For decades, I have been the sole person at Terra Firma Farm who plants almost a dozen of the crops we grow: Arugula, Beets, Chard, Carrots, Corn, Lettuce, Peas, Spinach, and Winter Squash. These are crops that are “direct-seeded”, meaning you plant the seeds in the ground rather than starts grown in a nursery — for those crops, we use “transplanters” that mechanically plant the little plants fed into them by humans. On our farm, Tomatoes, Peppers, Watermelons, Onions, Leeks, Broccoli, and Cabbage are all transplanted.
Roughly speaking, about half the land we grow in vegetables is “transplanted” while the other half is “direct-seeded”. Transplanting at Terra Firma is a group activity: one person drives the tractor that pulls the transplanting machine, plus either two or six people feeding the plants into it. One person per planter. But direct-seeding is a solitary activity, done by a single operator who drives the tractor pulling the seeder. For at least two decades, that person has been yours truly. Until recently, I had never really trained anyone else to do it.
Driving through farm country seeing fields with perfectly uniform rows for miles, you might think that planting is easy. But it’s much easier to screw up when you’re planting seed than it is to get it right. We have 5 direct-seed planters at Terra Firma. They are all complicated and precise tools with numerous adjustments for planting depth, spacing, and singulation of the seeds. All of them have a variety of “seed plates” that are specific to different sized seeds. Some are powered by the tractor, others driven by wheels that roll on the ground, and one is electric. Each time they are used, they must be correctly configured and then tested. One wrong adjustment is all it takes: seeds too deep, seeds to shallow, wrong spacing, wrong sizing mechanism. Then there are the simple human mistakes like forgetting to put the seed in the hoppers. And nature can mess you up as well: spiders seem to love building their webs inside the seeders where they will plug things up and prevent the seeds from dropping down into the ground.
On big farms, each planter is usually set up for a single crop. That is more efficient in many ways. But at Terra Firma, we grow so many different crops that we would need a dozen different planters to do that. Instead, we group crops based on the planting setup and figure out which planter works best. We have a dedicated planter for carrots, and another for Green Beans. But the other 3 planters are used for several different crops each. That means each time we use them, the setup has to be changed and adjustments made. It is not uncommon for me to spend more time on setup and adjustment than actually planting. And of course if you’re using the same planter for three different crops, they must be carefully cleaned each time the seed is changed to avoid mixing the different seeds together.
Direct-seed planters are not consumer items. They are very expensive and generally have to be special-ordered or even custom-built. The one brand-new seed planter we have, we took out a loan to buy. Farm auctions are one place where you can find them for reasonable prices, but most of those are built for large-scale farms and are not appropriate for what we are doing. And when I have found something I can use at auction, I have always had to purchase additional parts in order to be able to use it for our crops. Often, the additional parts cost more than the planter cost at the auction.
I have mixed feelings about the idea of giving up my role as the sole seed-planter on the farm. There is a “the buck stops here” component to the job that I have been hesitant to burden anyone else with. have felt it was important for that the person bearing these responsibilities should be one of the farm owners.When you make a mistake, it’s a very public one: everyone who works here can see it when a field has been poorly planted, and they know who is responsible. And while farms growing commodity crops with no particular deadlines for harvest can replant, we don’t have that option here: replanting a field a week or two later means not having that crop for a week or two for our customers. The result is the same if you simply get the seeds in the ground late; the person responsible for seeding has to have good time management and prioritization skills.
On a different level, though, it’s risky to have only one person with knowledge of how to do a task on the farm, especially an absolutely critical one. It was beyond time for me to start training a second person into that role. Luckily for us, the right person stepped up: Hector Melendez Junior, who has been apprenticing with me on the farm for over two years now. Having spent ten years delivering CSA boxes and other produce provide him with all the right executive skills, but not many of the agricultural ones. So I’ve been teaching him to plant carrots, beets, chard, lettuce and just recently, spinach and arugula and he’s been learning quickly. He planted some of the carrots and most of the lettuce you’ve received in your boxes in 2026. This week we finished up most of the fall direct-seeding of crops, and everything looks great so far. You’ll start seeing those items soon.
Thanks,