Once again, the following post was written awhile ago and not posted. Blame it on the grantwriting work that is piling up on every available surface in my home office. Sorry no pictures this time-- I just want to get this posted and move on to the next topic. This post was written in early November.

While it may be only starting to get really cold for all my friends 100 miles south in new York, here in Columbia County we’ve been getting hard frosts since the beginning of October. Still, that wasn’t the end of the harvest season; while tomato harvest was over as soon as the plants froze, plenty of other vegetables just sat there until we got around to harvesting them—including beets, turnips, carrots, fennel, brussel sprouts, and some greens.

Unfortunately, once they were picked, though, that was the end. In the height of summer, many plants will just keep sending out new fruits to replace the ones we pick. But once it’s cold, everything stops growing, and what’s in the ground is all you’ve got left.

In the midst of the dwindling harvest, we spent much of October putting the farm to rest for the winter. The remains of the tomato plants, along with the stakes that heroically staved off chaos in the field, were pulled out of the ground, along with the irrigation hoses that ran under them. Cover crops—oats and rye—were planted over vast swaths of the farm as the plants that formerly grew there died and were pulled out. (These crops will not be harvested, but were planted to fix the soil and guard against erosion.)

So, as Bob began planning various winter projects and Karyn hunkered down in her warm, indoor office to work on educational workshops, actual farm work dwindled. In an instance of perfect timing, it was at this point that I managed to secure another consulting gig (grantwriting for a Latino community organizing non-profit in New York City), so my days at the farm—at least for this year—are over.

I’m giving some thought to whether I want to continue this blog and branch out to broader food policy issues and talk a bit about the international food relief world that I’ve entered as an employee of Action Against Hunger. More on that soon.

In the meantime, one more story about the ever-entertaining chickens. Last week Karyn and I (along with Nancy, one of the Mexican farm workers, who could probably run the place if her English were better) were harvesting squash out of the children’s garden, which is in full view of the chicken house, when we noticed that, once again, several had flown the coop. Karyn was mystified—there’s chicken wire and netting all around the bottom of the chicken house, so even though they can get outside and peck around the ground under the house, they’re not supposed to be able to escape onto the larger farm, thus exposing themselves to predators and dehydration when they can’t get back inside.

But as Karyn watched, she finally caught one in the act. Apparently there was a hole in the netting, where it wasn’t completely fastened to the ground. This hole was tiny—it couldn’t have stretched to more than two inches off the ground. But the chicken, with a confidence that proved she had done it many times before, stuck her head under the netting and more or less crawled out of the enclosure. (Until then, I was unaware that chickens could imitate crabs.)

Moreover, when another chicken decided it was bored in the big wide world and wanted to rejoin its friends, it stuck its head under the netting and made the reverse trip.

Chickens, as Karyn once again reminded me, are not dumb birds.

Roots and bulbs

Been awhile since I signed in. In a rather exciting (but time-consuming) development, I recently secured a grant writing job with Action Against Hunger-USA, an international hunger-relief organization. Watch the web site on October 16 for the launch of a new campaign to promote Ready-to-Use Foods-- and a lead article in ACF's online newsletter, RESPONSE, that I wrote (with some editing by ACF's communications guru, James). Anyway, below is a post I wrote on the train coming back from a visit to New York City for meetings at ACF:

So who was it that first had the bright idea of eating root and bulb vegetables?

Really, think about it—prehistoric man (or woman) is exploring his hunter-gatherer options and looks at a perfectly innocuous plant growing like any other, and thinks, maybe I should pull this up and eat it. Doing so, he devours the plant stem and leaves—but he’s still hungry. Then he looks at the dirt-covered root —let’s make it an onion-- that he just pulled out of the ground in his haste to get at something edible, and has an epiphany. He could wash this (or maybe just rub the dirt off)—and eat it. Or, better yet, he could sauté it and serve it and add pizzazz and some B-vitamins to that woolly mammoth he just killed.

Somehow I can’t see it.

OK, so I’m getting a little carried away. A day spent harvesting and processing root and bulb vegetables—all of which have to be pulled out of the ground with more than a little effort-- will do that to a person. Seriously, would you ever think that something like this

could be cleaned up and put into a soup? (Those are leeks, by the way, for anyone who thought they were seeing really big scallions.) It takes a lot of people sitting around like this. :

(That's Matt, cleaning leeks.)

In addition to the leeks, we were also pulling and processing garlic (harvested weeks ago, then tied up and cured in the barn), carrots, and celeriac, otherwise known as celery root. That makes two bulbs and two roots, for anyone who's keeping score.

