I don’t understand…

… why some people buy organic foods but insist that other people should buy chemically grown food.  Why would you choose to purchase organic and sustainably grown food, yet want other people to have the option to spend money on food that isn’t sustainably grown.  Perhaps these people are making these purchases for status reasons?  I just don’t understand.  What is even more confusing is when chemical/conventional farmers choose to purchase organic foods for their family?  Why would you choose organic but grow conventional?

Can anyone help me understand this?

words from a farming friend:

This is an article that was written for The Matter Daily.  You can find the original article here.  When you read this you get an honest sense for Nic’s personality.  He’s a soft-spoken man who chooses his words.  I’m glad to know him.  Enjoy.

Farming Romantic: An Invitation to Come Home and Eat

I don’t have any statistics to convince you that our food system needs some repairing or any studies that tell us for the umpteenth time that food and exercise affect our health.  What I do have is a love of farming.  I’m a farming romantic, and an idealist.   I have soil on my hands, and hours hunched over a hoe.   I have boxes of produce on my shoulders, proudly carrying the bounty.   I have sun-warmed water melons broken on my knee, juice dripping down my chin.   I have cold fall mornings, wool cap, and red hands bunching the sweet greens.  I have a glass of Colorado wine after a true full day’s work.  Sun up to sun down.   I have a life drenched in home, and soaked in the people, the food, the art, and the industry of this place.

 

I am a vegetable farmer.  With my partner I farm between 2 and 3 acres of rented land.  Our farm follows the Community Supported Agriculture model. We also sell at farmer’s Markets and have a few local wholesale accounts.  I love to grow food, I love to feed people, and I can’t think of a more fulfilling way to live.  Farming is an enchanting life, a raw and direct relationship with the earth.   We, as farmers, are engulfed in abundance and nourished literally by the fruits of our labor.

But, in our current food system, we struggle to make a living.  We are uninsured, undercompensated, and without land.  We, collectively as a society, are acting as the feudal lords of the farming people, paying a fraction of the worth of their work.

We have been duped into believing that food should be cheap and that farmers are less valuable than other professionals.  We pay exorbitant fees for a visit to the doctor and we pay our mechanics over 100 dollars an hour, but I get insulted at least once per farmer’s market for the price of my vegetables.    Last week a woman scoffed, accosting me with the most belittling stare exclaiming disgust at the price of our spinach. I think about the work that went into getting that spinach to market; the water, the seed, the tractor and truck fuel, the bending over, the long hours kneeling, the cramped fingers, moving of irrigation pipes, the refrigeration, the washing, and myself.  I am in the food that I grow.  My intentions to nurture, to steward, and to learn are all there.  I crawl on hands and knees, literally bowing to the ground caring for these plants to ultimately pass that care to the community.  Food is elemental and essential, but we won’t pay for it.  We place a higher value on knick knacks and gadgets than we do on our food—so much so that I as a full time farmer am classified as living below the poverty threshold as set by the U.S. government. Annually, I earn below the $10,830 poverty line.  During the growing season I work an average of 60 to 70 hours per week, my partner works both on and off the farm, we have two unpaid apprentices, five working members, and an average of 15 volunteer hours per week.  Our production numbers are high, our quality is excellent, and our food is in high demand, but still we scrape by.

But, that it is not to say that the small farm isn’t a viable option.   And I don’t bring up our economic conditions for pity, but rather to inform and to encourage action.  Small local farms need the support of the community.  For small farms to survive eating locally needs to be embraced by the everyday people.  To become a part of the average person’s average meal, local foods must move from the plates on the fringes to those in the center, from novel to obvious.

I believe wholeheartedly in the importance of efficient, intuitive, and inventive producers, and that both producer and consumer play indispensible role in solving the food crisis, however I believe that the solution falls with more weight on me as a consumer than me as a producer.  We producers are here working the soils of your land and grazing cows on your pastures.  We’re milking goats and making cheese.  We’re picking berries, collecting eggs, slaughtering pigs, and planting orchards.  We are fortunate in Fort Collins, we have a choice.  Food produced on our soil and under our sun is at our finger tips.

So, what is the value of food, of integral, locally and thoughtfully produced food? Do we value preserving farm land and what’s left of our pastoral landscape?  Do we value the ethical treatment of animals, and a Poudre river free of agrichemicals?  Does their value not profoundly transcend a mere economic value?   Right now we pay very little for food that is riddled with huge costs but that is often void of nutritional value.  How can we be so obsessed with diet and so clueless about food?

