17 September 2009

Eggplants, Garlic, Melon, Mustard greens, Onions, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Spinach, Squash, Tomatoes

Here are some things you might see if you come to the farm open house on the 27^th: a barn full of onions (we dry them in the hay mow), donkeys (the semi-feral Franklin and Eleanor), sunflowers (pick your own), beds of broccoli (we have three plantings out in the field for fall harvest), pheasants (six of them keep turning up around the farm), deer (a lot more than six of them turn up around the farm), potatoes (if the weather is nice we will harvest some), snails (see note about deer above), hot peppers (you can learn how to make hot sauce with them), frogs (we have three ponds full of them), trees (you can go for a walk in our woods), a hyperactive puppy (we hope he calms down before he outweighs us), celery root (it will turn up in your bag in October—or in a deer, see note above), migrating geese (though I cannot help noticing that they are headed south only about a quarter of the time), the famous eggplant patch (also, perhaps, known to some of you as the infamous eggplant patch), field houses full of fall crops (we are filling them up so we can keep picking right greens right to the end of the season), late blight (though this dry weather seems to have slowed it down; hence the tomatoes in the share), late carrots (let’s hope the deer develop a preference for weeds), pies (including, perhaps, your own triumphing over all the others in the contest), blue herons (three ponds full of frogs are an irresistible attraction for blue herons), red efts (Mike found one hanging out under a husk cherry plant the other day), Mike (the farm’s official red eft spotter), husk cherries (not just tasty, but also a great red eft habitat), mold board plows (just back from the repair shop), the brush cutter (just back from the repair shop), a Kubota tractor (just back from the repair shop), a farmer (back from the back repair shop), leeks (in the field across the road), leaks (in the drip tape), the muscovy duck, Terry (short for terrine), the chickens (soon to be in a terrine if they go after the tomatoes one more time), other CSA members (your pie contest competition), Sam and Will (members of the pie judging panel), dinner (I guess we should not just eat pie so there’s a potluck dinner before the pie contest; we supply drinks, plates, utensils), stars (sorry to raise your hopes, but no celebrities, just an amazing starlit night sky), your breath (it’s starting to get cold; we’re putting rows covers out again), orb weavers (big yellow spiders that make webs with a lightning bolt pattern), brussels sprouts (we might even get a crop this year), Jan (who would eat all the kohlrabi if we let her), kohlrabi (if Jan hasn’t finished it off), Mickey Boy, the large pig (who doesn’t like kohlrabi, but will eat all the squishy tomatoes and melons we care to give him), Adrienne (who is less excited than Jan about kohlrabi, and way less excited than Mickey Boy about squishy tomatoes and melons), winter squash (we have a big pile upstairs in the barn), the seed drill (we will use it to plant oats and winter rye in parts of the field where we have removed crops, such as the winter squash patch), the sunset, the moonrise, the sunrise (all right, probably not the latter, but maybe we’ll stay through the night eating pie and looking at the stars), dirt (we have lots so feel free to take some home with you).

I hope something on that lists appeals to you enough to convince you to come to the farm on the 27^th and see where those bags of produce come from and meet the people who fill them up and at least some of the other people who empty them out. The open house starts at 3, dinner around 6, and the pie contest whenever the judging panel can’t resist trying all the pies.

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.

3 September 2009

Basil, Beans, Beets or turnips, Cucumber, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Melon, Onion, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Squash, Tomatoes

On Monday afternoon we went out and destroyed a large section of the tomato patch. We chose the part with the biggest plants, the vines as tall as us and loaded with fruit, and killed everything with a flame weeder.

It might be fair to assume that after yet another arduous morning of tomato harvesting, we just could not take it any more and decided to cut our work load. But that is not why we were out there killing tomatoes. You might think we were finding filling out the shares just too easy what with all those tomatoes and felt we needed to give ourselves more of a challenge. But that was not the reason for our tomatocidal endeavors either. You could come to the conclusion that we have it in for our members and, overcome by a desire to deny you such a tasty crop, chose to destroy it and spend the rest of the season stuffing the bags full of obscure root vegetables instead. But that did not drive us to this desperate measure either. Late blight did.

