First let me wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

It is a good time of year to reflect on your farm's progress, the things you have done right as well as wrong.

December is the start of the new farming year. Outside activities are restricted by the weather in most areas of the country, and it is an excellent time to make your farm plan for 2003.

Actually, your cover crops should be planted by now, equipment greased, oil changed, parts cleaned, and equipment shedded.

This is the time of the year when your farm gets besieged with seed and equipment catalogs, so there is really no excuse not to make your farm plan.

Our January/February issue will have our annual seed catalog directory. Most of these companies are independent; they are farmers just like you, who have chosen growing seeds as their niche market.

For beginning farmers, try these companies—the open-pollinated varieties will certainly add color and flavor to the produce you sell next year.

As long as you are trying some heirloom vegetables, you might think about how heirloom chickens fit in your program.

Heirloom chickens and dual-purpose chickens certainly fit into the niche market desired by small farms:

1. they are hardier;
2. their color helps camouflage them from predators;
3. there are great premium markets for brown eggs;
4. there is a great premium for pasture-raised meat chickens;
5. these chickens perform bug catching and cow pie scratching duties—reducing fly populations as well as spreading manure.

Heirloom grains, such as corn, sunflower, sorghum, wheat, and beans, have a place on your farm. Because of plant breeding and high fertilizer testing conditions, modern varieties of wheat do not respond as well to soil Mycorrhizae as do some of the older varieties. In general, organic farms have more Mycorrhizal fungi present than non-organic farms. Eighty percent of all land plants have and need the mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with Mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi have other benefits—helping the plants resist root disease.

Just because it is new does not make it better, and just because it is old does not make it obsolete.