Archived entries for Farming
Squash Film – 55 days to harvest
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Time lapse film of squash growing in Phoenix, AZ. 55 days to harvest.
Broccoli Film – 105 days to harvest
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radish film – 40 days to harvest
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Time lapse of radishes. 45 days to harvest.
I am a fourth generation farmer whose land and life are quickly being overcome by suburbia. Because of the encroachment I was inspired to create ‘lifecycles’ to collect and share the images from the most important daily process of agriculture, the growth of our produce. Using timelapse photography, I have begun the process of filming everything I grow, and inviting other farmers to do the same. The arranged short films show a single production cycle of each plant/tree. Ambient noises are taken from the farm and plants while growing, and the accompanying music is composed by musicians inspired by the footage. I invite you to watch your food grow, and better understand what an effort these plants undertake to make it to the marketplace and later to your tables. Thanks for your time, and I hope you enjoy watching them grow as much as I have.
Matt
Radish harvested
Well, today my dad and I harvested the radishes for one of the videos. The weather has been perfect, and it shows in the short season with these plants. Normally during this time of year, with our short winter days, it may take anywhere from 50-70 days to have a proper size radish for market, but these suckers made it in under 45 days. While a week may not seem like that big of a difference to those of you reading this post, it is colossal. The reason being that when you grow on a large scale like the company which leases ground to grow these radishes from our family (Miedema Produce), your harvest is planned to sustain a certain level of product for up to 6 months. For example, say you plant 1000 acres of radishes a year, you cannot plant that all at once. You have to stretch it out over the course of the year while planning for supply and demand considerations based on your past years’ experience. So the big season for radishes is during the Super Bowl – party veggie packs with ranch…come on, you know what I talking about. It is basically a large tray of veggies which are vehicles for Ranch dressing, but I digress. To plan for this rise of demand in the middle of the season you have to increase your acreage to have ample amounts of produce ready to harvest the week before the big game. So you plan as much as 6 months in advance. If you lay it out on a graph the acreage will look like a bell curve, the week before the Super Bowl being the peak of that diagram.
Here is the kicker, you planted radishes for that delivery date based on a days to harvest average of 60 days and you show up 2 weeks early. It is a ripple effect, your planted acreage reduces after Super Bowl weekend so you have planted less acreage in advance. You end up at the party with a radish shortage, and then Florida farmers get snowed on….no more radishes around, so you become enticed by harvesting sooner to keep up with the demand and corresponding rise in price…so on so forth, Eventually you have to stop to catch up, you get the idea.
The end of the story is farming is a constantly changing landscape, if it’s not the weather, it’s the market, and if is not the market, it is encroachment, drought, seed shortage, back aches, foot pain, and broken tractors….I better stop. What a dream crusher I am. But the rewards are truly infinite. It is a unique life to work with something that you are bringing to life to sustain other people’s lives
radish harvest
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Farm History
My family has been farming the same land 35 miles west of Phoenix, Arizona since the 1920’s. My grandfather’s uncle Jim purchased the first small portion of the ground back then, and soon after my grandfather moved from Richmond, California to be raised by his Uncle Jim and Aunt Lola. Waddell, Arizona did not have much to offer back then from a farming point of view, but with the newly constructed Waddell Dam in the early ’20s the desert landscape was quickly being plowed under to grow citrus, grapes, and eventually a crop that Arizona became well known for, cotton. My grandfather met my grandmother in Phoenix and they were married as they finished up their time in the military. They used their GI bills to purchase the first major piece of ground since the original family purchase. Mickey and Bob farmed alfalfa in the begining years, but expanded to cotton as market prices rose for the commodity in the post war economy. My grandparents raised three children, in Waddell. Michael, the oldest, is my Father, and he ended up returning to the farm after a stint in the Navy and a quick job search in aerospace engineering, both of which had career paths that dimmed in comparison to return to the farm. My father returned to the farm just before I was born and steered the business though some tough times during the ’90s when the cotton market was bottoming out….they do not call cotton poverty weed for no reason. In the ’90s my father grew organic green and brown cotton, watermelons, onions, and many other vegetables until settling on carrots, which we still grow today. I returned from undergraduate school and worked for a few years on the farm before returning to school to get a graduate degree in sculpture in San Francisco. It was during that time the development began to ramp up in the Phoenix area. By the time I returned from San Francisco in 2003 to the farm, suburbia was less than 3 miles from my childhood home. I have been running the family business ever since my return. We still grow carrots, and now parsnips. We also have two small organic farms, one a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), the other a direct market farm for restaurants and markets. It is on these farms that the time lapse units reside.
Nearby Development 2003