F.A. Farm

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.

I was a fruit tramp (i.e. migrant worker specializing in fruit) for eight years, from 1974 to 1982. I started with cherries, usually in Washington in June, but one year I started in Lodi, California, in May. Then came the Columbia Gorge cherries - first White Salmon and then Hood River. After that came the late cherries at Flathead Lake, Montana, peach picking, pear picking and then the apple harvest. By the end of October I was done picking and took a week backpacking trip in the Pasayten Wilderness west of Loomis, Washington. I always carried winter gear and some years I used it - other years I hiked in runners and shorts. Then back to Tonasket to prune all winter (for three years) or later, off to Vail to spend the winter ski-bumming.

Now I have my own farm and orchard and I keep my trees short enough so that I can pick them with an 8-foot ladder. On the tramp, I had to use 14-footers for the pears and 20 foot extension ladders for the cherries. Most of my apple picking was on 10-foot or 12-foot ladders. Today, as I look out my office window, I can see my orchard and the ridge to the north of us. Up on the ridge to the northeast is an old single-wide trailer that is still used. Straight north is a building site and a storage unit that might as well be another trailer (in fact there was another old single-wide up there until last year when the new owners towed it away). My trees partially hide the trailer now and I am thinking of letting them grow another two feet so they will completely obscure the trailer and any building that goes up on the building site. I have been encouraging apical dominance in my pruning the last two years and the tip growth on top has been good. I was intending to shorten the tops a little this year to encourage bushiness, but now I am thinking of letting them go and getting a bigger ladder. This is problematic, as I am older and less sanguine about slamming into the ground at 32 feet per second than I was 30 years ago. There are pluses and minuses. I like to look out my window and just see green. That will probably carry the day.

Yesterday I responded to a Local Harvest forum post about getting local milk into schools. It strikes me that the whole idea of healthy food in an institutionalized setting is structurally unsound. Let's start at the paradigm level. Schools and prisons are basically warehouses for people. Schools are more about enculturating your child with his peers and acculturating him/her to the adults' culture. Enculturate = assimilating into the home culture. Acculturate = assimiliating into another culture. Most anthropologists would probably argue (anthropologists do a lot of arguing by the way) that children enculturate in school, but I view the dynamic in terms of oppressed/oppressors. Adults are the oppressors and the children learn how to manipulate them in order to "fit in." This naturally leads to the the eighth-grade phenomena of "nasty" girls and "stupid cool" boys. [And yes, I am dealing in gross generalizations here, but have you seen this in your local middle school? Of course you have.] So, the children are warehoused under the watchful eye of the oppressor adults and they learn how to get along to go along. This becomes useful in later years if and when they go to prison. So, the concept here is that we must look to the school system as a precursor to prison and one of the reasons we have the highest incarceration rate among developed nations. In prison, the guards are just bigger, meaner, and they have guns in addition to psychological intimidation techniques.

So how about the food issue? In an institution, food must be consistent and prepared in mass quantities by workers who are bored, unattentive and careless. Anytime you opt for consistency OR large quantities, you must descend to a lower level of quality. For example, last night we had garlic scapes for dinner. Some were a little hard and some were nice and soft, simply because I have different kinds of garlic in my garden and I picked them all at once. My option? Hot oil in a cast iron pan, sizzle for a bit (all the while standing right over the pan so I could catch them at the right time), and then turn off the fire and cover the pan. The steam of the scapes' own water softened them up and they were muy bueno served with just a bit of soy sauce. Could I have made such a dish for 100 people, even if I had enough scapes? Not likely. They would have come out much more bland, AND if I was employing a whole raft of minimum wage workers who don't give a rip about the peculiarities of each individual dish, they would have come out like mush. The same line of reasoning can be applied to the source of the food. Can a school cafeteria cater to the peculiarities of each vegetable and each farm source? Not likely. Thus, the food must devolve into mush-like food products. Does it even make sense, cost-wise to even buy local vegetables? Again, not likely. It really is about cost anyway, so it is quite logical to buy processed, canned and packaged food. Institutional food is just a maintenance diet then, and your job as parents is to counteract the crap fed to your child in the school cafeteria by the good breakfast and the good supper he/she gets at home. In point of fact, if your school has a Taco Bell or McDonalds nearby, their products are really not that much different from what the school cafeteria is providing.

What about Washington state and the "Local Farms - Healthy Kids" bill passed unanimously in early 2008? This was supposed to buy local produce from local farmers for school lunches and snacks. Well, it is on hold because of Governor Gregoire's budget cuts (once again, I am condemning Gov. Gregoire because she makes consistently bad choices in fiscal matters). So . . . it really is about costs isn't it? If you are going to warehouse people in schools and prisons, you want to get by as cheaply as possible.

