To the disappointment of the general public’s imagination
and the press staff hoping to tell our story, when an idea is born it’s not
always an ‘ah-hah moment.’ The farm as a defining point of Glass Bottom Brewery
is such an example.
Since its ideological inception, Glass Bottom Brewery has
been about the collaboration of two friends trying to find a meaningful life of
work that seems worth doing. For me, Evan, that work is outdoors, in the
elements, hands and tools shaping the natural world into something productive
for people and sustainable for the world’s future. When Ezra made it clear he
would be happy to make delicious, interesting beer as his life’s work, my
challenge was to figure out what agricultural and mechanical system could fit
into that model. While hops production is an easy choice on paper, it is a
challenge in the field.
Upstart farming with no land, almost no machinery, and a
hazy understanding of the desired crop (as a result of its relative local
scarcity) is the kind of proposition no one could recommend for a fledgling
business. That’s the hop yard at Glass Bottom. What follows is a history of
repairing the lacks described in the first sentence of this paragraph in order
to fulfill a commitment to a farm-brewery business in Massachusetts that
actually lives up to the ‘farm’ part of that title.
Farms where hops grow lack the pleasantly bucolic image
conjured by the average landowner who thinks of waving grain or neat green
vegetable rows or peaceful cows out to pasture: so the first challenge was a
sales pitch. I’m a notoriously poor salesman (just ask some local restaurant
and bar owners), therefore I strove to be as honest as possible with the
landowners I spoke to while looking for a place to build a 1-3 acre trellis to
support the 18 foot tall mature hops. The best description I had for the
trellis structure (built in the beefiest way possible for wind, rain, and
mature plant loads of about 90,000 pounds per acre) was a telephone pole yard.
Hardly bucolic. I spoke with and presented my plan (called an enterprise budget
in farm business management lingo) to three landowners before finding Dale
Culleton on North Plain Rd in Great Barrington. He thought that despite my
description, the yard would look interesting and be a unique part of the local
scenery. Location challenge completed.
Building the trellis to support growing hops plants is an
exercise in appropriate engineering for weight loads. Dale’s property had black
locust trees, known as the last good source of rot-resistant wood in New
England (RIP, American Chestnut). Since the trellis is at its core a series of
posts that support a grid of cable, and the hops plants are perennials boasting
7+ years of mature cone production, longevity of the posts that are sunk into
the ground (4 feet to get below the level of frost heaving) is crucial. Having
locust on site to use as posts (which were on average 24 feet, 20 above and 4
below ground) was a essential to preserving the bottom line of the construction
of the overall trellis. Even still, each post costs, and I used 60 in one acre,
four of them corner posts weighing twice as much as the center posts. To tie
them together the appropriate weather-resistant material is called ‘aircraft
cable’: stranded galvanized wire almost a half an inch thick. And most
importantly, all the posts and cable need to be counterweighted outside of the
actual growing space of the trellis. These counterweights, called anchors, need
to be buried deep in the ground with the slanted end posts of each row
connected to them via cable. Since the posts were more than $2000, the cable
about $1500, and the labor and machinery to dig holes for said posts, install
them, and put us in the air high enough to secure the cable was looking like
another $7000, our $10,000 budget for the farm (~ 10k per acre being a textbook
rate for hops trellis set-up) was already bulging. Getting back to the anchors,
the standard in-ground anchor system relies on poured concrete ‘dead-men’
blocks. As it was one of the last logistical considerations, and so much had been
devoted to budgeting the more obvious parts of the farm like posts and cable
and machinery, I was desperate for something low-cost. Since the anchors are
also essential to counterbalancing the weight of the plants that hang from the
trellis, cutting corners wasn’t an option. In the end, the black locust provided
a solution. Simulating dead-men blocks using locust chunks with rebar set
through them and welded together allowed for a labor-intensive (drilling holes
in each piece of hard locust, hammering through the rebar, and welding it) but
virtually free anchor that could be buried six feet deep and ensured to last
the lifetime of the trellis.