We managed somehow, mostly I think through pure luck, to hold the epidemic at bay for weeks and weeks. As other farmers’ tomatoes succumbed, ours thrived. In fact, I have never had such a healthy outdoor planting of tomatoes. In a few of the low spots the persistent moisture had stunted the vines, though not enough to stop them from bearing quite heavily. Elsewhere along the rows the tomatoes had grown over the tops of the stakes, the foliage dense and dark green, the fruit remarkably clean and large and plentiful. The field has good soil, and it had been planted to alfalfa the past three years. In addition, we were spraying fungicide earlier and more often than other years in an effort to ward off late blight, which helped prevent many of the other usual tomato diseases.

Obviously the health of the vines did not result in early ripening. In fact, we only started picking outdoor tomatoes a couple of week ago (about three weeks later than normal). But given how good the planting looked and the quantity of fruit, we were looking forward to a good crop right through the rest of the month. At which point we might well have had enough of tomato picking and started killing the plants if a frost did not do it for us.

So much for our plans. But then plans tend not to last too long out in the field. There’s always a temptation to lay out the season on spread sheets during the slow winter months as though doing so will somehow impose order on what is really an ad hoc undertaking. You can organize planting dates, draw up field maps, figure out just how much of each crop to sow and when to put on row covers, put in trellises, spread fertilizer. And the plan usually holds together for several weeks, at least until you start working outside and find that your early carrot beds have not thawed and that, no matter what other tasks you have put on the schedule, you need to replace the greenhouse plastic and fix the deer fence. From there it only gets more chaotic, with more and more fields and crops subject to more and more uncontrollable events.

You don’t have to farm long to lose faith in things working out as planned. In fact, plans go awry so reliably that you start to believe that the very act of planning itself invites catastrophe—that some malevolent entropic force takes your attempts to create order personally and cannot resist the challenge. Which is to say that even as you accept their inevitability, you start to take the setbacks personally. If we had not been so happy with our tomatoes, so confident in their ability to produce another month’s worth of fruit because of our well planned field preparation and spraying, they might have remained uninfected. And it can hardly be a coincidence that this stunningly virulent pathogen specializes in our most valuable crop. There’s no particular reason, other than a desire to cause maximum harm, phytophthora infestans couldn’t have developed a taste instead for rutabagas or marjoram.

This is of course nonsense. That tomatoes can get a nasty disease is just the nature of things. And anyway rutabagas and marjoram have their share of problems. They just don’t bother me as much. I’d hardly get excited about putting a 200,000 btu torch to the rutabaga bed, but it would not pain me as much as burning up hundred of pounds of tomatoes does. I doubt many of you would grieve either if I told you not to expect to see a lot more rutabagas this season.

Indeed, it is the impersonal nature of these assaults that makes them so trying. It is one thing to do battle with an implacable foe. It is quite another to be at war with an enemy that not only has no feelings about you but does not even know you exist. I played a role in this disaster by planting the host plants, but a role that anyone could fill.

I don’t mean to say that human beings have no real part in this contest between plant and fungus. By cultivating so many acres of tomatoes and potatoes, by taking control to some extent of the destiny of these crops, by developing such an arsenal of chemicals to combat late blight, we have inserted ourselves in the midst of this ancient conflict. But if we think this actually has to do essentially with us, if we come to believe that we are the central characters rather than actors taking our turn in a long running drama, we are fooling ourselves.

But enough of these metaphors, which threaten like a bad fungal infection to run amok. At least I can put an end to them—though I think it is worth noting I could also put an end to the late blight on the farm if I were willing to use the conventional farmer’s chemical cocktail; the choice to do without these miracles of modern agriculture comes with its costs as well as its benefits. I am afraid I probably won’t be able to put a stop to the late blight and all our tomatoes will likely be dead in a week or two from fungus or flame. So enjoy them while you have them. Anyway, seasonality is one of the points and pleasures of a CSA share. That our tomato season will be cut short by late blight is part of farming, and thus something to be if not celebrated then at least understood and accepted. That, anyway, is what I tried telling myself as I pulled the trigger on that flame weeder and committed the tomatoes to the fire.

27 August 2009

Basil, Dill, Eggplant, Escarole, Garlic, Lettuce, Peppers, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Shallots, Squash, Tomatoes

Lots of people think there’s something special about growing up on a farm. I am not in a position to comment on the truth of this first hand. My best friend in middle school, Andy, lived in an apple orchard. I spent a lot of time there. We ate huge numbers of apples and roamed around the place with various weapons and flammable liquids, amusing ourselves and causing minor mayhem (I only recall one trip to the emergency room). Apart from visiting Andy, though, I spent little of my childhood on farms. I lived in Poughkeepsie and come from a pretty thoroughly nonagrarian family. My grandfather had a remarkably lovely garden, including a little vegetable patch at the back by his woodworking shop where he grew vegetable marrow and runner beans, and my great uncle Basil wanted to be a pig farmer, or so he said, though he was in fact a doctor and had never, as far as I know, made any attempt to tend swine. And that’s about the extent of my family’s farming endeavors going back any number of generations.

