REALISTIC PATHS TO INCREASING LOCAL-ORGANIC OPTIONS

[We wrote this a couple years ago but forgot to post it here to our blog until now]

  Last year we wrote about seven reasons to support local-organic grain farming.  In response to what we wrote there one of our customers asked us why we had said that local-organic grain for human consumption mainly needs to precede local-organic grain production for animal feed and why we wouldn't get very far at all the other way around.  Here, more or less, is our answer to that question, which we hope will be of interest to some of you as well, particularly if you've ever lamented the very substantial compromises to local-organic methods practically always involved with pork and poultry, even from local farmers that grow other things organically.  (Cattle are sometimes an exception because they can be raised entirely on grass, which swine and poultry can't be.  Sheep and goats raised for market practically always fall far short of local-organic practice, even though they can be raised entirely on grass and browse.)  We hope our response will deepen your understanding of the hurdles to a more complete local-organic food system and motivate you to help overcome those hurdles, particularly by buying local-organic grains to eat.  These issues are complex, especially if you're a consumer trying to decide what to eat without the benefit of knowing and trusting any farmer well enough to let your consumer choices follow his lead.  The easy solution is just to content oneself with some "non-GMO" or "pastured" window-dressing on farming which isn't really the least bit local or organic at all (or just to abandon local and organic pretenses altogether), but if you want more than just superficial organic window-dressing on your pork or poultry..., here's our attempt to explain why the grains you eat yourself will have to come first.
  Perhaps the most important reason we don't see any realistic path to local-organic pork or poultry that doesn't begin with local-organic grain for human consumption is that farmers would have to convince customers to care about it and pay for that local-organic feed, and we really can't see consumers caring about (or even understanding the production facts of) the grain they eat indirectly as animal products if they haven't yet even changed the grain they put directly on their own plates.  And the same would be true for the farmer that would grow the grain.  Presumably before any farmer would try to sell the value of local-organic feed grain to his customers, he'd have to be convinced of the value of it himself, but think about the kind of farmer that would grow his own feed grain without herbicides, etc.: what would motivate him to hand hoe those rows of corn instead of using herbicides (not that corn is a complete feed anyway; the high protein component of any complete feed would very likely be even more challenging)?  If he valued local-organic food and farming, would he feed that hard-won, homegrown grain to his animals while he kept on buying his own grain from the supermarket (or other retailer selling grain from the same sources as the supermarket)?  Quite simply, people are going to come first and then farm animals.
  But to explore the details beyond that basic point, consider that even if a local farmer could grow a particular grain efficiently enough to compete with commodity-organic prices, he wouldn't be able to maintain that efficiency on a scale as small as the local-organic market potential, and even if he could grow it price-competitively on a scale appropriate to local markets, there's no single grain crop that can efficiently serve as a complete animal feed, and there would be very substantial added costs to processing grains for feed (normally including extracting oil and using the leftover oil seed meal for animal feed), so the unavoidable reality is that local-organic grain means taking on additional costs that would make it impossible to compete even with commodity-organic feed, let alone the cheapest conventional feed on the market.  And yet, the vast majority of consumers that buy organically grown vegetables at local markets, if they also buy pork or poultry/eggs at those markets, buy from farmers feeding conventional (not even commodity-organic, let alone local-organic) -- if their feed is non-GMO, and it mostly isn't even non-GMO, it's mostly just feed made from 100% conventional ingredients for which genetically modified options just aren't on the market yet -- which goes to show how great the cost pressures are and how little it takes to displace local-organic practices in the marketplace.  If a farmer believes in local-organic agriculture, there are things he can do for himself, things that were commonly done by most farmers until not that long ago, to raise local-organic pork or poultry, but getting customers to understand those things, appreciate the differences, and trust the farmer to do things that don't make sense to agriculturally illiterate consumers (or very minimally literate and easily misled, even by selective facts that are completely true) is the huge hurdle, especially if customers are mainly price (and convenience) shopping based on just an assortment of a few of the buzz words ("pastured," "hormone-free," "non-GMO," etc.) that farmers can offer without growing any of the feed their animals eat (or even so much as having a clue where the feed was grown.)  ("Pasture" can potentially play a significant role in the feed of swine or poultry, but most often its feed value is completely insignificant.)
  And the cost differences between local-organic and conventional grain are compounded by using grain for feed.  If our farm sells grain for human consumption for around $2/lb (or a little more for milled/processed grain products) we might be about double the price of conventional (non-organic) counterparts at the supermarket but fairly competitive with USDA-organic supermarket prices (largely by being able to cut out all the processors and distributors and retailers that commodity farmers have to support.)  But unlike supermarket options, at $2/lb most of our cost is in actually growing the grain.  There would certainly be some savings to not having to keep our grain food grade and being able to use it in bulk for animal feed, but on a small (direct market) scale we'd still have to put our cost of growing grain as animal feed at or above $1/lb (compared to about 50c/lb for commodity organic whole corn we could purchase by the ton), and if you compare that to conventional grain prices (less than 10c/lb), that's over 10 times the price (and, again, that's without considering the likely more challenging high protein part of a complete feed.)  Put simply, local-organic grain products for human consumption can compete much better on price with their counterparts than any animal products raised on local-organic grain can compete with their counterparts.  So there's a whole lot of pressure there to keep feed costs down, and before farmers (and consumers) bear those greater costs for the sake of what they're only going to indirectly eat (animal feed), we can't imagine they wouldn't first pay the smaller costs for what they would eat directly (as food).
  But one excellent way to minimize the costs of animal feed would be to utilize the byproducts of growing (and milling) local-organic grain for (human) food.  There are lots of ways this can come up.  When we run our wheat through our seed cleaner to get out weed seeds like rye grass and small bits of chaff, etc., probably 5% or more of our wheat (smaller and broken kernels) gets sifted out along with the rye grass and chaff.  With our corn significantly more grain gets culled as animal feed.  We definitely err on the side of culling hard, but even in a good year we're probably culling close to 25% as animal feed.  In 2014, when crows pecked into the ends of the ears letting rain into the shuck we wound up with a whole planting that just went to animal feed.  There are also opportunities to fence animals in to self-harvest crops that have lodged or otherwise failed.  Mostly piggybacking the grain needs of pork or poultry onto grain crops grown primarily for direct human consumption can go a long way to making local-organic pork and poultry relatively economical.
  But we don't mean to over-emphasize the need for feed grain in a local-organic context, especially not grain grown intentionally for animal feed, because small diversified farms can utilize a lot of other different surpluses, byproducts , forages, etc. in feeding poultry and swine and really minimize the need for grain, even completely do without at times, but we think grain will inevitably be the feed that fills in the gaps between all those other feeds and forages.  But those other feeds and forages are going to quickly become impractical and uneconomical as farms scale up and specialize.  For example, it's one thing to feed lettuce to the geese that's wilted or is starting to bolt, but it's entirely uneconomical to coordinate with and drive to a produce farm to get lettuce to feed to geese.  Similarly, it's a whole lot easier to feed one's own cull watermelons or pumpkins to the hogs than it is to get a farmer to get another farmer to coordinate any collection (especially anytime besides just the week after Halloween, and such pumpkins wouldn't come from organic farms anyways) and get them to the farm where the hogs are.  In other words, the less specialized a farmer is, the more alternative options (besides grain) he's likely to find practical for feeding swine or poultry. 
  But these ways of making local-organic animal products (like pork and poultry) more economical aren't going to happen when customers shop superficially item by item and farmers position themselves to serve that kind of market.  Buying USDA organic flour that was grown in and around Kansas and pork that was raised locally on corn grown in Ohio and soybean meal from an oil processing plant in Indiana from soybeans grown in five different states (none of which is North Carolina) and buying pumpkins from one non-organic North Carolina farm and apples from another non-organic farm and buying sweet potatoes from one local-organic farm and USDA-organic tomatoes in December from Mexico... leaves none of those farms with an assortment of surpluses to economically feed a good, mixed diet to some pigs, nor does it leave those surpluses with the kind of farmers that would be interested in small sideline production anyways, and so the only options for pork (or chicken) that customers find anywhere on the market are options raised on commodity corn-soy (or similar) type mixes, certainly nothing like a diet of apples and acorns and pumpkins and heirloom corn and cheesemaking whey, etc.  That's not because those options couldn't be economical, only that they can't be economical unless farms are more diversified.  But the only realistic way for farms to really diversify is if they can find a way to sell a wide assortment of products (tree fruits, garden crops, grains, dry beans, lumber, nuts, dairy, etc.), without having to compete superficially (mostly just on price) item by item, which is a sure way to force farms to specialize in order to survive.  So that's the answer we see to local-organic pork and poultry (and eggs), and we see local-organic grains for human consumption as an essential and hugely important piece of that puzzle.

