Shop Your Local Farmers First!

I have a wheelbarrow of cucumbers waiting to become pickles. I have about 30 lbs of sweet, fuzzy, drippy, baseball-sized peaches sitting on top of the cucumbers. A friend loaded me up with about 10 garlic heads yesterday, the chard is, unbelievably, still producing in the sweltering July-ness of Texas. Plus, the grasshoppers have descended heavy enough to make us guard for the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse.

No wonder I haven't blogged.

Summer is in full swing here and I am going to bang the drum once again for local farmers.

A study just released by Virginia Tech found that if each household in the State of Virginia spent just $10 per week on local food - squash, milk, pork, fruit or whatever, it would add $1.65 billion - that's billion with a B - to the State's economy. Holy smokes - how many jobs would that create?

If that doesn't convice you to stop by your local Farmer's Market this week with a ten in hand, here's a story:

Across the street from the Kirk Ranch is a roughly 25-acre field farmed by some friends of ours - a couple in their 70's, named Charles and Carolyn. For decades, the two of them have grown squash and cukes on this land, harvested, sorted and driven this totally fresh, never refrigerated produce to the Dallas Farmers Market. Since 1941 DFM has sold local, wholesale produce in South Dallas. The farmers market, as a trend, has clearly taken off, with the number of markets more than doubling in the US in the last 10 years, but for DFM it's not a trend - it's old hat!

The chefs show up at dawn every day in the summer and buy their produce direct from the farmer - it is an elegant win-win situation for hardworking chefs and farmers both. Charles and Carolyn have been taking their produce there for DECADES. This requires them to get up in the middle of the night, drive 120 miles to Dallas, arrive before dawn for a good spot in the local vendors shed and be ready for the chefs and other early birds.

Ranch  Boss asked Charles yesterday when and where they sleep - do they get a room or something. Charles, who is a hilarious character anyway, said , "Heck no, you sleep right there with your vegetables."

So let's review. 

A couple in their 70's gets out into the field in the morning, harvests squash until noon then washes, sorts and boxes it well into the afternoon, completes all their other normal chores - which for Charles probably means spending the balance of the day on the tractor mowing hay. Then they load up at midnight to drive to Dallas to sell vegetables at dawn. They repeat this procedure as long as there is squash.

As you are taking your second coffee break of the day, stretching a little from a morning of answering e-mails, I'd like you to pause and calmly consider Charles and Carolyn. Consider how hard farmers actually work to grow and sell food. What's sad about this story is there is a glut of squash on the DFM right now- maybe because of all the rain we got, I don't know, but Charles told Ranch Boss they had to bring a bunch home. All that work for nothing. Ugh.

So this is a battle cry!

I implore you shop your local farmers first! Sure you can buy squash at thesame time you buy toothpaste and charcoal and that's super convenient - but just remember somebody busted their tail to grow that squash and if they can't support their families doing it (as all the farming trends suggest) they will quit.

Then what? This isn't a small problem.

We at the Kirk Ranch are awaiting news about a Texas Department of Ag grant called "The Young Farmer Grant" designed to help young people get back to farming. Think about Charles, can you blame twenty-somethings for their reluctance to go all in on a farm?

Now of course, Charles and Carolyn are an absolute delight to be around, they have farmed their whole lives and Charles is one of the happiest guys I know. I can't imagine trying to keep up with his 1000mph lifestyle and I'm half his age. So certainly there are joys inherent to a life spent outside in the sunshine and air with plants. But don't kid yourself, it's hard work.

So make a day of it, take your kids to your local farmers market and spend some money there. Texas is crazy ripe and delicious right now.

See for yourself! July 13, 2010

Why Heirloom Matters - A Primer.

It's so hip to be green right now, it's awesome.



Consumers are panicking about the recent Harvard study which suggests that pesticide residue in fruits and vegetables may increase the occurrence of ADHD. Analysists predict the demand for organic produce will double by the end of the decade and every urban restaurant worth its salt, has heirloom vegetables on the menu.


Unfortunately, the lexicon has become ponderous - USDA organic, non-certified organic, locavore, F1 hybrid , non-GMO, heirloom etc. If you are lucky enough to eat heirloom vegetables but have no idea what they are, we are here to help.


Heirloom vegetables come from plants, usually old varieties that maybe your grandparents grew, which have undergone no genetic modification or hybridization. Simply put, if you save a seed from an heirloom sweet chocolate bell pepper and then stick it in the ground, you will grow a sweet chocolate bell pepper plant.

