This April was a wild one. Overall, it was the warmest April on record in much of western PA. There were long stretches of pure summer-like weather, where we had to water our seedlings three times a day to keep them from turning to dust.
This April also featured some relatively late, brutally cold nights. We recorded 20 degrees Fahrenheit one morning in late April. As a result, we had some significant crop damage to our snap peas and onions. We also totally lost some nasturtiums that were just transplanted, as well as all of our red cabbage.
We were lucky. Lots of other farms, particularly farms that focus on tree fruit, were completely obliterated. A late freeze will kill tender flowers and fruit buds on fruit trees. Many in our area reported a nearly 100% loss and simply won’t have any fruit to harvest in 2026.
The comparison between a total loss of what might be your only income and my loss of a couple of growing beds had me thinking about the word resiliency. You hear the word a lot in the farming world because farmers literally have to weather a lot of storms.
More and more, we’re seeing how our farm is almost purpose-built to be resilient. Not only do we make decisions about what to grow and who to sell to that reduce risk, our growing practices often moderate the extremes of weather to the betterment of our plants. Let’s talk about building resilient farms and why that matters!
How Our Farm Builds Crop Resiliency
In many ways, the foundation of our farm’s business model is inherently resilient. We’ve chosen to build a diversified market-garden-style farm. That means we have dozens and dozens of crops growing at any one time. Does this make our crop planning schedule complicated? You better believe it!
But it also means that if we have adverse weather, pests, disease, poor soil, or any other number of farming challenges, it usually only affects one or two individual crops. That hard freeze in late April may have wiped out our red cabbage, but our lettuce was totally fine.
We also have a wide variety of produce available all summer, which means we do a lot of succession planting. Instead of planting the whole farm at once, leaving it vulnerable to a poorly timed hail storm or freeze, we plant every week in smaller quantities. We also plant lots of successions of the same crop. Vole damage to a bed of carrots? That’s ok, we planted another bed a couple of weeks later that looks great!
On top of that, our ecological growing philosophy naturally makes the farm more resilient. Cover crops, compost, and mulch moderate our soil, meaning that it takes longer for it to get too hot, cold, wet, or dry. Dry summer heat waves may dry out conventionally tilled soils, but ours stay moist for longer.
Because we don’t use any chemicals like herbicides or fungicides, our soils are teeming with life! This life balances the soil, making it difficult for specific pests or diseases to take over and destroy crops.
Resilience in Our Farm Sales Market
Resiliency also extends to our sales outlets. We deliberately diversified our sales so that we split our income between a CSA, Farmer’s Markets, and Restaurants. We’ve had some disruptions to our farmers’ markets this spring, but because of our other two outlets, we’re still able to sell almost all of what we harvest. We’ve even been able to expand beyond a summer-only CSA model to offer a fall CSA as well, extending our season and getting fresh food to our community for a longer period of time.
Our sales outlets also provide a “waterfall” effect, where we can more easily sell produce that we may have an overabundance of. Cucumbers are a great example. Each year, we have a week or two where the cucumbers produce like crazy, and we have tons of them. We’ll include them in the CSA, and whatever is left over from there is offered to our restaurants. Whatever they don’t take goes to the farmer’s market, giving that abundance of cucumbers many options to find their way to hungry customers. That means we don’t waste as much of what we grow, while also helping to support the farm’s health as a business.
Why Resiliency Matters
Farming is hard! While there is a lot we can do to control our farm, lots of forces aren’t up to us at all. Food prices, farmer’s market traffic, restaurant business, and of course Mother Nature, all throw curve balls at the farm. Businesses that aren’t resilient may be chugging along and then be totally derailed by a single event, like a late April freeze.
If we want local food and local farms to be in it for the long haul, they must be able to handle all of these changes and challenges, because they will happen sooner or later. Otherwise, we have a local food system always teetering on the brink of collapse, and farmers who can’t stay in the game long enough to build strong communities.
Finally, and most importantly, resilience is about protecting the earth. One of our neighbors recently told us how excited they were to see the lightning bugs in our back pasture, and how many there were. Ecological farms like ours become an oasis of biodiversity, and each year we see more bugs, birds, and flowers on the farm.
These ecological systems are critical for building a resilient Earth, one that will continue to allow us to grow food and feed ourselves from its soil. This is especially true as our climate warms and changes in ways that will be even more unpredictable and extreme.
We’re happy that the farm we want and love is a resilient one!