By Audrey Bunnell, Swette Center student worker
In Litchfield Park, with the roar of jet engines flying overhead out of Luke Air Force Base, sits one of Arizona’s oldest organic farms.
It’s hard to miss. At Blue Sky Organic Farms, rows of dark green collards and kales stretch along the roadside, contrasting starkly with the brand new, grey, industrial developments dotting the surrounding area. Upon arrival of our field day, the Arizona Transition to Organic Partnership Program (AZ TOPP) team and attendees from the local community were introduced to Sara Dolan, owner-manager at Blue Sky, to learn more about the challenges and promise of organic agriculture in Arizona.
History
Our tour with Dolan started with an overview of the farm’s history. Originally a cattle pasture for over 50 years, transforming the landscape from bermudagrass to a verdant vegetable farm was no easy task. But the effort has paid off — Dolan is confident that the mineral-rich soil at Blue Sky produces a better flavor profile than can be found anywhere else in the country, even her New England hometown. “We’re never aiming to be the cheapest product out there. We aim to be the most flavorful and the most nutritious,” Dolan explained.
Operation
The 40-acre vegetable farm constitutes Blue Sky’s main source of income. This farm produces over 70 crops in a given year, with 15 acres always dedicated to salad mix. Freshness is the name of the game here, with produce always being processed the same day it’s harvested. In fact, everything picked on the Friday we visited went to market the very next morning.
Sustainability
Dolan is very cognizant of the fact that water is an essential concern for agriculture here in Arizona. She insists that underwatering is always better than overwatering. “Farmers get a bad rap when it comes to water consumption, but we’re some of the best at sustainability because we always have to do more with less.”
Another way that Blue Sky has done more with less is by tackling food waste. The farm composts all the waste from both of their locations, including animal manure, and donates uneaten produce to St. Mary’s Food Bank.
A trip to headquarters
Following the tour of the vegetable farm, our group headed over to Blue Sky’s main location, where their livestock and farm store are located. There, we took a pause to hear presentations from experts like Senior Integrated Pest Management Supervisor at Duncan Family Farms and TOPP Mentor Ryan Tomlin. Tomlin immediately engaged the crowd by handing guests real samples of common crop pests. As we carefully examined shriveled basil and aphid-afflicted kale in plastic bags, he introduced his presentation on integrated pest management, where he went on to identify the pests in front of us and discuss a variety of sustainable controls producers can implement to manage them.
Tomlin was followed by Cathy Greene, former head of the USDA Economic Research Service and senior fellow at the Swette Center. Greene’s vast experience with organic research was evident as she familiarized us with a trove of USDA data resources on organic production, including organic certifier and producer surveys, organic trade data, organic market/price reports, the Agricultural Resources Management Survey, and the Organic INTEGRITY Database — many of which she played a pivotal role in creating. Shortly after Greene’s presentation, we resumed our tour with Dolan, this time exploring the farm’s animal operations.
Dolan breeds approximately 40 baby goats each year, whose sales help the farm break even, and has also rescued a number of older goats. Unfortunately, Dolan explained that she’s unable to certify these goats as organic because there are currently no organic alfalfa producers in Arizona to provide feed for them, highlighting one of the many supply challenges organic farmers face. After an adorable session holding a few of the new babies, we carried on to meet the farm’s chickens, pigs, and donkeys (plus even more goats!).
Final takeaways
Our visit to Blue Sky Organic Farms concluded with an insightful presentation from Dr. Kathleen Merrigan, Executive Director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. Dr. Merrigan drew upon her experience as the former Deputy Secretary of the USDA to contextualize recent changes in the federal government as they pertain to organic agriculture.
A key theme of our visit was the need for producer connectivity in organic agriculture, and this Field Day brought together farmers, students, and Swette Center staff alike to serve that goal. To close out the day, the AZ TOPP team engaged our group in a resource sharing activity, where we mingled with other visitors from different backgrounds and worked together on visual diagrams representing what we could offer each other. It was undeniably rewarding to discover that each participant could provide a solution to another participant’s challenge. The AZ TOPP team later took this to the next level by compiling our visual diagrams into a fact-sheet and interactive map, tools that can connect organic producers to local resources and nurture further collaboration. Witnessing the construction of these networks in real-time opened my eyes to the power that programs like TOPP have to bring people together, solve critical problems in agriculture, and create a brighter future for food.
This field day was supported through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Transition to Organic Partnership Program (TOPP). TOPP is a program of the USDA Organic Transition Initiative and is administered by the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) National Organic Program (NOP).