It’s a question of values.  Clean local food, functioning communities, water we can drink, and air worth breathing are all invaluable and to try to label them monetarily is demeaning and unfruitful.  The answer lies in changing our definition of value and bringing back the art and essence of living, the joy of eating, and the grounded heart of home.

As I mentioned prior I’m classified as living below the poverty line, but that is a poverty based on one parameter.  There is an art to life, an admirable thoughtfulness in frugality, and a means to live a secure and fulfilling life living with less.   Let me relish in my poverty.  I’ll start with my poverty stricken dinner of roasted potatoes with fennel and basil, my poverty stricken frittata with heirloom zucchini and fresh eggs, my poverty stricken lunch of arugula with blue cheese, western slope peaches and a glass of Blue Mountain Wine.  Should I mention my poverty stricken month long travels gallivanting on bicycle tasting my way around the hemisphere, or my poverty struck forays to hot springs, my poverty struck guitar lessons, college degrees, and other frivolities?   I am not poor, and more importantly I am happy and contented by this life living within the means of this place.

I wonder if in fact we with our fractional income, our second hand clothing, and our meager rental house are living in a more realistic way.  We have plenty.  Perhaps we need to reassess, and rather than bringing everyone up to an unrealistic high, we ought to adjust our standards.

We are basing the value of our planet, our town, our community, and ourselves on the human construct of currency.  How many idioms can there be about the fool’s paradise that lies in the fanatic quest for the mythical pot of gold?  Let’s bring our values back home.  It’s time to deemphasize the false security of money in the bank and emphasize the true security of a tight and functioning community built on relationships.   Bringing our web of necessities back home creates true security.

Relationships must be built. Local is not the answer alone and local is not synonymous with good.  Relationships must be built.  We mustn’t let local become the new organic, trusting that all is right just from the presence of a sticker on our apple.  We don’t need a certification to tell us what’s local, we need a relationship.  Enough with our complacency.  Reach out and meet the people working in your community.

There was a time when community came together to bring in the harvest.  When people knew about food and cared about farmers, when bartering was common place.  A time when social gatherings were centered around food getting; shucking corn, digging potatoes, hulling beans.  Not as a chore but as a celebration of the harvest, with no sharply drawn distinctions between work and play.

They say we are what we eat and right now we are scattered around the globe with no roots, homeless, ungrounded and anxious.    We are fat featherless butterballs, we are cows standing knee deep in our own feces, we are genetically modified corn, and we are hydroponic tomatoes with feet dangling, longing to touch to the soil.

We can ground ourselves by becoming our place.  Together we can begin to build a gastronomic identity as a place known for its support of local farmers.

Adapting to a life of local food is a challenge.  It takes work and patience.  It takes appreciation of the present and planning for the future, but it is not a sacrifice of our quality of life; it is enrichment.  It is the answer to our empty hearts and our appetites to build relationships and to relearn the true art of living.  It’s time to let go of fluffy aspirations and grasp tightly what is literally right in front of us.  We are homeless but this is an invitation to come home and eat.

Written by Nicolas Theisen
Photo by Dave Woody

Pressing apple cider:

What if…

So you’ve been thinking about eating a more local/regional diet and you would love to “grow your own,” but living in an apartment complex makes this a challenge.  You’ve heard about CSAs, but you don’t live anywhere close to a farm.  So what can you do?

What if you had the option to pay an extra $30 a month for a vegetable share along with your rent?  What if the apartment complex had rows of cabbage around the complex instead of dead juniper bushes?  What if the apartment complex you lived at hired a farmer instead of a landscaper?

I haven’t thought much about this idea, but I’m wondering if someone else has.  Do you know anyone?

…Faith in Renewal

Soil is the crust of the earth in which life is rooted – a porous medium between rock and air.  It is neither entirely mineral nor entirely organic; it is composed of sand, silt, clay, air, water, and the decomposed remains of plants and animals.  The simple act of digging garden soil in preparation for spring planting triggers strong emotions: a sense of connection to the earth, to the regeneration of life.  It is an act of nurturance and an expression of faith in renewal.

