| Land Values:
A New Jersey Farmer Builds Soil and Profits
Adapted from The New American Farmer: Profiles of Agricultural Innovation
Bob and Leda Muth
Muth Farm
1639 Pitman Downer Road
Williamstown, NJ 08094
- 11 acres in mixed vegetables and cut flowers
- Three-quarters of an acre in strawberries sold from a roadside stand
- 40 acres of hay
Bob Muth grew up on the farm, but left New Jersey after college to work as a Cooperative Extension agent in South Carolina. After three years, he returned to his home state to work on a master’s degree. “One day,” he says, “I looked out the window and realized I’d rather be sitting on a tractor seat than working in a lab, and I’ve never been back.”
Since 1990, Muth has farmed full time, growing tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, okra, and smaller amounts of squash and melons. Many of the crops are set as transplants in plastic mulch and raised with drip irrigation, and he has been experimenting with using super-reflective plastic mulch between rows of strawberries. Recently, he also tried a few beds of cut flowers under high tunnels.
Muth’s gravelly, sandy loam soil is about 15 percent clay and has a tendency to crust when worked intensively. “But you can grow excellent vegetable crops on it if you manage it more carefully and add organic matter,” Muth says. He relies on a good sod crop in his four- to five-year rotation, and, at any given time, only about 16 acres are in vegetable cash crops. Recalls Muth, “I heard that one farmer said, ‘Bob doesn’t do anything, the whole farm is in grass,’ but after a few years he started taking notice. Just because what you see is grass doesn’t mean there isn’t a plan behind it.”
In a typical rotation, after the vegetable crop is turned under in the fall, he covers the ground with up to six inches of leaves from municipal leaf collections. The following spring he works in the decomposing leaves and then plants a hay crop of timothy, orchard grass, or both.
The leaves add a variety of nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and calcium, and six inches of leaves equal 20 tons of dry matter per acre. This influx of organic matter really helps the soil, but at first the leaves also tie up nitrogen. But Muth doesn’t mind if his hay is a little nitrogen-starved its first year—it’s not his main cash crop—and he really sees benefits in the second. After two or three years in hay, he plants a cover crop of rye/vetch or rye alone, and follows it with vegetables the next spring. He also often uses sudangrass as a quick-growing, high-mass summer cover crop to break up compacted soil, suppress weeds, and guard against erosion.
Muth did some searching to find the right combination of cover crops. He tried crimson clover, but found it died during cold springs. In seeking an alternative, he came up with vetch. “It was described as a ‘noxious weed’ in some references, so I figured that was just what I needed,” he says. “It wasn’t until afterwards I found out about the SARE program and that vetch was one of the cover crops they were recommending.” According to soil tests, his soil-building program has now given him fields that test as high as 5 percent organic matter, unheard of for the mineral soils of southern New Jersey.
Muth Farm provides for the family’s current needs and also generates enough income to save for retirement. In a good year, the farm grosses $250,00 to $300,000; on a not-so-good one, $150,000 to $200,000. Net profits vary, too, depending on the year, but Muth has been able to gradually build his savings.
Muth rents all of his farmland on a year-to-year basis, except for his family’s home place: “Renting has been one of my secrets to success,” he says. “You don’t lock up your cash. You can’t buy land at $20,000 an acre and make it pay, but you can rent it for $40 to $50 an acre and be successful.”
Once primarily farmland, southern New Jersey is now becoming increasingly developed. This is good for selling crops, but it makes environmental concerns more intense, and one benefit of his soil building and rotation program is decreased soil and fertilizer runoff. To keep pesticide use down, Muth depends heavily on integrated pest management. “I know I am using fewer chemicals than most, and using them more efficiently,” he says. “And with this rotation, any pesticides are used only on a small part of the farm each year.” His management program also helps control Phytophthora blight, a major problem in peppers in the area. “We’ve got some disease pressure,” he says, “but nothing like those other guys.”
As for the future, Muth plans to expand the raising of flowers under high tunnels, and next year hopes to have seven or eight tunnels, planning the crop so the flowers come in at the same time as strawberries in the high-demand months of May and June.
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