F.A. Farm

Yesterday, one of my friends made a video of me harvesting, threshing and winnowing winter wheat. The exciting part for me is that I can do the threshing with an electric chipper/shredder that I bought used for $50. This is one of those simple, but elegant, solutions for which I am always searching.

Here in northwest Washington, winter wheat does quite well. Last year I planted a soft white variety and this year I plan to plant a hard red variety. The hard varieties have a higher gluten content, but I am looking forward to making a test loaf with my soft white winter wheat. The video is self-explanatory and I hope you get a kick out of it. Here's the link:

http://suburbansurvival-community.blogspot.com/2009/07/find-your-farmerfa-farm.html

I have seen an interesting confluence in the past few months. Lately, I have even heard sneering remarks about "market gardening" business models as well as being labeled "marginalized" and therefore irrelevant. [You would think that building a model that can feed people with only minimal amounts of fossil fuels would be a good thing - but nooooo.] Another aspect is running into several people who totally buy into the modern business model, with all its zero-sum and "selling ice to Eskimos" assumptions. Even the concept of cheap food, foisted upon us by Nixon's Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz, has refused to die. The upshot is that some people expect market gardeners to magically compete with large-scale corporate agriculture, even though the corporate types are getting subsidies and the deck is stacked against the market gardeners. [Market gardener is a better term for what many small farmers are doing, especially those who depend on CSA share programs and/or farmers markets for their retail sales.] The marketing gurus never seem to get that I only need to sell to a small number of people, among other finer points.

You have heard these complaints before. BUT what I find to be new and interesting is the idea that modern marketers walk into a well-defined situation that is already set up for them. That is, the school system, the media, the legal system, the political system and all the rest of society is set up in a zero-sum game, where the money is always being flung into the air and the game is to touch as many dollars as you can while they float down to earth. Every once in awhile, the government turns a fan on and the dollar bills swirl up into the sky again. Some people have wisely invested in vacuum cleaners that suck up huge amounts of bills, while most of us try gamely to snatch as many as we can using our puny little hands.

So the marketer walks into this situation where the members of society are constantly being pressured and coerced to buy and the marketer just devises a newer way to divest them of their pitiful stash of dollars. Of course the marketing departments of large companies can generate sales! It would be hard not to. What amuses me is the simple-mindedness of people who think they are actually being creative by parroting the corporate playbook. A fatal assumption with this type of marketer is the assumption that a proven strategy is separate from its situation.

Let's take a page from anthropology for just a moment. One of the more fascinating aspects of shamanism is that it is intrinsic to place. Religion, on the other hand, supposedly works in all geographic locales. Thus you have a triad of desert religions that are imposed on native peoples in the Amazon, the Arctic, and other non-desert, non-Middle Eastern environments. It would be patently ludicrous if it weren't so tragic and constantly being imposed via M-16's and AK-47's. As with the religions, so with the marketers. People are trapped in a world they never made [Remember the old Howard the Duck cartoon? "Trapped in a world he never made!" - with apologies to Stan Lee. The comic book was way better than the crappy movie.] The marketer walks into an already defined situation where the corporations and governments have seized control of the marketplace. The marketer then comes up with a variation on what has already been done. At the end of the week he/she gets a paycheck and comes home to a nicely chilled gin fizz and reruns of "Law and Order" on their flat screen TV. You know what? I kind of like being "marginalized."

Here is a picture of me harvesting winter wheat with a sickle last Tuesday, July 21st. I grab the wheat at about knee height and cut the stalks about 6-8 inches below that. Then I place them in the wheelbarrow, all facing the same way. When the wheelbarrow is full, I take a wheat stalk or a piece of twine and slide it under the bundle of stalks. If using a wheat stalk, I overlap the loose ends and twist them under several times. You can sometimes tie a knot, if the stalk is not too brittle. However, the dryer your wheat, the more brittle the stalks. With a piece of twine, it is simple to just tie a knot. After the wheat is tied into a neat bundle, it is easy to stand them up in a patch of stubble. They are now shocks of grain and left in the field to dry. You can do a primitive moisture test by putting a handful of grain in a pint jar with the lid screwed on tight and left outside overnight. If there is still a lot of moisture in the grain, you will see beads of water condensing on the inside of the jar in the morning. By the way, the tall grain in the background is spelt, which is also fall planted. The stalks are a beautiful red color.