Final point. The idea that you have to counteract the bad nutrition your child gets in school can also be extrapolated to the subjects your child is supposed to be learning. You should think about how you can counteract the crap your children get from their underpaid, undertrained and undermotivated teachers, as well as the fascist atmosphere they are subjected to each day. You might want to consider home schooling. The few families I know who have home-schooled their children have done a much better job than the public schools.

This morning I dug up some Bintjes for breakfast. Bintjes are a Dutch yellow potato that is fast growing (65 day) and high yielding. They also have a buttery taste that make German Butterballs look like German Margarineballs. My potatoes also have a "complete" taste, because of my focus on adding trace minerals to my fertilizer mix. When I boil potatoes, I start with cold, unsalted water and when they are done, they don't even need salt. The key is to add both greensand and langbeinite (sul-po-mag) to my fertilizer mix. Both are ancient seabed deposits. The greensand comes from New Jersey and the langbeinite from Utah. They both add trace minerals in addition to being a potassium source.

Trace minerals are very important. They not only allow the plants to utililze the N-P-K more effectively, they also help round out the nutritional needs of the plant, so their immune systems can fight off pests. It works the same for us humans. Since I feed my soil trace minerals in addition to N-P-K and lime, the plants I eat out of that soil transport complete nutrients to my own immune system and other bodily functions. There is a noticeable step-up in the taste of the potatoes I grow now and those I grew in the past and I am convinced a big factor is my emphasis on trace minerals.

Back in my youth, we always had a salt block out for the cows, and a red trace mineral salt block at that. Many of the old skinflint farmers in the area would only buy the white salt blocks, which were just salt and cost slightly less. Norwegian-American farmers are known for their penny-pinching and their distrust of something new. Let's see - I can spend a tiny bit more at the feed store so my cows can utilize their feed more efficiently and give more milk - OR I can keep the extra few pennies and buy another pinch of snoose and spit the extra nutrition out the window at the neighbor's dog that always runs after my truck. Uff da, what a quandry!

I sell my salad mix for $8.50 per pound. Occasionally I get someone out to the farm who is a little taken aback by the price, but then I show them what a pound looks like. A pound fits loosely into two gallon bags and provides about 8 salads - even for big eaters like Toni and I. This is just over a dollar per salad, which I find to be quite cheap. Elsewhere on the Local Harvest forum, a former chef said you could get 10 salads out of a head of iceberg lettuce. At a dollar fifty per head, that is 15 cents per salad. So, you can eat even cheaper if you buy iceberg lettuce at the supermarket. However, what is a dollar worth to you? With $3.00/gallon gas and 21 miles per gallon on your automobile, you could drive 7 miles. At $4.00 a pint, you could buy half a cup of beer at the local pub for a dollar. You could buy a pair of white cotton socks at the Ferndale truck plaza for a dollar. Or, you could eat a salad for a dollar that is healthy, tasty, attractive, and contains 12 different kinds of lettuce. Sounds pretty cheap to me.

People may have noticed how cheap red meat, pork and poultry is right now in the Pacific Northwest. Meat may also be cheap in your part of the country. There may be overriding political concerns that encourage dumping to keep the populace well fed (sort of like an American version of bread and circuses - in this case hamburgers and trash TV). It may just be that corporations make SO much money that they can afford to lower their prices dramatically and still make a profit. Another reason is that since feed prices are still high (controlled by corporations of course), costs of production continue to be well above commodity prices paid to the farmer. Since there is already plenty of meat in supermarket cases, increasing production (the old "get big or get out") will not necessarily provide a living, especially if there is no profit margin anymore due to high feed costs.

A contributing factor in the case of beef is the CWT Dairy Herd Reduction Program. CWT stands for Cooperatives Working Together and has been around since 2003. The program is funded by a 10 cent contribution per producer or cooperative on each hundredweight of milk sold. The idea is to retire dairy cows and heifers to reduce the volume of milk produced in this country, thereby increasing the price paid to the farmer. As an example, the price of Class III milk (milk used to make butter, cheese and nonfat dry milk) was down to $9.84 per hundredweight in May and has risen to $9.95 in June. The futures price is expected to rise to $14.30 per hundredweight in December. For those unfamiliar with milk pricing in hundredweights, milk weighs 8.5 pounds per gallon, so at $9.95 per hundredweight (cwt.) a gallon of milk sold for making cheese is now valued at 85 cents. The futures price in December values a comparable gallon at $1.22 - an increase of 44% over the current price! The reason for this dramatic rise is probably due to many factors, but the success of the CWT Herd Retirement Program seems significant.

CWT has conducted six herd retirements since 2003, removing 276,000 cows. The most recent was in February and removed 51,000 cows. The latest audit of participating farmers started May 20th and CWT plans to retire 103,000 cows in this go-round. This will remove about 2 billion pounds of milk per year. The upshot here is that not only is CWT increasing the number of cows removed per round, but is also stepping up the frequency of removals. Of course the Beef Associations around the country are worried, but there is really nothing they can do about it because the program is privately funded by dairymen themselves.

