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.