EVIDENCE OF THE SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS OF BIO-TECH ANSWERS TO THE PROBLEMS OF AGRICULTURE

  The story of dicamba (an herbicide used together with crops that have been genetically modified for resistance to the herbicide) has been in the news for a while now, but more and more evidence seems to be filling in the story, and the following article seems to do a good job of bringing it together pretty succinctly.  We recommend you read it.

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/markets/this-miracle-weed-killer-was-supposed-to-save-farms-instead-it’s-devastating-them/ar-AAqX7aN?li=BBnb7Kz

A point the article touches on in passing that we'd like to focus on is how the early steps away from local food sovereignty may not be so bad, at least as far as science is able to clearly demonstrate at the time those choices are made, but even in the early stages science can point to the fact that the bio-tech and chemical solutions are only going to be temporary solutions, and nevertheless we can also know ahead of time that accepting those temporary solutions means burning bridges to more traditional ways of farming.  For example, suppose some bio-tech trait coupled with a chemical herbicide offers the possibility of labor-savings that would allow farmers to grow two or three or four times as many acres as before: what happens after, in order to make way for the greater profitability and efficiency of the new way of farming, all those family farms that have sold out or gone broke or have ceased to be worth passing on to the next generation... what happens when the high tech solution quits working?  Our agriculture will then have become dependent on finding and accepting a new generation of chemical and bio-tech solutions; those relatively smaller family farms that could have dealt with the problems without the same kind of chemical dependency but that gave way to "greater efficiency" will likely be gone for good; and all those smaller farms will likely require generations to reestablish.  We will have then created for ourselves an emergency (an emergency we should have foreseen) where the only minimally disruptive remaining solution will be to accept chemicals and bio-technology with already known adverse side effects we never would have accepted to start with.  And this is almost exactly what seems to be unfolding with dicamba right now. 
  So what can farmers and the consumers that support them do now?  Do we keep heading further down the same path, setting ourselves up for having to face even worse choices in the near future?  That's surely the direction mainstream agriculture is going to go, but our hope is that stories like that of dicamba will be a wake up call to many in our community (and elsewhere), that more people will recognize the overlooked costs of conventional agriculture, that they'll open their eyes to see how many bridges have already been burned, that they'll see the short-sightedness of choosing the short-term cost savings and conveniences of conventional food, and that they'll invest themselves in building alternatives that offer a thorough-going alternative to the series of foreseeable emergencies and gradual impoverishment that conventional agriculture represents.  Or to put that more simply: we hope you will increase your resolve to find the most thoroughly homegrown alternatives to the kind of food sold in supermarkets, not just tasty and colorful but calorie- and acreage-marginal things like vegetables (although that's often the best and easiest place to start), but also crops (like the soybeans in this story) grown for "vegetable oil" and feed for animals to produce the animal products you consume (and their substitutes like butter from grass-fed cows and other grass-fed dairy and meat.)

CAN SMALL, LOCAL-ORGANIC, FAMILY FARMS FEED THE WORLD?

