Farmer Profiles

"Liz McClunin"
Full Circle Farm, Latrobe, Pennsylvania

"Weeds and bugs are a state of mind."

A picture of the Full Circle Farm

The Farming Operation:   Liz and her husband, Dave Szurszewski, purchased their 42-acre farm in August 1991. It's located in the Laurel Highland mountains of Westmoreland County in western Pennsylvania, an hour east of Pittsburgh. The area is still largely farmland. Liz grows four acres of vegetables on gently sloping ground near the farmhouse and hay on the steep hillsides. The farm came already planted with black raspberries, blueberries, seckel pears, and sour cherries. Liz has added apple trees.

Liz, who believes that "old is good," makes good use of the equipment that came with the farm. Both she and Dave are handy, and like to go to auctions when they need equipment. However, despite her fondness for old equipment, Liz likes her new, two-person transplanter best of all her machinery, and they invested in a new Kubota tractor, too. Liz uses a friend's potato plow to harvest potatoes.

Liz and Dave spent their first few years on the farm fixing up the dilapidated farmhouse. They began farming in 1996 when Liz began a CSA operation. The farm is currently certified organic. Liz will decide later whether or not she will seek organic certification or biodynamic certification next year.

Liz uses hay cut from her fields as mulch and bedding for the poultry. She gets free horse manure from a farm down the road to help with her soil fertility program. To control deer, Liz employs IntelliTape™, a single, 1/2-inch wide strand of highly visible electric wire from Premier Fence Company, that she baits in the spring and turns on at night. Colby, the Labrador retriever, helps with deer control in the daytime. Binkley and Marble, the cats, help with rodent control. All three like to keep Liz company while she's working.

Drought has proven to be Liz's biggest challenge to date. She uses drip tape and mulch but has trouble supplying all the irrigation she needs from an on-site spring and with an 8 gallon per minute well capacity. Insect pests like cucumber beetles and squash bugs also hamper production. Liz controls them using Remayä row covers and applications of biodynamic preparations.

Animals in the Scheme of Things:   Liz has two moveable chicken coops and allows her chickens to forage for bugs and greenery during daylight hours within the confines of their electric fence. She has about 90 chickens at a time. She's had Rhode Island Reds, white Wyandottes, black Australorps, and currently has Barred Rocks. From these layers, she gets about six dozen eggs a day, marketed to her CSA shareholders and sold at the Ligonier Farmers Market. She also sells stewing hens to her CSA members. They're butchered by Randy Hawkey at Hearts Content Farm in New Alexandria, PA.

What's in a Share:   Liz began her CSA in 1996. In 2002, she managed 43 shares using two Thursday afternoon drop-off locations. The CSA operates from June until late October. One batch of produce and eggs goes to Monroeville (the driver of those shares receives a free share in exchange for doing the pick-up and delivery). Liz took the rest of the produce and eggs to a pick-up location in the parking lot of a Greensburg health food store. As a promotion for the store, each shareholder gets a coupon with the share that entitles him/her to $5 off a $25 purchase (that day) in the health food store. Liz feels that she and the health food store both benefited from the arrangement.

Each share contains about four grocery bags worth of a wide range of vegetables plus fruits and flowers. Free- range eggs are available for purchase, although Liz requires pre-orders a week ahead. Liz also buys organic fruit and makes it available for purchase.

Shareholders receive regular newsletters with recipes as well as opportunities to visit the farm for picnics and other events. They can work off a portion of their share (a minimum of six hours of work on Wednesdays for $100 off and six hours every other week for $50 off). That amounts to labor at the rate of 76 cents an hour, but Liz gets takers. In fact, she relies on it, managing the CSA herself with just seven regular volunteers. She estimates that she puts in about 70 hours a week during the season and has stopped growing labor-intensive produce like beans and strawberries because of the time they take to harvest. Liz believes that her CSA members volunteer more for the farm experience and the opportunity to help produce their own food than for the break in cost.

In 2003, Liz plans to require that shares be picked up at the farm. This will save her not only the time involved in taking the shares to Greensburg, but also will get the shareholders more involved with the details of where their food comes from.

The Farmer's Background:   Liz grew up on a tobacco farm in southern Maryland. She participated in 4H as a child and learned organic gardening principles from her mother and grandparents. She attended the University of Maryland and received a B.S. in Agricultural Science and Resource Management (with a minor in Biology). While at Maryland, she was employed to do research on the biological control of insect pests. After graduating, Liz worked at Jug Bay Environmental Center for four or five years as an environmental educator before coming back to farming.

Dave does not have a farming background. He works full-time off the farm as a software engineer, but does a lot of the haying on the farm.

Guiding Principles:   Liz is a firm believer in organic production and uses biodynamic farming principles as well. She is also an advocate of sustainable agriculture, and feels that buying fresh and buying local may be even more important than buying organic. She actively promotes these topics to local groups, urging them to consider healthful eating, wholesome cooking, and the benefits of organic and sustainable agricultural production.

Goals:   Liz would like to increase the diversity of crops she grows and animals she raises. She wants to add more animals to her farm, including sheep for milk and soft cheese. She'd also like to have a Guernsey cow or two for butter.

She has selected a future pond and wetland site (and has a spring to fill them with). She likes the concept of a wetland on her farm, and the pond will help with the farm's irrigation needs.

She and her husband plan to put the farm into some type of agricultural easement program so that the land stays as farmland in perpetuity.

She also would like to build a new machine shed. It would have a second floor to provide housing for interns. Right now, she gets requests for internships but has to turn them down because she has no housing available.

And lastly, she would like to offer educational programs at the farm on topics ranging from nutrition, to cooking, to organic and biodynamic gardening philosophies and techniques.

Sources of Information:   Liz is a member of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association and the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association. She likes to attend conferences in the off-season. She also reads a lot. She highly recommends the quarterly "Small Farmer's Journal."

Tips:   To philosophize, Liz believes that "weeds and bugs are a state of mind" - and if you let them get to you, then you will have a problem.
Her practical tip is to put juice from the Aloe vera plant in the chickens' drinking water when the weather's hot. She feels it helps the chickens deal with heat stress.

Contact:   Liz McClunin, Full Circle Farm, R.R. 4 Box 175-F, Latrobe, PA 15650 phone: (724)593-7041 e-mail: farmfolk@winbeam.com website:www.localharvest.org/listing.jsp?id=3955&hit=1

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