A Long Delayed Introduction and Vision Statement

This blog is written by Tim Ward who is the main founding energy behind this farm project incarnation. Tim’s biography and resume is included in a blog entry soon to follow, but in short words Tim is returning to a long standing  passion for farming after years of studying the environment and economics in college, educating youth outdoors about science, farming, and leadership, and as an activist trying to help save our threatened natural environment and community systems.

The Boontberry Community Farm project has had many other important contributors to its founding, early visioning and initial successes including most significantly Regina Williams, Justin Laqua, Burt Cohen the farm owner, Andrew of Pacific Wildcraft and Alex Kielty my good friend.

Boontberry Community Farm is envisioned to be a non-profit educational farm center and community gathering place on an amazing 50 acre prime agricultural property adjacent to downtown Boonville, CA.   The founding impetus for this endeavor is the belief that the modern food system is destroying the natural environmental systems, making people sick, and threatening greatly our future food security.  The mission is to create for the local community a stable, “closed system” farm that will produce food for the local foodshed and be a learning center about self-sufficient agriculture.  The project is organized by the following areas of mission focus:

• Healing and building the soil, water, and other natural systems on the farm
• Producing high quality organic food and medicine for our local community
• Creating opportunity for people to connect to nature through agriculture
• Educating about organic food and herbal medicine production, biodynamic methods and permaculture 
• Raising heritage breeds of plants and animals to help preserve their diversity

 In this time of visioning and preparation Tim is actively seeking collaborators of many types for this project.  If you have any interest in the future of the farming project please consider these needed roles:

• Experienced farmers- as partners in the farm operation.  The structure of the farm crew is still being visioned and budgeted for and there is still room for creative exploration of ways to incorporate different partners
• Farm members - who purchase  ownership of a share of the farm operation and some of the animals and receive a proportional share of the farm produce
• Investors- Who would like to support the farm through a financial investment in the initial capital campaign to cover the costs of start-up
• Consultants-  In the realms of farm management, soil science, animal husbandry, orchard management, business planning, financial planning, and marketing
• Volunteers- Who would like to help on the ground to make this farm reach its full potential.  Volunteers can choose to work through the WWOOF organization or directly through our non-profit project

Please contact Tim Ward with your interest in any of these areas, I’d love to connect: timocratical@gmail.com   (831) 332- 5131   

Arrival, Landing, Transition, and More Clean-up(!)

To encapsulate a long, difficult and sad part of the story of the first month of this new farm endeavor briefly:

Tim and Regina moved to the farm after 3 years of relationship with lots of rapidly acquired animals to pursue what had become Tim’s vision.  Then Regina left. She is supporting from afar with good feelings between us.This blog is then the account of one man attempting to launch a community farm.

While the insanely busy first two months of development were very hard on the humans, the animals have been happy as clams in a beach in Baja.  Thanks to the late spring rains and the fertile valley bottom land of the farm there has been lush forage for the goats, turkeys, chickens, ducks and pigs.  They have been so busy eating that they have not even noticed the humans struggling and toiling.  I have been bearing the hot days together with the animals, doing more water carrying than a smart person with plumbing parts in the barn should stand for, but the systems get more established every day.

The above mentioned lush forage quality also meant that in June we walked onto an abandoned 25-acre farm of head high grass.  There were many hours of tractor mowing, weed whacking, fence removal and continuous discovery (and subsequent disposal) of more debris and trash and metal wire and so on and so on.  So my earlier declaration of the slaying of the trash pile was an underestimation of the clean-up process of at least a hundred hours of labor and 10 more cubic yards of landfill and almost that much scrap metal.  Besides getting help from Regina, I received many incredible volunteer work blessings from friends and neighbors.

The lush summer pasture yielded 800 bales of hay of varying quality from high to low in early June and then re-grew to 2-6 inches of grasses, clovers, vetch, and plantain.  The focus of the farm work has been largely around the structures, fencing, and infrastructure needed to raise and pasture the animals.  Tomorrow on the second to last day of July I will be putting my first vegetable garden in the ground.  The sad starts have spent an extra month in their 4” containers because having my own tomatoes or cucumbers wasn’t the highest priority (maybe it should have been).  The plan is to do a fall garden planting in late August aiming at doing some marketing in October along with the eggs that will be coming in, in order to get out and solicit members for our CSA launch the next year.   

More chicks will be hatched this fall to have the ideal size laying flock and turkeys and ducks will be bred over winter, all with careful projection for the farm season next year.  The 5 female goats will be bred also this fall to our soon to be arriving buck, Elvis.  This should of course result in goat babies and lots of milk!   

Okay, back to work… I mean off to bed.

Construction (and De-construction) Begins

Finally.  We didn't have to spent our whirlwind weekend picking up dirty diapers, used motor oil, rotting wood, rusty metal, beer bottles and cans and PLASTIC (so much!)...  So we got busy building and demolishing.  Some of this had begun a week earlier with Tim and a new local friend Ben.

Fortunately for us, our friends stepped up and we had 15 friends come and help us over the course of our 2-day work party.  The beauty of working with people we really know and trust is that we could explain jobs to them and then walk away.   Regina and I were able to focus on some really dirty projects and logistics, and before we knew it... BAM.  Serious progress.  Unfortunately we don't have a working camera, but we will soon take some pictures so we can show some before and after shots.

It is SO exciting to us to see this quiet, and pretty much wrecked farm space come alive and start to transform into the visions, plans, and drawings that Regina and I have been working on remotely for so many months as we have prepared to begin this project.  After one more weekend of Tim finishing up some projects ahead we will have a farm that is at least ready for our 6 goats, 2 pigs, 10 laying hens, and dozens of baby chicks and turkeys.  We will be camping on the land for the first few weeks while we finish preparing the place to be suitable for us.

We hope you will come and visit soon!

Slaying the trash pile

When we first saw the farm (and everyone we took to see it in the early times) we couldn't really find words to describe the mess it was left in.  A good friend came to help me but then just walked around, mouth open, too stunned to do anything.  Fortunately we have big imaginations and Tim has a lot of stubborn energy and a few amazing friends and family really stepped up in a big way to help us slay the beastly pile.  Thank you Rachel, Justin, Matt, Alex, Nick, Ryan, Cobb, Susan, Ben and others!



So, 200 hours of labor later, how much trash was there?

Not everyone is enough of a spatial thinker to easily conceptualize what 1 cubic yard of trash looks like.  So to help you visualize this, it is about one small pick-up load.  Hopefully that will help you to understand the amount of work required to remove:

• 60 cu. yards of landfill trash
• 3 cu. yards of beer bottles and cans
• 50+ cu. yards of scrap metal
• 50+ cu. yards of scrap wood
• 8 cu. yards of recyclable black irrigation tubing

You can also probably imagine our excitement that we have finally managed to remove all of this material from this piece of earth so that we can best grow healthy clean food, and maintain an organized farm!  We can't wait to bring people to see the beautiful farm-scape to be.

We also want to take from this experience strong lessons about how we choose to use materials and resources in the future.  It's not that we don't value saving useful things (we definitely salvaged some useful materials from the chaos)... we just want to close loop on farm inputs wherever possible.  Stay tuned to see how we do at accomplishing that (HUGE) goal.