Evening Song Farm

48 Nice Road, Cuttingsville, VT
www.eveningsongcsa.com

Artist: Clover Ajamie 

Products: Certified Organic Vegetables, Garden Starts

Where to buy: Online, on-farm CSA, and various retailers in Rutland County & Okemo Valley 

Farming in an era of floods

As the climate warms, extreme rainfall events are increasingly likely — as we’ve seen  here in the Upper Valley in recent years. Heavy downpours and floods have forced  farmers to adapt. Maybe a farm moves off a floodplain. Maybe they experiment with  new crops or varieties. Maybe they look to nature for creative problem solving.

Kara and Ryan Fitzbeauchamp from Evening Song Farm did all three after they lost their  farm in 2011 during Tropical Storm Irene. “There was nothing we could have done at  our first farm to prevent the catastrophic damage because the river changed course  and took away the land,” reflected Kara. Relocating to a different part of the river basin  would likely result in a similar catastrophe later on. So they moved their farm up a hill.

People are shocked to hear that they grow food on sloping land. But after more than  ten years, they’ve learned a lot. Especially how to handle the rain. “We get really jazzed  to talk about the ways we manage the hillside to control water movement and prevent  erosion. It only indirectly relates to selling veggies, but we think it’s cool!” exclaimed  Kara.

The farm is now like a marble run for water. When it rains, water flows through their  covered garden plots, across swales (shallow channels) towards the outside of the fields,  and then over ditches at the field’s edge that are lined with beautiful rows of willow  hedges.

“We had almost no erosion damage during the flooding this summer  [2023]. For the first time since we lost our farm to Irene, we felt really  proud of the attention we have paid to water movement.”

Kara knows that she will see intense rainstorms for the rest of her lifetime. “We feel like  our duty is to be creative and proactively and experimentally figure out how to grow  food during the climate crisis.”