(Anne Winston Spirn, The Granite Garden, 1984)

The appeal of a monocrop

Stupice, Black Krim, Orange Taxi, Banana Legs, Cherokee Purple, Brandywine,Peron.  This is just a short list of the tomato varieties that are growing.  It’s interesting to walk though the tomato house and see how the different varieties grow.  The colors, shapes, and sizes are fascinating.  Each variety holds it’s own characteristics.  A few days ago I was walking through the tomato house to see what was ready for harvest.  We pick our tomatoes at the red-ripe stage as opposed to the green stage that most commercial tomatoes are picked at.  Picking at red-ripe allows up to offer our CSA members the freshest possible tomatoes.  We can do this because once picked, the tomato will only travel 6 miles to get into the hands of the CSA members, rather than the average 1500 miles commercial tomatoes usually travel.  Because we grow so many varieties it takes extra time to harvest because each variety looks different when it is ripening.

I was showing another farm intern the difference between a red-ripe Black Krim and a red-ripe Cherokee Purple when a thought popped into my head.  “This must be one of the reasons some farmers grow monocrops.”  A monocrop is a field or farm that is growing a single crop.  Picture driving through Nebraska…corn as far as the eye can see.  Sometimes farmers will go one step further and grow a single variety.  I can see the appeal of that.  It takes time to recognize the differences between varieties.  It can be particularly tedious to mentally adjust what you are looking for every 5 or 10 plants.

This appeal also shows up when harvesting carrots.  Carrots can be particularly tricky because the desired part of the plant is hidden.  Carrots come in several shapes and sizes and colors.

If you are harvesting a row of carrots and and pull out a Scarlet Horn variety expecting a Nantes variety you will likely assume that they aren’t ready yet.  Then, if you assume you are waiting for a Nantes variety to mature you will end up with bolting, cracked carrots.

I can see the appeal of a monocrop in the sense that I would simply need to focus on a single crop and variety.  I could know that crop inside and out, vegetative and fruiting.  But I don’t see any place in the small farm, CSA system for a monocrop production.  Do you?

The problem with peas

Yesterday I brought a bunch of peas home from the farm.  The peas we planted didn’t germinate very well and as a result we haven’t had enough to put in the CSA shares, so I’ve been gleaning from them throughout the year.  I normally pick sugar snap peas, with edible shells, to toss in a stir-fry or eat on their own, but I decided to pick some shelling peas this week.  I’m generally not a fan of peas because most peas that are in the grocery store are bland.  But like most veggies, if it comes right off the farm, or the garden, it tastes much better. 

When I got home I separated the snap peas from the shelling peas.  I had about 2 pints of snap peas and about 1 pint of shelling peas.  I started to crack the shells and pop out the green pearls. Minutes later I had about one cup of the most tasty peas.  As I was shelling the peas and noticing the amount of effort it took to end up with one cup of peas, I wondered how many people have shelled peas before.  I also wondered how many peas I would need to shell if I wanted to make split pea soup. 

As I’ve been thinking about our disconnect from the food we eat, I often end up thinking of this questions: “How would people’s attitude change toward food if they had to prepare a week’s worth of food for themselves?”  I’m not suggesting that people should butcher their own cow, or make their own cheese, or bake their own bread (Although I don’t see anything wrong with that).  That system, of self-reliance, is not a sustainable system for the majority of people nor does it draw people together.  More on these thoughts later.  I do think that it would change the way we thought about food if we shelled peas if we wanted split-pea soup.  I think that if we look at a package of frozen peas as a luxury (because we didn’t shell them) and not as an expectation (because someone else will do it for us), we would see our food in a different light.

Accessing healthy foods with federal support

One of the things that got me interested in growing food was the desire to find ways to make healthy, sustainable foods accessible to people living with low incomes. There is a expectation that you have to be affluent in order to eat real, organic foods.  I mean, they don’t call it “Whole Paycheck” for nothing, right?  If a person is living on a fixed or low income they are likely spending 20-30% of their income on food where as a person living in the upper-middle, or upper income brackets are paying only 5-10% of their income on food.  Those living with disposable income have the ability to buy food that has the true cost attached to it, however for those living on low or fixed income the food marketed and available to them is often hyper-processed and heavily subsidized.

There are programs available for food-based financial assistance such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, used to be the federal Food Stamps Program) and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.  Both of these programs, as well as others offered through the private sector, offer assistance to people based on financial and nutritional needs.  People who are using these programs are given a debit card linked to an account that is filled each month or week depending on the program, then they are able to use the card to purchase the food that they need.  Each program has a list of food and drink that are a person is not able to purchase while using the card.  This ensures that the money in the account is going toward actual (and somewhat healthy) food.