The celeriac was the real challenge—like many root vegetables, it has to be loosened with a shovel before you can even pull it out of the ground. Then it has to be cleaned—which we did sitting out in the field where we had harvested it, cutting off the muddy, hairy roots with a machete, then lopping off the green shoots, leaving ourselves with a big knob that looked quite similar to, but not at all like, a mandrake root. THEN we took the whole mess back to the barn and washed it, using high-pressure streams of water (more or less—this isn’t an industrial operation) to spray the celeriac to within an inch of its life, as the mud slowly loosened its grip and was slurped, not without protest, down the drain in the floor.

The leeks received basically the same treatment, although their roots didn’t provide such a tangled mess to scrape off. The carrots just had to be washed. Since they were bunched up, and the bunches were held together with a rubber band tied around the stalks, we didn’t even have to take the stalks off them.

As for the garlic, it also had its stalk cut off, and was peeled enough so that all the brownish, ugly-looking skin was gone and it, well, looked pretty. (Please remember that the farm belongs to a catering company.)

This post has been yet another attempt to explain why organic food costs so much.

Eat Your View

This is a phrase that gets bandied about a lot in the foodie world. Michael Pollan, in a NY Times blog post from 2006, has one of the most elegant explanations for the phrase: "If you want to preserve your view, eat from the food chain that created them." (In the City, of course, this wouldn't work so well. But you get the idea.)

I am delighted to report that the view that I eat is indeed stunning. The examples below speak for themselves:

Katchkie Farm, with the Catskills in the background

The greenhouses

Eggplant

Okra flowers-- and actual okra

The herb row-- lots and lots of basil

Tossing pumpkins

Summer is indeed ending, and with it goes the last of the summer vegetables—the tomatoes, the cucumbers, the zucchini. As those plants yield the last of their bounty, vegetable farmers throughout Columbia County are turning toward the fall harvest.

At Katchkie, the winter squash—pumpkins, acorn squash, butternut squash, and a host of others I’d never seen before—are all in a patch at the end of one of the fields, all planted together and mixed in with each other.

Since winter squash is usually very heavy and very bulky, our normal method of dragging bins around and filling them with whatever we’re harvesting wasn’t going to work so well. (Just picture an attempt to fit pumpkins into a plastic bin that is usually used to collect cucumbers and beets—we’d fit maybe two of them in each. Not very efficient.)

So we spent the day playing “toss the squash”: while Nancy (one of the farm’s Mexican workers) clipped the squash off the vine and then tossed it to me, I stood there catching squash and dropping it in the back of the farm’s motorized golf cart. A little nerve-racking for this ex-geek who could never catch a dodge ball, but I had to admit that it was easier (and infinitely more fun) than the alternative scenario of bending over, picking up pumpkins, and hauling each to the car by our own leg power.

Periodically I also had the distinct pleasure of moving the cart among the squash rows, every once in awhile driving over a rotten specimen that no-one had bothered to move with a sickening, but rather satisfying, splat. This portion of the day further extended the joy of my new opportunity to indulge in childish pursuits.

When the cart was full, we hauled the entire load over to a large wooden bin (probably about four feet square), and transferred the squash into the bin. Then it was back to the squash patch to start the process all over again.

We spent the entire day this way, filling four big wooden bins and then, for good measure, about two dozen vegetable bins with tiny pumpkins. The pictures below do not show those little guys.

Chicken run!

As anyone who has read a farming memoir will tell you, there is no limit to the range of activities that can be accomplished with the aid of a tractor. Various attachments allow farmers to plow, cut grass for hay, haul things, or cut vegetables (such as onions) at the root so they’re easier to harvest. But I arrived at the farm the other day to witness a use that I’m not sure anyone ever thought of before: herding chickens.

Since a laying hen’s life consists of eating, sleeping, making eggs, and, well, eliminating chicken waste, the mobile chicken house is periodically moved to an, um, cleaner place. If Katchkie were a biodynamic farm the nitrogen-rich chicken poop would absorbed back into the farm as fertilizer, a process beautifully described by Michael Pollan in his discussion of Polyface Farm) in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma. But it’s not, and the chickens can’t really be allowed to run free because they’d get picked off by predators. So instead they have their own little chicken condominium, complete with a little run under a trap door in the floor that allows them to get down to the ground whenever they want. The entire condo building gets moved after the ground has endured a few weeks of chicken use.