  That's a grandiose question, but implicit in the big question is whether farms like ours are frivolously inefficient or whether they're a model worth supporting because of their better care of people, communities, and ecosystems.
  Certainly big, industrialized farms free up/displace lots of workers. Lots of small, family farms would require lots of farmers and that means fewer people doing other jobs. A shift to small family farms might come about in part by farmers replacing workers in pesticide manufacturing plants or global food transport workers or food marketing specialists or treadmill salesmen, but that would only be a part of the shift; small farms can really only become mainstream in America to the extent that mainstream Americans become farmers again.
  Relearning how to farm well (especially growing more than just the most profitable niche products) would take a lot of time even if the whole world were convicted of the value of small family farms overnight, and, of course, small family farms aren't compatible with the kind of consolidation of land ownership that we have now, but what if the workers were willing and able and could buy back their ancestors' family farms? How much food could such farms even produce? To try to answer that question, we first have to confront the reality of synthetic fertilizers. In the case of garden crops, which take up very little land, there are reasonable alternatives to synthetic fertilizers, particularly in the presence of all the organic waste materials that our current economy generates. On the other hand, the yields of the crops that take up a lot of land -- the crops that ultimately really feed the world (and lead to the organic wastes that make it seem so easy to organically fertilize calorie- and acreage-marginal crops like vegetables) -- depend much more heavily on synthetic fertilizers. Synthetic fertilizers allow for supplying practically unlimited nutrients to crops, at least so long as the fossil fuels and other mined nutrient sources required to synthesize the fertilizers are plentiful. (Of course, we're ignoring, meanwhile, all the ways in which industrialized agriculture relies on non-renewable and unsustainable inputs, the permanent damage that industrialized agriculture is doing to the productive capacity of the earth, and all the different sorts of risks that come with industrialized agriculture.) Growing crops organically means the only nutrients available to the crop are what can be recycled (through manures, kitchen scraps, animal bones, mulches, etc.) When it comes to the crops that produce the calories that feed people, crops like corn and wheat and oats and forages for livestock, synthetic fertilizers make a huge difference, perhaps doubling potential yields per acre or even more.
  Does that mean small, organic, family farms could only produce half or less of the food of big, industrialized farms (and would be at least twice as expensive)? Some of big ag's proponents might suggest that, but for one thing that ignores the great efficiency with which small, diversified farms can make use of land, land that is too sloping, too varied, or divided into plots too small to suit big machines and extensive management. Even vacant lots in large cities have proven fertile ground for small, organic farms and gardens. Our own farm was long ago abandoned by mainstream agriculture as too marginal; yet to us it offers overwhelming potential production. The biggest difference may be that small farms are so much more flexible in terms of how they can convert sunlight into food. For example, instead of growing (and devoting land solely to) genetically modified, herbicide-resistant soybeans for chicken feed, free range chickens on small farms can scavenge the worms and grubs they need for protein, along with much of their energy needs, all from land devoted primarily to other uses. Hogs, similarly, are wonderful at utilizing what would otherwise be waste: crop residues from the field, acorns and beechnuts from forests, leftover whey from cheesemaking, etc. Goats can potentially thrive year round on nothing but invasive exotic plants and other unwanted weeds and forages that would otherwise just be mowed or sprayed with herbicides. In contrast, industrialized agriculture devotes a majority of America's most productive cropland strictly to growing animal feed (and fuel ethanol.) How uneconomical!
  Here's a good perspective on the actual, real-world inefficiency of modern industrialized agriculture:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-corn/
Some might argue that how inefficiently the products of industrialized agriculture are used and how much waste goes along with industrialized agriculture are separate issues from the question of industrial agriculture's productivity, but we believe these issues are deeply and inseparably interconnected.  The history of the world's worst famines provides exceedingly strong evidence that precisely these kinds of issues that we see with our current industrialized agriculture are the worst causes of famine: over-reliance on monocropping systems (e.g. 1.5 million dead in the Irish potato famine, 7 million dead in the Bengal famine of 1943 when a fungus infected the rice crop), forfeiting local economic sovereignty (especially food sovereignty) to outside power centers and the exploitation and political corruption that those centralized systems foster (e.g. 2.5-3 million dead in the North Korean famine of the 1990s, 5 million dead in the Russian famine of 1921, 10 million dead in the Soviet famine of 1932-3, 15-43 million dead in the Great Chinese Famine between 1959 and 1961), and replacing crops for local consumption with non-food and export crops, which has a lot of overlap with forfeiting local food sovereignty and exploitation by non-local power centers (e.g. , 2 million dead in the Vietnamese famine of 1945 when Vietnam was heavily focused on rubber production, 10 million dead in the Bengal famine of 1770 when Bengali agriculture focused especially on indigo and opium production.)
  Even if a predominantly industrialized agriculture can currently feed much of the world (with an emphasis on the wealthiest and least food-insecure parts of the world), one must ask whether current practices can be sustained. What will industrialized agriculture do without cheap and abundant fossil fuels for its machines and for synthesizing its fertilizers? What will industrialized agriculture do when the weeds and insects and disease organisms develop resistance to the current array of synthetic poisons? Of course, the only answer is blind faith in the prospect of newer and higher-tech poisons and machines, meanwhile assuming that the pollution and side effects of yesterdays poisons will prove negligible.
  As for us, we maintain hope in a different kind of agriculture, a culture of small, local-organic, family farms.  There's lots more we'd like to say on this topic if we had time.  For a look at what it would mean to eat almost entirely from a small, local-organic, family farm, see this post on our blog.

Follow-up on food waste

   A few weeks ago we wrote about the things we do to avoid food waste on our farm.  We discussed several things we do with unsellable and surplus food, things that even most small, organic farms don't do or don't do to a significant extent.  By far the most important of those things is preserving food for our own family's later use, but all of the things we do to avoid food waste take time.  The question we aim to address this week is why you as a consumer might (or might not) want to deal with a farmer that takes the time to do these things, especially preserving food for his own family.
  And we think the most important answer to that question is that if you believe in pursuing a real alternative to supermarket ways of farming then we think it makes sense to look for a farmer that wants to eat his own food year-round.  We think the inverse is also true: a farmer that would rather focus more on making money during the busy season (instead of preserving food for his own family) and is content to take that money to the supermarket in the off-season is more likely a farmer that isn't so committed to a way of farming that's so distinct from the supermarket. 
  This begs the question of whether the products of any local farms really are preferable to the supermarket to begin with, especially when it comes to comparing something like home canned local tomatoes with fresh tomatoes from Florida or California.  Perhaps you'd rather eat fresh tomatoes from the supermarket when they're out of season instead of eating home-canned tomatoes or doing without.  And perhaps you'd prefer a farmer that shared and followed those same priorities, concentrating on bringing the best of everything he can to the market during the market season instead of getting distracted with things you wouldn't even really care about for yourself.
  In theory those fresh tomatoes from the supermarket in the middle of winter could even be certified USDA organic, but in practice shopping at the supermarket almost always means substantial compromises to even the USDA organic label, to say nothing of all that the USDA organic label leaves to be desired.  But one could trust in and patiently wait for the USDA organic system to improve and offer more and better options, focusing in the meantime on the certified organic things one can buy, and taking comfort in mostly meaningless alternative labels ("all natural," "non-GMO" olive oil, "hormone-free" chicken, etc.) for all those things for which there aren't certified organic options or for which the certified organic options seem like a rip-off.  One could trust that ultimately it's going to be supermarkets, the far-away farms that supply them, and government programs that fix the problems with our food and agriculture.  Lots of people don't believe that abandoning responsibility for our food and farms to unaccountable corporations and government programs was at all to blame for how we wound up with so many problems in the first place.  Pretty obviously, we believe consumer disconnectedness is at the root of our food and agricultural problems, but if you'd just as soon buy what you want to buy when you want to and leave it to corporate and government specialists to think about and take care of all the details, with (or without) an organic label to help that process, then you'd surely think (if you took the time to think about it) that how we farm is generally a pointless and inefficient waste of our time and your money.
  Even in that case, if we happen to have something on the farmers' market table that looks good for a price that looks good, you might still want to buy it, but that might just not happen very often.  We would probably have compromised too much of what you'd be looking for for the sake of things you don't really care about at all.  And you almost certainly wouldn't want to make any commitment to our way of farming (like a CSA involves.)  Fair enough.  Thanks for looking.  On the other hand, if you'd rather not trust the supermarket or the USDA organic label to answer all your food and underlying farming questions for you (present and future), and if you'd like to support and eat from a source that's a lot more than just a nearby version of that same system, and especially if you'd like to build and grow a comprehensive alternative to the supermarket system such that the homegrown alternative amounts to more than just token supplements to your diet, then we'd encourage you to consider getting to know and partnering with a farm like ours.  If you share that perspective, you might actually prefer that we spend significant time preserving tomatoes (and all sorts of other things) for ourselves when we might otherwise be putting more on the farmers' market table for you, precisely because there's no better guarantee of good farming than what a farmer would choose for his own family.  And if you get to know us and decide to partner with us, you may come to find that we're actually providing you with good things that the corporate marketing specialists didn't even tell you you were missing.

