Food safety silliness in Chicago

Anyone still wondering why we're so virulently opposed to the new crackdowns on food safety, especially as it applies to small farms and local foods, should read this piece from the Chicago Tribune. Even when someone follows all the rules and tries to be an honest businessperson, the government can just arbitrarily decide to wipe them out. Seriously, read the article, and keep in mind that the new food safety legislation specifically gives Federal agents the right to inspect any farm, any time, any where, and declare its products "adulterated" or otherwise problematic and order them destroyed with no right of appeal. Just wait until this starts happening to small farms.

Cornmeal at Lee School

Our local chapter of Slow Food does a lot of neat things, especially their partnership with Lee Elementary School in Columbia. Along with arranging farm field trips and building garden beds with the school, they arrange monthly sessions between farmers and urban kids:

Our “harvest-of-the-month” sessions have introduced the children to a locally raised or crafted food each month. Not only do these sessions enlighten and delight the children, but they strengthen the connection between local farmers and the community. Slow Food Katy Trail pays local farmers to bring their tomatoes, sweet potatoes, popcorn, honey, eggs, wheat, cheese and so forth to the school every month. The farmers discuss life on the farm with the children and how they grow or produce their products. The children study the various foods in different areas of the curricula such as history, art and science.

Last Friday, it was our turn to take part at Slow Food's invitation. This wasn't the first time we had worked with the group (we hosted an on-farm dinner last fall) but it was our first time taking part in the Lee School program. It can be hard coordinating farms and schools, as their schedules are so opposed. The peak of most farm activity, at least with relation to fruits and vegetables, is when schools are out. So we all agreed that featuring our heirloom dent corn and cornbread would be something new for the kids, and easily done in the middle of winter.

We had two 40-minute sessions with two classes, and divided the time between ourselves and several Slow Food volunteers. One class spent a period talking with us about how we manage the farm and the fascinating biology of corn and its pests. Meanwhile, the other class worked with volunteers and teachers to make fresh cornbread from our recipe, baking and eating it in one session. Then we switched, and did it again.

It sounds like the baking went great, and the kids certainly liked their cornbread. Meanwhile, we had a blast showing photos and fielding lots of questions from inquisitive 3rd graders. We made the "mistake" of including a photo of a raccoon, to prompt discussion of how we manage pests and other things that like to eat corn, and the kids just latched onto the coon problem. Every few minutes through the rest of the time, another hand would pop up with a new suggestion for how to handle the coons and keep them out of the corn. It was the kind of basic problem-solving that's really good for kids to engage in.

Overall, we covered how we prepare the soil, plant the corn, protect it from weeds and predators, how it's pollinated, and how we harvest and use it. Many of the kids had never seen or heard of corn other than sweet corn or popcorn, and were dazzled by the array of colors, sizes, and shapes we brought to show. My favorite quote, after we displayed some ears of popcorn: "Wow, I never thought to look in the bag before it popped!". Many got a chance to turn the hand-grinder, and they all saw how corn goes from a kernel to a plant back to a kernel and then directly into food. We had some good discussions about topics like using manure to fertilize plants ("But doesn't that mean that when you're eating corn, you're, like, eating poop?") and how plants need and use different resources than people.

These are the kinds of connections we all need to make with our food and its sources, and I think everyone involved had a great and worthwhile time. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall of all the homes that night, to hear what the kids told their parents that night. All in all, a great and worthwhile time. We're grateful to Slow Food Katy Trail for arranging programs like this, and for all the people who take part in their fundraisers like the Sycamore Whole Hog Dinner to make these programs possible and to be able to pay farmers for their products. We're looking forward to our next chance to do this.

Toyota question

We have a Toyota truck, which we use for most farm & marketing work. It's covered under the massive recall recently issued for unwanted acceleration, or "sticky gas pedals". I read today in the Washington Post that Federal Regulators are questioning whether the problem is in the engine electronics instead, meaning the gas pedal fixes won't do anything.

