Clockwork

Before starting farming on my own ten years ago I had already spent a couple seasons on farms in this area and elsewhere. And, despite that farming experience and having grown up spending my free time wandering the outdoors of the DC suburbs, I hadn't spent any particularly focused time paying attention to the minutiae of the Mid-Atlantic seasons. So when it came around to August, and suddenly there were grasshoppers everywhere, whole flocks of them rising up in front of the trucks as we drove through the grass, I was a bit surprised–and amazed by their density. How could I not have noticed such an entomological bloom before? I chalked it up to the vast fields of grass out on the farm as opposed to the neatly mown cul-de-sac lawns of my childhood.

The following year, when I struck out to farm on my own, I eagerly awaited the return of the grasshoppers in August... but they never arrived! Had I mis-remembered and was actually somehow astounded at several grasshoppers flitting away from me in a field, now an unremarkable sight? I was confused. And then I forgot about the grasshopper clouds, one of those memories that feels true but might in fact be a function of its time in one's life filtered by the vividness of being in a new place. I forgot about it, that is, until 2016, when in August, as on cue, again there were dozens and dozens of grasshoppers stirred up from where they sat, invisible, but now floating clumsily out of harms way whenever we drove past, looking like little brown butterflies until, near the ground, wings folded away and all of a sudden a regular old grasshopper dropped to the earth. 2016 was a Grasshopper Year.

I used to assume that each year the same animals appeared at the same time like clockwork, a product of the Newtonian seasonality of climatic cause and effect, inevitably the correct species materializing at its proper time. In fact, I used to assume the same of plants on the farm: that given identical inputs of seed, water, and calendar, results would be predictable from one year to the next. But it turns out--as all the returning CSA folks already know--each farm year is different, a product of unseen and unknowable factors.

2018 was a Wasp Year. Wasp nests in the shed, expected. Wasp nests in rolls of irrigation line, unexpected (and painful!). Wasps residing inside the tubular metal frames of farm equipment so often that, before hitching the tractor, I began to sight down the framing tubes (from a distance) to be sure they were clear of wasps. I dispatched wasps with boards, with poles, and when necessary, with wasp spray.

This year, there are no wasps. Nobody has been stung anywhere on the farm, not even once, and when it became clear that this was not a wasp year I began to feel safe and secure yanking old pieces of metal from the weeds and reaching into storage containers. What would have been dangerous in a Wasp Year holds no risk at all this season.

Because this year, it turns out, is an Ant Year. I have never thought of anthills as anything but a somewhat comical nuisance of working outside, a surprise to deal with from time to time (“OH! --ants here. Hm.”), but of no real consequence. This year, though, there are ant colonies in the potting soil bags and between stacks of wood, in a box of seeder parts (then scurrying away down the one blade of grass leaning up against the box), and in crates of onions curing in the greenhouse, no matter that we elevated them off the ground; under regular CSA-bag delivery spots forcing temporary relocation and, most recently, even living inside the weatherstripping of a seldom-used walk-in cooler door. This is entirely unusual, and no longer surprising–“OH. Ants, of course.”

Each year I scratch my head a little and try a little less to understand the unknowable, yet perhaps somewhere in that secret is the reason that each vegetable, equally mysterious, does not offer the same result from year-to-year even though I follow more or less the same planting schedule each season.

2020 is a Lettuce and Squash year, as you well know. Never in the history of the CSA has there been lettuce for you every single week! But peppers? Where are they? 2019 was a Pepper Year--there were so many that we sold boxes of seconds peppers for weeks--but not this year. We've had Sweet Potato and Carrot years, and even Eggplant Years (the most confounding vegetable). No matter how much I try to have just the right amount of everything, invariably a few vegetables end up defining the year with their abundance–or failure. Fortunately it always seems that whatever conditions depress one vegetable will boost another, so that on balance there are always the right amount of vegetables. I like to think it keeps the CSA exciting and fun--kind of like tie-dye, always plenty of color, always interesting, but the pattern unknown until the fabric unfolds.

Seasons on a farm

We've turned the corner to autumn, as you might have noticed by the slight color changing of a few leaves, the blissfully cooler nights, or maybe the the dramatic influx of pumpkin spice everything flooding the advertising space around us--nevermind the first winter squash and salad mix in the CSA shares and the obvious decline of tomatoes.

It's funny how the onset of September evokes such images of autumn and change for so many of us--back to school, the end of carefree summer, the beginning of sweater weather; the time to pick apples, resume baking, and cook hearty meals rich with winter squash. Even though astronomical fall begins three whole weeks from now on the 22nd at the equinox, perhaps our sociological Fall begins this weekend, at Labor Day.

But there's no conflict in that; even though spring, summer, fall, and winter seem integral to our understanding of yearly time, even though they're based on something as scientific as the celestial equinox/solstice cycle, our culture pretty much just made them up. In ancient Japan the year was divided into 24 seasonal stages and 72 microseasons, each lasting a few days, with names like, "mist starts to linger," "wild geese fly north," "first lotus blossoms," and "deer shed antlers." The Cree and Hindu calendars each recognize six seasons; Thai divide the year into three seasons. Science writer Ferris Jabr takes a big-picture view: “If we zoom way out, we can see certain global rhythms: the ebb and flow of light; the bloom and wither of plants; the expansion and retreat of ice. Earth has a million seasons, or just one, depending on your perspective." Jabr even suggests, what if we imagined seasons from the perspective of creatures other than ourselves?

Popular supposition might be that we farmers, being outside all the time, would see the shifts between the four seasons more keenly than most. However, the truth is just the opposite: we're zoomed in so close that we see such detail as to obscure the lines between the "four seasons,” leading us to mark time in the year based on small changes rather than quarter-year shifts. The culturally assigned seasonal categories are fairly irrelevant in our day-to-day experience of farm life; we have our own markers in the farm year, no doubt invisible and meaningless to others (just as you may have, in your own lives). Our year begins with the Groovy Bird singing “GROOvy GROOvy GROOvy” in April as we plant onions, then when it gets hot the June Bugs arrive, dozens of them buzzing slowly about. In Late July, around brassica-planting time, the Curious Wasps swarm low to the ground circling circling circling, never threatening, just curious to see what's going on, and then, now, we hear the first of many geese honking through at dusk as they look for a place to spend the night on their way South.

Seasons allow us to know not only where we are, but what's coming next. Those who have been with the CSA for a while may mark time in the CSA year, knowing that the season of cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes declines and then gives way to the season of storage roots and greens, culinary seasons eliding one to the next without clear division--except to notice in retrospect that we no longer see the vegetables we used to, the food once rare and fresh now our common staple, letting us know that next season is on the way.