How to eat like a farmer

  The basic concept of our Full Farm CSA (and the Vegetable CSA as a smaller step in the same direction) is that we grow and provide as complete an assortment of as many food groups as possible, including things that wouldn't be practical or economical to sell to the general public, and our CSA members make a comprehensive commitment to our farm in return, making significant changes to their food habits for the sake of eating from our way of farming.  The idea is that we grow first for them, and their food choices begin with us.  That frees us from catering to less informed customers and allows us to farm in the way we believe best, and it enables those that share our beliefs to obtain and to eat food grown in ways that largely wouldn't be available otherwise.  (See here for a discussion of food groups that have been completely left out of the local-organic food movement.)  Basically our CSA means you eat more like you would eat if you were growing your own food, and that's how we farm.  These are things we've said before, but we want to explain what we mean in a little more depth here.
  So how does growing our own food shape how we farm?  Perhaps most significantly, diversifying instead of specializing -- our farm provides us with fruits, vegetables, nuts, sweeteners, fats, dairy, meat, poultry, eggs, grains, pulses, herbs and teas... really everything besides fish -- means that we are our own most significant customer.  Our own family eats a significant percentage of almost every crop we produce.  If we were selling 99.9+% of each crop, like most full-time farmers in America, then we wouldn't have any real incentive to do anything besides what made the most money, but since we're farming for our own food as much as we're farming for money we don't, for example, just grow the highest yielding sweet potato variety, but we grow an assortment of the best tasting varieties... every issue from taste to diversity to affordability to organic integrity to food safety to the deeper questions of sustainability concern us personally and affect our personal food supply as much as anything, so instead of being forced to compromise everything possible to compete for fractions of a penny with thousands of other farmers serving millions of customers, most of whom are in a position to judge only the most superficial questions of price and cosmetics (swayed by advertisements, misleading product labels, etc.), we're in a position to weigh all the questions in the balance.  We farm the way we want to eat, because we're eating so much of what we farm.  And the extent of the differences between even USDA-organic food, on one hand, and how people eat and the ways they choose to farm when they're farming for themselves, on the other hand, is dramatic, all the more if you consider not just what people growing for themselves eat but also how it was processed, what chemicals and other inputs went into producing it, etc.  (See here or here for more discussion of what our homegrown style of farming does and doesn't mean.)
  But lots of obstacles stand in the way of customers being able to join in eating from a homegrown system of farming like ours.  Our farm can't offer the same crops, processed into the same foods, available at the same times and in the same kind of places as what almost all of our customers are currently in the habit of eating (including how we ate before how we believed in farming reshaped how we eat.)  We don't sell prepared tomato sauce, which the supermarket does sell, but we do offer bulk discounts for processing grade tomatoes, and that's something the supermarket doesn't sell, and certainly not from heirloom tomatoes picked ripe the day before and grown without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, etc.  Similarly we don't sell ice cream, but we sell exceptional honey from unmedicated hives that you could use to make your own ice cream for a homegrown quality like nothing you could buy in the store.  And that gets at a difference beyond just processing: honey is generally a substitute for sugar, but it tastes different, it requires adjustments in preparation/cooking methods, etc.  While we can grow foods to cover nearly every food group besides seafood, we can't grow all the same foods, especially not pre-processed foods, you're used to buying if you're used to getting most of your food from the supermarket system of farming, and especially not the same produce items if you're used to buying the same items fresh year-round.  Even our beef is seasonal based on the grass and based on our preferred meat processor that won't kill beef cattle when they're busy with deer hunting season.  And the logistics of selling our beef by the package are complicated enough that, going forward, we plan to only sell it on quarters, which pretty much means we can only sell to customers with stand-alone freezers (or to customers willing to buy a quarter cooperatively and divide it.)  Our point in all of these examples is that eating from a homegrown system of farming like ours requires lots of adjustments from normal supermarket habits.
  So the trouble is that if you come to us with a shopping list based on normal supermarket habits, we're not going to be able to offer you much.  The idea of the Full Farm CSA is that, instead of beginning with a shopping list, you'll begin, like a farmer, with what your farm has to offer.  Having already decided what kind of farming we want to eat from as much as we can, a lot of food questions are pretty well answered for us as farming questions before they ever become food questions.  For example, we haven't seen any reasonable way to try to grow rice in our location, so instead of eating rice and beans, we often eat grits and beans.  Having already grown it, heirloom corn is a given for us, and so we find ways to use it and to enjoy it.  Similarly, because we already have corn, we don't buy tortillas or tortilla chips at the store, but we'll cook whole kernel corn into hominy, grind it in a cheap hand mill and roll it into tortillas, and for chips, fry tortilla pieces into chips.  Of course, that means that tortilla chips aren't a quick and easy thing to decide to eat (unless perhaps we have leftover tortillas from the day before), and it means we don't eat tortilla chips all the time (but how much better are warm homegrown tortilla chips when we do make them!)  Letting our small farm direct how we eat, means that a lot of "fast food" options like tortilla chips are still possible, but they're no longer fast, and they require significant kitchen time and planning.  But that also leads us to a different kind of "fast food."  Vegetables are mostly fairly quick and easy to cut up and saute, so we eat lots of fresh vegetables.  Vegetables that we already cut up and froze or canned are even easier to pull out.  And how good are homegrown spring garden peas hand picked at just the right stage, shelled, and briefly boiled out of the freezer!  Of course, raw vegetables as in fresh tomato sandwiches or ripe pepper pieces filled with goat cheese or lettuce salad are even easier than cooking vegetables.  Yogurt is another "fast food," sweetened just with honey or with added fresh berries, when they're in season, or out of the freezer, or with roselle sauce, or as a dressing for a cucumber salad.  Meat out of the freezer is potentially easier than going to the store to buy it.  Overall letting a farm like ours lead how you eat will almost certainly mean more time spent in the kitchen, more skills to learn and employ, but the bigger point is that our CSA will turn a lot of normal supermarket food culture upside down so that you shop and cook and eat more like farmers that grow their own food.