I recently received my copy of Gene Logsdon's Small-Scale Grain Raising, 2nd ed. (2009, originally 1977). Besides the info on raising various grains, there are recipes to encourage people to get out and grow some of their own grain. I tried the soy milk recipe the last two nights and it is quite delicious. Last night I was up until 11:00 pm, finishing off a triple batch, so Toni and I would have soy milk for several days. Since it takes quite a bit of time to make and this is my busiest time of the year, it really doesn't pencil out costwise compared to soy milk from Costco. However, as I exclaimed this morning, "You can't get this at a store!"

Suddenly, I realized how effective this simple phrase can be. I am not much of a marketer, as my base assumption is that marketing is all about manipulation, so I have gravitated towards talking about taste and nutrition with potential customers, rather than establishing a "brand" that is cool and hip. As with the soy milk made in the kitchen, my customers cannot get produce as high quality as mine in a food store, even in a co-op or natural foods store that try to sell high quality products. For my customers in turn, they can grow their own produce on their own land or in containers that should be of higher quality (for them) than mine. Thus we are back to the 3 levels of risk management and quality (the two are inextricably linked). 1) Grow some of your own food - it is good for you and you have more control over the safety. 2) Buy from local farmers you trust - they want you to be satisfied and can grow items you may not be able to. 3) Make choices at the food store - we vote with our dollars and choosing clean, nutritious food helps both yourself and the system at large.

This morning I noticed a few of my Rouge d'Hiver lettuce plants bolting. This is a very attractive, nice-tasting red Romaine that I got as plants from my neighbor. I also put this variety into my salad mix, which I direct seed into beds. When I got the plants they were quite large, so I grew them out, cut the heads and bunched them for my CSA boxes. I didn't need them all, so I left a few. Now the few that I left have grown up again and are bolting. I think I will let them go and harvest the seed.

I went to a seed-saving seminar two years ago and Romaine was mentioned as a problem seed in our area. Ideally, you want the lettuce to hold as long as possible, but yet put out seed in the right time frame for your climate. However, perhaps we can rethink a basic assumption. If a grower is using the Romaine in a salad mix for multiple cuttings, does it really matter if your particular landrace is slow bolting or late bolting? [A landrace is a localized strain of seeds.] I cut my salad mix when it is 4-6 inches high, as I find that to be the best compromise between mature lettuce flavor and succulence. I cut it several times and then till it under when it becomes bitter or tough. I don't really care if it is slow-bolting, because it never reaches the bolting stage.

This idea of timing of harvest as influencing your seed-saving decisions is similar to one of my previous posts about mitigating late blight by harvesting new potatoes. [New potatoes are out of the ground before the time of year when late blight is a problem.] This also uses the kind of mindset important to Integrated Pest Management, which is all about timing your actions to fit in with the pest's natural lifecycle. Adapting to the lifecycle of the plant your want, as well as the pest you don't want is a solid method to gain control over your food growing. Now isn't that a switch - adapting to another lifecycle to control it?

Yesterday, I took the afternoon off and went down to a field day at the Mount Vernon Experimental Station. I learned quite a bit about seed growing and diseases in potatoes and spinach. For example, high tunnels help control late blight in both tomatoes and potatoes, which is bloody obvious, since the spores spread rapidly through splashing of rain drops or impact sprinkler irrigation. At the station, they had both potatoes and tomatoes together in a high tunnel. Per companion planting concepts, potatoes and tomatoes supposedly dislike each other, but I didn't get a chance to ask about that. Both species seemed to be doing all right together. I also learned about a new late blight-resistant variety called Defender. Per my web research, this is a white-skinned processing potato, developed in Idaho, that is usually used for french fries. 

