Organic farmer describes composting methods

Jim Kinsel, left, discusses his composting practices with a small group of farmers at his Honey Brook Organic Farm. (Photo by Richard Skelly)

CHESTERFIELD — A small group of organic growing enthusiasts gathered at Honey Brook Organic Farm one late fall afternoon to listen as pioneer organic grower Jim Kinsel detailed his composting methods, critical to his Certified Organic farm here.
The meeting was organized by members of the Northeast Organic Farmers Association, New Jersey chapter.
The group’s conference will be held online only this year on Jan. 29-30.
Standing beside one of his compost piles, he showed thermometers that varied 140-170 degrees F in the mid-sections of the piles, “but that’s after two months,” he said.
“Like many conventional farmers you’re not necessarily going to orchestrate the perfect carbon-nitrogen ratio so that does complicate the process a bit,” he added.
The parameters he can control he said, is the aeration for the compost piles and he has an automated switching system that blows air into the piles for five minutes on, 10 minutes off.
“That was kind of intuitive, because early on I noticed the piles were getting really hot as I was putting air into them,” Kinsel said. “I’m reading the literature and it’s saying after two days the temperature will start to come down but that wasn’t really happening.
“We had a problem at one point where I accidentally left the air pump on 24/7. It didn’t do anything. It didn’t bring the temperature down, possibly because we didn’t have enough of a flow rate.”
The blowers Kinsel uses are cheap enough, $50 or less on E-Bay, and they’re basically toy or bed inflation blowers.
“It’s not any kind of high-tech device, but if you’re looking for exhaust for excess heat then you need something more rugged.”
In the early years of Honey Brook Organic Farm at a different location on leased land closer to Princeton Township, he and Dudas and their crew were making heavy applications of 20 tons to the acre.
“There was a time in the 1990’s where most organic farmers were only relying on compost for fertility” he said, “and it was not really thought to be a problem, but at some point in the late 1990’s researchers learned if you’re applying for nitrogen you’re over-applying for phosphorus and then that phosphorus will run off an organic field into fine particulates so then organic farmers became aware that you cannot just rely on compost alone,” he said.
Leaves are something of a hedge because the phosphorus in manures is coming from the grain that feeds the livestock that provides the manure.
“Leaves are very low in phosphorus, so if you’re using leaf compost you’re pretty much good in terms of your soil composition but even then you’re probably not getting enough nitrogen, so we would do six to eight tons to the acre of leaf compost and then we would side-dress with a high nitrogen fertilizer like soybean meal or alfalfa pellets, which are also very good.”
Prompted by questions from NOFA-NJ Director Nagisa Manabe and others, Kinsel offered up his own observations on the current state of the Certified Organic, locally-grown, Jersey Fresh marketplace.
“We’ve been doing vegetables for about 30 years now, and at our peak point we were doing about 140 acres of vegetables. But lately my feeling is that the public is retreating from its commitment to local agriculture and some people have pointed out that there’s more competition now but I don’t think that’s all of it; I think there’s a huge and growing demand for organic produce but not for ‘local organic,’ and I think these two segments have been growing at different rates” Kinsel said.
He and Dudas don’t think local organic is keeping up with demand for food coming out of California, Peru or Mexico. Kinsel noted Honey Brook Organic Farm reached its peak with CSA subscribers – about 4,000 subscribers — in 2016.
“Every year after that, we’ve been losing a few hundred members, and I think last year we were at 3,500 and then this year we lost another thousand or so.”
“Why?” Manabe asked. Doesn’t local organic taste better than California organic?
“I think it was partly a fad, the local food movement,” Kinsel said. “You have to look at where it was 20 and 30 years ago. If you wanted to buy organic you couldn’t buy it in the supermarket, you’d have to go directly to a farm.
“Now, if you want organic, it’s like a hyper commodity, there are so many options. You can get it in the supermarket, you can get it delivered to your front door in two hours.”
In response, Kinsel and Dudas began offering home delivery options to some of their CSA membership, but they found it too burdensome and would have been far too costly to maintain a fleet of vehicles for home delivery purposes. This flood of readily available organic produce has changed the attitudes of previously loyal CSA members, he said.
“Now, they start treating you like you’re Amazon and their expectations are often too high,” he said. “Things like, ‘I thought I was going to get a green zucchini, but you substituted a yellow zucchini. I want a refund!’”
That’s not what CSA programs were about when they first came into fashion, Kinsel said.
“CSA’s were about a farm supporting the community, not the other way around.”
There was a time when it was necessary for people to support a local farm if they wanted organic produce, but now, that’s no longer the case, he argued.
“It was a relationship of convenience, but also of necessity at the time it was really necessary for people to support a local farm if they wanted organic vegetables,” he said, “now, that’s no longer true.”
In closing his talk near the compost piles at Honey Brook, Kinsel said “I’m not saying that nobody cares about local, I’m saying that there was a time in the late 1980’s when the largest organic farms in California were perhaps 100 acres tops, they were not the huge mega farms because it was thought that they might not work on a large scale.”
He said he and other pioneers in the organic movement around Mid-Atlantic States wanted to see more organic farms back then. “Local produce” labels and a set of laws governing them for conventional and organic farmers are being considered by the New Jersey legislature this month.
“It’s kind of what we wanted years ago, but one would have thought consumers would have placed more emphasis on local,” Kinsel said. “So now it is more of an uphill battle with so much of the market” flooded with organic produce.