7 REASONS TO SUPPORT LOCAL-ORGANIC GRAIN FARMING

   The reasons why local-organic grains have been so terribly neglected are fairly straightforward.  First, compared to most other foods, grains are relatively non-perishable, so they're relatively cheap to ship, and there aren't hardly any issues like with tomatoes or peaches of sacrificing flavor by harvesting under-ripe to withstand long-distance transport.  Secondly, from a gastronomic perspective, grains are that essential part of a meal that you normally just take for granted and don't pay any particular thought to.  Pasta dishes are defined by the sauce (or at most the shape of the pasta, which has nothing to do with the grain farming); a sandwich by what's inside; rice is just a side dish or a "bed" for what defines the meal; and oatmeal is just oatmeal.  And if grains don't get attention when they're actually on the plate, how much less attention do they get when they only made it as far as the feed trough?  From meat to dairy to eggs to farm-raised fish, there isn't a single farm animal that isn't commonly fed grain, often exclusively, and even as the great bulk of the calories in the diets of most pastured livestock and poultry.  But if you think about the farms you depend on for your eggs, do you think all about chickens or do you think at least as much about the grain fields that fed the chickens?  Grains are hugely important, but whether as feed or food they're easily overlooked by the consumer.  Thirdly, grain farming is especially highly mechanized.  Most acres of grain in America probably aren't stepped on once by the farmer's feet over the course of the whole year: only tires and steel and chemicals need to touch the ground, and that means that large scale, heavily mechanized farmers have bigger cost advantages in grain farming than in any other major farming category.  It takes a huge scaling down of modern farm equipment to meet the tiny market potential that currently exists for local-organic grains.  And finally, grains lend themselves especially well to pre-processed convenience foods. Using local-organic grains requires kitchen time.  It's much easier to slice a local-organic tomato for a tomato sandwich than it is to bake the bread for a local-organic tomato sandwich.  Local-organic grain options will require consumers to look beyond the easy habits of boxed pasta, instant rice, frozen pizza, corn flakes, etc.
  So why not just be content leaving grains out of the local-organic food movement?  Here are 7 reasons we believe local-organic grains are at least as important to local-organic food as anything else, reasons that if understood should provide ample motivation to meet the challenges:

1. ACREAGE AND COMMUNITY IMPACT
  Grain crops like field corn (which is corn that is harvested when the kernels are hard-dry), wheat, barley, rice, etc. account for far more acreage than fruits and vegetables.  We'd guess the difference in our county and general area is at least 100:1 if not 1000:1.  If we want to support a healthy ecosystem around us, if we want healthy soils, healthy rivers and aquifers, and if we want to foster the local food economy and build sustainable farming communities, then we can't leave grain farming out of the equation; the land impact is just far too significant.

2. HEALTHY CALORIES
  Directly and indirectly (by feeding to farm animals), grains account for most of the calories the average American (besides about any other country) consumes.  If you're concerned about what you're eating and how it was grown (and what went into growing it), grain farming is hugely significant to your diet.

3. FIRST STEP TO LOCAL-ORGANIC PORK AND POULTRY
  We don't see any realistic path to local-organic pork or poultry (including eggs) that doesn't begin with local-organic grain for human consumption.  If local farms can find support for local-organic grains (as cornmeal, grits, corn for hominy/tortillas, whole wheat flour, buckwheat flour, and whatever other grains can be relatively efficiently grown organically and processed on a small scale in our region), then there will be various byproducts (milling byproducts and parts of crops that for various reasons wind up unfit for human consumption and sporadic damaged crops that can't be harvested but can be fenced in for animals to harvest directly) that will go a long way to making local-organic pork and poultry feasible and economical.

4. FERTILIZER VS. POLLUTION
  The present alternative to feeding farm animals local-organic feed is to raise pork and poultry and other farm animals on grain shipped in from far away organic farms or more often from farms that aren't organic at all.  That leaves problems on both ends, for both the grain farm and the livestock operation.  The grain farmer is left with a nutrient deficit from shipping away the nutrients in his grain, and the manure can become a waste liability or pollutant on the other end.  When the grain farmer replaces the manure with synthetic fertilizers highly susceptible to run-off and leaching, that can further exacerbate the pollution liability.  The natural solution to the problem is to use animal manure to fertilize grain crops, but that can only practically happen when farm animals are being raised on the same farm as the grain that feeds them (or at least in the same farming community and as part of the same farming system), and that's realistically only going to happen as consumers that value local-organic farming begin by supporting local-organic grain products for human consumption.

5. FIRST STEP TO OTHER FIELD CROPS
  The equipment and facilities for growing and processing grains like field corn, barley, wheat, etc. share a lot in common with other field crops like oil seeds (seeds that are pressed for salad/cooking oil) and pulses (dry peas and beans, soybeans, etc.) and seed crops like cover crop and forage plant seed.  Growing and finding markets for true grains and grain products (like flour, cornmeal, etc.) will likely prove to be a necessary first step to local-organic farms and communities once again growing and offering and stewarding these other foods and field crops.

6. CROP ROTATIONS
  Diversified farms that grow produce crops together with grain crops and forage/hay crops and animals are in the best position to practice the kind of crop rotations that improve soil health, cycle nutrients, and break pest and disease cycles.

7. NATURAL MULCH
  Before produce farms were all covered in plastic, straw was the natural mulch for crops like straw-berries and many other produce crops.  Straw is a byproduct of grain farming (the leftover stalk of grains like wheat or barley or oats.)  Unlike plastic, which just adds to landfills, straw naturally decomposes, improving the soil in the process.  If your vision of an organic produce farm isn't one covered in plastic, that's one more reason to support local-organic grain farming.

NOT WAITING FOR CHANGE

  For the sake of helping our customers and especially prospective CSA members understand what our farm is about we want to talk this week about one very important aspect of our approach to farming, specifically how we approach all the many foods that the local-organic food movement has generally decided are better just to outsource or ignore (at least for the foreseeable future.) As we detailed about a month ago, there are several huge holes in the local-organic food movement (in terms of what foods are grown and sold), holes that invariably account for most of the acreage that even the most dedicated farmers' market consumers have farmed on their behalf (i.e. most of their agricultural footprints), as well as most of their calories.  We believe too much in the value of local-organic ways of farming and eating to be content with such a marginal role for local-organic agriculture.  Of course, it's easy to focus on colorful things like fresh vegetables and ignore background things like staple dry goods or the feed that makes animal products (especially if the animals are raised on small local farms, just on feed purchased from a very different system of agriculture), but we wouldn't continue to go to the trouble to grow hardly anything ourselves unless we had some real hope in a broad system of food and farming that's truly distinct from what's become the modern norm in our part of the world.  Perhaps one might be content with some colorful changes at the margins for a while if one avoided asking too many questions, but for us as farmers the questions have been too hard to avoid, and so we're not content to wait for the economics of local-organic farming to redefine itself before we make real efforts toward comprehensive changes.
  What we're talking about here is efficiency and labor cost.  The biggest holes in the local-organic food movement aren't there because there aren't local-organic ways to fill the holes (i.e. produce the food); the biggest holes are there because the local-organic food movement has been waiting to develop modern efficient methods for filling the holes, methods that haven't been developed, particularly not on a scale consistent with local-organic markets.  So, for example, we're talking about whether it makes sense to hand hoe/weed corn (in our case primarily for cornmeal/grits/hominy/tortillas and secondarily for animal feed) even when there are herbicides (either selective herbicides or broad spectrum herbicides in conjunction with herbicide-resistant GMO corn) that with the right machinery could be sprayed on over a thousand acres in the time it would take us to hand hoe one acre (even as a follow-up to tractor cultivating.)  Even apart from the direct conflicts with organic principles, there are often indirect conflicts: machinery that can yield big gains in efficiency often comes at a huge cost, which requires a huge scale of production, which creates organic impasses in other places.  For example, one might be able to realize much greater efficiency with modern harvesting equipment but only on a scale at which organic methods for weed and pest control and local-organic marketing were no longer feasible.
  So what should we do?  Obviously, cost matters, but in more or less the materially richest nation in the world at the materially richest time in history, surely for almost all of us our long-term choices aren't dictated so much by the necessities of survival.  So is there enough value in local-organic food and farming to accept significant trade-offs in superficial dollar efficiency?  Or should we just abandon ideas of local-organic production for all those foods that can't be produced according to modern ideas of efficiency?  When the only way to produce a given food local-organically involves lots of old-fashioned hand labor -- and in the present reality (and foreseeable future) that's often the only available choice -- we don't immediately infer a reason to jump the local-organic ship. Obviously, we want to find the most efficient ways to do things that we can, but our definition of efficiency isn't the narrow definition of efficiency that rules commodity markets, so local-organic values are critical to our accounting.
  We also don't care so much how local-organic farming costs compare to conventional costs.  In other words, no matter how cheap high fructose corn syrup gets, we're still going to want to eat honey. If local-organic honey is too expensive for us we may eat less honey and more local-organic sorghum syrup or we may have to cut back on sweeteners altogether, but the cost of corn syrup sweetened supermarket food doesn't really factor into our accounting at all. This same kind of thinking about how we want to eat as a family plays a heavy role in determining what we have to offer to our customers.
  What does this mean for the CSA members for whom (after ourselves) we're primarily growing?  For one thing, to put a positive spin on it, it means our CSA members have access to a lot of foods for which there aren't hardly any local-organic options (e.g. dry beans/peas, peanuts, wheat/flour/bread, storage onions, English shelling peas...), or to put a negative spin on it, it means we're focusing heavily on foods that a lot of organically inclined farmers' market customers would rather buy more cheaply at the supermarket (and without having to shell peanuts or peas themselves, and with more convenient options like ready-to-use canned beans instead of dry beans, multiple types of ready-made bread available any day of the week...)  From another positive angle, we also believe that there's value in recovering, developing, and preserving the locally adapted genetics, the seed stock, and the knowledge that go into producing all the foods that the local-organic movement has mostly abandoned. We hope our CSA members will find value in supporting those efforts.