The trouble is that chickens can get out of the enclosure when the fences are taken away in preparation for the move. When I arrived, Karen, her fiancé Matt, and Bob had already finished moving the chicken house, and four errant chickens were running around free, thoroughly enjoying themselves as they pecked at the bugs in the dirt around the children’s garden.

And, so, reluctant to chase the chickens on foot, Bob decided to employ the tractor. Picture it, if you can: a big, green farming machine—tires with a diameter of approximately four feet, by my very imprecise estimation—coming up behind four running, clucking, occasionally fluttering birds, who definitely have the advantage, as they simply run behind the flowers planted at the edge of the children’s garden and stymie the behemoth in its oversized tracks.

Karen finally managed to corral one of the chickens the old fashioned way—she dove for it. She then carried it, clucking imperiously, back to the enclosure. At that point Bob gave up and drove off to tend to vegetable harvesting. Karen, Matt, and I spent the next half hour or so replacing the fence, during which time two of three remaining runaways wandered back toward the chicken coop to be with their friends, which was really all they wanted in the first place. (Chickens like to form cliques, which anyone who graduated from an American high school will find a little traumatic to witness.)

We caught the other one later in the day, when it was tired, hungry, probably dehydrated, and definitely thinking that the wide world is a little too big.

And the point of all this running around, corralling chickens, feeding them organic feed and oyster shells so that they’ll get enough calcium? They’ve been laying eggs like crazy.

I took a couple home over the weekend and Jeff cooked them into an omelet with fresh parsley I’d picked from Katchkie’s herb garden and—the crowning glory—oyster mushrooms I’d picked up at the farmer’s market. Much to my surprise, I’d learned that oyster mushrooms actually can be cultivated—I’d thought they had to be gathered. But these babies were so far beyond the pathetic button mushrooms that pass for the real thing for most people that they should be assigned another food group all together.

Oysters come in big bunches (see picture), and one full bunch was enough for a good-sized omelet that fed both of us. They were slightly more elastic than most mushrooms I’ve had, and I was surprised at how little water they gave off when I sautéed them. The eggs themselves were, as expected, a darker yellow than you’d expect from store-bought eggs, as most organic eggs have more beta-carotene and other vitamins than eggs laid by feedlot chickens. Just as important, they actually had flavor. (Michael Pollan writes several pages about eggs’ “elasticity”, a quality that I don’t really feel qualified to comment on.)

Combined with the faintly earthy flavor of the mushrooms, this omelet provided the kind of pleasure we just don’t get from food very often anymore—sort of like sex on a plate.

Humming the day away

The tomatoes continue to ripen, and we continue to pick them for processing into ketchup at a plant in Poughkeepsie. Sitting in front of the plum tomato plants the other day, concentrating on finding red ones and avoiding the rotting ones that would explode in my hand as I picked them, I remained vaguely aware of the low humming of bees happily flitting from flower to flower. I’ve gotten used to the bees now and have stopped jerking my hand away every time one comes near. Drunk on nectar (or something), they seem to have judged us neither dangerous nor interesting and generally leave us to ourselves to pull fruit.

Vaguely aware of the distant roar of Bob’s tractor, the hot sun on my back, and the fact that lunchtime was quickly approaching, I suddenly realized that the “hummm” I was now hearing was much louder than the bees’ understated buzzing. It sounded more like an engine. Looking up, I half expected to see a small plane flying across the morning sky. Instead, I found myself staring straight into the black eyes of a tiny hummingbird.












Tomatoes, tractor, sun, and lunch all forgotten, I could only stare as the bird remained suspended above me, beating her tiny wings into a blur of motion that it’s hard to believe exists in nature. It only took a second; I had just enough time to take in her tiny, gray, perfect little body, the curved beak—and then she was gone.

Such fleeting, up-close glimpses are an integral part of the organic farm experience. One of the more disturbing aspects of industrial agriculture is that pesticides, herbicides, and other inputs have left the environment of most factory farms unable to sustain any life aside from the crops that are growing there—no bugs in the soil, and no birds flying overhead, all victims of the chemicals that are considered essential for our food to grow. (For an example of recent stories about pesticide-related songbird die-offs, see here.) Ironic that much of the food that sustains us is actually grown in a dead zone.

But organic farms, with their healthy soils and plants, provide food and shelter for a number of animals (including bugs) that then return the favor by preying on pests, pollinating the flowers on some vegetable plants (including tomatoes), providing other useful services, and sometimes ignoring us and the farm completely. I frequently look up from work to see turkey vultures soaring overhead, or the comical site of large crows being chased by small killdeer birds. (Why they would do this is unclear to me, but they seem to enjoy it and I’ve never seen a crow turn on them and take advantage of its superior size to silence the yippers once and for all. Maybe crows are more patient that I am.)