The Game of Farming

I hardly know the first thing about poker, but I like knowing how things work so when I came across How To Be A Poker Champion In One Year in The Atlantic, I opened it right up. To my surprise, I realized the author's approach to becoming a poker champion in one year is similar to what I enjoy about farming--although with a longer learning curve.

"Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn’t quite realize it wasn’t just uncertainty about the outcome of the cards. It’s uncertainty about the 'right' thing to do."

I can make all the plans in the world--and I do, over the winter--but the longer I farm, the more I accept that there is no certainty in them. How can there be, when the implementation of those plans is necessarily reliant on weather yet to come and other unknowable factors related to the essential problem of farming: imposing human order and human desires on inscrutable natural systems.

I used to aspire to the perfect season, where all the ground was perfectly prepared, the seeds all sown according to winter plans, each vegetable abundant--because surely if I made the perfect plans, with the perfect execution, that would inevitably lead to perfect agricultural results. But as much as that is my starting point, in the end I am not working with a mechanical system; there is no certainty here on the farm. Being good at farming is not about knowing how to grow stuff (plants just do their thing, really) or even the methods (although there are indeed incremental improvements and new innovations each year), but about honing one's decision-making ability and making the best decisions each day, moment-to-moment, based on the situation at hand.

There is no "knowing" what to do, as if it could be learned in a textbook; my job is to figure out what course of action is most likely to work out best, accounting for some intuitive sense of how bad and how likely the worst results might be, as well as how likely the best results might be. For sure the longer I've farmed, the more conservative I've become, favoring decisions that are very likely to work out acceptably, and with little downside risk--even though this inherently leads to a similarly small chance of perfection. To borrow from a different card game, to "shoot the moon" is not a viable farm strategy; that perfect result is an impossibility.

“Less certainty. More inquiry,” Seidel relates to Konnikova in the poker article.

Assessing what may happen and understanding why past results were the way they were is a more useful approach here than feeling any certainty about how to proceed. I realize that I use my years of observation of my own successes and non-successes--as well as the much longer experience of my neighbor farmers--to game out what might happen as a result of any farming decision, in order to assess the likelihood of positive results. Will the soil crust before the seeds emerge, or perhaps the rain will come--or what happens if it rains too much, and would it be a net advantage to delay until later? The longer I farm, the more chances I get to observe and understand why things worked out the way they did, and the more granular detail I can build into my imaginary model to make more informed decisions about what is most likely to be the most advantageous course of action in any given situation. I enjoy, each year, being able to understand deeper levels of detail, to be able to act with closer tolerances during short windows of opportunity--not to know what to do, but to have a clearer sense of what is most likely to work.

"The object of poker is making good decisions....When you lose because of the run of the cards, that feels fine. It’s not a big deal. It’s much more painful if you lose because you made a bad decision or a mistake.”

So too with farming. I can't know what's best, and I surely can't get it "right" every time--there may not even BE a "right answer" every time. The best I can do is to make good decisions, good gambles, and know that I've played my best hand no matter how it ends up going in the end.

Happy August!

Typically July is the hardest month for a farmer, since it's the month of picking overlapping with planting, the satisfaction of summer crops competing with concerns about fall crops yet to be grown. The main focus becomes simply getting the food out of the fields, with our schedules now determined by the plants rather than our own desires. In past weeks I could decide in advance what was going into the shares and knew that vegetable quantities were going to add up after we completed the picking. But now that we're picking squash every day, cucumbers four times a week, tomatoes twice a week, only after the harvest comes back can we determine how much exists and figure out how to divvy it up for the CSA. This is the first week that has felt for me like the vegetables are fully in control.

And during all this, of course, we've still got to get the fall crops like cabbage, carrots, and spinach in the ground! Being fall crops, they really aren't a fan of hot dry weather, so it's a matter of keeping a close eye on the forecast and making best guesses on when is likely to be the best opportunity to put out the plants--and being ready to go when that moment arises, since this moment is invariably on a Monday or Thursday during the big CSA prep day.

Last Thursday it was likely to rain two inches or more beginning late afternoon, and I had a decision to make. Do I seed carrots before the big rain, and risk them getting compacted into the ground by driving rain, struggling to break the surface four days later? Or does the big rain mean great germination, with more rain possible in four days to soften the ground and allow them poke up above the surface? Or do we wait out the big Thursday rain because it might be dry enough to plant over the weekend, and avoid the downsides of the drenching rain? But--what if it ISN'T dry enough, or even worse, what if a storm happens to come through on the weekend and keeps things wet--and then it rains Monday and Tuesday, and suddenly things are very delayed. The deciding factor, for me, was knowing that if the carrots didn't come up, there would still be time to re-plant and try again next week. If I waited until after the rain, it would be too late to make a second attempt if the first seeding didn't work out. And hey, if it WAS the perfect window of opportunity--well, I wouldn't want to miss it!

So in a flurry of Thursday afternoon activity, in the midst of CSA picking and prepping, we got the beds ready, seeded the carrots, and covered them with fabric rowcover to protect the soil from from driving rain and lock in moisture to keep those finicky carrot seeds happy. And... wouldn't you know, although the sky looked consistently ominous, the rain came hours later than expected, and so we just kept going, seizing the window of opportunity to get even more fall bed prep done. I ended the day picking squash by headlamp--but tradeoffs must be made. And instead of two inches of rain, we hardly got half an inch that night. The perfect amount--enough to keep it moist, but not enough to firm up the ground! Today, four days later, the seeds have grown little root "tails" and are ready to send up their shoot just as tomorrow's probable deluge will liquefy the soil surface and make it so so easy for the little carrots to emerge. At least, that's the hope. I feel very lucky so far, but we'll find out what happens!

As luck would have it, today is a repeat of Thursday; again it's a CSA prep day and again it's forecast to rain two inches. With four days of cool rainy weather on the way, is this the window to plant spinach? Encouraged by the (presumptive) success of the the pre-deluge carrot seeding, I decided to chance it and seeded all six spinach beds. So this afternoon, once it clouded over and got cool and before the rain began, we got the spinach done. And then I picked squash not in the dark, but in the rain. Because again, tradeoffs must be made. In this season of hot weather, the windows of opportunity are brief and not to be missed.

And so, with the last seeds planted, it's on to August and its relentless vegetables to pick and pack, but with the fall crops safe in the ground, gambles made, to hopefully bear fruit in a few months.

Eat like a farmer

Right about now is the point in the season when some folks start feeling like they're "falling behind" on keeping up with the vegetables. Many people join a CSA with goals to up their cooking games and try a new recipe every week. And even longtime CSA folks tend to earmark the farm vegetables as "special ingredients" instead of basic staples, wait for the perfect special recipe to use them, and end up with the dreaded vegetable stackup (or worse, waste). Moreover, this local-farm CSA thing is not the same as standard market shopping, since there is no way to meal plan when you don't even know what you're getting until the night before! But regardless of the reason--self-imposed goals or CSA-imposed vegetables--this decidedly different cooking experience can get overwhelming.