9 LOCAL-ORGANIC THINGS FARMERS LIKE US GROW FOR THEMSELVES THAT YOU CAN'T BUY (even if you're a local-food-super-hero consumer)

  If you believe, like we do, that there are lots of important questions -- important enough that they deserve meaningful attention -- that go into growing food and bringing it to the table, and that the cheapest way (with or without any set of rules like those of the National Organic Standards Board) isn't automatically and always the best way (subjects we've previously discussed in more detail here and here), then you may have come to the same conclusion we have: that real power to make meaningful choices in these questions comes by connecting much more closely to the source of your food.  And in that case, if you've considered all the different parts of your diet, you've probably found a very substantial list of food categories for which there just aren't any real options for sale anywhere in our broader area.  In other words, if you live in this area (or pretty much any other area in the industrialized world), there are lots of foods/food categories you just can't buy except from the supermarket system of agriculture.  Obviously some foods, like tropical fruits or new foods like margarine are by their very nature not foods one should expect to be able to source from local farms, but our list below is a list of foods that, although challenging and complicated in various ways, we're fully able to grow for our own use, foods which also were mostly commonly available from local sources until just the last couple generations.  So, first the list of 9 things we're able to grow to the full extent of our own family's needs but which can't be bought from any comparable local-organic sources:

1. Buckwheat (particularly in contrast to rice...)
2. Dry peas/beans
3. Cow's milk, yogurt, butter, ice cream, mozzarella...
4. Goat's milk cheese and goat's milk (and goat meat)
5. A full assortment of local-organic fruits
6. Bread (and pancakes, biscuits, cakes, pasta, pizza, etc.)
7. Pork (and lard, bacon, ham...)
8. Nuts (so far: peanuts, black walnuts, chestnuts, and American hazelnuts, besides pecans we get from friends)
9. Corn tortillas

  This would get too lengthy for our newsletter if we gave even a brief explanation of each category on our list, but there are lots of details to consider.  If you have questions about why we say none of these things is available to purchase from local-organic sources, please talk to us about it further, but we'll summarize by saying that those items which are available locally mostly either involve substantial organic compromises (especially with animals raised on non-local, non-organic feeds and often conventionally medicated as well) or aren't complete enough that we would consider them full substitutes (as with the limited supply of local-organic fruits and nuts.)  We'd also note that we're attempting with our new-this-year Full Farm CSA plan to offer some of the above products to our Full Farm CSA members, but our point is that even though these foods can be grown, none of them is actually being grown for sale to the general public.
  We place buckwheat at the top of our list because, although for most people and for us as well it's not a major staple, it played a leading role in motivating us to more carefully consider the whole range of foods that we had previously contented ourselves to buy from more convenient sources.  A few years ago we had decided that if we were going to buy any foods from the supermarket system of agriculture that we would at least buy USDA organic, but when we ordered a bulk bag of organic buckwheat our bag of USDA organic buckwheat came labeled "Product of China."  For a number of fairly obvious reasons this made it clear to us that the challenges and costs of growing crops like buckwheat, dry beans and peas, a full assortment of grain crops, the feed for our animals... were worth taking on, and for the first time last year, although we failed to harvest as much as we hoped, we did harvest enough buckwheat to meet all our own family's needs.  We hope to learn from some of last year's failures and harvest enough to supply all our Full Farm CSA members this year, but in any case, buckwheat represents many of the common grains and grain products (rice, oatmeal, boxed breakfast cereals...) that as a category are simply left out of the whole local-organic food movement.
  We'd like you all to especially consider that while things like buckwheat and tortillas and the wheat that goes into making bread and the feed that goes into making pork... are things that are easy to overlook when there are lots of exciting local foods to focus on instead, the crops on the list above (and their conventional counterparts) represent a huge part, probably a majority, of the calories we consume and the acreage of farmland we use by proxy.  They certainly represent a majority, probably a very heavy majority, of what practically everyone in the industrialized world eats (regardless of diet preferences) if you add in the foods that our family would like to grow for ourselves but so far haven't yet fully managed, things (and more common counterparts) we've mostly either done without or continued to buy from the supermarket system: very substantial amounts of feed for our poultry and eggs, salad oil, cider, beer, soy sauce, millet, oats, mustard seed, fermented sausages like salami, hard cheese...) [2017 update: we're now growing a full supply for our family of oats and mustard seed, still working to varying degrees on most of the others, except still basically just dreaming about fermented sausages.] In other words, even a local-food-super-hero consumer with unlimited time and money still couldn't eat even half of any kind of normal diet from local-organic sources, particularly not counting by calories or by one's farm acreage footprint.  We also don't see that any notable changes are likely to be made with any of the categories on our list above in the foreseeable future.
  As farmers that likely think about these issues more and understand them more deeply than most of our customers this leads us to think that if we can't do more than the local food movement is currently doing and get beyond the trajectory that the local food movement is currently on and find some realistic hope of tackling the bulk of our diet and the bulk of our farming footprint -- gradually and with time but with some kind of reasonable plan for accomplishing more than minor token changes -- then we might as well give up now.  And that's what a lot of farmers do when they content themselves with selling just profitable niche foods to rich people -- things that make a plate or a menu look good and feel local but that replace very few conventional calories or acres -- or when they resign themselves to quit farming for a living and just grow what they can for themselves.  But we really want to find hope in a real alternative; we just think hope depends on a deepening of cooperation between farmers and consumers.  If we can grow for our family and eat the foods on the above list, even if it's not feasible to sell them to the general public, we (and other small farmers that would eat a full spectrum of the same kind of food they would grow) should be able to find ways to grow a pretty full diet for those customers that share our values enough to want to cooperate deeply with us and let our way of farming re-define how they eat in the same way it has defined what our family eats and our agricultural footprint.  Increasingly this goal is the focus of what we're growing and how we're selling.