Hummingbirds often buzz around flowers that contain nectar for them to drink, and tomato plants certainly don’t provide that. But I found some information on another gardening site that suggested that they’re attracted to the color red. There was also some speculation that hummingbirds will hang around tomato plants in order to eat fruit flies and other insects feeding on any damaged fruit. (Thanks to the tomato hornworms, we’ve still got lots of that.)

After some research, I figured that the one I saw must have been a ruby-throated hummingbird, since that’s the only North American species that regularly nests east of the Mississippi. Since it didn’t have a ruby throat, though, it must have been a female, which, like females in most species other than humans, is the less ostentatiously adorned member of the couple. Here's a picture of one, courtesy of wikipedia:

Worms as lab experiments

And, once again, back to the hornworms.

The whole “hornworms eaten by wasps” thing was really interesting to all of us, but the idea of leaving the worms on the plants, even as they themselves were being slowly digested by wasp larvae, was, um, problematic. How long did it take the worms to die and how much of the plant would they consume in the meantime?

So my colleague, Karen, educator and farm assistant extraordinaire, decided to do a little scientific experiment. (Karen comes by her scientific credentials honestly, having earned a Master’s Degree in Geology along with one in Education. So she combines an educator’s curiosity with the scientific know-how to back it up.) She caught a bunch of wasp-infected hornworms and stuck them in a plastic container with a couple tomato leaves and green tomatoes. She then left the containers in a corner of the greenhouse and we all sat back to see what would happen.

As it turned out, not much. After about a week, the wasps did, indeed, hatch, but they flew away and left the worms severely weakened but alive. I subsequently found some evidence on the Internet (http://www.gardengrapevine.com/TomatoWorm.html) that the horn worm needs to keep munching for the wasp to complete its life cycle correctly. Sort of a devil’s dilemma—kill the worm and the wasps won’t live to protect your plants; let the worm live and it devours your plant while in its own death throes.

The stock advice seems to be to move the infected worm to another part of your garden so that it won’t destroy your tomatoes as it dies.

Food and Community

Sorry it's been so long since I posted. As it often does, my life got in the way of my life. Various family members came to visit, we had to do two quick days in New York, etc. etc. The following post was actually begun before all this activity. I'm not exactly happy with it, but I'll improve it later.

Up here in Farm Country, it becomes really obvious how food can encourage community. I’d been having trouble articulating this until I saw a wonderful post on the online magazine Grist, celebrating Iowa farm markets. In the middle of a dissertation on how people socialize at the Farmers’ Market while they move as quickly as they can through the aisles of the nearest Wal-Mart, heads down, the author concludes, “It is another way that real food brings us together, while mass-produced food-like substances further divide and isolate us.”

But wait, you’re protesting, I’ve had fun times at McDonalds. I’m not saying you haven’t. But most of the time, McDonald’s—and most other processed food meccas, including the frozen food aisle of your grocery store—exist to indulge people’s need to eat fast and on the run.

Consider Michael Pollan’s description in The Omnivore’s Dilemma of a typical modern American family meal: “Over the course of half an hour or so, each family member roams into the kitchen, removes a single-portion entrée from the freezer, and zaps it in the microwave. . . After the sound of the beep each diner brings his microwaveable dish to the dining room table, where he or she may or may not cross paths with another family member at the table for a few minutes.”

OK, so we’re not all that bad. But lots of processed food is designed to be eaten conveniently in front of the computer or the television, or in the car, and is not conducive to conversation. According to Pollan, in fact, the new holy grail of the processed food industry is a meal you can eat with one hand, presumably with the other on the steering wheel.

Increasingly, we eat alone—as fast as we can. There is little room for dinnertime conversation, or even for savoring the food we eat. In this context, I can better understand the lure of the masses of starch that now masquerade as food. After all, it’s just fuel.

Looming heirlooms-- and why sometimes it's best to leave the pests alone

Reason that real food costs so much, #489: real vegetables are not bred to last.





I am talking here about heirloom tomatoes, which everyone has heard about while very few people actually know what they are. I went to the Wikipedia site on heirloom tomatoes for a straightforward definition-- and was thwarted by the "some people say this; some people argue that" tone of the article. Apparently the construction of simple declarative statements is a lost art. (Check out the Wikipedia site anyway-- it's got some good information on specific varieties.)





