True No-Till Market Gardening
($100,000 An Acre Income)

Dateline: 26 May 2015


Paul Kaiser appears to be doing something remarkable with his market garden micro farm in Sebastopol, California. Here's a quote from This Online Article....

Last year, Kaiser’s Sonoma County farm grossed more than $100,000 an acre, which is 10 times the average, per-acre income of comparable California farms. This includes Sonoma’s legendary vineyards, which have been overtaking farmland for decades, largely because wine grapes have become much more lucrative these days than food, at least the way most farmers grow it.
Kaiser manages all of this without plowing an inch of his ground, without doing any weeding, and without using any sprays—either chemical or organic. 


I learned about Paul Kaiser's unique farming methods from This Interview. His web site is At This Link.
An interesting part of Paul Kaiser's farming system is the use of occultation covers, much like Jean-Martin Fortier uses in Quebec. But instead of referring to the material as black plastic, he calls it "black fabric." 





3 comments:

David Rogers said...

Off Topic:

Herrick,

We got your Whizbang gardening book and I built 3 solar pyramids. Does the soil
get too hot at this time of year and cook the seeds? Well I guess I'll find out.

Your website is the third I look at after the weather and craigslist-farm and garden.

Keep up your thinking.

Thanks

Dave Roges

Herrick Kimball said...

Hi Dave,

My experience has been that the soil does not get too hot. The environment inside the pyramids is like a greenhouse, and the open top provides ideal ventilation. But my experience is limited to my central NY climate.

I have used my solar pyramids this year, like a greenhouse in the garden, to nurture tomato, broccoli, cabbage, romaine lettuce, parsley, beet and kale seedlings before transplanting them.

Thanks for asking.

Elizabeth L. Johnson said...

I prefer the no-till back-to-eden method. After a normal winter it is no fuss, no muss: no irrigating at all, all summer; no weed pulling, no fertilizing at all, no pests at all. Just seed-time and harvest!