How we farm at Coyle organic farm.

July 4 2024 revised

This is not a profitable farm. If you want to farm organically, care for the animals and improve the soils life becomes pretty impossible if money is the object. Basically we are a subsistence farm, providing food for the animals and people while selling oils and flour to pay our expenses.

We grow sunflowers, oats, rye. Spelt, camelina and hay. The fields are rotated every year. We try to leave pastures for the horses after the sunflower crop. From the crops we produce spelt flour, sunflower oil and camelina oil. Sometimes we have hemp for pressing too.

We grow too many crops to be economical. Our fields are quite small because I only produce what we need for the sales of sunflower oils, sales of spelt flour, rye flour or corn meal as well as hay for the horses. This way of farming makes a lot of sense but certainly is not profitable unless you count the soil improvement.

This is a very difficult lifestyle with endless chores, many maintenance issues, lack of income for producing the best quality food, a changing climate that produces too much rain or too long a drought. There is a huge issue of difficult internet problems and the fraudulent activities going on everywhere . Our bank accounts have been hacked as well as our emails which make farm life sometimes difficult using the internet which is required by all governments now.

This being said I love the basic lifestyle of not having to drive to work, arrange my own day, spend time with the animals, the good food, being outdoors every day and seeing things grow.

I am sincere in believing that the many problems in the world all point to becoming self sufficient in farming. Farming to grow food is my main aim along with improving the soils. Becoming more local is my other incentive since if I can deliver food to people who live close by then I save a lot in not having a vehicle to deliver and in fact if I can do it by bicycle so much the better.

We grow our own sunflower oil seeds, spelt and rye flour seeds organically. We also have heritage chickens for eggs and a Dexter cow along with cats to keep the mice in order.

Crop rotations, cover crops, minimal plowing and carefully observing the fields are the farming practices we follow. We only use only sunshine to dry our crops. I no till plant sunflowers into crimped rye which reduces the weeds almost nothing.

We are not certified organic but adhere to regenerative farm principles.

I use horses as a source of energy in the fields or for logging. I still use tractors fueled with sunflower oil to finish some field work with a hope that horses will eventually do everything.

In the fall I plant rye with various cover crops such as white clover and peas which over winters and yields green plants in late February for the horses to eat. To cut down on the weeds and provide green manure I continually clip the field with a horse drawn sickle mower or swather. I broadcast red clover in the sunflower stubble with great success as this gives the horses lots of red clover to eat which I fence off once they have trampled and eaten about half.

I use the horses to maintain the fields. The horses are fenced off with an electric fence in a large pasture.

We mill spelt flour from the spelt we grow on the farm. Spelt has a hull and must be taken off to get the seeds that we will then mill for flour. Spelt is planted in the fall and is harvested in August of the following year. We automated the flour making by adding an auger to take the milled grain to our sifter. The mill rotates at a slow speed to keep the flour temperature between 80 and 90 degrees F. Like our pressing of the oils we only press once a month to order. All bottles and bags of flour are marked with the date of pressing or milling.