Our Projects

If you live on a small farm and are like us, you probably find yourself continually building things. Well, maybe it's just us. We are always looking for ways to improve our farming - new ways to produce crops and livestock, mechanisms or processes to save labor, infrastructure to improve the quality of our products, etc. Here you can read about a bit of what's going on at our place. Hopefully you'll find some information you can use. Or, you may be reading along and discover we're struggling with a problem you've solved. Please let us know ideas you have or things you would like to see tried out. Perhaps we can work some ideas into our operation in the future and publish the results here.

Hoophouses

We installed two 34 x 72 hoophouses in 2007. You can read about them, and our thoughts so far after growing in them for a while.

Livestock in Hoophouses

After installing the hoophouses, we got the idea to try raising animals in one of them during the winter to see how much, if any, impact their body heat had on the minimum nighttime temperature. Western SARE supported this work, and the results were quite interesting. You can read about this project here.

In-vessel Composter

An in-vessel composter is where composting takes place inside an enclosed container of some sort. There are large-scale composters suitable for corporations or communities, and then there are the small rotating drums used for home gardens. We wanted something in between and relatively, cheap for the small farmer to build. Ours is a based on a used diesel drum, and although it's currently still a work in progress, there is some material to read and some photos here. This work was also supported by Western SARE.