Last week I read an article on the Green Fork blog that talked about a new program that the WIC is promoting:

An especially exciting aspect of the new WIC package is the inclusion of cash value vouchers (CVVs) for fruits and vegetables, ranging from $6 (children) to $10 (breastfeeding women) monthly. States have the option of authorizing farmers to accept the CVVs at farmers’ markets and roadside stands, making it possible for mothers on WIC to feed their families nutritious produce and bolster their local economies at the same time.

The article does recognize that $6-10 a month isn’t that much on it’s own, but there are other programs like this that help to supplement healthy foods into the diet of those using these programs.  My initial research led me to believe that Colorado isn’t participating in this program yet, but many Farmers Markets accept SNAP cards as well as Colorado Quest cards.

I think that the more opportunities that people living off of assistance have to fresh, local foods the more the myth of healthy=expensive can be corrected.  Of course, purchasing real, minimally processed foods means that you will need to prepare the food at home.  One of my goals is to be involved with people and helping them learn how to plan weekly meals, cook simple foods, and provide healthy meals for thier families.  I think that the CVV is another step in the right direction.

CSA pick up and left over bounty

Yesterday was the CSA pick up day.  We spent the morning harvesting lettuce, extra kohlrabi, and basil then loaded the truck up and headed off to the pick up location.

The pick up was pretty smooth.  We experienced our usual rush of people right around 5.  I’m really hoping to be able to serve some sort of food next week.  I think it would be really fun to have something to offer people cooked up right from the field.  We aim for bringing just enough produce for all of the shares, but somehow we came up short on squash.  The few people who came closest to 6 were offered extra broccoli in place of the missing squash.

After 6, when the pick up is done, we were still left with a bunch of produce, so we filled our bags.  I didn’t realize how many veggies I had grabbed until I got home and started to unpack.  I had 4 heads of lettuce, 1 bag of spicy Asian greens, 3 small heads of broccoli and a bag of single broc shoots, 2 kohlrabi, 1 onion, 2 ox heart carrots, ruby red chard, rhubarb, 4 cucumbers, and 2 too-beat-up-to-give-to-members squash.  I’m really excited to make a salad tomorrow afternoon with all these veggies.

Words for the CSA newsletter:

Last week I left the farm for a few days and headed off to Seattle to attend the wedding of two good friends.  I haven’t spent much time in that part of the country, and I was excited to be able to wander around a bit the day and a half I was there before the wedding.  I knew that if I was going to only have a few hours in Seattle I needed to stop at Pike Place Market.  It was early and we were a bit jetlagged, but my wife and I wandered past stall after stall of fresh fruits, veggies, and seafood.  It was quite overwhelming.  The morning before the wedding I had the opportunity to play tourist in Port Townsend (just a bit north-west of Seattle).  When I saw a sign for the farmers market, I knew I needed to check it out.  Two blocks were sectioned off and filled with people lingering at tables, talking with farmers, cooks, ranchers, and fishermen about the food they had available at their stand.  I spent some time talking with a guy who was selling “Sea Beans” (Salicornia virginica), Chanterelle mushrooms, wild blackberries and black raspberries, and currants.  All of the things that he was selling were things that he had foraged.  He told me about the incredible bounty of wild, edible fruits, veggies, and herbs available in that part of the country.  I was all but ready to call Frank and tell him I wasn’t coming home.  I bought a pint of blackberries from him and continued to wander through the market.  With berry-stained lips and fingers I found myself in peaceful wonder; people everywhere are celebrating food.
It’s easy for me to forget that in cities and small towns all across the country people are seeking out real, healthy, sustainable foods.  I can become so enveloped in harvesting radishes and squash for our CSA that it can surprise me that there are farmers all across the country (and world) doing the same thing for the people in their local community. We can relish the uniqueness of the CSA program that we have with CSU.  We can be proud to be in a position to run variety trials and other experiments for the purpose of sharing the information with other farmers throughout Colorado.  But don’t ever think that we are alone in what we are doing.  We are a small part of a growing community of farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and— most importantly—eaters, who are making choices to find food closest to the source and sustainably grown.
I cannot tell you how encouraging it was to be able to get back out on the farm after my vacation.  I walked down the rows of kale and broccoli, onions and leeks, tomatoes and peppers, and melons and felt a growing excitement for the opportunity to be a part of this community of food-celebrators.  Thank you for being a part of this community, too.