Avoiding the real GMO's

    There seem to be several common misconceptions about GMO's (genetically modified organisms) that lead people to suspect GMO's where there aren't any and in the process to distract them from where there really are GMO's.  You may not know that there are currently "only" 8 GMO crops in commercial production: corn, soybeans, canola (rapeseed), cotton, papaya, summer squash, sugar beets, and alfalfa.  And despite all the talk about disease and drought resistance and nutrition... the superficially noble causes GMO proponents tout, in actuality the single GMO trait that defines most of these crops is merely herbicide resistance, meaning these crops have been genetically modified such that they can be sprayed with more chemicals -- there are good reasons that the companies selling the agricultural chemicals are the same ones genetically modifying crops to go with them -- specifically chemical herbicides (weed killers) that would normally kill the crop, too.  Of course, new GMO's are in the works -- GMO salmon will be available in stores soon, and it will be the first GMO animal you can eat -- so simply avoiding the GMO list is going to get more and more limiting, and we don't mean to recommend that as a path forward. But before we talk about alternatives we want to deal with some of the misconceptions of where we are now.
   The first big misconception is that GMO's have much to do with produce (yet).  The 8 GMO crops are mostly major field (as opposed to garden/horticultural) crops and they take up a huge percentage of crop acreage, but when it comes to the fruit and vegetables you might buy locally, there's not much on that list except for sweet corn (which is just a tiny percentage of all the corn grown for animal feed, corn syrup, fuel ethanol, etc.) and summer squash. Seeking out or supporting a farmer that sells non-GMO tomatoes or green beans or cucumbers or watermelons or apples is (at least for now) like seeking out and supporting a brand of bottled water that advertizes that it's low carb, which is to say it's technically true but it accomplishes nothing except to distract you from why you're really getting fat.
   If you really want to get the GMO's out of your diet -- we'll ignore GMO non-food products like biofuels for now -- you should look first to the animal products you consume.  Meat and poultry and dairy and eggs and farm-raised fish account for the lion's share of GMO food.  If it's not either (1) wild caught (as in fish), (2) all-grass-fed (which as far as what's presently on the market is limited almost entirely to beef), or (3) one of the very few actually USDA organic-fed animal products, then it's almost always made of GMO feed.  Supermarkets like Whole Foods seem especially prone to mislead customers on this point.  Even the employees at the meat counters of supermarkets like Whole Foods don't seem to understand that most of what's in their cases is made of GMO's.  If an animal product isn't specifically labeled (1) wild caught, (2) all-grass-fed, or (3) USDA certified organic (even assuming the whole supply chain has dealt honestly and the product is labeled accurately), it's almost certainly made of GMO feed, and all the anti-GMO public relations material and all those non-GMO labels all over the rest of the store are serving to distract you (like non-GMO labels on bottled water) and give you a completely false sense of the GMO reality.
   Animal products from farmers' markets and other local, direct-market sources, unless they fall into one of those same three exceptions, are likewise mostly made of GMO feed.  Direct-market farmers that have or express any kind of organic leanings almost never grow GMO crops of any sort, whether as food or feed, but these same farmers often do buy GMO feed and other products grown on other farms to use on their farms and to feed their animals.  These farmers don't use GMO's in these ways because they're any less opposed to GMO's than you probably are; they use GMO's for the same reasons you'd probably use GMO's if you were trying to produce the same products: because it's mostly impossible to be vertically integrated (i.e. to grow everything your animals eat) and make a living at the same time, especially when hardly any customers are prepared to pay significantly more for comprehensive integrity than for superficial window dressing and misleading advertising.
   For a grain farmer it actually wouldn't be that much harder to grow non-GMO crops, but the trouble is that we've abandoned local control of all grain farming.  The grain farmer's trouble wouldn't so much be growing the crop as finding buyers for eleven million pounds of grain grown any other way than the absolute cheapest way possible, and in today's context that means GMO's.  In other words, all the remaining grain farmers -- unless you count our attempt to resurrect local markets beginning with cornmeal and grits, which, frankly, haven't been very popular -- are completely dependent on selling to global markets, and it's those global markets instead of local farmers or consumers that effectively decide how grain is grown here.  Abandoning local control of grain farming might not have seemed so bad at first, but now that we've lost sight and understanding of where our food is coming from the collateral damage and abuses (like GMO's) are really stacking up.  So the only option that's left and what is so much harder (and getting harder yet as we get further and further from the working knowledge and the small farms and locally suitable seeds for grain crops, etc.) is simply farming outside of the mainstream at a marginal scale.  However, farming at a marginal scale is the only real answer to food sovereignty (which means being able to choose what we eat instead of letting global markets directed by ag-chemical-pharma-biotech companies make all those choices for us.)  To the extent that it exists at all, the market for homegrown alternatives is much too small (and getting smaller the longer we wait) for farmers to employ the labor-saving machinery for growing and harvesting and processing the grain crops that generally make animal products so historically cheap.  Even the biggest farmers at local farmers' markets selling GMO-fed chicken and eggs from GMO-fed hens and pork from GMO-fed swine and cheese from GMO-fed cattle or goats... even these farmers aren't coming close to the scale (the millions of pounds of grain) that even the smallest end of today's grain production machinery dictates.  The same challenges apply to the major GMO non-animal products: granulated sugar (from GMO sugar beets), corn syrup, fats (vegetable oil, cottonseed oil, shortening, etc.), and other soybean products.  There's no simple, homegrown alternative to these foods for the consumer buying them or the farmer wanting to produce them, but there are solutions to these dilemmas beyond just avoiding the pervasive and growing number of GMO's.  The real solutions demand a level of consumer involvement and commitment that mostly just hasn't come together.
   We're not trying to single anyone out as the guilty party.  We think the problem is simply that even the local food system is much too fractured.  The solution we're hopeful for is for farmers and their customers to form much deeper partnerships where customers trust farmers to grow like they would if they were growing for themselves, not just vegetables, and not just vegetables and superficially local animal products (made of purchased, commodity feeds), but replacements and substitutes for the foods that farmers' market customers (and most farmers) currently take for granted they're going to buy from the corporate food system: grain products and other dry goods, everyday sweeteners (including pre-sweetened prepared foods like ice cream or chocolate), canned, frozen, dried, and stored produce, fruit like apples and bananas and oranges, etc. Of course, farmers can only grow for customers the way they grow for themselves if farmers actually do grow for themselves and if customers are willing to choose and eat and preserve and prepare foods the way farmers do for themselves, accepting limitations and letting those limitations lead, among other things, to new ways of eating, etc.  The way things are now, consumers pay farmers to do things (like producing GMO products) they don't want, and farmers do things they don't believe in and would rather not do, and the reason is that farmers are selling to the marketplace instead of specific consumers.  As long as farmers are forced to compete in a marketplace where consumers aren't invested enough in any farm to understand and support real alternatives consumers will find very little in the way of real alternatives.  In other words, farmers can't make a living doing things that inevitably add to their costs (whether that be growing without GMO's, etc. or simply growing on a locally accessible scale at all) when the market can't recognize and appreciate the differences.  The path we'd like to recommend is to connect deeply enough with specific local farmers that share your core food/farming values and that you can get to know well enough to trust to transform your food choices.  If that sounds really challenging and complex, and you need an easy answer, here's your alternative: go to the supermarket, buy whatever the ag-chemical-biotech-pharma companies and their servants in the government teach you to want (including, prominently of late, GMO's), and trust that that system is the best guardian of your interests and values.

