F.A. Farm

My winter wheat is now fully headed out. I planted it September 9th last year. I also planted spelt, but it has not headed yet. My planting methods for grain are crude but effective. I tilled the ground as well as I could and then broadcast the seed by hand. My throwing arc is getting better and it really is not too difficult to get good coverage. After sowing, I set my tiller on the shallowest setting and tilled in the seed using my tiller's second gear. I like to till in second gear anyway as I think it lowers the risk of tiller sole (i.e. the hardpan you get 6-8 inches down when you till too much at the same depth), but going faster also makes for less footprints in the fresh soil. The spot where I have my wheat was newly tilled from sod last year, so there is quite a bit of new organic matter for the soil bacteria to munch on. There are also some spots of poor germination because of the low, wet spots. This is just a small plot, only 2500 square feet, and I only expect a bushel (60 pounds for wheat) out of this experiment. When I did spring wheat last year, harvesting was not a problem, using only a small sickle and tying up the grain into shocks. I pulled a wheelbarrow along as I cut and the wheelbarrow held about two shocks worth of grain. Tying up the shocks with a wheat stem worked well. Threshing by hand was a pain and I finally used a lawnmower to shred the shocks and I got a very low percent of cracked grain. I winnowed out the grain by hand using a house fan and pouring the grain back and forth between two containers. I am looking at getting an electric chipper/shredder for easier threshing. It is not necessary to bring the machine to the grain; it is only necessary to bring the grain to the machine. I already have a hand grinder and if this experiment is successful, I will have to get a pasta maker. Then we can have homegrown pesto on our homegrown pasta.

You too, can grow your own grain. This might become important in a year or two.

Yesterday, I finished reading Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001). I had been a fan of Ehrenreich since the early 90's, but I didn't bother to read her book when it came out because I knew the subject so well. But I lucked into a copy recently and it was a quick and interesting read. Also yesterday, I viewed a short video of Seth Godin that was recommended by another blogger on this site. Godin is big on creating our own "tribes" and moving away from mass marketing. A third confluence I thought about in the last 24 hours was Samuel Fromartz' book Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew (2007). These three influences have helped solidify the direction my direct marketing has taken in the last year.

Ehrenreich is a long-time socialist-leaning investigative journalist who also has a Ph.D. in cell biology. After Clinton's ill-conceived "welfare reform" in the 90's, she set out to see how bad it really was for the poor. She took a series of minimum-wage jobs in three separate states and tried to make a living. She quickly found out it was impossible to make a living on the bottom of the wage scale. Her book's penultimate paragraph says a lot about America. "When someone works for less pay than she can live on -- when for example she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently -- then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The "working poor," as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes wil be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else (page 221)."

Seth Godin also has a new book out, called Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (2008). What I found interesting is his assertion that mass marketing is not needed and his notion of "telling a story." This is niche marketing in a nutshell. The aspect of forming our own tribes is a good starting point for those people who want to do something locally and under the radar of government.

Fromartz' book was one of my reads over the 2007-2008 winter and it made some very good points about how the organic movement has been hijacked by agribusiness. However, the concept that really resonated with me was the idea of subsidizing your customers. Here is his quote from page 102. He is talking about a young couple trying to make a living on the land. “As with any start-up, you could argue these were the lean years. But a start-up is predicated on the assumption that the business will take off, that a profit will ensue and an asset will grow in value. The farm was on the right track, but it was taking an awful lot of work and patience to wring even a basic living from the land. I later told Hedin that given what he was making after a sixty- or seventy-hour workweek, he was in effect giving his customers a food subsidy.”  

Putting all these together, what we are doing with sustainable agriculture, CSA programs, farmers markets, and the like, is to subsidize our customers. Someone who works as a high school teacher, for example, certainly works hard but is getting a subsidized CSA box whenever they drive out to the farm. This is not the case of the teacher ACTIVELY oppressing the farmer, of course, but simply taking the advantages meted out to them by the system for which they work. In industrial corporate agriculture the subsidy comes from the energy slave of 65 million-year-old petroleum products that are used as inputs. The fossil fuels keep the prices down. Instead of slaves producing cheap food for the supermarkets, the energy slave of oil produces cheap food. As long as the farmer stays within the mainstream system, he (or she) can MAYBE make enough to keep themselves well-fed and anesthetized to the real cost of food - pollution, soil depletion, and the US wars to secure oil supply lines. When we try to break out of the fossil-fuel production box (or trap), we basically devolve into semi-slavery, comparable to the wage slaves profiled so well in Ehrenreich's book. The solution, as far as I can see it, is something along the lines of what Godin is talking about - niche marketing moved up to the next level of self-made tribes. Back in the late 60's and early 70's, I started to see some advantages in doing the right thing. In other words, I started to see some payback for my antiwar and co-op efforts. These were measured in human, subjective terms, rather than money or position. We thought of ourselves as the counterculture back then and tribes were another organizing motif. As the circle turns again, the same ideas have new currency.

Yesterday I had a hankering for some fagioli, so I pulled out a quart of my home-grown cannelinis to soak. I didn't have time to make it last night, so I left them in the refrigerator overnight. I then poured off the soaking water and added fresh water. They cooked up fast and made a wonderful dish, but I discovered something new. After they were fully cooked, I added a half cup of olive oil, a tablespoon of salt and simmered them for 30 minutes. [The original recipe calls for 2 cups shelled beans and the quart yielded over 8 cups of soaked beans, so I quadrupled the original recipe but cut back on the salt by one-fourth.] I then drained the beans and reserved the liquid as I prepared the rest of the dish. My recipe calls for only adding enough of the reserved liquid to keep the final dish from drying out, so the liquid would normally be thrown out. However, I tasted the drained bean broth and it was quite delicious! So I just drank it. This was quite a revelation. It was almost "meaty" in its taste and quite filling. The upshot is that this could be a new way to get the essential bean nutrients AND you still have the beans for your regular dish. I am going to try this with the other beans I grow and a couple of bean varieties from the regular food store. This should be a fun experiment.