Another interesting point was how extra liming helps combat verticilium wilt in spinach. Preliminary findings are that lime is effective up to 2 tons per acre because it reduces pH. This is also the level where it starts to be uneconomical for most growers to put on more lime. Of course, we are talking about commodity farmers who are getting such a low return per acre (<$1000 or even <$500) that an extra ton of lime, at $65 per ton, is significant. If an organic grower sells through direct marketing and is getting $20,000 per acre for specialty crops, for example, an extra $65 per acre is insignificant. It is even insignificant if the direct marketer buys his lime in bulk or in bags. An interesting side note about pH is that anhydrous ammonia is acidic and so lowers pH when it is used as the nitrogen source in mainstream crop production. Switching to a higher-price nitrate source does not lower pH as much, and organic sources of nitrogen have even less downward pressure on pH.

The wheat trials were quite impressive. Washington State University (WSU)has been a leader in wheat trials for years and are developing perennial wheats, among other things. This is a slow process however, and will probaby take another 10-20 years. At the station, the USDA had a couple of plots of winter and spring wheats and were looking for resistance to stripe rust (reduces photosynthesis and thus reduces yield). The spring wheat plot had 9,000 varieties and the winter wheat plot had 8,000 varieties. These were all in 1x2 foot rectangles.

The station has 5 acres of certified organic trials and are doing some valuable work in things like wheat and pea cover crops for weed suppression in growing wine grapes. Washington has a significant wine industry now and I even prefer Washington over California wines. Hard cider is getting established in the state and there are also some trials with bittersharp apples for cider. I make hard cider with some of our apples like Kingston Black and I am pleased that there are local hard cider companies with products in the pipeline.

Finally, there are barley trials at the station and I learned a little about malting barley. One farmer at the field day mentioned low protein barley gives a clearer beer and the higher protein malts are the reason for the cloudiness of so many of the Northwest's craft beers. Well, I just had to confirm this, so I stopped at the Stein in Ferndale for a pint and asked Lloyd, the owner and head brewer. He confirmed what I had been told.

The bottom line is that experimental stations have a role to play, but they still put most of their energy into research for the chemical companies. There is a certain amount of buzz generated by the internet and in academia that land grant colleges are becoming irrelevant for agriculture research because of this. One of the ways the WSU Mount Vernon experimental station is keeping its relevancy is to devote some acreage to organic research. The five acres is just a small percentage of the total, but it is doing important work. The people at the Mount Vernon station also seem to value farmer input. I liken this to the archaeologist who does fieldwork, but still teaches introductory anthropology courses. Explaining the research and the discipline to novices helps the researcher to articulate his/her findings and provides important feedback from a perspective distant from day-to-day academia or fieldwork. Most of the advances in agriculture have probably come from the small farmer over the last 10,000 years and the ideological ground has shifted again. People like myself can do subjective trials on a small scale and both provide some subjective input to the station researchers, as well as get valuable objective info from them.

I have already dug over 400 pounds of potatoes this year. Most were sold, but I am also saving drops for seed potatoes and storing some for our own use. Last year, I started storage in mid-June and we finished off our storage potatoes just as I began harvesting new potatoes on June 6th. I like to eat new potatoes and I often say, "I never met a potato I didn't like." (With apologies to Will Rogers.) The downside to new potatoes is that you are stealing poundage from your crop. In other words, if you get a pound of new potatoes now, you could have had two pounds in September or October. However, I always plant way too many potatoes and have never been able to sell all my potatoes anyway. This year, I actually got 127 pounds of Bintjes (a very nice, productive Dutch yellow potato) from an 80-foot row (1.59 pounds per row foot), and they were all harvested in June. This is an outstanding yield for new potatoes, especially since my overall yield last year was 1.14 pounds per row foot. So, new potatoes are an early, tasty and nutritious addition to my CSA boxes and my diet.

