Established 2021
We’re proud to show off our brand new logo! Special thanks to Airdrie local graphic designer Emma Flemming for designing the logo for us. We were looking for something simple we can use in all sorts of different ways. She gave us tons of options, …
The Airdrie Urban Farm Collective is a diverse collective growing the wellness of people and the land for our community. Our 2022 season was a huge success, bringing in more volunteers than ever, fresh food to our tables, and an abundance of learning through trial …
This week I’m listening to an amazing podcast about soil health, vermiculture, microbes, fungi, and more with Nicole Masters on the “No Till Market Garden Podcast”. Excellent info in an easy to listen format!
Click below to listen to the podcast, or look up the “No Till Market Garden Podcast” episode from 2021/08/30 with Nicole Masters – For the Love of Soil, however you listen to your podcasts.
This week I read a timely blog (as fall is beginning) about transitioning a garden to a no-till system. That means no more turning your beds! This has some huge advantages (and some pitfalls to be aware of). However it requires a mindset shift and …
“Sustainable”, “Organic”, “Regenerative”, “Chemical Free”; all have become buzzwords in the last years, but what do they mean exactly? There’s a lot of information out there, and many of it is questionable, much of it is counterproductive, and yet there’s almost always something to be …
If you’ve been by the farm recently, it’s hard to miss the big black wire mesh barrel over by the compost pile. Everyone who sees it seems to stop, scrunch up their face, and wonders out loud what’s going on!
The contraption is a Johnson-Su “BEAM” bioreactor out of the University of California Chico. Below is an excerpt from the CSU Chico website about it.
“Adjunct Faculty member and CRA Associate Dr. David Johnson has been doing breakthrough work in regards to the efficacy of biologically correct, fungal-dominated compost for carbon sequestration and improved soil health and crop yields. His method is called BEAM (Biologically Enhanced Agricultural Management) and centers around the products created using the compost creation system he devised with his wife Hui-Chun Su (called the Johnson-Su Bioreactor).
Compost is usually thought of fertilizer, a way of adding nutrients to the soil. BEAM compost actually addresses soil health through soil biology. It replaces soil microbes in soil degraded through conventional agriculture methods. That, along with no-till practices, cover crops and other Regenerative Agriculture practices, enable the normal symbiosis between these microbes and plant roots to occur. Quite quickly, the soil starts to recover, and striking improvements in crop yields and carbon sequestration occurs.”
https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/bioreactor/index.shtml
Here’s a few pictures that have been submitted to the CSU Chico page from successful implementations of this compost system. Take a look at their projects page for more details on the implementation in each project here!
This is a big experiment for us, as Dr. Johnson developed this in a totally different climate than we have in Airdrie, and we’re still struggling to figure out how to keep it wet without proper irrigation at the farm (currently using the blue barrel with drip irrigation). But since there’s so little input required except keep it wet and give the microbes a chance to do their thing, there’s a very low cost to do the experiment, and it could have a huge payoff. We’ll let you know in 2022 and 2023!
All pictures, and the entire idea for the project, come from CSU Chico’s website for the Dr. Johnson-Su BEAM bioreactor project. https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/bioreactor/index.shtml
Welcome to the Airdrie Urban Farm Collective! We started in the spring of 2021 on about one acre of land in Airdrie that Daybreak Church graciously “donated” long term. The land was previously a soccer field, and hasn’t been used for quite some time, so …