A recent email from my local resource network contained an interview with a long-time proponent of the Brix scale and the use of refractometers. The interviewee also mentiond the work of Drs. Reams, Albrecht, Andersen and Skow. [You can google those names and get quite a lot of information on their work so I won't summarize.] The Brix scale is a measure of sugar content and what some people are now doing is to use this as a proxy for nutrient-density.

I have been aware of this line of thinking for several years, but it has always seemed too simplistic. The interview I read hasn't changed my mind any. It still smacks of pseudo-science, especially as the Brix reading can be altered by adding sugar to the solution or diluting the solution itself. However, the interview did make a comment about categorizing grapes via the Brix reading while they were green and that was rather astute. These grapes can then be sorted into more valuable wine grapes and less valuable concentrate grapes at harvest. This is similar to what the fieldmen in Washington are doing when they use a refractometer to help time the apple harvest so they will store well in the packing shed.
 
That said, I have been planning on buying a refractometer for several years, since I should have one for my apples once my trees get more mature and produce more. Then I can test some plants and see for myself whether Brix readings correlate well with taste and nutrition.
 
This also raises the larger question of subjectivity vs. objectivity. Subjectivity is just fine and people who are doing experiments that work DO NOT have to rise to a quantitative level that appears to be scientific. Simply saying the Brix scale is correlated with taste is quite enough. A researcher doesn't have to postulate that insects see something that we are measuring on an abstract numerical scale. [The example in the interview was that an insect sees weakness in a plant as a measurable wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum and attacks it. We can see the same thing on the Brix scale. This is laughable.] He just has to say it works. In point of fact, it is better to just say, "I feel better because I feed my soil and the plants feed me." One of the changes that are happening all around us is that the pseudo-scientific method used by economists and bankers who want to enhance their prestige by appearing to be objective is already in the toilet. It then becomes an opportunity to just start talking subjectively like the First Nations elders (or like us dirty hippies used to talk 40 years ago). I am a scientist and I say science is overrated.

[As another sidebar, the creationists used to use the term "scientific creationism." This was a political move to take advantage of the patina of objective scientific method in order to enhance credibility. It didn't take too long for real scientists to point out that there is no way to refute, or test, creationism, so it is not amenable to the scientific method. The creationists are now having more luck getting their message across to high schools across the country since they accepted their basis in subjectivity.]

Back in the day when I went to the gym (I don't need to work out now since I work many hours at hard labor), I once had a conversation with another exerciser about how much to eat. He was of the opinion that your stomach normally holds two fistfuls of food and you shouldn't eat more at one sitting. That actually is good advice - and it doesn't need any scientific studies or numbers! I remembered this conversation recently because I was thinking about how most Americans eat - large portions heavy on the meat and cereals, with just a pittance of fruits and vegetables. Our diet here on the farm is more of a "vegetablanarian" blend of vegetables and some meat for flavoring. Yet we also have a tendency to overload the portions, too. I think a better idea is to eat like a gourmet.

By eating like a gourmet, I mean to enjoy the tastes and the mingling of tastes in properly prepared foods. Very often, we like to serve a vegetable on its own, so we can discover the subtleties of that vegetable. (Think parsnips or Brussels sprouts for example.) The key here is not portion size, but rather the "bang for the buck" is in the taste. Most of us American types think more is always better, but it ain't necessarily so. Perhaps a good gauge is to have one dish that has a mingling of flavors and the other dishes just a simple vegetable or fruit. This allows for clarity of palette. Reducing the need for seasonings fits into this idea also. For example, I don't boil my potatoes in salted water and I can taste the natural mineral salts in the potatoes when they are done. If I need more salt, it is easy to add later. Part of this taste is the trace minerals I add to the soil as I build it up. It seems to me that plants that are healthy will have the right mix of vitamins and minerals - this is the real reason for soil development.

So, if we eat smaller portions and really enjoy what we eat, we can afford to eat higher-priced food. This is not typically what we think of when we think of gourmet eating, but the world is changing all around us. Why not be a gourmet on a budget?

Last night we got some rain, which we needed for germination. This morning, I noticed my French fingerlings are up. They were planted on April 11th and are a 65 day potato. I am tres pleased. My Red Thumb fingerlings have been up for some time (planted April 10th), which is what I expected. Red Thumbs are a nearly perfect fingerling - red inside and out, 65 day maturity, excellent as new potatoes, excellent keepers, with fantastic taste. The French fingerlings are getting quite a lot of press in the last couple of years and they have a romantic history. Supposedly, they were smuggled into this country in a feedbag of a horse, in the early part of the 20th century. They are also a 65 day potato, have a red skin and are buff-colored inside, often with a hint of a red blush or a red ring. They are quite tasty and store well.

Another early riser are my Bintjes. This is a Dutch potato that I tried last year for the first time and it is quite delicious and both yields and stores well. It has a yellow skin and is another 65 day potato. Last year, I started planting on April 6th and harvested my first new potatoes on June 12th. This year I started planting April 10th, so I anticipate potatoes in around mid-June again. As I say, I am tres pleased.