Another thing I have been thinking about is late blight. I don't have it and I dutifully rotate my potato crops year to year. I also have 4 varieties out of my 20 varieties that are blight resistant. These varieties are Chieftains, Nicola, Island Sunshine and Desiree. However, if I remember my history correctly, the late blight that devastated Ireland's potato crops from 1845-1849 showed up via aerial transmission in August. The problem back then was that the Lumper, the variety most poor people were growing, is not edible until October. Thus the Irish crofter could not eat new potatoes. So, if a person is worried about late blight, the problem can be mitigated by harvesting some of your crop as new potatoes. Storage is not really a problem, even with the sensitive skins, as they will cure in storage. You just cannot stack them in layers inside your boxes. I have plentiful room in the canning room and an abundance of recycled banana boxes which I use for my CSA program. Any cool, semi-dry place would do for curing.

Integrated pest management (IPM) emphasizes knowing the pest cycle. If Phytophthora infestans is not active until August, there is a 2-month window for harvesting potatoes before the blight hits. For the home gardener worried about late blight, new potatoes provide an easy solution. An early 65 day potato like Bintje or Satina produce very tasty spuds and they store well. Socking away 400 pounds for a family before August is cheap insurance. Then, if you have no problems, you just rotate your stock as you eat your potatoes. My customers like getting 2 different kinds of potatoes each week and I eat them about every other day, year-round.

Yesterday I sowed a small plot of Japanese buckwheat. Buckwheat is a very good summer cover crop. It comes up fast, grows fast, suppresses weeds and is easy to till in. Recommended seeding rate is 2-3# per 1000 square feet. Last year I got some from Organic Growers Supply (a Fedco division), but Osborne in Mount Vernon, WA also has a different variety (look in the cover crops section of their catalog or look it up online). I let it grow to maturity last year and harvested the seed by shucking it off into a bucket. 5 gallons took less than an hour. The grain was quite clean but it was easy to get out the occasional stem by rubbing the grain between my hands and winnowing in the wind. After I sowed this year's crop from my own seed, I got out my Corona hand grinder, set it on coarse grind and ground up the hulls and all into flour (because of the polygonal shape, it may be more difficult to hull than wheat). It was then easy to sift out the chaff with a kitchen strainer. The yield was 40% flour and 60% chaff. Then I took some of the flour and mixed it half and half with whole wheat flour and had pancakes. Delicious. I also boiled up the hulls and made a thick soup broth, which I can use for soup, a thickening agent, or as the liquid in my pancake mix.

Buckwheat can be a very important grain for the home gardener. It is easy to grow, provides good bee forage as well as outstanding honey, can be stored easily until needed and has proven to be a good alternative for people with celiac disease. Buckwheat does have oxalic acid in it and is in the same taxonomic family as rhubarb (Polygonaceae), so a person should experiment with small quantities of it, if you don't eat it already.

My next small-scale grain crop will be barley, then oats, winter wheat and spelt. The barley is a 2-row awnless spring barley that came up fast and smothered all weeds. It is turning yellow now and looks quite attractive in the sunlight. Since I have always been intrigued by the transition from hunting/gathering to grain production, I am going to try out one of my pet theories - early grain production stimulated by a fondness for fermented beverages. I plan on harvesting by hand, and sprouting the grain with whatever stems are left using my primitive hand techniques. Then I will lightly toast the result in my largest cast-iron pan and boil my wort stems and all. I plan on making both an unhopped and a hopped ale, using my own hops, so the beer will be an all-farm product, except for the yeast. I might even make a batch using wild yeast. We shall see.