But I digress. Heirlooms are varieties of tomatoes (or whatever other "heirloom" plant you're investigating-- this wikipedia site is much more helpful) is essentially a cultivar that was commonly grown during earlier times in history, (i.e., pre-industrial agriculture) and is not used in modern agriculture. Of course, the cardboard-tasting red balls you can buy in the supermarket are not the only alternative to heirlooms-- there are many varieties grown by organic and small farmers that are also modern-day hybrids, which are easier to grow and store. The big point to remember is that heirlooms are quite a diverse lot-- they're all sorts of colors, shapes, sizes-- and eye-popping flavors.





So why do they cost so much? First off, the seeds are more expensive. More importantly, however, you can put tons of effort into growing heirlooms and get very little yield. There's a very small window between ripening and spoilage. Out picking heirlooms yesterday, I was initially excited to see all the splashes of red peaking out of the green stems. But going through an entire 100 feet or so of heirloom plants, I probably had to junk about half the ripe ones I found. Many had split, and many more displayed a black spot on the bottom that belied the beginnings of "blossom end rot". (In that case, you can often cut off the black spot and eat the tomato yourself. But forget about displaying it at a farmers' market or getting any actual profit from it.)



I also had my first encounter with the dreaded tomato horn worm. These caterpillars are not only the ugliest thing you're likely to see on the farm (compared to them, earthworms are positively gorgeous), but are some of the most destructive. In addition to actual tomatoes, they munch on new growth at the tops of the plants, leaving naked stems in their wake. I'm also told that their--ahem-- excrement is about the size and shape of goat droppings, but thankfully I have yet to encounter this particular sight.



My mother, who always grew a few tomato plants in her backyard garden, used to get these things, too. At the time (this was 30 years ago), she simply hit the whole plant with some kind of pesticide. This is, of course, a no-no now, particularly on an organic farm. Instead, we get to pluck the thing off the plant with our (preferably-gloved) hands, drop it on the ground and step on it. At least that's the simplest way. If you have a lot, you can apparently also drop them all in a bucket and then burn them.

Probably not the preferred method for the animal-rights community, who would have been gleefully laughing at me later anyway, when I looked up tomato horn worms on the Internet and made an interesting discovery. The particular horn worm I saw had a bunch of white fuzzy things sticking to its back, which made it look even more like something I really didn't want on my plants. Another farm worker (who will remain anonymous to protect his/her identity) told me that they were eggs. (See this web site for pictures of the normal horn worm and scroll down a little for a picture of the white egg-like things.) Turns out that they're actually cocoons of a small braconid wasp called contesia congregatus, which is a natural parasite of the horn worm. Apparently, once the cocoons hatch, the wasps will actually kill the horn worm-- and then go off and seek more to parasitize.

I realize that none of this is very appetizing. But the point is that the standard advice is to leave parasitized horn worms as they are-- they'll die soon enough anyway and the wasps will live to chew on another of its kind.

On the other hand, I'm still not sure I could have left the thing there to munch, even knowing its days were numbered.

Oniony entities and how to feel rather silly

"It's shallot day!" exclaimed Bob the Farm Manager, as I arrived to the first bright blue sky in days.





Evidently all the rain we'd gotten over the last week took a toll on Katchkie's shallots, which were soaked and in danger of rotting under their healthy-looking green stems. They needed to come out of the ground, even if they weren't ready yet. When I asked Bob how much longer they should have been in the ground, he replied, "I don't know; I've never grown these before." Huh.





I spent the next few hours pulling stems out of the ground, most of the time taking the shallots with them. Every few plants, the stems came up but most of the shallot stayed put-- it was rotted through and just broke. Or an entire shallot would come up, wet and mushy and hosting some very well-fed worms. The presence of worms does, indeed, prove that the soil is healthy, so the farm's ecosystem is working just fine-- the only losers are the humans who need shallots in their recipes.





Not to worry. The good shallots still filled three crates, which I promptly took back to the greenhouse and spread out on two tables to dry further in the heat.





But I wasn't finished in the "spicy herbs that people peel" department. There were three rows of garlic that also had to be pulled up. I had been out in the field a few days before, snipping garlic scapes, and just for fun I had tried pulling one out of the ground. No go-- it was embedded in there.



(In case anyone is lost, both shallots and garlic-- and all oniony entities-- are roots. The stalks that grow out of them are often edible-- as in the case of garlic scapes.)