Having gotten through the challenge of finding land and
building a trellis during the 2012 season, I was left with no time to plant
hops. We were in mid-summer and the appropriate time to get the young rhizomes
(root pieces) established was three months prior. The next challenge was
getting the soil ready with hand tools, an ATV with a wagon, a neighbor’s
borrowed tractor, and a good friend’s rototiller. Since farming is about
creative solutions given generally unfavorable conditions, the ATV, wagon, and
a few friends served as a dump truck for soil amendments. While rototilling
should never be a first choice for primary tillage, using what you have is
better than doing nothing at all. The weeds, sod, and soil structure were
pounded to bits, but no weeds and no soil structure is better than massive weed
competition for a fledgling plant. Other challenges included how to maneuver
within a field that was filled with regularly spaced posts and what to do to
keep the rototilled, pulverized soil from blowing away now that no roots were
holding it to the field. With a lawn-tractor spinner-spreader towed behind the
ATV I laid down winter rye seed from a local farm where I once worked and hoped
that the rye would find a way to dig in without anything but the mild churning
of a shallowly set rototiller.
The next spring rye was growing and I had to find enough
hops to plant commercially without the capital to purchase commercial bulk rhizomes.
Some long-term planning on our part had led to a decently sized backyard garden
full of hop cultivars interesting to us: German Perle, and American Willamette
and Cascade. Another backyard grower, Bob Galisa of Cheshire, MA, contributed
cuttings of his own plants to supplement ours. With a free stock of rhizomes
and a spring that looked green and orderly at the hop farm, we undertook extra
compost hauling with our makeshift dump-truck system and hand planted 500
rhizomes in half the field. The next two months were without any substantial
rain, and I hadn’t installed irrigation for the plants yet, assuming
cooperation from the New England Spring that always results in field
inundation. Dale’s soil had amazing drainage and human-added nutrients, it just
needed water. Over the next two months, as the rhizomes dried out and I
futilely walked around with a garden hose, I realized that I would have to
replant over half of the field. That is what happened: drip hose irrigation
eventually went into the planted rows, fed by a water tank and a homemade pump
setup (involving a domestic well pump, a generator, and a down-home series of
shrink-tight electrical connections) from Dale’s spring pond 40 feet below the
level of the field. From the planting season I learned that preparing for the
worst and spending extra time at the beginning often prevents the kinds of
heartache involved in pulling out hundreds of dried shriveled rhizomes that
never got enough water in Dale’s wonderfully well-drained soil. While it’s an
easy lesson on paper, the inclination is always to just make a start at a
project with what you have and sort out the lacks later on down the road. Since
farming is often cash and time limited, there may have been no choice but to
plant the rhizomes without having money or time to set up irrigation prior to
planting, unless I had blocked that time and money out during the previous
season when the trellis structure was under construction.
The hops grew! The timing may have been months later than a
commercial yard in a place like Oregon or Washington, but they grew and as they
grew, out of the soil sprang everything else that could grow. At this point in
a field’s development, the standard farmer would start looking for commercial
sprays and tillage equipment. I went for a walk-behind BCS tractor and no
herbicide, thinking that weed pressure could be controlled mechanically. BCS
tractors are Italian made and notorious for longevity in their motors,
gearboxes, and simple bicycle-style mechanical controls. I bought one used,
figuring as many do who know machinery more peripherally than intimately that a
good track record means nothing to fear with any individual unit. Our facebook
page tells a brief picture story of my hubris and the subsequent disassembly of
the BCS tractor into each individual part, both transmission and motor needing
a serious inspection and about $1000 in replacement parts. The upshot was I learned that equipment is
only as good as the operator that cares for it. While the repairs were ongoing
the hops grew but the weeds grew faster, given a hot rainy summer as cruel
follow-up to the dry spring for any plant hoping to compete with a seed bank of
weeds in the churned soil. This year, the BCS with its Italian cultivator,
plow, harrow, and mower attachments will need to actively bring down weeds in
order for the yard to go from a state of surviving to a state of thriving. This
challenge is not yet surmounted, and may be my kryptonite as I continue to use
small machinery without backup equipment close on hand. Kickstarter money,
sheep for weed control (they don’t eat the hops once the plant gets to a
certain height) and extra attention are my current ideas for solutions.
While many other challenges face the Glass Bottom Hop Farm,
including integrating the public with signage and tours, preparing for a
commercial harvest with drying and vacuum sealing equipment, and managing the
yard as it diversifies in cultivars and the plants establish their vast root
systems, the casual reader will have long abandoned this history of challenges,
and even you, devoted readers, hopefully feel satisfied that the farm has been
many trials from inception to execution. Remembering that this project is my
labor of love is what brings me back to it each week to manage my compost,
inspect my plants, scheme for the future, and marvel at everything involved in
such a complex and diverse undertaking. When I’m at the hop farm, despite these
myriad challenges and uncertainties, I feel content.
-Evan