This whole saga raises a question in my mind which I have not seen addressed in any article. In the situation in which a vehicle's gas pedal sticks, or seems to stick, why can't the driver simply shift into neutral, thus mechanically negating anything the engine is trying to do? My truck is a standard, which I've driven all my adult life. My instant reaction on an engine revving out of control would be to mash down on the clutch and let it do so, then shift into neutral.

I'm not as used to automatics; in fact when I do drive them I've caught myself nearly grabbing the shift column mid-drive. They have a neutral gear, but can you shift into it while driving? It would seem to me that you could, even if it's counter-intuitive. Obviously this doesn't help the actual problem, and wouldn't help in short-span situations like the woman quoted in the WaPo article who claims her car accelerated into a tree from a parking-lot stop with no time to react. But I'm haunted by the story of the California cop and his family who drove ever-faster for eight miles with a runaway gas pedal, having time to call 911; is there an automotive reason they couldn't have force-shifted into neutral?

Anyone know the answer? If that would work, why isn't it all over the news as the most practical immediate advice to people in situations where that would at least help prevent death or serious injury though an accident may be inevitable?

Seed order diversity

Note: I initially used the wrong chart in this post; anyone reading before 8am Monday saw a distribution by cost, not quantity.

Diversity on a farm can be measured in many ways. Particularly on market farms that like to grow heirloom varieties, the word is often taken to mean a wide selection of varieties, such as our 10+ kinds of garlic. This kind of diversity is primarily culinary and economic, allowing cooks to explore and use just the right kind of item, and farmers to reach niche markets. For example, customers can choose among our garlics to get varieties better suited for roasting, using raw, or making spicy food, a selection not possible at a grocery store. By exploring this kind of diversity, we can reach niche ethnic markets like the Russian customers who love to buy our big, black, hot radishes although no one else does, and thus improve our business.

However, it's important not to confuse culinary diversity with biological diversity, as many customers and even farmers do. A stand offering, say, 30 kinds of tomatoes, 20 kinds of peppers, and 10 kinds of potatoes is culinarily diverse and thoroughly attractive, but all three of those items belong to the same biological family, Solanaceae. This means they are susceptible to the same pests, draw similar nutrients from the soil, and are otherwise comparable in the farm's ecosystem. For organic and sustainable growers, who (should) rely on crop rotation to help break pest cycles and keep their soil & plants healthier, it's very important not to rely too heavily on any one biological family. Farms who don't pay close enough attention to these relationships may wonder why they have so many pest problems year after year despite how "diverse" their stands may look.

Managing this diversity, and an effective crop rotation, is one of the key aspects to developing our planting plants and seed order every year. The chart below presents a breakdown of our 2010 seed order by biological family:

The total varieties represented here number 181, not including other varieties for which we save seed ourselves or which are perrenial (coming back every year, like rhubarb).

We make a point of keeping these ratios balanced, even where a specific variety or family might be lucrative if we did more of it. There are three reasons for this: first, it reduces our need for pest control and soil management, a hidden benefit which is hard to quantify but is very important for true organic management. Second, it is not safe to assume that an item which is lucrative at one scale will remain lucrative at another. Making a good profit on 1,000 heads of garlic doesn't mean we'll make the same on 3,000, and we're better off balancing a known quantity with something else. Third, maintaining this true diversity is a basic form of insurance. If we overplant just a few families (such as the ever-popular Solanaceae), we're deeply reliant on proper weather and growing conditions for those families. A farm of mostly tomatoes and peppers will be wiped out by a bad year, though it may do better than us in a perfect year. We feel that maintaining a rational, conservative balance is better than a binge-or-bust farm plan.

Often, biological families are not intuitive. Tomatoes and potatoes do not, on the surface, seem to have anything in common. But nature works by very different rules than the visual spectrum, and a good gardener or farmer pays attention to how the world actually works. Growers who don't consider this properly can end up having more pest problems than necessary, and feeling the need to correct this with methods they shouldn't have to use. So the next time you're planning a garden, or browsing a farm stand, take a moment to consider all the different ways diversity can be measured and considered.