However, having a larger quantity of vegetables around than you would ordinarily purchase isn't necessarily the same thing as too many vegetables--it just takes a different strategy to eat them than you would normally employ. Now, I've had some practice at eating vegetables, and so I thought I would offer a few tips: First, don't treat these vegetables as special. They aren't. They're just fresh, good-tasting, regular-old vegetables, and you have my permission to eat them up without any special preparation or special occasion. And second, although we love to send you new recipes, a focus on recipes can lead to a backlog of vegetables not yet assigned to the perfect meal plan. So here is my tried-and-true farmer-approved method for eating ridiculous quantities of vegetables: CUT THEM UP AND EAT THEM.

Yup. That's right. The busier the season gets, the simpler a farmer's meals get. Any cookable vegetables (like zucchini and cabbage) plus salt, oil, and a protein (meat or beans) will likely taste great. Any raw vegetables will also taste great together, like cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes. By all means, try that delicious new recipe, but if you feel like you're falling behind...just eat them up.

In fact, to help you breathe easier, I'll share with you my summer cooking process:
1. Pick a base: rice, tortilla, pizza crust, corn chips, pasta, etc.
2. Saute the cookables: squash, onion, garlic, some greens like chard/kale/cabbage, + beans/meat. Literally cut up as many vegetables as will fit in the pan (do not skip this step). Be sure to include something acidic, like a tomato or some lemon juice, and cook until well done and just starting to brown and stick, adding a little water when necessary.
3. Pile that onto the base and add some fat (cheese, sour cream, etc).
4. Voila, you've got stir fry, quesadillas, pizza, loaded (and I mean loaded) nachos, or pasta. Just put as much vegetable on as you can stand--tis the season for vegetable luxury!
5. If it fits your dish, cut up the raw vegetables (tomato, cucumber, onion, + raw corn cut from the cob), along with salt and olive oil to make a fresh salsa. Or experiment with fresh salads -- canned beans, rice, or tuna all combine with a fat (sour cream, olive oil, etc.) and any raw vegetables in various proportions to yield various dishes.

This method will work for everything else we've seen so far. It may not be as exciting or nuanced as seeking out that special recipe, but if you are looking to go through a quantity of vegetables, I recommend process over recipe:
1. Cut Vegetables;
2. Eat Them Up.

Coronavirus

I am sequestered here on the farm and although our own lives are distracted and disrupted, the natural world pays no notice and things proceed as usual. The squirrels and birds outside my window continue their lives as before; the plants sprout on cue with the change in the seasons, preparing for the heat of summer that will come as it always does. The vegetables will be as fresh and good as ever. Since the farm is much more dependent on natural systems than human systems, it is a fairly resilient place and I do not forget how fortunate I am to be able to spend my time outdoors and have a steady supply of fresh food. Still, while I am confident about the farm itself, the uncertainty about the future is a real force in my life now, as it likely is in yours.

As you know, each farm season is based on long-range plans made in the winter and executed in the summer. Not knowing what this year will bring, I've been re-thinking this year's plans and figuring out how to build in the most flexibility for yet-unknown challenges. I have scrapped plans to add more office pickup sites as many people begin to telecommute, and I have only added new sites where I have an existing strong connection so we can adjust quickly if needed. I am planting more storage crops than usual so that if necessary we'll have the flexibility to alter the timing of the CSA weeks themselves. I don't know exactly what will happen, but we've certainly handled many complications in past years, and the CSA has gone out every single week. The coronavirus may offer a new genre of issues to solve, but I am confident that we can figure out this one too.

You, too, will have the flexibility to adjust. We can offer more skip weeks if necessary, and if someone needs to cancel the CSA or switch pickup sites mid-season because their circumstances change, it will not be a problem. We'll all need to be flexible to meet these new challenges, and we will do what we can to be sure that the CSA can work for you.

We all are thinking about safety and social distancing.  Fortunately, there are only about 5 people who work on the farm, and it is fairly easy to limit our contact with the wider world. We are lucky not to be going to any farmers markets. Most CSA pickup locations are outdoors, and we may look at ways to move the few indoor sites outdoors as well. We are of course doubling-down on handwashing protocols and making sure that nobody comes to work sick. We'll look at offering paid leave if it's not included in Congress's relief package.

Many of us are suddenly spending more time cooking at home and putting more energy into making healthy, nutritious meals. There is no more reliable source for fresh ingredients than a local farm that grows food with natural systems, and there is no better way to get this food than from a CSA. Spending dollars on real food produced by people close to home is what makes us more resilient in uncertain times, and now, more than ever, is the time to be a part of our local food economy. We're not sure what will happen with farmers' markets this year, but the CSA will be here. We are ready to get creative to find ways to feed people. And we are open to suggestions.

Seasonality

Well, it's happened again, you've eaten the entire farm. That's all the vegetables we've got. The cooler has been jam-packed for weeks with all the stockpiled carrots, potatoes, squash, and cabbage; after tomorrow morning the cooler will be emptier than it's been in a long time. That's the plan, of course. You've seen the farm season through from start to finish, from the first leafy sprouts in May to the last of the root crops in November, and now it is no more.

Similarly, on a smaller scale, you've watched each crop tentatively arrive, flourish in its prime, and eventually decline as its time comes to a close. Take the spinach, which has transformed from new and fresh and small, to full size and vibrant, and now is diminished by cold. Within another month, by the time winter begins, the leaves will be small, wilted, looking nearly dead. But though some plants may die, the spinach in its stalk, the carrot in its taproot, the potato in its tuber, and the cabbage in its leaves all consolidate strength to lie low through the winter then send up the first shoots as the weather warms in spring, racing with the other plants to be the first to drop seeds for the new year.

Like the plants, so too the farm recedes into winter after a season's growth, the tomato stakes put away, irrigation hoses rolled up, the supplies stacked in the shed, and the remains of our carefully planted crops tilled under to turn back into soil. Although the life, the complexity, we built here this year is no longer, the farm is not destroyed and dead, but decomposed into its constituent parts ready to spring forth not five months from now with new growth next year.

As the farmer, I too feel quite the same way...quite ready to rest at the season's end and hunker down to rejuvenate over winter, sustained by stockpiles laid by while the sun offered enough energy for life–the food I've frozen, canned, and stored in the cooler in preparation for the cold and dark ahead. And, after spending every week for the last six months thinking about you all and what vegetables to send out in the shares each Friday, the biggest change will be to suddenly have no more CSA planning and picking.

