ABOUT

Woody Creek Farm is located in the mid-Atlantic region of the eastern United States in historic Darlington Maryland in the lower Susquehanna River valley. Our neighbors include several horse farms, a beef farm, and a vineyard. We plan to experiment with organic farming of wine grapes, ginseng, truffles, barely, and hops and experiment with wood-fired beer brewing using our own organically grown ingredients. We will see what works and does not work, what we like and do not like.

The development of the 15 acre farm will be a recreational activity in the near term. We have established careers and day jobs. However, in the long term, the farm could grow into a source of activity and income as we head into retirement, although our retirement strategy will not rely on that case; it would only be a nice bonus.

Our approach to organic farming will incorporate elements of "precision agriculture" and "sustainable agriculture". Precision agriculture is a farming management approach based on detailed scientific assessments of the temporal (time) and spatial (location) components of the products comprising a farming operation and responding to variabilities and problems in real-time. This has been made possible in recent decades with the advent of embedded computing technologies, GPS, sensors, wireless communications, distributed computing, the internet, and now cloud services. The primary objectives of precision agriculture are to [1]:

• Build up a record of the farm
• Improve decision-making
• Foster greater traceability
• Enhance marketing of farm products
• Improve lease arrangements, if applicable
• Enhance the inherent quality of farm products

In this context, our farming will be experimental. We will use computational resources to sense, collect, store, search, correlate, compute, and analyze farm related data to determine what works and what does not work. What "works" will be framed within the context of sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture is a method of farming using the principles of ecology which study the relationships between organisms and their environment. These principles are applied to site-specific farming operations to ensure the health and sustainability of the entire farming ecosystem and minimize or remove any impacts to the environment. The primary objectives of sustainable farming are to [2]:

• Satisfy human food and fiber needs
• Enhance environmental quality and the natural resource base upon which the agricultural economy depends
• Make the most efficient use of non-renewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where appropriate, natural biological cycles and controls
• Sustain the economic viability of farm operations
• Enhance the quality of life for farmers and society as a whole

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_agriculture
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_agriculture