Fresh direct-market citrus

Citrus is a natural winter-seasonal treat for many folks. Growing up, my family got big boxes shipped directly from Florida through our church, and the oranges and grapefruits were always so much better than what we could get in the store. I'd fallen out of the habit of thinking about this option, until this winter when we started talking about researching direct-market citrus growers from whom we could order directly, getting better products and letting the grower keep more of the profit.

Coincidentally, I received a promotional email from Localharvest promoting various member growers and their winter specials. I can't remember the last time I acted on a promotional email, but after some quick research we decided this was just what we were looking for. We ordered a full bushel mix of Honeybell oranges and Ruby Red Grapefruit. I don't even know what citrus goes for in a store, as we almost never buy it, but the price (including shipping) worked out to about a dollar a fruit. This seemed reasonable to us to support a more sustainable grower (by their claims) than store fruit was likely to be, assuming the fruit was actually good.

The order went in just before the big, damaging freeze down in Florida, so we figured it would be a while before it came through as all the growers were scrambling to harvest or protect their crops. The box finally did come, delivered right to our door, packed with oranges and grapefruits.

And oh...my...are these good. The oranges are thin-skinned, seedy, and rather messy to eat by hand, but wonderfully juicy and sweet. They'd be great juiced, though so far we haven't bothered as they're good enough out-of-hand. The grapefruit are just amazing. The best grapefruit I can remember eating, a perfect balance of sweet and sour. These were well worth the price, and it's nice to know that the money went almost all to the grower, rather than being diluted through a long chain of middlemen. Scurvy, begone.

A visit to Stoney Acres sheep dairy

On the way home from a recent quick trip to visit Joanna's parents in Arkansas, we fulfilled a long-time wish by arranging to visit Stoney Acres sheep dairy. Founded 13 years ago deep in the Missouri Ozarks, it was the first sheep dairy in the state, blazing a number of trails for small direct-market dairies to follow.

image linked from Stoney Acres website

Rick was pleased to have visitors and spent over an hour showing us around and answering questions. Their operation is simple and efficient; milking around 50 ewes who are kept on rotated pasture. The photo above shows their entire dairy infrastructure; the gambrel-roofed left side of the barn houses a small milking parlor that holds six ewes at a time, while the simple right side houses their cheese room, aging coolers, washing stations, and sales table.

It was fascinating to see a truly compact and efficient setup like this in which they have found many effective, legal shortcuts and cost-saving measures to keep things simple. They milk into metal cans, but freeze the milk so they don't need a bulk tank (thus saving expense and cleaning needs). Both goat and sheep milk freeze well, and can be used after thawing for cheese-making. Their cheese-making area is a single stainless-steel table with associated sink, on which they make a few wheels of small-batch cheeses at a time. All the cheese is aged raw-milk, saving the need for a pasteurizer (another source of expense and cleaning needs). A restaurant-style steel cooler ages and stores the raw cheese, which by FDA rules is legal to sell after 60 days. On the other side of the room, a simple water heater and sink take care of sanitary needs. And that's all they need.

Rick gave us a history of the dairy, which includes lots of conversations with the state dairy authorities to educate and convince them of his methods. This was the first sheep dairy in the state, and required some work to even be approved. Practices like freezing the milk needed work, too, as no one here had heard of that despite it being common practice elsewhere. Regardless, it was his opinion that the authorities had been and were pleasant to work with, and he didn't find the regulations, testing, or other requirements particularly onerous.

He did have some funny/disturbing stories to tell about Federal authorities, including the Homeland Security folks who showed up and insisted on taking 200lb of cheese for contamination testing (apparently worried about bioterrorism). When he protested that this was more than his entire stock on hand, they eventually agreed to only take 75lb. Even though they paid for the cheese, this still wiped out his inventory and kept him from making sales and deliveries for a while. I don't think he ever got an answer from their tests.