I imagine the end of season may be a big change for many of you, too. You'll most likely have eaten vegetables from my farm more weeks than not this year! Come Spring, I bet you'll be looking forward to fresh, new vegetables as much as I will be looking forward to growing them again, and I hope you'll stick with the farm next season.

Underlying Soil

Many people think farmers are engaged in some sort of idealistically bucolic lifestyle, with the traditionally meager pay more than offset by the rewards of working outside in a pastoral setting. And, to be honest, I know a lot of farmers who hold this perspective as well: Farmers who are more than fulfilled by the agricultural life even though USDA data says that in most years most farm operations lose money, with family expenses covered by off-farm income.

I didn't get into farming because of these pastoral qualities--I happened to take a job on a vegetable farm during college, saw it to be a good fit for my interests, and found that I enjoy the work of running a farm business and the possibilities afforded by the enterprise. I have enjoyed the project of growing top-notch vegetables with responsible farming methods while providing a livelihood for myself by carefully expanding the business bit by bit. I can't imagine running this sort of farm, and then having to work a winter job just to make ends meet.

Small businesses like mine make up the the vast majority of American businesses; together, small businesses generate nearly half of US economic activity, and nearly one-fifth of employees work for a company with under 20 workers (that's me!). But these businesses aren't the ones we hear about in the newspaper. Instead, companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Boeing are making the headlines. And, even though these corporations have shown their business methods lead to incredible business success, the neighborhood small business probably isn't being run in the same way as these headline-generating firms that supposedly prove the American Dream a reality.

What if I DID act like a big corporation, and measure my success on corporate metrics? As far as I can tell, big business tends to seek profit above all else--except, perhaps, that fairy-tale of endless growth. So if I were trying to sell as many vegetables as possible to as many people as possible with regard for little else but the bottom line, what would I do? Would I secretly violate your trust assuming you won't find out? Would I cause environmental harm because there aren't regulations to stop me or, if there are, the chance of enforcement is low or penalties inconsequential? Would I maximize profit at the expense of everything else and somehow earn hundreds of times as much as my lowest-paid worker? Or, perhaps, would I marry my farming roots with American big business and act like Certified Organic agribusiness, pushing my growing methods right up to the letter of the law, and then getting a seat on the Organic standards board to try to change the regulations in my favor?

Even though I think of my farm as a business, that sort of approach isn't the least bit interesting to me, and the idea that the only success is endless growth, with dollars the only metric, isn't how I set my goals for the farm. Don't get me wrong; of course I am trying to sell you vegetables. One of my main goals with the CSA is to create something you will want to sign up for again next year--the farm provides my livelihood after all. I've worked to grow the business and expand the farm, but only to be able to do more of what I enjoy, and to do it in a way that sustains a long-term farm future. I feel like I'm almost (but not quite!) to the size of farm that can support a sensible workload, sustainable income, and stable farm crew--and someday work on daydreams like transitioning to solar power.

While Amazon's customers are mined for cash and Facebook users offer up endless data, that raw material of modern business, I choose to remove my farm from that extractive business environment – in just the same way as my farm's sustainable growing practices work with the natural environment rather than destructively extracting all that is there. In our sort of farming the soil is not simply a substrate from which to mine dollars; neither are the customers simply a source for cash. And just as it is the soil which allows the plants to develop, fostering their growth throughout the season to finally bear fruit, so too it is you all, the CSA folks, whose involvement with this project allows the farm to grow and bear fruit in its own way.

Climate Action

This past week was Climate Action Week, bookended by walkouts, protests, and attempts to disrupt “business as usual” of the people in DC whose decisions inflame our global crisis. The United Nations climate scientists, the IPCC, released another dire report and, at the UN climate summit, world leaders again urged action to little effect. Here at home, we CSA farmers are coordinating this week to focus our newsletters on the topic of climate change.

I have always, it seems, been at least peripherally aware of climate change. I remember hearing in elementary school that the earth was warming—the sort of factoid someone might share at a party. We learned about the greenhouse effect and how CO2 reflects sunlight back to earth. “An Inconvenient Truth” came out and it became clear that global warming was an important issue that should be taken seriously, but only in the “Glad somebody is protesting to save the whales, but it's not something I pay much attention to” sort of way. I remember passing through a museum exhibit on “The Sixth Extinction” about how humans were causing the disappearance of the very animals that are part of our cultural history. It felt sad to know that the next generation might grow up in a world that looks quite different, but it didn't feel like this would disrupt the global ecosystems upon which humans depend—as is likely.

A few years ago, when the Paris Accords were being negotiated to try to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, we heard a lot about what that 2-degree warmer world would be like: oceans rising and coastlines receding, hotter summers and heavier rains, and climate refugees putting stress on international stability... but nothing that seemed particularly dire (even though the science says it will be absolutely dire). Even if everything comes to pass I figured I can deal with more rain by controlling the plants' climate with hoophouses, transition mostly to solar power, and sure it'll be hotter but 2 degrees doesn't really sound like very much.

All along, I just assumed everything would be okay in the nick of time. To believe otherwise was to believe that, even though we have all the information we need, the technology to turn this around, and enough time left to avert disaster... in the end we will not do so. Surely we couldn't possibly continue to sit back and just allow it to happen.

But that is what is happening. It does look like we as humans will get our comeuppance in a 2-degree warmer world, the result of our self-centered inaction. And I agree that, while all those changes sounds uncertain, and different, and a little scary, they doesn't sound unmanageable. It's not terrifying. What IS terrifying is the trajectory of that warming. What nobody made a big deal about, in the discussion of whether we could keep temperatures from warming 2 degrees, was that as long as we do nothing, the warming will continue on the same steep trajectory indefinitely—from 2 degrees, to 3, to now nearly 4 degrees projected warming by the end of the century unless we dramatically change course. I didn't understand how huge these small numbers are until googling to find out that during the last ice age, the world was only about 4.5 degrees colder than today. If earth is such a fragile equilibrium that a few degrees colder meant mile-high glaciers over New England, I can't imagine it would be no big deal to go 3 or 4 degrees in the other direction.

We may not know exactly when disaster will come, but it is certain that the global temperature graph's terrifyingly steep rise does lead to certain disaster. And so, seeing no global action, I too am beginning to take action in my own life rather than trust that everything will work out in the end. Part of that is to join other CSA farmers in writing about this topic this week. More concretely, the farm has endorsed the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act as a business, and my farm-neighbors and I are working to get our Loudoun congressional representative to cosponsor it. The bill puts a fee on carbon at the source then gives the proceeds to households, letting market forces do the work of reducing carbon emissions. It's the best method, endorsed by thousands of economists. Those of you picking up shares in Jennifer Wexton's district will receive a postcard that I hope you will write a quick note on and drop in the mail to her. No matter how small our own personal carbon footprint it's going to take government action to get us out of this mess. Our voices, combined with the voices of CSA folks from other farmers, can be enough to make a real difference.