Based on the time I spent at Andy’s house, I certainly thought being a kid on a farm was great. But I was only a visitor running amok, and anyway Andy’s family didn’t manage the orchard. They rented it to their neighbor. There was never any danger that I would be forced to spend my time there picking or pruning or slaving in a packing barn.

I am fairly sure that the putative positive effects of a farm childhood derive not just from the setting, but also—and more importantly—from participation in the work of farming. Without the work you are just growing up in the country, which can be fine (though there’s always the suspicion that it leads to a certain slowness of intellect). But it lacks the moral uplift and insight that honest agricultural toil provides. Something, I suppose, about laboring in concert with nature, about doing work with palpable results, about the determined effort required, about the element of self-sufficiency and the shared familial burden makes a real farm childhood valuable. That, at least, is the theory.

While I did not have a farm childhood, I do have two children and a farm. The least I can do is make sure that Sam and Will have every opportunity to reap the benefits of their agricultural upbringing. To that end, I have had them help with a number of jobs on the farm this month, including weeding the shallots, red cabbage, beans and chard, helping to pack the bags, picking carrots and potatoes, and helping me at market. I should probably have worked them from dawn to dusk in order to give them every possible advantage, but doing so would have meant that I had to rise at dawn too, and there are limits to what I will do for my children.

And has it proved special? While Sam and Will have more or less (with perhaps a tad more emphasis on the less than the more) willingly participated in this experiment, I doubt that special is precisely the word they would use. Will enjoys going to market—he’s a persuasive vegetable salesman—and they don’t mind bagging produce, but I would say they like serious weeding about as much as anyone. I have not heard them begging to be allowed to turn off the Wii and go weed.

Of course, it is much to early to say if their farm childhood will prove useful. I suspect shallot weeding falls into the “you may not like it now, but some day you will thank me” category of activities. Given an appropriate opportunity to engage in mature introspection, they may find that those hours pulling crab grass offered them all sorts of heretofore unappreciated advantages. Such as what, other that the certainty at an early age that they did not want to be farmers, I am not qualified to say. I came to farming way too late to gain any profound developmental edge from weeding.

Or maybe they won’t get anything from this farm life. Maybe growing up on a farm offers no more benefits than growing up on a cul de sac or in a co-op. But at least they weeded the shallots, and I am pretty sure the shallots benefited from that.

There is one farm task that Sam and Will do like: running the root vegetable washer. One look at your potatoes, however, will show that I have denied them that pleasure this week. I did so not for my kids benefit (delay of gratification has wonderful effects on children), but for the potatoes’. Washing did not do the previous batch of potatoes we handed out any good. Their hard farm childhood—they are growing in a poorly drained field—did not do them much good, and they don’t seem to have the fortitude to withstand a trip through the washer. I figured you would probably prefer dirty potatoes in good condition to clean ones going soft. Plus, for those of you have cannot make it out to the farm this season, it is a chance to get your hands dirty in our soil.

The eggplants had at least as trying a farm childhood as the potatoes. They got frosted in late May, flooded in June, and assaulted by slugs and snails in July. Apparently, though, something about what they went through did make them stronger. I have never had such a prolific eggplant patch before. I wish I knew what part of their upbringing had this effect on them so I could get these results every season—and maybe try leaving Sam and Will out in the cold or covering them with tiny snails. But it is rarely possible to say what exactly from our youth made us who we are as adults. The peppers, which grew up right next to the eggplants and endured the same trials, are an almost total failure. I could raise the peppers and eggplants the same way next year and get the opposite results, and still not have the vaguest idea of how to explain it.

It is possible the only lesson here is that it is fun to visit a farm occasionally. I can certainly recommend it based on my own childhood, and I urge you to try it yourself—for instance on September 27^th, when we have our open house and pie contest.

20 August 2009

Beet greens, Carrots, Eggplant, Garlic, Onion, Anaheim or Ancho hot pepper, Spinach, Squash, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes, Turnips or beets

The Washington County Fair, which starts this coming Monday, features a lot of cows. 10 barns full of cows. Stall after stall of Holsteins and Jerseys and Brown Swiss and Herefords and Ayershires and Dexters and Charolais. More cows than all the other animals—goats and sheep and chickens and rabbits and pigs and a horses and oxen and a few reindeer—put together. And way way more cows than pies. There’s not even one barn full of pies. In fact, all the baked and canned goods take up a small section of a small barn, about as much space as is given to the table setting competition.

