By Mary Lowther
No wonder there are so many farms in New Brunswick! Farmers see so few slugs or sow bugs that one farmer had me spell the words out so he could look them up on the internet!
“No”, declared Pierre, I’ve never seen either of these. We do get some flea beetles and cucumber beetles though, so we cover the plants with spun cloth covers (like Remay) until the plants are so big that the beetles aren’t a problem.”
We were at a Moncton, New Brunswick Saturday market, at a booth of the Ferme Terre Partagee, a co-op of five organic farms. Customers came up speaking French and Pierre easily switched languages. In fact, conversations moved back and forth between both languages. Pierre says everyone there speaks a mixture of mostly French and some English in the same sentence, but when they speak English they sound French. He laughs: “People in Quebec think we’re English because we throw in English words here and there.” But I digress.
The farm buys composted crab meal from processing plants for 82 cents a pound and this supplies nitrogen and minerals. They also spread composted chicken, pig and cow manure on their fields and use no chemicals. The pigs eat milk, butter and yogurt supplied by a member of their co-op and the cattle are pasture-raised. Chickens live outside in moveable compounds that follow the cow fields a la Joel Salatin’s ingenious method: cattle are confined to a luscious, grassy pasture enclosed on three sides with a fence and the third with an electric wire. When they’ve eaten the grass, the rancher moves the electric wire and the cattle file through to the next grassy corral. Chickens are brought onto the previous cow field where they scratch and peck at the cow pats full of insect eggs and larvae, spreading manure in the process to nourish the field and getting fat on their “salad bar”.
Pierre says the chickens are happier living this way than when they were in the greenhouse. He works on the farm six months of the year but gets another job in the winter. Since the farm grows and ferments its own peas and grains for the chickens, the only amendment they require from outside the co-op is crab meal. But this meal is crucial to the operation because it replenishes the soil of nutrients removed by crops and animals. We face the same problem, augmented by our winter rains that wash minerals and nutrients from our soils, so perhaps we can recoup this loss by using marine by-products like the New Brunswick farmers.
The dearth of slugs and sow bugs aside, farmers must contend with everything flying that bites and I bet they wear beekeeping suits when they farm. I can hardly wait to get back to my slugs.
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.