership after a Led Zeppelin album) is simple. The majority of space is given to 7 parallel raised beds.

        Under the beds are trenches that form a subterranean heating and cooling system 4 feet below the building. The trenches are insulated and hold a system of perforated plastic pipes. The pipes are sized for optimal air flow and heavy enough to support hundreds of pounds of crushed rock and soil.

        In the summer, cool air from the ground will flow into the growing area to lower the temperature and in the winter fans will move warm air from the peak into the system to warm the rocks and the soil and keep food growing year round.

        The plants sprout from a mix of peat moss,perlite/vermiculite and clean food-quality compost using the increasingly popular “square foot method” in which beds are fertilized with compost between growth cycles.

        Every surface inside the building is light-reflecting white. Light pours in through the glazing on the southern roof. The 16mm Lexan polycarbonate sheeting is designed and engineered to diffuse and filter light. Blue and ultraviolet rays pass through and promote plant growth but reds are reflected.

        The material, with a 10 year warranty, has a R value of 7 and is hail proof. The roof is pitched to both capture sunlight and shed snow. The other sides are insulated, solid walls.

        Separated from the raised beds but within the structure is the hen and goat housing leading to a ¼ acre pasture with plans for a 1 acre pond. Nesting boxes will invite 40 chickens to lay during the day and roost at night. The number isn’t random. 1 hen will produce manure for 10 square feet and these beds measure 400 square feet.

        Next to the nests is a paddock for 2 troublesome goats. The goats present a challenge since they will trample anything, eat everything and jump over what others might see as barriers.

        There is an electric ribbon fence around the chicken/goat pasture but goats aren’t bothered by anything less than 8-12 joules of electricity. Unfortunately that’s enough to kill a chicken so the bottom ribbons need to be higher than a chicken’s inquisitive beak and the solar panels will have to hum along to produce enough power for the fence and fans.

        A door at the end of the henhouse serves as a compost passage for the transference of manure to an interior composting bed. Compost isn’t as simple as pile it up and let it rot. Strict rules govern time and temperature for the composting process. After the process starts inside the building it must move outside to a windrow. The strict process will provide a natural control of bacteria.

        Everything is designed to work within natural cycles. Nitrogen will cycle from chicken and goat manure to be broken down by bacteria into compost which will fertilize the growing beds and then emerge in plants to, in part, nourish the animals and the farmers.

        Natural insect control will be the job of pecking chickens and occasional introduction of predator insects.

        There’s a cycle of energy as heat and cold will flow in this controlled loop to keep the temperature of the soil above 65 degrees. There’s a cycle of carbon dioxide. Given off by the animals at night, it will be pumped through a filter into the growing area to give the plants a higher density of carbon dioxide, optimizing photosynthesis.

        There is a test garden already producing seed and the growing area has space for a vertical garden later when the first production levels are established. 

        There has already been an offer from a local restaurant to purchase the chemical free, healthy produce but Harris also hopes to work with subscribers wanting to take home lettuce, herbs, eggs and vegetables every week. He hopes to also encourage others to join in local, year-round food production.

        Your chance to see Sunset Farms is at 2 pm on October 5. Signs will help lead you to the farm on South Hill Road. The open house will offer tours at 3 and 5 pm and a lettuce/spinach taste testing. Senator Cathy Young will visit the facility at 3 pm. Join Sunset Farms on Facebook for emerging details.

 

Chickens on Hertel

Chickens on Hertel Avenue

A Hardman Family Story

We have a family story about Jay and his encounters in Kuala Lumpur with the man we named “The Chicken-Plucker.” Memories of chickens in my childhood are from the chicken store on Hertel Avenue in Buffalo in the 50’s.

My family lived in the first of a group of three houses next to a car dealer and across the street from the dry cleaner/bookie. (I don’t know if there was really a bookie, but my father said that there was because he saw people go in empty handed and come out the same so I wasn’t allowed to walk in front of that building.)

Sometimes my mother sent me past the other two houses and the church parking lot, on the good side of the street, to the brick building that held a car repair shop and a chicken coop on the ground floor and apartments above.

Entering the shop was strange because, on the inside, it didn’t look, smell or sound like the city. The floor was covered in sawdust. The owner walked through the mist of odors, leading with his enormous belly, wearing a blood-spattered apron over his long-sleeved white jacket. The sawdust on the floor behind his counter was not fresh but mixed with chicken droppings and feathers.

The back of the store had cages and a chopping block. The wire cages held chickens, sometimes more, and sometimes fewer, but always noisy. The birds would pompously strut with their darting beaks. Their combs proudly dressed their heads and their bead-like eyes sparkled in the light of the bare bulbs hanging on black wires.

The man sold eggs in gray, cardboard boxes tied with a string that spun from a spool on the counter, traveled through a wire loop above and came back down to his flying hands to be wrapped around the carton, tied and snapped, the small sound of which was lost among the clucking. Placed in my hands, those eggs were carried, cautiously, back to the kitchen at 1101.

Sometimes I was not an egg customer but a chicken customer. The chickens knew the difference. “My mother wants a nice, fat chicken and she doesn’t want any feathers. She hates the feathers!”

Then he went to the cage to select a chicken for butchering, the noise was deafening. Shouts of chicken kinship or chicken fear were far more hectic than those of egg loss.

His counter was too high for me to look over though I could peek around the side. I didn’t see the business that so fascinated and shocked Jay in Malaysia because The Chicken Man stepped outside the back door to do the serious stuff. When finished, he would hand me the still-warm chicken wrapped in paper and tied with his flying string. It was okay to skip, run or even to roller skate with a package of chicken and, when I was holding a dead chicken, a chicken so recently gone from life to meat, moving faster seemed like a good idea.

There were always a few small feathers and my mother would burn them off with the flame on our gas stove before she washed the chicken and started dinner.

The man and his chickens were gone by the time I was ten years old and could walk all the way to the corner drugstore or ride my bike around the whole block. I remember stopping once to look in his dark window. The cages were empty, a few feathers were on the floor in the dusty corners and the quiet, so unusual for that store, was eerie.

Elaine Hardman is a retired teacher/potter/tin cutter who gets eggs from Meredith and stories everywhere.