"But wait," you say. "I've never heard of sweet chocolate bell peppers, I can't even imagine what one tastes like." That's because sweet chocolate bell peppers look weird, they're delicate and don't fare well in shipping containers crossing the ocean. So, in our industrial food system, farmers don't grow them because wholesalers don't buy them. Therefore, you don't get to eat them.
The good news is you can save seeds from bell peppers and plant them in your garden. Humans have done this for millenia. Unless, of course, the supermarket bell pepper you are eating is an F1 hybrid - which it probably is.


With apologies to Gregor Mendel; a first generation hybrid is the product of two different plants with desirable characteristics, like heavy-bearing, frost-tolerant etc. Their union creates a new, uniform variety with those desirable qualities. These days hybrids are bred not so much for flavor and novelty but to withstand the rigors of the industrial food system.


Say you were inclined to save hybrid seeds to plant in the garden. You'll wind up with a pasty, wilty mess of a plant that is good for nothing. "So what," you say. "Seeds are cheap. I can just go to Walmart and get more." Well..yes..but those are probably hybrids too and they make plants that can't reproduce themselves either, so you go back to Walmart the next year and buy more seeds and...see where I'm going with this? Also, the seeds for sale at your neighborhood garden supply are, due to supply changes in the industrial food system, a narrow genetic slice of the variety that was once available.


Are you Irish-American? I am. Two and a half million Irish were displaced in the 1840's because they basically all planted the same variety of potato. Nature likes diversity and if the Irish had planted several varieties of potato, maybe one of them could have survived the blight; and I could be drinking a Guinness in County Cork right now.


Seed Savers Exchange, whose members have saved an estimated 1 million varieties of rare garden seeds since 1975, put it thus: "The vegetables and fruits currently being lost are the result of thousands of years of adaptation in diverse ecological niches around the globe."


Renowned plant collector Jack Harlan said of seed saving, "These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine."


Whoa.


In addition, seed company scientists are churning out varieties that have been genetically engineered - Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO. For instance they might splice a cold-water fish gene into a tomato to make it more frost-tolerant. Unlike hybrids, which are like breeding a horse and a donkey to make a mule, this is mating fish and tomatoes - something that could never occur in nature.


So is this food safe to eat? Thirty countries from Japan to Austrailia and the entire EU don't think so. These countries have passed restrictions or outright bans on GMO. The US is a different story. According to the USDA, in 2007, 91% of the soy grown was GMO. By the way, if you eat anything processed, you eat soy.


Health questions aside, there are two other facts that freak me out as much as the phrase "catastrophic starvation."


Problem #1 - Worldwide 81% of GM crops were genetically engineered to resist herbicides, says research by the Center for Food Safety. That means you can spray the whole field and everything dies, including beneficial insects, beneficial microbes in the soil, birds, fish, frogs, etc., but the crop doesn't. This is the wonder of modern science.


But oops... this just in,  farmers across the US have found 10 weed species growing quite well in their Round-Up Ready crops. Round-Up Ready means the plants are genetically engineered to tolerate the application of glyphosate. The presence of weeds means the weeds are evolving to resist the chemical. So what do we do now? Spray more? Yum!


Problem #2 -  Fans of the recent documentary Food Inc will recall a fellow in it named Maurice Parr. He travels from farm to farm, for a living, helping farmers save their seed.. However, since genetically modified crops are developed in a lab they can be patent protected as intellectual property.


So the film tracks Parr's legal troubles with Monsanto - who according to Wikipedia is the largest conventional seed producer in the world, who produces 90% of the GMO sold and posted revenue of $11.3 billion in 2008. In the film, Goliath has been punching David in the face without pause for several years now but David just won't lie down. Look at Monsanto's website, they defend their position.


It's fascinating and provokes questions like: "Who owns the global food supply?"  A question which is worth calm consideration and then complete hysteria.


So here's what it boils down to.


If you buy seeds from places like Seed Savers or Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, you can skip all this nonsense. You can save your seed and grow it again next year without being sued or growing crappy plants. And you are personally helping prevent a catastrophic starvation event by encouraging genetic diversity in your own garden.


If you can't swing all that, just eat a prosciutto and melon appetizer made with an heirloom Charantais melon at your favorite restuarant. After you freak out over how good it is, find the owner, thank him or her and then go get all your friends and repeat the process as often as you can.


We can handle supply, if you handle demand. May 22, 2010