9.6: A Case Study, Bob Muth

Gloucester County, New Jersey

Farming 118 acres in a bedroom community of Philadelphia, Bob Muth and his wife Leda raise a wide range of vegetables, small fruits, flowers and a little bit of small grains, which are sold to wholesalers, through a farmers’ market in Collingswood, New Jersey, and at their home farm stand.

Muth’s operation is based on his passion for soil building. Since he took over running the family farm about 30 years ago, Muth has been spreading thick layers of leaf mulch—provided for free by two local municipalities, one of which pays him a small fee—at the home farm, on rented fields, and later on two additional purchased tracts of land. Mulching forms part of a rotation scheme that he devised early on and to which he has remained faithful: only a fifth of his tillable acreage is planted in cash crops each year; the remaining area is put into cover crops. “When I started mulching and using this rotation, my [farmer] neighbors thought I was losing my marbles,” he says. “The prevalent idea at the time was that you had to farm a lot of acreage as intensively as possible.”

Muth’s rotation consists of a high-value crop the first year, followed by a leaf application the second year, two to three years of cover crops—primarily rye and sudex—then a combination of rye and vetch as a cover crop seeded in late summer or fall of the year prior to returning to a high-value crop. Following this rotation has improved the quality of his sandy soils. “With this strategy, I get all the positive indicators such as high CEC, organic matter and nutrient levels, including enough N to grow good-quality crops without a lot of inputs,” he notes.

Muth tests the soil in his fields annually and carefully monitors changes in the data.

I like having hard numbers to back up what I’m observing in the field and to make good decisions as the years go by."

— Bob Muth

Such careful attention to detail has led him to reduce the thickness of leaf applications once fields have cycled a few times through his rotation, in order to keep soil organic matter within an optimum range of 3.5–5%. “Anything higher than that, and I risk nutrient leaching,” he notes.
Muth likes to use drip irrigation to reduce plant stress and disease, and to improve water use efficiency. "Water shortage is my biggest issue on the home farm. One well pumps only 40 gallons a minute and the second only pumps 20–22 gallons a minute,” he says, noting it originally pumped over 100 gallons a minute. A residential development boom on the land surrounding his farm has drastically reduced the available groundwater. He says, “You have to be creative about breaking up your fields into zones in order to make water do what you need it to do.” During dry periods, this may mean running the well 24/7 for a stretch of 60 days, watering one section for four hours at a time, until they get a decent rain.

Muth relies on a range of IPM (integrated pest management) techniques for pest and disease control. He scouts his fields daily and takes notes of his observations throughout each cropping cycle. “It’s worth investing in a jeweler’s loop,” he advises, “because it’s the pests that are most difficult to see—like the white flies, spider mites and thrips—that will get you.” He regularly plants trap-crop borders around his high-value crop fields, which enable him to monitor pest populations and determine when and how much to spray. For example, he suggests using red kale or mizuna as a trap crop to prevent tarnished plant bug damage on savoy cabbage and other brassicas.

“You have to figure out what [pests] require in their life cycles and disrupt them,” he says. After several years of observation, “you begin to recognize if you’ve got a crop for which you haven’t figured out a good control strategy.”Muth likes to encourage beneficial insect populations by leaving flowering strips of cover crops unmowed on the borders of his crop fields. He has found that interplanting cover crops, adding buckwheat and dill to vetch, for example, significantly extends bloom time, thus fostering multiple generations of beneficial insects.

In high tunnels, where he grows berries, vegetables and flowers, he controls aphids and spider mites by releasing predatory mites. He selected a special film to cover the tunnels that enhances light diffusion, reduces condensate drip from the ceiling and purlins, and helps prevent overheated conditions, ensuring an overall superior growing environment.

“There are so many things you can do to help yourself,” he says. He has learned how to prevent early-season pythium rot by waiting to plant crops until a preceding rye-vetch cover is fully broken down and the soil warms up. He keeps pythium, which also likes hot and wet conditions, in check later in the season by planting crops out on highly reflective metallic plastic mulch, under which soil temperatures are lower relative to those that occur under other colors of plastic mulch. The reflective mulch also proved useful with his latest thrip outbreak. Muth planted his first tomato crop on black film because the soil is too cool to plant them on the metallic mulch in early May, which would stunt their growth, and they were damaged by the thrips. But the following tomato crops were all planted on the metallic mulch, and despite the large numbers of thrips still there, Muth says the tomatoes turned out perfect because that mulch repelled them.

Overall, instead of adhering to a strict spray schedule, which “may control one critter but make things worse if you also kill your beneficials in the process,” Muth suggests “layering together” different types of controls, such as improving soil quality, creating insectaries of flowering covers, using sprays judiciously, and letting pest and disease management strategies evolve as time goes by.

Sometimes pest problems can’t be avoided. Recently, thrips overwhelmed the early tomato crops growing in his high tunnel, and he was forced to sell them at a reduced price. But without his diverse rotation and having plantings staggered out, he says the outcome would have likely been worse. “If you had everything in one planting and got whacked like that, you’d be falling back on your savings,” he says. “By doing the little plantings, diversifying and staggering [crops], you spread out your risk, so you’re not totally dependent on one crop at one period of time.”

Muth’s decisions to “go with a good soil building program” and IPM methods also smoothed his transition into certified organic production, which he achieved in 2001. He recalls finding a fact sheet that had a dozen or so practices the certifier recommended for transitioning into organic and realized he was doing most of them.
“When I started getting into organics, people told me, ‘Bob, you better be careful or you’re going to end up with buggy stuff that’s full of disease that people don’t want.’ But I haven’t seen any of that,” he says. “I haven’t been overwhelmed; in general, pests and disease levels on my farm amount to no more than a minor annoyance.”

Encouraged by his success and customer demand, Muth is applying his expertise to figuring out how to grow more “difficult” crops organically. For example, when area specialists said that growing organic super sweet corn in New Jersey would be impossible, he could not resist the challenge. “We decided to start our corn plugs in the greenhouse,” he says, noting that “the people at Rutgers thought this was revolutionary.” He transplants corn plugs after 10 or 11 days (to prevent plugs from becoming pot-bound, which reduces ear length) onto plastic mulch and keeps row covers over the plants until they are 12–18 inches tall.

Such strategies effectively foil corn earworm and corn borers, says Muth. “You can grow corn early, scout it closely, and with spot use of approved sprays for organic production, get three weeks of absolutely clean, fantastic-quality organic corn in July.” His customers are thrilled and are willing to pay him a premium price for the fruits of his discovery.

With so many new techniques emerging, and with consumers increasingly interested in buying locally and organically produced food, Muth says this is “an exciting time to be in agriculture.” “If you’re savvy, you can farm a small piece of land and make a good living.”
“I wish I was twenty one again,” he says, “because I’d do it all over again. It’s a pleasure to get out there and get to work.”