I do understand that the cow business plays a significant role in the economy of this county. Dairy products, cattle and calves account for 85% of the county’s agricultural sales (vegetables account for 5%), and agriculture is far and away the biggest business in the county. So it is no surprise then that the County Fair, that annual showcase of our bounty, puts on such a bovicentric celebration.

Pies, on the other hand, constitute an immeasurably small sector of the economy. Well, not immeasurably small. I don’t doubt that a sufficiently motivated researcher, someone with a real passion for economic statistics and baked goods, could come up with a reasonably accurate assessment of pie’s role in the county’s economy. But certainly unmeasured. If you look through the county’s economic development plan or scan federal census data for our area you will see no mention of pie at all.

But just because it is not a major player in the economy hardly seems like a good reason to shortchange pie at the Fair. The fair is not about the economy. If it were it would be something of a bummer this time around—a weeklong carnival of gloom to mark the dire financial situation in the dairy business. We could hand out special awards to the farms with the biggest debt and greatest negative cash flow and put up an electronic sign in the milking parlor keeping a running total of the milk’s negative worth (farmers get about $6 a hundred weight less for their milk than they spend to produce it). Any cows shown in the judging ring that failed to impress could be sent off immediately for slaughter as part of a herd reduction program and the tractor dealers could offer displays of used equipment. Instead of the usual (and bizarre) cooking utensil demonstrations in the midway, bankruptcy attorneys could offer enthralling spiels touting their services to rapt audiences.

Of course, nothing of the sort will happen at the Fair. The mood and the tractor displays may be a little more subdued than usual, but the celebration will go on. Serious farm kids in clean white shirts will bring their cows and rabbits before soberly attentive judges. Teenagers will flock to nauseating rides. Countless slices of terrible pizza will be eaten. The toy farm dioramas will be put on display and the Argyle firemen will barbeque vast flocks of chickens.

It will go on because the Fair is about not the actual state of farming but the essence of it: the ideal udder (there’s a prize for best udder), the best duck, the most powerful tractor, the perfectly trimmed sheep, the well set table, the latest forage harvester technology, the tallest stalk of corn. It will go on because going on is precisely what farmers do, even if it makes no sense (they talk of people who have gone out of the business in a tone that’s equal parts pity and scorn).

In this context it seems to me that the well-crafted pie has as important a role to play as anything else. Its ingredients—wheat, egg, milk, fruit—are basic farm products. The recipe is so simple a kid can do it, but to do it properly requires effort and hands-on experience best passed down from one generation to the next. It’s modest but a source of quiet pride when done well. It’s always better homemade than store bought. It is made to share. And while pie baking won’t make you rich it will keep you well fed. In other words, it is a rather more appropriate symbol of farming than any cow, and it smells a lot better.

I doubt it would pass muster with your average Washington County farm wife, but you can make a tasty pie (well, a tart, but let’s not quibble) with tomatoes, squash and onion (you can find the recipe on the web site). You could use the spinach or beet greens in an egg and cheese pie (which you can call a quiche if you are determinedly effete) quiche), or put your pepper, roasted and peeled, in a cheddar pie if you want something more American. In fact, you can put just about anything in a pie. Pie is highly adaptable, a quality the dairy industry might want to consider learning from it in order to survive. A quality the industry would be a great deal more likely to grasp if only they let me run the Fair and give pie its proper place.

Since that’s not likely to happen any time soon (the folks on the Fair Board are good eggs, but perhaps a little lacking in whimsy), I just have to put on my own pie celebration. Hence the annual Alleged Farm pie contest (and farm open house), this year on Sunday, September 27^th. I realize this only gives you five weeks to hone your pie making skills and a really good crust takes about three generations to perfect. I feel confident, however, given your obvious commitment to sustainable local farming and ready supply of fresh produce, that you will create something inspired, something surprising, something that in its blend of simple ingredients, hard work and fresh thinking captures the spirit of American agriculture. Or at least tastes good.