This, I learned, is why farms have tractors. Or one of the reasons anyway. Bob went over all three rows with the tractor, cutting low enough that the earth was disturbed and the garlic came up easily. We then pulled up great bulbs of the stuff, often with lots of mud and the occasional earthworm. (Happy happy earthworms.) Getting all that healthy mud off the garlic bulbs turned out to be a chore-- we shook the bulbs, knocked them together, and sometimes just raked cakes of mud off with our fingers. Finally we piled all this garlic on the truck bed (also attached to the tractor) and drove it back to the greenhouse, where it was spread out on tables next to the shallots.

One of the garlic bulbs did go home with me, and Jeff spent the next two days trying to figure out why it was dry enough to cook with. Until, that is, Bob said something two days later about hanging the garlic in the greenhouse to cure.

Yet another tidbit from vegetable processing land: one must cure garlic before using it. It can't be pulled out of the ground and cooked the same day like an onion, no matter that it vaguely resembles one. Am I the only person who didn't know this?

The obligatory informational post

Eagle-eyed observers (and maybe those who are not so-eagle-eyed) have probably noticed that until now I've carefully avoided explaining where exactly I am. That was because I hadn't actually asked anyone yet if it was OK to talk about the farm on a personal blog-- and I know from long experience that organizations can be prickly about unauthorized use of their names. But I got official permission last night from the owner of this whole operation, so now I can stop tying myself in knots to avoid identification of my whereabouts.

Katchkie Farm is located in Kinderhook, NY. Rather than being an independent farm, it is owned by Great Performances, a catering company based in New York. (Kinderhook's claim to fame is that it's the home of Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the United States and apparently one of the originators of the idea that politicians should put party loyalty ahead of personal ideology. So in a way, we've got him to thank for Karl Rove. But I digress.)

Great Performances is a sprawling operation. Aside from the company, which supplies several museum restaurants, the owner has also founded The Sylvia Center, an educational non-profit that brings "the farm experience to children" and teaches them about real food. The Center keeps a children's garden on site at Katchkie and brings groups of kids to the farm for a day of planting or harvesting food and learning how to prepare it.

Katchkie was founded two years ago to supply food for the catering company and for two farmers' markets in New York City, at PS 180 in Harlem and at Rockefeller Center. As a Great Performances operation, the farm is somewhat shielded from the economic ups and downs affecting small family farms. More about that in a later post.

Katchkie encompasses about 60 acres, including some woods and a pond as well as the area under cultivation. Mostly, we're growing mixed vegetables. (I will pause a moment for you to process your image of a 20-acre salad bowl.) There are also laying hens, which are under two months old so they're not laying anything yet. (We did put wood shavings in their little cubby holes in the chicken house yesterday, so maybe they're thinking about it, but I'm not too optimistic. A couple chickens watched me pour in the wood shavings and then set to work pecking at them, apparently unaware that they were actually supposed to be sitting in them.)

Hopefully there will be pictures in the next post-- I'm still trying to figure out the best way to haul my beloved (but rather heavy) Nikon D-80 on my bike for the seven-mile ride from home to Katchkie.

So keep those comments coming-- I still haven't figured out how to count the number of viewings, so comments are the only way I know anyone is reading this!

Tomatoes

I wish I could transport smells over the web. There is no way to do justice to the smell of a tomato plant unless you sniff it yourself.



Close your eyes and try to conjure the smell of green. Except it's stronger than that-- green on a hot summer day, when it should rain but it hasn't yet so everything is a little humid and heavy with anticipation.



Is this all a little abstract for you? I've been spending a lot of time in the tomato greenhouse, so I've got tomatoes on the brain. The plants in the greenhouse are growing so quickly that they're demanding a lot of attention. The vines need to be pruned regularly of any new growth that threatens to become a "sucker", or a branch that gets some ideas about independence and thinks about becoming its own plant. Sometimes I miss a sucker or two-- and soon after that it's turned into a whole new branch. But since a tomato plant is, technically, a vine, and there's nothing holding it up, it flops over and starts to break off. Or it grows near enough to the next plant that it gets tangled. There's nothing to do but cut the whole thing off-- even if it's started to bear fruit. This is a painful thing for me, which I avoid as much as possible-- and inevitably I am punished for my squeamishness with a huge sucker that juts out of the row of plants, with bigger tomatoes that still have to be snipped off.



Yesterday it was totally out of control. The cherry tomatoes at the back of one of the rows, which have been unruly for quite awhile, had finally grown over my head, and the branches had grown so fast that they were tangled around each other and it was hard to tell which sucker was attached to which plant. I wasn't even sure where to start, so I appealed to Bob, the Farm Manager, for help. He went in there and cut off 10 suckers in about a minute-- just walked right in and started snipping without any thought to the fruit that was already growing. He was right, of course-- the plants were so overburdened that Bob's sacrifice of the few will improve conditions for the rest.



