June 2022 - 1

Growers feel fertilizer,
input cost crunch
Transplant drench fights
devastating carrot
weevil
7
12
18
How to find, keep your
farm's CSA members
June 2022 | Volume 56 |
Issue 6
Patchwork Farms offers healthy fresh
produce for residents lacking options
By Doug Ohlemeier
Assistant Editor
An urban farm in a low-income
Atlanta neighborhood is working to
make healthy fruits and vegetables more
accessible to the community.
Jamila Norman, founder of
Patchwork City Farms, wants to shine
a light on people growing food and
regenerating land in disadvantaged
communities into productive soil for
fresh and healthy foods.
The 1.5-acre Patchwork farm is
southwest of downtown Atlanta. Once
an affluent part of Atlanta, the Oakland
City neighborhood is now bound by
freeways.
A diverse farm, Patchwork grows a
variety of vegetables, fruits and herbs.
Among its large catalog are baby greens,
arugula, kale, Swiss chard, beets, carrots,
eggplant, okra, peas, peppers, potatoes,
radishes, spinach, winter squash,
heirloom tomatoes, strawberries and
melons, as well as sprouts and flowers.
Fruit also includes paw paws, pears,
persimmons and figs. Norman plans to
plant more fruit trees, likely including
apples, plums and kiwifruit.
Certified Naturally Grown
Patchwork City Farms uses organic
production methods, but it isn't certified
by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's
National Organic Program. Instead,
it employs Certified Naturally Grown
methods to make sure it's taking care
of the land with environmentally
friendly methods conducive to healthy
communities.
According to the Certified Naturally
See PATCHWORK, page 5
Jamila Norman, founder of Patchwork City Farms, views some curly kale. Patchwork is
an urban farm in Atlanta. Photos: Patchwork City Farms
Digicrop views robotics, precision ag
By Doug Ohlemeier
Assistant Editor
Robotics and other technologies
designed to benefit agriculture were
at the forefront of Digicrop, the
International Conference on Digital
Technologies for Sustainable Crop
Production. The virtual March 28-30
conference assembled researchers from
a variety of disciplines who develop,
use and review new technologies to
improve the sustainability of crop
production and breeding.
Precision agriculture uses intelligent
automation to help farmers enhance
crop production sustainably while
reducing labor costs and inputs. Grower
adoption, however, has remained slow
and isn't widespread, said Chandra
Krintz, professor of computer science
at University of California (UC) Santa
Barbara and chief scientist and
co-founder of AppScale Systems Inc.
While some large-scale industrial
farming
operations have
begun to integrate
AI and machine
learning into their
operations, many
smaller operations
haven't. Existing
solutions collect data using on-farm
sensors, but move the data to the cloud
for processing by different vendors and
platforms. Because numerous vendors
make the sensors, such services don't
work. The solutions and platforms don't
communicate with each other and are
incompatible, Krintz said.
High-Tech Tools
2022
Connecting growers
SmartFarm is an open-source
computing system designed to
provide farmers precision agriculture
solutions. Krintz discussed how
SmartFarm combines data from a
variety of sensors, integrates recent
advances in data analytics, machine
learning and user interfaces that are
compatible with systems available
from public clouds. It eliminates the
need for an IT staff to maintain the
system.
" Many farmers have costly or poor
internet connectivity, making those
other solutions impossible to use, " she
said. " Since intelligent automation
needs to happen on-farm, moving
the data to the cloud and back, it
only causes delays and costs, while
requiring farmers to share or give up
ownership of their data. "
See DIGICROP, page 6
http://http:// http://http:// http://http://
June 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of June 2022
