TL;DR

I washed eggs while the other four team members covered the pepper field, then we planted. Multiple varieties of hot peppers and some cherry tomatoes were sunk, then we plucked suckers and low branches from the potted tomatoes to be ready to plant them in the new greenhouse next week.

Egg Washing is a Chore

There’s no getting around it…washing eggs is a chore. The value of local farm fresh eggs in the CSA is in large part the demand for them, not the profit. Profit on a dozen of these eggs is measured in dollars or less. Anyone complaining about the prices of these eggs at $8.00 while also being willing to purchase non-local, not-so-fresh eggs at a place like Whole Foods for more than that is…disconnected. The input costs of producing eggs at small-scale include:

• space for chickens…in this case mobile coops
• the chickens themselves (this year being doubled for growth reasons)
• safe, organic chicken feed
• labor which includes
  • collecting the eggs seven days a week
  • water and food delivery, also 7 days a week
  • moving the coops to the appropriate fields, infrequent but part of yearly planning
  • processing eggs about twice a week (results in sellable product)

There are other aspects of producing-chicken lifecycle I’ve not yet been exposed to. Maybe the above is enough to provide a deeper glance into why a dozen costs what it does. Economically, eggs are not just a recent national conundrum…they’re a commoditized staple of the American diet that, like many other supermarket items, has been largely divorced of context into how it gets from farm to table.

In short, you eat what you pay for eggs in terms of quality, locality, and safety. It’s not always the case that ‘the eggs you get are the eggs you deserve’…a derivative monacum statement ‘the [fill in the blank] is the [fill in the blank] you deserve’. Meanwhile this simply does not apply for most peoples not fortunate enough to affort eggs at more than one-half a minimum wage hourly rate (after taxes of course).

It’s more like, the eggs you can affort are the eggs you’re going to eat…duh…until the floor price of a staple goes beyond affordable for most. Today we see that many people will stop purchasing eggs when they’re too expensive, either due to scarcity or reality of input cost and profit margins being toyed with. Sharp spikes in lack of demand have huge ripple effects on any industry so we’ll have to see how current events play out.

Different Team Every Day

There are a handful of people that work on the farm, each with their own schedules of which days they can/can’t work. I am currently doing Monday through Thursday 8-9 hours and only don’t know one other person. Some days, we work all together on big projects and sometimes separate individual tasks here and there. It’s all in until the job is done.

Every person brings a different kind of ‘energy’ to work. I don’t mean effort level, that’s always assumed at your best; by energy I mean vibe, attitude, approach, etc. Some days that energy contribution is different because of other circumstances, other work fatigue, or something good happened recently. When combined, it’s always a slightly different group energy.

Contributing good energy while you work together is important to farm teams because the task can be a grind. Repetitive motions, often labor-intensive or simply monotonous, over larger scales than seem doable is the hike to prepare for…going the trail with others means being ready to listen, ask questions, provide your own thoughts. There is a social aspect to field work together and the aggregate ‘team energy’ makes it either easier or harder.

Planting Hot Peppers and Cherry Tomatoes

We first planted about 6 short rows of hot pepper varieties including Jalapeño, Shishito, and Habanero adjacent to the high tunnel we weeded on Tuesday. Then we switched to planting another pepper variety into the landscape fabric already on it’s 2nd season in the middle plot with the kale on the other side of the high tunnel greenhouse in the main field. The process involves:

• weeding the hole first (easy at this time of season, not so much later)
• adding a small handful of ProGrow 5-3-4 organic fertilizer
• cultivating the planting area with a spear trowel
• dropping seedlings near the hole
• planting the seedlings in the hole

Some of these things you can combine, such as weeding and cultivating. Others take both hands such as fertilizing and planting. So it’s nice to have had 5 people working on this and we got 2 300-foot rows planted in about an hour or so.

Pruning, Plucking, and Prepping the Tomatoes

Next week we’ll be planting tomatoes in the new greenhouse and likely also starting them on string to grow upright. To prepare for this, a few of us took the last hour to pluck the first few stems and also suckers from the paper-potted tomatoes. Doing this is for a few good reasons:

• they will be planted deeply, and you generally want to avoid planting foliage in soil
• anywhere the stem touches soil, it will eventually create roots, and more roots are better in this case
• foliage contact with soil tends to attract disease and pests, and there’s no landscaping fabric in this space
• airflow is better at the ground level with less foliage, discouraging molds and wilts

Dory the AI Fish

Right now, I feed my LLM transcriptions of audio notes for the day I worked and plan to write about. Along with some fine-tuned templates, for the most part this works well to produce a summary in bullet point sections that I use during my human writing hour to keep to the most important things I want to capture about this work. What I write is not always the dirty (no pun intended) details of farming work, though often that’s what makes for good writing. It’s also the human meta, the essence from my perspective, of what I was thinking about and what I learned.

But like Dory from Finding Nemo, it has very little memory (i.e. context tokens and window size) so below you can see that it thinks this is the first time I’m learning egg washing procedures. It’s because I’m not giving it prior context…this is by design as of now with intent to fix as soon as I can. There are other small things like proper-noun recognition that memory might also solve for, such as “Stake-staking cherry tomato plants” (which now makes me want a steak tip sammie). But the main problem is no-term memory, neither short nor long.

My solve for this will be to implement a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) model that searches for the most relevant blog posts I’ve written here and that are tagged with primary keywords in the transcript to build its vector database from, cataloged in stores. Then based on the most relevant documents in the store(s), it will fill the rest of the context window with as much of the prior posts’ relevant text. Then the prompt templates will have to change to reflect that the summary of the day should focus on what happened in the transcript based on activities that day, but be informed by prior experiences in the additional context section.

And though for humans in the real world, anterograde amnesia is no joke, for today this is what my Dory of an AI fished out of my notes for me:

Main Themes:

1. Farm work and tasks
2. Planting and preparing for growth
3. Maintenance and preparation for future tasks
4. Teamwork and collaboration

Activities:

1. Preparing hands and gloves for work with gauze and a band-aid
2. Processing eggs (3.5 hours)
3. Laying landscape fabric over the field near the high tunnel
4. Planting hot peppers in the field next to the high tunnel
5. Planting cosmos, zinnias, and other flowers in the small field
6. Planting kale and cherry tomatoes in the midfield field
7. Stake-staking cherry tomato plants with string
8. Plucking tomato suckers and branches from plants

New Things Not Yet Encountered:

1. The specific tasks of processing eggs (e.g., how to identify faulty eggs)
2. The Florida weave method for supporting cherry tomatoes
3. The new greenhouse setup, including trenches, trencher, and composting process
4. Possibly the specifics of the landscape fabric placement and soil conditions

Questions and Future Areas of Research:

1. What is the purpose of the Florida weave method for supporting cherry tomatoes?
2. How do the property owners plan to use the cosmos and zinnias planted in the small field?
3. Are there any specific challenges or concerns related to planting hot peppers in a high tunnel environment?

Suggested Actions:

1. Research the specifics of the Florida weave method for supporting cherry tomatoes.
2. Consider consulting with experienced farmers or gardening experts on the best practices for planting and maintaining hot peppers in a high tunnel environment.
3. Investigate potential uses for cosmos and zinnias beyond their aesthetic value, such as attracting pollinators or providing habitat for beneficial insects.