Sliding Scale Success

I'm experimenting with a sliding-scale pricing option this year, as you may remember from when you signed up for the CSA. As I described the situation on the website, “It's a reality that our country's food system maintains low prices through environmental degradation, worker exploitation, and government programs; that subsidy and regulation favor processed food designed to sell rather than to nourish; that access to fresh healthy food is difficult for those without the financial security and education to buy it; and that wealth is largely a product of the possibilities afforded by our parents' socioeconomic situation and our education―simply, of our access to opportunity.”

On one level, the sliding scale is simply a way for someone to elect to price the CSA slightly differently depending on their present income. But, at a deeper level, the purpose of the sliding scale is to create a way to engage with historical disadvantage.

For the past few weeks, since August 20th, I've been hearing a lot about 1619 in the news. On that date 400 years ago the first Africans were brought to America, where, for the next 250 years, black people were enslaved to build our economy, and then for another 100 years terrorized and legally kept from the opportunities to gain education and financial power. It's no surprise that this legacy has not been washed away in the 50 years since the climax of the Civil Rights movement. In my own schooling I remember learning about the Civil Rights era as past history, but it's really still present history to many. Fifty years of legal equality does not erase 350 years of social inequality, especially when most of our parents―our cultural and economic starting point―were born in a time when open discrimination was accepted and black people were kept from education, owning property, getting jobs, etc.

While I didn't make a big deal on the website about linking the sliding scale idea to our history of racial inequality (since I know not everyone holds the same narrative on this topic), it is clear to me that in America generational access to opportunity and financial power is in large part based on race.

This recent article in The Atlantic described how this familiar story played out for farming: from black land ownership, to white land ownership, to―in fact―corporate land ownership.

This is what I wrote on the CSA website: “Sliding Scale pricing allows people with financial resources to elect to pay more for their share in order to make the CSA available to people who have not had the opportunity to build financial security and thus, under our inequitable food system, are unable to access the healthy, well-grown food that CSA members enjoy.”

Since this was a trial―an experiment―I didn't know what to expect. I just wanted people to consider and decide for themselves. It turned out that about 45% of CSA folks decided to pay somewhat more than retail for their CSA. That was the simple part, it turned out. Since I knew there was little chance of anyone writing in requesting to pay on the lower end of the sliding scale (and indeed, nobody did), I figured I would work with a nonprofit to find the people who could make best use of the reduced-price shares. However―of course―social service organizations focus on the people in greatest need, not people who are doing okay but don't have the resources to prioritize spending on a CSA! Nevermind the fact that there are many barriers to CSA membership besides money, like the time and energy to prioritize cooking dinner, a kitchen to cook it in, and a stable schedule with transportation to pick up the share, to name a few.

I talked with my fellow farmer friends about how to bridge these barriers, about what to do with the reduced-price shares that I, in fact, had no audience for. We talked in the spring. We talked in the summer. We talked to friends of friends and eventually we put all the logistical pieces together and tried it out. And everything has been working smoothly. The money paid beyond retail price offset the CSA cost for 12 people in Southwest DC who, for the last few weeks, have been receiving CSA shares every Friday. All are extremely appreciative of the opportunity to cook with this food.

This was one of the bigger risks I took in designing the CSA this year so thank you, to all of my CSA folks, for engaging with these ideas and truly being Community Supported Agriculture members.

Idealism is perhaps the best answer

Yesterday Greta Thunberg arrived in New York City, via sailboat after a two-week trip here from Sweden. She's a 16-year-old activist known for organizing student strikes to protest inaction on climate change and in NY to attend the UN climate summit later next month. Although personally I'd only heard of her recently, she is somewhat well-known. Still, The Guardian's live updates about her arrival in the harbor and the subsequent press conference sure did surprise me. I don't think the news story was so much about the fact of her arrival, but the method of her arrival--by sailboat! That was the only way to traverse an ocean without burning fossil fuels.

Greta's boat trip is an example of change outside the current system, rather than within the confines of our current expectations. But her trip is merely an example of that change--a way to show the kind of bold thinking we'll need in order to get ourselves out of this mess. Despite the idealistic statement of her arrival, two sailors will fly here from Europe to bring the boat back east. It seems that even an idealistic teenager can't avoid the downstream effects of something so modern as a transatlantic commute to a meeting.

I can't help but compare all this to the ideals surrounding CSA. Whether it's supporting ecologically sane growing methods or reducing the carbon footprint of food transportation, many people join the CSA, at least in part, for environmental reasons. And, just like Greta made major changes to live out her values, some people join a CSA to make a small changes in their lives to live out their own values. In turn, people reasonably ask how I can make small changes to CSA bag packing to make it more in line with our environmental principles.

In particular, people ask about plastic. We DO use plastic bags. We use clamshells for cherry tomatoes. Isn't there a way around that?

With this in mind, last year I transitioned from using plastic bags to using the paper lunch sacks in the CSA bags, which seems to be working well. I can see why opening the blue bag to find a sea of plastic baggies would be a bit disappointing. (When I asked people to return the clamshells so they could be reused, none of them came back—! I gave up on that idea.) Using brown paper bags certainly feels like the environmental choice.

But then I really looked into it... and guess what? The jury is out on whether single-use paper bags are better than plastic bags that get recycled. Or even whether using and recycling paper bags is better than using and recycling plastic bags. Paper itself is renewable, of course, but the processing is much more intense. (Interestingly, nobody's ever suggested I use more plastic bags, even though they are much more reusable at home and more recyclable too.)

Similarly, it feels ecologically sound for food travel only a few dozen miles from farm to plate compared to across the country, but my back-of-the-envelope math indicates that a full tractor trailer uses the same amount of fuel to move a vegetable across the country as my inefficient, partially-full delivery van uses to drive a vegetable around DC. People tend to think more about the fuel used in tractors, but the overwhelming majority of fossil fuel used by the farm is used to drive the food to the CSA pickup site.

We all try to live by our own values and want to feel like we’re helping to push the world in the direction we wish to see it move. Unfortunately, the reality is that while these incremental changes (paper bags vs plastic bags, driving shorter distances or longer distances, etc) are all better than the alternative, they are all fairly ineffective in the big picture.

As I see it, the real issue here is that there are no good alternatives with the way our world is set up. We can do what we can to change the inputs to the system, but the modern society we've developed is not a regenerative, balanced system. Since it's our consumptive, non-regenerative system that got us into this climate disaster in the first place, there probably isn't any solution to it that involves substituting one input for another while keeping the same system intact. If only it were so simple!