I often take home a few fruits from the day's harvest-- always slightly unripe since it's so hot in the greenhouse at this time of year that they would split if left to their own devices. We usually put them in a bowl on the living room table and wait a few days until we have bright red, juicy tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes are my favorite-- they have a really strong, slightly tart flavor that fills your whole mouth when you pop them in. There is no better food in the world.



And so it is that I've been rather bemusedly following the national salmonella tomato controversy. Or perhaps it wasn't tomatoes at all-- now the FDA (or the CDC? I think the CDC tried to trace the disease and the FDA is regulating the reaction, but don't quote me on that) is saying the salmonella was in jalapenos. The point was that our system for supplying supermarket tomatoes is such that "responsible officials" couldn't figure out the source for weeks. Acres upon acres of industrial tomatoes in California could have picked up salmonella from-- well, anywhere.



In a typical overreaction, or at least a far-reaching solution to the wrong problem, the FDA has apparently now decided that anything but the food of interest must be wiped out from the farm-- including such things as other plants or beneficial insects. (No, you don't get salmonella from a spider. It's in animal feces. Which begs the question of how animal feces got near tomatoes. Or jalapenos. But never mind.) As usual, the organic growers in California are getting hit as hard as the big farms:



The goal is to eliminate all mammal feces by erecting big fences to prevent wildlife from entering fields and by ripping out vegetation used to buffer fields and streams, even though there is no evidence that wildlife caused the E-coli contamination.

"The effort on the part of FDA and some of the big buyers and the leafy-green handling association has been to try to eliminate wildlife from the farm environment, which is a very difficult thing to do," said Judith Redmond, owner of Full Belly Farm, a small, organic grower in Yolo County, and president of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers.

"It involves things like the FDA going to a cantaloupe farm and saying, 'Oh, there's a telephone wire above your farm, you're going to have to reroute that because birds could perch on that wire,' " Redmond said. "People in Salinas are putting up fences that are supposed to keep deer and (wild) pigs out at great expense and a huge disruption to wildlife corridors."

She said auditors are now asking for "clean strips - in other words, herbicides. No weeds, no plants, no nothing."

I was alerted to this story by the Ethicurean web site, but the original article was in the San Francisco Chronicle.


I can't even imagine how we would comply with such rules on the farm I'm at. We'd have to fence off all the fields and probably drain the lake, which attracts geese and other animals. And put a roof over the fencing to keep out the killdeer birds that fly around like they own the place. (Oh, sorry, as far as they're concerned they do.) Of course that would probably block the sun, which would negate the need for any regulations at all, since there would no longer be plants. Again, never mind.


And the non-organic agribusiness growers? Probably not a problem. They've used so much fertilizer and pesticide on their land that nothing can live there anyway. (That's just my opinion, but there are plenty of stories about how nothing can live in an agribusiness field.)

Hello and welcome

So what's a nice girl from New York City (by way of Boston, South Africa, Uganda, and, originally, Long Island, though I don't like to admit it) doing in Farm Country?

The quick answer is that I wanted to learn where my food's from-- really learn it, understand the labor involved in growing and harvesting, and transporting, food from farm fields to my dinner table. The origin of this desire, how I got from a non-profit desk job in New York City to part-time work on a farm in Columbia County, New York, is a much longer story.

In February of 2007 (only a year and a half ago?), on a weekend cross-country skiing trip to Vermont, I broke my wrist as I tried to negotiate an ice patch. (I was a rookie. Hopefully such things wouldn't happen to me now.) Back in New York, my orthopedist set the bone and told me that he thought I should get a bone density scan, since he only saw this particular kind of break in women with osteoporosis.

Well, long story short, I did indeed have osteoporosis. After numerous blood tests, consulations with two different doctors, and an endoscopy, I learned that it was caused by Celiac Disease, an autoimmune disorder that's triggered by the ingestion of gluten proteins. This disorder was also the reason I've spent my life with periodic anemia, very low energy, constant digestive issues, and, in a newer but very scary development, a phenomenon known as "Celiac Brain Fog". (It made me miss whole conversations and forget things like my fiance's last name.) Here's a link to the Celiac Disease Foundation if you want to know more.

