10 September 2009

Eggplants, Leeks, Lettuce, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Radishes, Squash, Tatsoi, Tomatoes

I chatted with a dairy farmer the other night about growing vegetables. He thinks he might have to find a new way to make money from farming. He has no intention of giving up. He and his family have conserved all 800 acres of their ground—and it’s good ground. They plan to keep using it. But unless the dairy industry changes significantly and soon, they may not be able to afford to milk cows any more.

This farmer could find all sorts of ways to make a living off the land. But as a conventional dairy farmer, he understands one basic way to do it: get the land to produce as much as possible and sell it in bulk. There are some incentives in the dairy industry to produce higher quality (that is higher fat) milk, and some strict guidelines for cleanliness on the macro- and microscopic level. But basically the industry pays farmers to produce more. The standard by which these farmers are judged is yield—bushels of corn or tons of silage an acre, pounds of milk per cow.

In pursuit of the best yields possible, dairy farmers have changed cows’ diets, employed an array of potent chemicals, invested in more and more specialized equipment, reduced the number of crops they grow and committed their animals to life in a harsh concrete environment. And they have had enormous success. The average modern American dairy cow produces about four times as much milk as its counterpart did 60 years ago. Harald and Hilding Pearson, the twins who were the last people to run our farm as a dairy, never contemplated getting anything like as much corn or hay from this ground or as much milk from their herd as the Wolffs, who rent much of our land now, succeed in doing.

In the course of a single day, with the aid of a self-propelled mower, merger, four hundred horsepower forage harvester, three dump trucks and an articulated tractor with a massive silage blade, the Wolffs can easily bring in hay from every one of their alfalfa fields on our farm and our neighbor’s, and fill a significant portion of one of their trench silos with high protein silage. It would have taken the twins a good stretch of dry days to mow and ted and rake and bale and put away the hay from one of those fields. Of course, the Wolffs will need every bit of that silage to feed their voracious Holstein herd if they want to keep those cows producing milk at the same rate (around 20,000 pounds a year per cow).

Not that all that hay will do them much good this year. It turns out dairy farmers may have succeeded too well. With more milk floating around than we know what do with, the price has collapsed. The Wolffs lose about $5 a day per cow right now and they have 300 (for those of you without a calculator handy, that comes to something over half a million dollars a year). Unfortunately, most of these farmers have invested so heavily in farming this way (the equipment the Wolff use to bring in that hay would cost a couple of million dollars bought new) that they have to keep doing the same thing—trying to squeeze as many pounds of milk as possible out of their cows for every pound of feed they put in—which won’t do anything, at least in the short run, to bring up the price of milk. A few farmers have sold their herds, hoping the resulting drastic reduction in costs will see them through, but they’re left with the same debt and a drastic reduction in income that seems to leave them in a slightly worse position.

It’s no wonder, then, that the dairy farmer I was talking to is thinking about trying something different. Well, sort of something different. On the face of it, trading in the dairy cows for a vegetable crop would be a major change. He would be dealing with new challenges—with unfamiliar nutrient requirements, spray regimens, harvesting equipment and storage need. But in effect he imagines continuing to farm much as he does now. He would chose one or two crops easily grown on a vast scale and sold wholesale and use every chemical and mechanical advantage available to maximize yield so he could find a little profit in a high volume, low margin business. He imagines farming like a guy he met at a conference, growing dump truck loads of peas for the Beech-Nut plant in Canajoharie, or like Albert Sheldon, who farms acres of potatoes along the Battenkill in Salem.

But he should take a closer look at Albert’s operation. Albert used to grow something like a hundred acres of standard potato varieties for the wholesale market. He’d pack them in 50 pound sacks and ship them off by the truckload. But the wholesale price collapsed, and now Albert and his wife grow a wide variety crops to market at their farm stand along with a range of local products. Albert recognized that in order to keep farming he needed not just to find a new crop, but also a new way of growing and selling. He still grows a lot of potatoes, still wholesales some, but he knows that that’s never going to be enough again. And now he grows all sort of potatoes, including fingerlings, which he always complains about because he cannot harvest them mechanically. The thought of digging potatoes by hand still irks him. It’s hard to set aside all your old habits.

I don’t object at all to getting a good yield. I have been enjoying the abundance of eggplant—not just because I like eggplant, but also because I remember more vividly than I’d like to all the years we have had a miserable eggplant crop. We’re giving away more eggplant to Community Action than we’ve picked in bad years. Some of you may be starting to wish we would give Community Action even more, but I hope you are not totally sick of eggplant. There are plenty of things to do with—grill, fry, stuff, mash. You’ll find excellent eggplant recipes from France, Lebanon, Thailand, Turkey, India, China, Italy, Georgia. There’s even a tasty eggplant and garlic chutney (I’ll give you the recipe if you are interested).

Unfortunately, our garlic is affording me less joy than the eggplant. We have a lot of it and it sized up nicely. But it seems the majority of it has been infected with penicillin mold and, as you may have noticed, the cloves are starting to break down—though so far you cannot tell that just by looking at the heads. Which is why we did not put any in the bags this week. We need to figure out what (if any) is good so we don’t end up handing out a lot of garlic flavored antibiotic—though if that is all we end up with it could prove a useful marketing strategy for an otherwise worthless crop. Sustainably grown local medicine. Now there’s something I have not seen a lot of farmers around here working on. Maybe I should mention it to that dairy farmer.

I should mention to you that you will find a few unlisted crops in your share this week, possibly including arugula (bunched greens), broccoli, husk cherries (little berries in papery wrappers), fennel and/or melon.

I should also mention—again—that our annual open house/pot luck dinner/pie contest happens on Sunday, September 27, and that I hope we will see then.