Organic potato growing advice and a profile of a young Amish farmer pursuing Regenerative Agriculture
Sue Sullivan
http://awaytogarden.com/growing-potatoes-organically-when-and-how-to-plant-hill-and-harvest/
At the earliest, I recommend planting two to three weeks before your average last frost date. Seed potatoes can rot if planted too early in cold water-logged soil. If your potatoes do get a heavy frost after they emerge, they will put up new shoots, but every time they die back they will produce a smaller and later harvest.
http://modernfarmer.com/2014/08/brilliant-unusual-twenty-something-hopes-unleash-next-green-revolution/
Why, he wondered, did the plants on the new field thrive, while the others withered? And why, more generally, were pest and disease problems on the farm getting steadily worse, despite Kempf’s best efforts to spray them into oblivion? He dug into periodicals like the Soil Science Society of America Journal and Biology and Fertility of Soils. He picked the brains of knowledgeable people. He identified gaps in his knowledge and then he chased them all down: botany, pathology, entomology, physiology, immunology, etc.
Kempf felt that the answers to his questions did indeed exist, but that the folks who held them had their noses so deep in their own work they were missing the bigger picture.
“Agricultural research and education has focused on areas of specialty,” says Kempf. “Many of [these scientists] believe that the answer to agricultural challenges lies within their own area of research, and they don’t communicate with each other.”
Kempf, though, was eager to communicate with all of them as he systematically worked to find, understand and synthesize these disparate bits of knowledge into a unified understanding of soil and plant health that he could apply to the farm. And although he was still a teenager who’d never even taken a ninth-grade science class, he found that scientists like Hatfield were eager to work with him.
“I was taken seriously,” Kempf says, “because I was able to ask really intelligent questions and I didn’t tell anyone how old I was.”
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Kempf quickly began to suspect that the chemical-drenched farming methods he’d been using were causing, not helping, his problems.
“A lot of materials used in corporate agriculture have the capacity to enhance plant growth and performance, but they suppress soil biology,” he says.