Greta Thunberg has been an accidental environmental activist for a year now, the face of the next generation of climate activism. She says, “In a way, I am more optimistic, because people are slowly waking up and people are becoming more aware of the situation. But also ... one year has passed and still almost nothing has happened.” And so, what to do? The best we can do may be to live our ideals as thoroughly as possible while not losing sight of the ways our own actions fall short of creating the change we wish to see. Even if that means throwing convention out the window and traveling by sailboat.

Farm Shark Tank

Have you ever thought about how ridiculous a business idea the local CSA farm is? Generally commercial farmers have always focused on growing large volumes of shippable commodities for the essentially limitless regional or national market. Which is to say, they focus on what grows the best at their particular location at any particular time of year. Why would a farmer choose to grow a crop that grew less well than some other crop, or to plant something at a time of year when it clearly might have trouble?

I mean, if I went to a bunch of average farmers and pitched the business plan of "grow a big variety of crops for six months out of the year, and have them all look good," they would think that's nuts! The farmer from the Northeast would say, "Why plant brassicas with such hot weather down there, when you could focus on peppers and eggplant?" The farmer from the south would say, "If you want early tomatoes, why don't you just buy them from us instead of trying so hard with your hoophouses and rowcover?" And someone else would remark that cucumbers grow great in Virginia but why are you trying to plant them past June--it's too hot! The big organic grower Lady Moon Farms (you've seen their stuff in the supermarket) even has land in three different regions--Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida--so they can maintain a greater variety of produce all grown at the optimal time and location.

And here we are deliberately putting ourselves on the hook for pushing out 6 different vegetables every Friday for 6 months out of the year, week in and week out. We keep high standards, given the constraints we're working with, but in a very real way we are competing with perfect-looking grocery store vegetables since the "global marketplace" can provide any vegetable 52 weeks out of the year, all grown in ideal conditions somewhere in the world. That's what most people are used to in their lives.

But, unlike those commercial farmers, we are constantly pushing the envelope--trying to get a crop to come in earlier or extend the season later--in order to have enough variety at every time of year. We pitch "eating seasonally," but what does that mean when farmers push the boundaries of the ideal vegetable season? I suppose what we really mean is not to eat seasonally, but in fact to eat locally--to eat the food that is produced nearby, rather than produced around the world. (If you think about it, everything in the grocery store is seasonal--it's all in peak season somewhere!)

The real answer for those skeptical farmers is that no, this business makes no sense at all from a production standpoint. But it's how I learned to farm and what I've practiced doing, not because it is a simple idea but because it is an endlessly fascinating and confounding one. What ties it together and makes it successful are the local eaters (that's you) who are drawn to the idea of getting the bulk of their vegetables from a single farm for most of the year. As a production farm, there is no WAY we could make it, even competing on just the regional scale. On a local scale though, given the sort of vegetables we can turn out, it seems like there are enough people who appreciate what we do for this to be quite a good idea after all.

American Stock Characters: The Farmer

Recently one of the local farmers market organizations sent out some publicity that caught my eye. It was a pitch for farmers markets, encouraging people to attend in order to “learn where your food comes from.” I found this interesting, because the very idea that touring a farmers market would teach us something about the origin of the food we eat is connected to the prominence of the “small family farm” in our cultural memory that I wrote about this last week.

As much as we'd like to believe the ideal, our food does not come straight off the iconic “Fisher-Price Farm.” Its red barn and silo represent the cultural symbol of a farm--a stock character alongside “The Cowboy” and “The Pioneer” (and perhaps “The Founding Fathers”), but the reality of these memories has always been more complex than our American narrative allows. The Fisher-Price Farm was originally released in 1968, just three years before Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz's exhortation to “get big or get out” brought us into the modern age of industrial farming. Would Jefferson be proud that the small-scale land holder is what comes to mind as the mainstay of American agriculture? Or would Jefferson be proud that American farms today are in many ways more similar to his operation at Monticello than to the small-scale farmer setting up at the local market?

If you are a regular grocery store shopper, as most of us are, you may notice the largest of the farmers-market farms showing up in the “Local” display at Giant, or an artisan product finding its way onto the top shelf at Whole Foods. But the farms at a farmers market are simply not the farms that supply our grocery store shelves. The general-audience food that Americans eat is produced on a national, industrial scale not a local farmers-market scale. And industrial agriculture has little in common with the sort of farm you might learn about at a farmers market or by reading these CSA emails.

When you join a farm-based CSA, (like you have), you have a close connection to where the food in your bags comes from, not a simple window into mainstream food production. Connecting with a local food system for your vegetables is inherently different, separate from our national food system. And so, to edit that farmers market pitch, I'd say, "Join a CSA so you CAN know where your food comes from." That possibility of unbroken connection to the source is perhaps the biggest difference here.

A Jeffersonian Fourth of July (maybe?)

If tomatoes mean summer agriculturally, certainly the Fourth of July means summer for us culturally. As a topical nod to farming and patriotism, check out this article, Why the founding farmers wanted Americans to be farmers, which ties together a number of themes we think about around the CSA. It is an accessible read that builds the narrative of how food production became a key determinant of American independence, with seeds serving as the organic capsules containing the roots of liberty. Seeds represented autonomy and independence. 

"...Farming represented a means of both procedural and distributive justice. The right to own property and the opportunity to work the land protected Americans from “the arbitrary will of another” and offered the privilege of receiving the benefit of one’s own labor directly. This sort of self-reliance and self sufficiency—at first a rallying cry against British colonialism—would become the underlying principle of our economic system today..."

This sort of small-scale family farming is still rooted in our cultural consciousness (as the marketing department of corporate food production well knows), and is at the core of our American story. As you may remember from grade school—or from Hamilton—Jefferson was a proponent of this agrarian vision, where agricultural production and land ownership forms the basis of a free country and, in fact, the basis of democracy itself.

But however universal those ideals, in practice Jefferson's agrarianism was based on the labor of people enslaved and sold to power those idealistically-American agricultural enterprises. And voting itself, the fundamental activity of democracy, was for the first 80 years of our nation restricted to white property-owning men. Our nation's agricultural origin story does not mean the same thing to all Americans. In a way, my farm is the sort of small farm Jefferson had in mind, and we could use the Fourth of July to consider how being part of a small-scale CSA enterprise strengthens the fabric of democracy, returning us to the Founders' ideals. On the other hand, we could remember that the large-scale players—for example, the Jeffersons and the Washingtons, and now corporate agribusiness—have always been the ones in power. I'd say that by supporting a small-scale farm, and its regenerative rather than extractive growing practices, and the person-to-person economic and social fabric that local business creates, you are supporting the independence of the people. As the grand finale of the neighboring town's fireworks shines through my window, I wish you a happy Independence Day

Election Day

“Eating is a political act.”