Even though CWT Herd Reduction Programs are having a big impact on milk prices, it does not have a causal effect on the glut of pork and poultry in the supermarkets. The major problem overall still seems to be the high cost of feed. Animal feed is subject to the same middleman effect to which human food is subject. In other words, that bag of chicken feed you buy for your layers has a very low commodity cost paid to the farmer, but a lot of money made by the middleman before you pick it up at neighborhood feed & seed store. So . . .  farmers are culling their flocks and herds and the resulting glut of meat makes the prices cheap. However, culling can be done quickly, but building your herd or flock back up once the prices rise takes much more time.

I suspect the futures price of milk in December correlates well with a significant rise in all animal product prices by Christmas-time, simply because the feed grain prices show no signs of coming down (high petrol prices for production and transportation, impacts of ethanol production, export sales, etc.). If you have a freezer, you might want to stock up now. Otherwise, rethinking your lifestyle and dietary habits is appropriate. The upside to decreased meat consumption is less methanol in the atmosphere and a generally higher level of health in the general populace, so it won't be a bad thing when meat becomes a treat.

We had our first new potatoes for supper last night, June 6th! This was a week earlier than last year, when the first potato arrived on our plates on June 12th. Our Red Thumb fingerlings had just started to flower, so I thought I would "tickle out" some spuds (so as to preserve the plant). I was quite surprised at the size of some of them. Red Thumbs grow fast and big anyway, but it is only 57 days since planting. I have been putting langbeinite (sul-po-mag), as well as greensand, in my fertilizer mix for the last two years and the spuds really respond to the quick shot of potassium and probably also to the trace minerals. I also notice that my potatoes don't even need salt, which I assume is because I am feeding the soil properly. Another thing I noticed last year is that the plants haven't even used much of the "drop" or "chit" when I dig up the plants. Evidently, they start grabbing nutrients from the surrounding soil as soon as they can, eschewing the stored carbohydrates from the drop. Anyway, we had a wonderful supper as usual, with fresh salad greens, sauteed Chinese cabbage with shallots, and fagioli. Toni had a mojito with spearmint from her herb garden and I opted for some of my homemade beer. We don't make much money from the farm, but we sure eat good.

Many people don't realize what a valuable resource the Local Harvest forums are. The forums have all kinds of info on food-related issues and opportunities to reach out with new ideas. However, there are always one or two "flaming" idiots who are merely trying to score points. It is really quite cowardly to sit down and vent without actually trying to solve the problem. Some time back, I ran into one of these types who are stuck in the current business model and who was personally offensive in order to cover up his lack of understanding in method and theory. And he even has a Masters in Aerospace Engineering (!), so he should know about proper survey methodology and calculation. As they say, a little knowledge is a bad thing.

Once again, I seem to have gotten sideways with a supposed market gardener who has had difficulty finding viable seeds for a rare cantaloupe. Of course, I am still a closet academic and the idea of buying more seed and trying a larger sample size appeals to me. There are so many variables in seed saving and the impacts start right in the field, even as the plants are growing. Simply expecting every seed, or even every packet of seed, to be in the 80-100% germination range is a false assumption. This really is part of the old business model - that regulation, certification, more regulation, and even more certification will ensure that you can TRUST the product. In reality, there is a very good reason nature is so conservative and produces huge amounts of seed. Not only does surplus seed production increase percentage of viability to maturity, it also increases the genetic and chromosonal shuffling, or recombination, that provides flexibility in a changing environment. As we tumble into the brave new world of the future, we should be saving more of our own seed and acclimating the food we grow to our changing environment. In order to do this, we need to think in new paradigms. I have been ensconced in the probabilistic paradigm for the last 10 years and it helps me quite a bit.

In 2007, I started my CSA season on June 22nd. My main concern was having snap peas in the first box. In 2008, I started on June 9th. I had plenty of overwintered chard and kale, with plentiful new greens, so I was able to start two weeks earlier. My main concern in the 2008 was the long, cool spring, which I saw as an anomaly. This year, I wanted to start on June 1st, but I had to delay the first box pickup until June 10th. I had figured two years in a row of extended cool, wet spring conditions was unlikely. Wrong! Now I see long, cool springs as the new norm here in NW Washington, but we could actually be moving to more like the Northeastern climate parameters - i.e. cold winter temps and higher early summer temps. The maritime climate here usually features more "equable" temperatures because of the Pacific Ocean (the largest thermostat in the world!), but we are getting more variation in both winter and summer temps. Yesterday set a record of 89 degrees in Seattle and my thermometer in Ferndale read 94 degrees. Even I had to take a break in the afternoon and went for a refreshing motorcycle ride. [SInce I don't get any days off, I feel entirely justified in getting out the bike for an hour - especially since I rode over to Birch Bay to check on their Thursday Farmers Market.]

On another note - my spelt is headed out now. It has an interesting look to it and I am intrigued by the size of the head. It is reputed to be hard to thresh. We shall see.

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.