13 August 2009

Basil, Beans, Cabbage or radicchio Cucumber, Eggplant, Garlic, Leeks, Lettuce, Pepper, Hot pepper, Potatoes, Radishes, Squash, Tomatoes

Several organizations in Western Massachusetts recently received a little Federal stimulus money to fund summer youth employment programs. These programs, which aim to instill life skills in kids, will be great for the region, according to the people involved, because teenagers who get their hands on money tend to spend it quickly. Thus these government-funded wastrels will give the local economy a small infusion of cash right away. Bravo, a life skill well taught. After all, how are we going to have a strong economy if we don’t teach yet another generation of Americans to spend everything they have—and then some—as fast as they can. A strong Chinese economy, that is.

I cannot help thinking there was a time in this country’s history when people would not—or at least not so blatantly—have celebrated a fellow citizen’s inclination to spend all his money as fast as he earned it. While it is true that in an earlier draft Franklin wrote “a penny saved is a penny pointlessly kept out of the local economy,” his friends, sensing the tenor of the times and afraid that such a saying might harm Franklin’s potential endorsement deals, prevailed upon him to alter it to something more marketable.

Perhaps we lost our taste for thriftiness when we ceased to be a significantly agrarian society. There’s something about farming that makes you a little slow to get your money out of your pocket. It could be the joint pain and muscle fatigue, of course, which leave farmers slow to do much of anything. It could have something to do with the large number of pockets farmers tend to have on their clothes, causing them to have to hunt around for a while to find their wallets. It could also be the perennially meager profits, which tend to reinforce any miserly tendencies. Or the traditional need to set aside some of each year’s harvest to plant the next year’s crops. And it is possible that having all your efforts at the mercy (such as it is) of the weather teaches you to set something aside just in case.

There are drawbacks to such a cautious approach to spending. Farmers tend to avoid investing in new techniques, preferring the safety of the familiar. Risk outweighs potential. This slows the spread of innovations that might well make farming easier, more profitable, safer and less polluting.

The culture of saving also helps breed an ethos of self-reliance that makes effective communal activity difficult. If dairy farmers in this country had agreed to a milk quota system they might have avoided a lot of the financial hardships of the past thirty years. But there was no way they were going to agree to impose limits on themselves for the general good.

Fiscal conservatism has also tended to translate into political conservatism, though the two need not go together. It is hard, in light of our current farm subsidy program, to say that farmers have exactly suffered politically for this. But it has led the farming community to adopt a number of positions—many of them at best tenuously related to agriculture—that alienate many people who would otherwise be disposed to support its interests, and to stick to a system that fails to serve the needs of many farmers. I would be happy to trade those subsidies, which of course don’t go to farmers like me, for programs offering serious support for things such as farmland conservation, habitat protection, regional planning, education and marketing. Instead of paying a relatively small number of farms to grow more corn, we could be giving grants to lots of farmers to make capital improvements, develop new products, control fertilizer runoff, build worker housing and place easements on the best pieces of ground.

Still, even if we farmers are a bit tight fisted and stodgy and Luddite and too proud for our own good, I cannot help thinking we might find better life skills to teach kids than how to dispose of disposable income. Such as how to deal with adversity, stick with a hard job or enjoy simple pleasures like a dry day or the flight of a blue heron or a ripe tomato.

Actually, given the way things are going this season, I don’t know if a ripe tomato counts as a simple pleasure. It is turning out to be a bit more complicated to come by them than usual. For instance, we (by which I mean Jan) have had to spray the plants weekly with copper to ward off late blight and try to control the bacterial disease that has run amok in the greenhouse. Obviously, our efforts are paying off. I do, however, given the amount of spraying we have done, have to warn you to wash the tomatoes in your share. It is worth the effort. I have eaten tomato salad several times in the past week and don’t show any signs of getting tired of it yet.

I have also been eating a fair amount of coleslaw happily. I have been making a dressing with oil, vinegar, a little cream, a lot of mustard and a bit of soy sauce, sesame oil and chile oil. You could use some finely diced hot pepper instead of the chile oil.

As for the other 12 crops in the share, if you are not sure what to do with them come out to the farm this Sunday between 10 and 2 and I (and perhaps some other members) can offer suggestions. Plus you can see the farm (including the giant pig), check up on vegetables you will get in future shares, have a picnic, ask the farmer questions, look for newts (we dug one up in the potato patch), and pitch in with a small farming task to find out what life lessons weeding can teach you. I hope I will see you here.