--Food journalist Michael Pollan, inspired by agrarian writer Wendell Berry

Why are you here in this CSA: what values drive your participation in this sort of agricultural, environmental, and social enterprise? Here are some common reasons people join CSAs:

For environmental or ecological reasons:you value caring for the natural world that we rely on

“Know your farmer,” the personal connection to your food:you value integrity and honesty in what you eat

For your and your family's health:you value access to what you need to lead a healthy life

To boost local small business:you value supporting the livelihoods of proprietors and employees of “main street” businesses

Eating rarely feels political, but whether you are here to make change in the world or just to buy some good food, it is very much a political act in that your choices drive social, economic, and regulatory change in the directions you care about.

You likely joined a CSA because of some of these values, and these values are front and center in our political world as well. If they are important to you when deciding what to feed yourself and your family, please consider these values when you cast your vote on Tuesday.

The adventure of farming, and, Why do we do this, anyway?

This time of year on the farm is always a combination of slowing and hustle. The days are shorter, the workers and crops growing fewer, but there is still much to be done to be ready for winter. Most of these winter-prep tasks have no particular deadline, but this season's weather constraints have persisted to the bitter end resulting in a worklist that has felt more like July than October. Which is to say, the last couple days have felt like quintessential farming days to me: a weather-imposed deadline for critical planting, resulting in a complex sequence of fieldwork and tractor work, which necessarily involves mechanical breakdown, all while managing the workflow so that essential picking doesn't fall through the cracks. Which is to say: exciting, challenging, rewarding. This time of year it isn't a cash crop we're rushing to plant, but a covercrop (in this case rye, which maintains and improves the soil over winter, before being tilled under in spring), since Friday's rain will close the window of opportunity for tractor work for a long time. Over the last two days we dismantled and tilled up quite literally half the farm, ready to seed with rye.

We prepared the long-dead cucumber and squash field, taking up the hoops that supported the fabric rowcover and pulling up the drip tape that irrigated the rows all season – a tool and tractor borrowed from a neighbor helped get it out of the firm ground. Then it was time to mow, but a few minutes to being finished with the field, I heard a disconcerting clunk and looked back to find that the shaft connecting the mower to the tractor had sheared off and broken free. Fortunately, neighbors will step in in a pinch, so I went to borrow their tractor to finish up. They were also preparing to seed covercrop, completing the same tractor sequence as me. I turned their tractor on, and it immediately ran out of fuel and died. We were surprised but filled it with fuel, I drove off, and stopping to open the gate noticed that fuel was now streaming out of the tank (from the bottom, where the drain plug should be). Well that explains why it was out of fuel! After running to find a n empty jug, calling the neighbor to help, getting buckets set up and settling in to let the 20 gallons of fuel drain right out again, I went to hook up my big disc to be ready for the next days' tillage. There's always a bit of unexpected setup and repair to do on such rarely-used equipment; this time a tire had gone flat and needed to be re-seated on the rim and a couple critical bolts needed to have the threads cleaned up with the tap&die set. I so enjoy the flurry of work that these sequences require, and the diversity of skills I get to employ – experimentation, problem-solving, equipment operation, and creative repairs to get the job done.

Today, luckily, everything went according to plan with the fieldwork. I drove the disc over half the farm, and over the one neighbor's field, and then the other neighbor's, since I have the big equipment for the tillage job and today is the right time to use it before rain. All the while the two workers were picking for CSA – but it took quite a bit longer than expected, because this season's weather and resulting lack of vegetables has forced us to rely on a couple terribly time consuming items this week. We finished the day by lifting the last two rows of potatoes with the tractor and potato digger, since waiting until after the rain would mean having to dig them out by hand.

Meeting the challenge of shifting weather, labor, and equipment logistics is always difficult, though it really is something I enjoy about this business: “Can we get this done? Let's find out!” In the end, the covercrop project will be a success, turning half the farm from crops to open ground seeded in rye, ready for the rain. However I'll have to do the seeding Friday morning, which means that I won't get the CSA packed in time, and hence the note about being late to deliver this week. In the midst of all this we did get the vegetables picked, which certainly feels like its own kind of success. I'm sorry to be off on the timing, and wanted to give you a little window here into what we're up to at the farm, so you can understand something of what's behind all those vegetables that appear in the blue bag. It doesn't always go according to plan, but farming always seems to offer an endless supply of challenges to meet and problems to solve, making it an endlessly rewarding livelihood.

We're all in the same boat, it turns out

In the last couple weeks we farmers have been talking. At times we each can feel alone on our own farms, lamenting our own personal vegetable failures and wondering why it is us who have such uniquely poor fortune. But the reality is that the weather has affected all farms equally and we're all in the same boat.

One neighbor, who usually buys in vegetables from many other farmers (including me!) to supplement their CSA, has been forced for the first time to rely solely on their own vegetables–their usual sources have nothing extra to part with.

I called a friend up the road to check in with her farm, and to see if she might have anything to sell extra later on in case I needed it; she reported, “Nope, we don't have anything here either–except a boatload of winter squash, for some reason.”

I hear tell of another farm, who was forced by lack of vegetables to give a pepper and a cucumber to some of their smaller shares, that's it. Somewhat extreme, perhaps, but an indication of the dire straights some of us were in.

It's the same story even as far away as New England. I took a trip up that way over the weekend and happened to meet another farmer, and you can probably guess what we discussed. I asked him, in the way that farmers make small talk, how the weather had been for him up there. “Oh, terrible, the worst season we've had in 20 years,” was his reply. I told him that yeah, we were doing all right most of the season--spinach even came up well in the summer, a great stand of spinach but then it rained for two weeks with the hurricane and most of it evaporated. “Same here,” he says, “Same here.” Two universal farmer complaints: weather and spinach.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Wow, well, have I mentioned the rain recently? We do our best to fend off its effects, but, as in a chess game, the weather makes moves to improve its overall position and eventually gain the upper hand. We made our own strategies for fieldwork, timing the tillage and planting to take advantage of the brief dry periods, not trusting the forecast to stay clear for any longer than necessary, and kept picking every last vegetable out of the field until long after the wet and damp had taken its toll on the plants. And, despite the early disappearance of summer vegetables and the delayed onset of fall greens, we still manage to squeak by, holding out for the relief that fall storage crops will be bringing next month.

It's almost comical--I mean, it IS comical, in the way that people smile in wonder at astonishing events--the way we think we're doing everything right and staying ahead of the weather, but then the weather takes it to the next level. For example, we have deluges every year, and wet periods are nothing new. We know what to expect and how to handle this. And, though the soil may stay frustratingly wet for too long, the days themselves return to the normal weather pattern. This is the first year I've seen where the big rains are followed by long periods (weeks!) of foggy, cool, cloudy, drizzly days where not only the ground but the air itself is saturated. This has had novel affects on plant growth--not the least of which is the salad mix, which actually got unusually tall and leggy from so little sunlight. The lack of sunlight may also have had something to do with how the peppers have given up ripening (just a hunch!), and so you have green peppers this week instead of red.