Pretty serious for a disease caused by the food I was eating. Gluten is present in wheat, rye, and barley, so every time I ate bread, pasta, cookies, cakes, beer, etc., I was triggering a systemic autoimmune reaction that, in the short run, made me tired, and in the long run was destroying my small intestine and my ability to absorb nutrients from any food I ate. The only thing to do now was eliminate all gluten from my diet. Immediately.

Easier said than done. When I started to look, I discovered gluten-- usually wheat or barley-- everywhere. It's in soy sauce. It's in packaged sauces and soups. Even gluten-free foods, like nuts and some grains, are often processed or packaged on machinery that also processes wheat products, so those are off-limits as well. (The gluten is on everything. Trust me. I've accidentally ingested gluten that way and gotten sick.) Of course, a variety of gluten-free products have come on the market recently, as the food industry has noticed that gluten-free can be profitable. But a lot of this stuff is expensive, and has essentially replaced chemical junk containing gluten with chemical junk that's gluten free. Read labels some time and tell me if you can even pronounce half the stuff in the ingredients lists.

The best thing to do, it seemed, was to go back to really basic cooking-- lots of fresh vegetables, grains cooked from scratch, and the elimination of meals in a vacuum pack. And so for the first time ever, I had to learn to cook-- and pay attention to what I ate, noticing flavors and ingredients. And I started to notice the difference between the vegetable-shaped cardboard you get in most supermarkets and fresh produce from the farmers' market. Besides, once I started looking at the labels and ingredients of the processed, convenience food I'd been eating before, I realized that there was very little food in my food.

While all this was happening in my little corner of the world, a growing chorus of writers and environmentalists were sounding the alarm about our unsustainable food system and the consequences that factory farms and processed foods have for our environment and our health. I was particularly influenced by Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and the musings of Tom Philpott on the Grist Magazine web site. I started reading everything I could about food policy and the dilemma of sustainability.

There are so many issues caught up with the methods we choose to feed ourselves: the pesticides that poison the earth. The factory farms that raise miserable animals on a diet of corn, which they were never meant to eat, and them pump them full of antibiotics to counteract the health effects of such an unnatural life. The exploitation of immigrant labor in slaughterhouses and other food processing plants. The more I read and thought about these issues, the more I wanted to adhere to the local food movement-- ensuring that my food did not have to travel across the world to get to my plate.

But the issue is not that simple, and the paradox comes down to this: local food buying and the elimination of factory farms would make our food system healthier, more sustainable, and more humane. But how do we get there from here?

The green revolution is rightly hailed as a miracle that allowed many countries in Asia (including India) to feed themselves. Only now are we learning the consequences of green revolution practices: farmers dependent on the market to buy seeds that cannot be saved year to year. Reliance on pesticides that are sickening people living in agricultural areas. And on and on. (See here for some examples.) But what would happen if, one day, we simply stopped using these modern methods and everyone went back to organic farming on family-sized farms? Actually, there's a lot of controversy about that, but most people agree that, at least in the short term, yields would fall and people would go hungry. Like it or not, we've created a huge behemoth of a system that we now depend on for our very survival. How do we get out of this mess?

Obviously, I'm oversimplifying many issues. The food system mess we're in is much too complicated to be summarized in one blog post. I haven't even touched on the huge role of "King Corn" in this system, or food aid to poor countries, or the contributions our food system makes to global warming, or the train wreck that is, was, and always will be the federal Farm Bill. But it does give you an idea of what I'm struggling with.

It seemed logical to me to try to explore some of these issues by beginning at the beginning-- learning how to actually grow food in the way I think it should be grown. Organically. Sustainably.

In the meantime, I had recently gotten married and my husband and I were looking for a new life. We were tired of the New York crowds, pollution, noise, and lack of bicycling options. (Personally, I don't like darting through Broadway traffic, dodging buses and breathing truck fumes, at 25 miles an hour. But that's just me.) Moreover, since I went gluten free I was feeling like a new person-- one who really didn't want to spend her life behind a desk in a climate-controlled environment. So we found a farm I could work at (not for pay, but never mind), in a place we thought we could live. And here we are, at least for now, in Columbia County, New York, about two and a half hours north of the city and pretty close to Albany. It's as good a place as any to start looking at the food system.

I don't know what I'm going to find, but I'm writing this blog to invite readers to come on this adventure with me. I'll try to describe the smell of tomatoes in the greenhouse, and the satisfying crunch of fresh snap peas. And explain about what vegetables are available when and how your mixed greens are grown. And read and think about any comments you choose to send me.

I started this journey because my health depended on it, but I'm discovering the joy in good food and heightened awareness. In the coming months I hope to share that.