6 August 2009

Arugula, Basil, Beets, Cucumbers, Frisee endive, Eggplant, Garlic, Lettuce, Candy onion, Pepper, Ancho or Anaheim hot pepper, Spinach, Squash, Tomatoes

My friend Jim sent me an e-mail in January from Texarkana asking if he could work on the farm this season. It was in many ways an unlikely request. Even healthy, he tended towards a languid Southern pace, his work frequently interrupted by snacks and siestas.

I would have been happy to spend more time with him. We had an easy friendship, in part because of our shared interests but mostly because of his real genius for friendship—his eagerness to know all sorts of different people as they are rather than as reflections of himself. A fundamental, unshakeable optimist, he took pleasure in my misanthropic tendencies, merely laughing off my gloomiest statements. He was excellent company, but I don’t know that I would have chosen him for a farm worker even at his healthiest.

And he was not at his healthiest. He had been dealing with advanced metastatic renal cancer for a couple of years. While a wonder drug (there are moments I have kind thoughts for the pharmaceutical industry)—and a kidney removal—had taken care of the major tumor, he had lesions on his liver, lungs and brain. He had gone home to Texarkana to spend a warm winter with his parents and gain some weight on a steady diet of good Southern home cooking. It was working—chicken-fried steak being every bit the equal of anything out of a drug laboratory—and he had regained his normal weight and his normal optimism.

But I felt pretty certain his optimism had outpaced his physical capacity. He had the energy to stay up all day, to go around town, to write to friends and read. But farming demands more than that. There are, I know, more grueling activities—fire fighting, underwater demolition, alligator wrestling—but the steady grind of farm work places physical demands on the body that will wear down the fittest in the course of a season. Jim, fatter but still seriously depleted by illness and chemotherapy, simply lacked the stamina for day after day of grunt labor. I don’t know that he had the stamina for one day of it.

Jim certainly knew about the physical nature of the job. He had been here often enough, helped out a bit in the fields, heard me talk about it, seen what the job had done to my back. And, at least on some level, he was aware of his own condition, his basic unfitness for the sort of work we do here. And yet he felt a desire to come to the farm and join me in the fields. I cannot say for sure why, but I think he had fallen prey to the notion that farming is good for you—that an agricultural sojourn would aid in his recovery at least as much as fresh biscuits and medicine.

That farming will cure what ails you is a surprisingly common idea, a misguided extension perhaps of that basic parental injunction to go outside and play, the fresh air will do you some good, mixed with a belief in the value of hard work and the spiritual value of communing with nature, plus a feeling that if vegetables are healthy then growing them must be extra healthy. I suppose there’s something to it. Certainly going outside, an increasingly uncommon destination, offers many possible rewards, including, I suppose the chance for some sort of spiritual awakening for those prone to such things. Hard work has its rewards too, and people ought to try doing a little even if they intend to avoid it thereafter so they can at the very least appreciate what they are not doing. As for the health effects of growing vegetables, it does tend to provide you with more vegetables than you might otherwise have and perhaps a greater desire to eat them, so that could do you some good.

None of that, however, makes farming good for you. Keeping warm in the winter is good for you, but that does not mean you should walk into a fire. I cannot imagine prescribing farming as a course of treatment for any malady physical or mental. It makes the feeble feebler, the depressed gloomier. We might well have had a great time out in the fields, Jim and I, talking about books and noshing on beans and lying in the cool grass admiring the golden evening light on the hillside. But he would not have been able to do much farming, and what farming he did would not, I am sorry to say, have made him better.

It is nice though, to imagine he was right, to think of him blossoming as the days passed, each menial tedious task, each tub spinach harvested, each row of carrots weeded, each tray of lettuce seeded restoring his health. We could have sent him off to clean up the onion patch or pick cucumbers and felt no guilt about giving him the worst tasks because they were doing him good. And then when word got out about his farming-induced remission we would have had an army of sickly peons vying to take on all our work, begging for a chance to pound tomato stakes or grease the tractor. We would have wandered among the suddenly immaculate beds of vibrant crops, cool and relaxed and pleased to help others by having them help us.

Unfortunately, Jim never made it back to the farm to test its healing properties. Doctors and Southern cooking can only do so much. It’s too bad. I could use a dose of his optimism in this strange wet season. He would have known that the weather can only improve, have happily predicted a warm dry fall. And he would have laughed and pointed out that things can hardly be as bad as I suggest when we can fill the bags with fourteen different crops and manage, finally, to coax a reasonable numbers of ripe tomatoes from the reluctant vines. And then, his work done, he would have munched on a cucumber and gone off to nap.

Rest in peace.