While the weather has certainly affected the plants on the farm, and thus the mix of vegetables you see each week, this is the first time out of all the flooded, rainy weeks this year that it has had a direct, physical, effect on what you're seeing in the bag. I had planned for potatoes this week, relying evidently too much on the weather forecast saying rain Monday and clear the rest of the week. Instead, it was calm Monday and rainy the rest of the week, leaving the potatoes locked underground in the mud for the time being. So, instead, you have green tomatoes (admittedly not an equal trade but they ARE great breaded and fried). On the other hand, it would usually be too early in the season for carrots this size–in general they are still too small to pick–but since the ground was so wet it was possible to select the individual, large outlier carrots and pull them out by their tops, yielding enough bunches of full-size carrots for everybody in a week where it would otherwise be too early to see such carrots. (By the way, do take the tops off the carrots if you're not eating the carrots right away; the tops suck moisture out of the carrot roots.)

The next week is looking beautiful though, with no rain in sight--apparently the first time in quite a while where we've had 5 days in a row without rain. I'd believe it!

Florence, or, the rain

The hurricane was every farmer's focus of conversation this past week. It's hard to remember now, but a few days ago Florence was a huge concern. How to prepare, how to plan, and how to conceive of yet more rain on already-saturated fields. Do we rush to harvest crops that might be blown to bits by the big event? Will fields be washed away, plants too waterlogged to grow? Should we dismantle hoophouses, lest they be destroyed by tropical storm winds?

All those decisions were relatively minor and could be made later compared to the biggest decision: What to do about Friday CSA delivery? I couldn't quite ask you all to pick up your shares during the very afternoon a hurricane arrives. So I figured we could move the delivery a full day earlier this week, though that would require some advance planning–plans that needed to be made, really, before the forecast firmed up. I was ready to make that decision Tuesday night, and then the forecast started to shift in our favor. Wednesday morning, it was looking even less dire, and I thought we might deliver the CSA half a day early but again delayed deciding. And then, in the end, the hurricane kept moving south and the early delivery plan kept moving later until we were right back to the normal Friday schedule, no hurricane in sight. We might have some significant rain and wind next week, but most likely in amounts we can cope with, and not on the CSA day. We are feeling pretty lucky.

The big surprise then, is that last weekend's unexpected 5 inches of rain is the big rain story of the week. We have already received our full year's worth of rainfall plus some, and it's only September. There was a time when 5 inches of rain was an incredible amount, but no longer. This climactic shift is indicated more by how unremarkable these rains have become than by how high the rainfall total continues to climb. Remember the two weeks of saturated ground in May, just as the summer crops were going in the ground? And the two weeks, again, of ridiculous rain in late July just as the summer crops were hitting their peak? And now we have two weeks of tropical storm rain and then hurricane rain, which is putting a decisive end to those summer crops and delaying the fall crops as they sit languishing in saturated soil under the clouds and fog.

Let's just note, for the record, that this is quite unusual. Although I've been pleased by how well we navigated the crazy weather patterns this season and still managed to get all the crops in the ground, we're starting to see the real effects now. You'll notice, for example, the comically tiny amount of tomatoes, a vegetable you will likely not see again this season. Every single zucchini, cucumber, and eggplant we picked this week went into the CSA bags.

Although in most years the shift from summer to fall vegetables is more a product of the arrival of fall crops rather than the disappearance of summer crops, we have definitively made that transition this week, and all of a sudden. Expect to see much more fall-like bags from here on out. I hope you're ready, because we sure are!

Why I am NOT certified Organic.

What do you think when you see this label ?

• Food grown by hippie farmers?
• Products certified to be grown using environmentally sound growing methods?
• Food from farms that follow a USDA regulatory regime certifying that they only use products from an approved list--a list which is drawn up by the Organic Standards Board to exclude non-biological substances no matter the ecological (or, the logical) reason?

Of course, if you've read about my growing and selling practices, you know I think it's the latter.

I recently received an email that so clearly demonstrates the thinking of USDA ORGANIC that I wanted to share it with you. We use paper pots to transplant some crops, and various small-farm groups are petitioning to get these paper pots approved for use on Organic farms. You might think this would be a slam dunk, especially since the use of paper is already allowed under Organic rules. But can paper be allowed...as a pot? Recycled paper is currently okay, but what about the use of...non-recycled paper?

Here's the email I received from someone working to to get paper pots approved (edited for length and clarity):

“Over the course of many phone calls and meetings, I have learned that while the initial concern regarding the paper chain pots was the resins used, a fundamental issue is that the use of paper as a paper pot is not part of the Organic rule. The Organic rule currently only addresses the use of paper as a mulch or as an ingredient in compost. So, before ANY paper pot product can be approved, the Organic rule needs to be amended to allow the use of paper as a paper pot.

The petition being submitted requests that the Organic Standards Board approve the use of non-recycled paper for use in paper transplant pots. Currently, the allowance of paper is restricted to “newsprint and other recycled paper.” It is the contention of those submitting the petition that non-recycled paper should also be allowed. Not surprisingly, a large number of additives, resins, glues, inks, and other materials are commonly found in paper. Given that “recycled paper” comes from “non-recycled paper” the petition argues that paper-use on organic farms should not be restricted to only recycled paper.”

Government regulation in general serves a critical purpose in protecting things that our country values, but which businesses value less than profit. The Organic regulation serves a critical purpose in providing a financial reason for agribusiness to use less-destructive methods. In the past I have seriously considered going for Organic Certification, but I know that I wouldn't be able to put up with this kind of ridiculousness when my reason for certifying would be to communicate to customers that my farm uses non-exploitative, environmentally-sane farming practices. Unlike big business, I can talk to my customers directly, rather than communicating through the regulatory label. When you buy from big business, I do hope you look for the Organic label. But when you buy from local farmers like me, I hope you will just talk with them about what you care about, rather than finding meaning in the Organic regulatory label–a label riddled with exceptions favoring the practices of the large agribusinesses who have more “money,” ie, “speech,” a label whose meaning is being eroded by the agribusiness reps who sit on the Organic Standards Board hoping to someday permit even GMOs under Organic.

The more ubiquitous Organic products become in national supermarkets, the more customers look for that label in their local farmers market and other small-business settings. And when this increasing customer demand for the Organic label drives local direct-marketing farmers to certify under a program guided by and most appropriate for big business, agribusiness has won. This is why I am not certified Organic, and why I encourage you not to care about such labeling when buying food from people like me.

Trust your farmer, not the label.