Another interesting and useful aspect of the visit related to their pastures. When the dairy was first established, much of the land now in pasture was abandoned and grown up in cedars (an extremely familiar concept to us). As we're doing now, he simply got to work clearing the cedars, cutting the stumps off at the ground, and letting the remnant seed bank take over. Now, over a decade later, he has wide-ranging, beautiful pastures of mixed grasses. It was a great look into the future for us, as this is exactly what we're working to achieve here.

We picked his brain about all sorts of sheep-dairy-related points, as this is something we very much want to expand into someday. There are many cheeses that can only be made authentically with sheep's milk, including some like feta that need to be mixed with other milk (like goat, in feta's case). We want to keep both sheep and goats down the road, having started with goats primarily because we had a friendly nearby goat dairy to learn from. If we'd settled near Stoney Acres, we'd have gone the other direction. As it was, we had to resist the urge to buy a few sheep he had for sale and stuff them into the trunk for the ride home.

As regards the cheese, he didn't have much stock left as they were in the process of lambing and hadn't made cheese for a while. However, we were able to sample small amounts of feta, gouda, lambert (a mild aged cheese, their base standard), and something called nibblers, which was lambert seasoned with some form of purchased garlic/Italian dressing. The nibblers weren't our style, but we liked the basic lambert a lot. Rick noted that they had started out making sharper and stronger cheeses, but no one in their area liked or bought them, so they transitioned to milder cheeses (nibblers are their best seller). Today they sell in stores from Arkansas and southern Missouri, direct off the farm, and online.

This was a fascinating, educational, and entertaining visit. They're off the beaten path, but are very happy to host visitors any time of year. Anyone passing through their area (Competition, MO, southeast of Lebanon) would do well to arrange a tour and buy some cheese. Rick is very friendly, loves to talk and tell stories, and seems to relish company on his otherwise fairly isolated farm. Our deep thanks for his hospitality and willingness to share ideas and experiences.

Developing our seed order

Our annual seed order is always a long and complicated task, as we attempt to balance a wide variety of factors and plans. Considerations include short- and long-term crop rotations, market plans and demands, efficient use of growing space, compatibility of varieties (either interplanted or in succession), up-front cost & expected profits, labor demands and timing, input/resource needs, cover-cropping plans, and so on.

There are also many variables with the order itself, including balancing cost & reliability from various suppliers, availability of varieties overall, availability as certified organic seed, shipping costs, efficiency of ordering, and so on.

Preparing the seed order is a major step in the development of the farm plan for 2010. We set ourselves a deadline of January 15 for this, to ensure that it wasn't put off, and to help ensure availability of varieties that can be in short supply. The growth in small farms, and gardening, has been outstripping the existing network of seed growers in the past few years, and shortages are an increasing reality. This is especially true for certified organic seed and heirloom seed, our two primary foci. Indeed, by NOP regulations, we have to use certified seed unless we can document that the desired variety cannot be found certified. Establishing this documentation takes a fair amount of time for a farm that grows hundreds of varieties and a high percentage of heirlooms.

The process gets more complex every year as the farm grows, especially this year as we're expanding our growing space nearly 3x. Joanna is the primary seed-planner, and she has spent many, many hours surrounded by seed catalogs, reference books, and scrap paper. We find it easier for one person to do most of the planning with consultation of the other as needed; it's more efficient and minimizes conflicts. So I work on my own projects while being available for questions and discussions, while also taking on certain subsets of the order (such as cover crops & animal feeds).

When we're nearly finished, we sit down together in front of the computer and go through everything, revisiting the various factors going into each choice and confirming amounts and sources. Then it's time to submit each order to the various seed companies, some of which have excellent online interfaces while others are brutally obnoxious (this, too, affects our purchasing plans). And, of course, we always find that someone is already out of something, and have to scramble repeatedly to find another acceptable source or alter our plans.

We hit our deadline exactly this year, sending in the last order by the end of the day, January 15. Of course, we're not truly done, because there will be a few more small orders later in the year to take care of changes or forgotten items, or to get items that aren't available until other seasons. But fundamentally the wheels are in motion for 2010, and we're already preparing to start the first onions indoors within a few weeks.