The point to all this is to demonstrate small-scale grain production at the home gardener level. For further information you can check out Gene Logsdon's Small Scale Grain Raising, 2nd Edition (2009). Buckwheat is the perfect summer cover crop and you can get 2-3 crops in a year, depending on the length of the growing season. It is easily killed by frost and you can just bend it over with a rake and till it in.

Over the last five years, I have run into several people here in Whatcom Country who seem to think that niche protection is a good idea. To me, this is nonsensical. On the one hand, people pay lip service to incubating new farmers, but on the other hand, they actively seek to discourage small scale participation in direct marketing. On one hand, they want to grow the organic/sustainable market segment each year, but on the other hand, they want to force new farmers to sell at wholesale prices, while doing all the marketing and transport themselves. This ultimately benefits the restaurants and food stores more than the farmer. In short, the farmer is still a price-taker, although the end-users are "kinder, gentler, more touchy-feely" stores and restaurants.

The strait-jacket of commodity wholesale pricing is kept in place by differentiating the consumer and the producer. If a consumer does not really have a clue to the work a farmer does each day, they cannot even begin to grasp how the farmer is subsidizing their cheap food. And let's get real - if I am not making a living on my 3000+ hours of labor I do each year, I am subsidizing everyone to whom I sell food. As I often say to people (only half-jokingly), "Didn't get your bailout or subsidy from the federal government? Go to your local farmer and get your very own local subsidy!" Another point that consumers fail to grasp is how much edible food goes to the compost, or the Food Bank, or sold at a half-rate price to get the shiny, perfect-appearing produce in the co-op or grocery store.

So how do we bridge the gap between the clueless customer and the exploited farmer? One approach is to encourage everyone to do SOME gardening. Once you grow your own arugula in your flower box, you won't give a rip about flea beetle holes. Once you hill your own potatoes, you will not balk at $1.50 a pound for organic spuds. Once you do some weeding on your hands and knees, you will appreciate what it takes to get the produce to your table. Once you try to fit in all the tasks necessary to grow food, you will not be so demanding that farmers take time out of their busy schedule to deliver at YOUR convenience. So . . . if we encourage everyone to grow a little of their own food, we will benefit from the ancillary effect of consumers becoming educated about the REAL cost of food.

For years I have advocated a simple formula: 1) Grow some of your own food. 2) Buy from local farmers. 3) Make choices at the grocery store. You may have noticed that this is quite similar to the Mother Earth News mantra. I did not crib it from them - it is more a case of being on the same page and inventing something independently. However, I do want to give them some credit, because they have been doing an important job for almost 40 years. Sometimes I modify Number 3 to read; Make political choices at the grocery store. In point of fact, when you buy soda pop, you are voting for subsidies to corporate corn farmers and manufacturers of high-fructose corn syrup.

How does this relate to niche protection? Simply put, if you are discouraging small-scale production at your farmers market by charging high stall fees, you effectively freeze out the small producer in favor of the large producer. If your co-op refuses to buy produce from someone unless they are certified organic, you freeze out the politically astute producer who sees the hypocrisy of sucking up to the USDA, as well as the shoestring-budget farmer who simply cannot afford it. Another point about niche protection is that it is based on a false premise, that of zero-sum economics. Zero-sum economics says if someone wins, someone has to lose. This may have some validity if a large portion of market share is challenged. However, since organic/sustainable farming is less than 1% of the food production in the United States, there really is room for plenty of market share for everyone, so niche protection is not necessary. Also, zero-sum economics does not make sense when new wealth is being created, as we are doing every day we grow something from the soil. Thus, there is both a practical and a theoretical flaw in niche protection as it pertains to organic/sustainable farming.

Here's the bottom line. We need to sell more sustainably-grown produce in order to make a living. The easiest way to do this is to encourage more of our customers to grow some of their own food. Then they will appreciate what we are doing for them and will get used to the idea of paying the REAL cost of food. If we cannot break this impasse soon, a lot of us will go out of business, just at the time we need many more sustainable farmers to deal with the transition out of petroleum-based agriculture.