Thoughts on the "full diet CSA" model

   We know some of you all are already familiar with the most prominent "full diet CSA" farm from the book The Dirty Life.  Essex Farm is near the Canadian border across Lake Champlain from Burlington, VT, in New York State.  We thought it could be helpful to introduce more of you, our customers, to the Essex Farm CSA model and to share some of our thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages, particularly as that model might apply to our farm.
   So far as we know Essex Farm was the first farm to offer all-you-can-eat CSA shares including most major food groups.  Their CSA members pay a fixed amount per year depending on the ages and number of people in the household, and then they come to the farm once each week, throughout the whole year, and pick out as much as they can use.  Their farm seems to be based mainly around their full selection of seasonal garden crops (at least as full as their far northern location allows) and all the standard animal products (dairy, eggs, beef, pork, chicken.)  Quoting from their website, "The all-you-can-eat membership price for 2013 is $3700 per year for the first adult in a household, and $3300 for the second adult, with a $400 discount for each additional adult. Children over 3 are $120 per year of age (e.g., a five-year-old is $600 for the year, a seven-year-old is $840, etc.)"  They farm a lot more acreage than we do, and they employ about 8 or 9 full-time employees.  They have 222 members, which we guess means they have around 100 families as CSA members.  They have 9 draft horses that they use for a lot of their farm work, but they also use tractors, and they purchase hay and grain from off the farm.
   We suspect what at first stands out the most for many of you is the price.  For a married couple the cost would be $7000/year or about $135/week.  For a family of 4 with two intermediate age children the cost would be $9160/year or about $176/week.  (For comparison, the 2013 price for our basic CSA was $462 for 23 weeks, and was based on a $21 weekly box.)  $10,000/year may sound incredibly expensive at first.  Then again, some of you may spend $176 on a single trip to the supermarket without buying even commodity organic.  If Essex Farm's customers were to actually eat almost all their food from the farm, they wouldn't be paying much more than average Americans, and they're eating worlds better and not only supporting a local organic farm, but they're even supporting the use of "organic tractors" (horses), and that's one of the most striking parts of their model to us.  It's not that we're anywhere near ready to rely on draft animals, but it's remarkable that Essex Farm's CSA model has enabled the farmers to lead their customers with their understanding of good agriculture and what makes sense for their place.  That general idea of being able to farm the way we would if we were growing just for ourselves but on a larger scale together with customers that share our values and want to support and share in the fruits of that style of farming... a CSA model that enables its members to choose a model of farming instead of making thousands of isolated food purchases is admirable.  (Those thousands of isolated food purchases are a big part of how supermarkets divide and conquer small farms.)
   And that CSA model clearly changes how the members eat. Obviously it makes it possible for them to eat foods grown in ways that don't conform to existing broad market categories, but it also empowers the members to make choices they wouldn't have made otherwise. Instead of the way supermarkets have over the last several decades led consumers to redefine their food choices and diets to conform to corporate-industrial agriculture, the all-you-can-eat model leads the members to conform their shopping and eating habits to what makes sense locally and seasonally and according to the way of farming the members have chosen by buying into that particular farm.  As farmers, we know how much richer our diet has become by following the seasons and the logic of a small farm to a richness we never would have found as simple consumers.
   The Essex Farm CSA model also must make it easier for the farm to sell products that to sell in stores or to the general public would require additional licenses and special processing equipment, things like fresh dairy or meat that they butcher on the farm.  And so the members enjoy a lot of food items for which they likely wouldn't be able to find local options at all apart from the full diet CSA model because the traditional local options were squeezed out of business decades ago.  As both state and federal regulations and paperwork burdens continue to mount, threatening even this year to start killing off local farmers' markets and in the very immediate future to altogether put an end to local farmers' markets as we've known them, we're increasingly drawn to a marketing model that like Essex Farm's avoids much of the tension with opposing value systems by cooperating more closely with customers with shared values.
   But there are also aspects of their model that we'd prefer not to imitate.  We'd have to get a lot bigger, particularly in terms of acreage and employees, in order to be able to offer a near continuous supply of all the animal products they offer.  We probably couldn't get big enough if we wanted to, but we're not at all ready to give up on family farms, farms that have the potential continuity of families and that are limited in scale by the limits of the people with long-term bonds to that particular farm in that particular community.  The family farm model (by which we mean not just family-owned but predominantly family-worked and therefore family-scaled farm) has a history of land stewardship and quality food production that spans continents and centuries, and we're not ready to dismiss those benefits as purely coincidental.  Remaining a family-scaled farm would mean, however, that we wouldn't be able to offer a regular supply of everything we produce to all of our CSA members,
   And we see compromises we'd have to make in the integrity of our farm if we did scale up to regularly supply something like their "full diet."  (There are, on the other hand, foods like honey and increasingly orchard crops that we offer our CSA members that, so far as we can tell, are largely left out of the Essex Farm "full diet.")  We know, for example, we could sell plenty of chicken and lots more eggs if we scaled up our flock, but we can't see how to scale up without sacrificing our present low-tech, free range, and heavily forage-based system.  Freely available forage only goes so far for so many chickens in any one flock.  The amount of scratching and pecking that any given area can sustainably tolerate is likewise limited.  Mother hens can only effectively raise a very limited number of clutches in the same area at the same time.  If we scaled up we'd probably have to trade in our mother hens for purchased biddies from conventional hatcheries.  Scaling up would generally seem to require sacrificing our low-tech and more thoroughly homegrown/local model for a model that would depend more on purchased inputs from corporate-industrial farms, and it would increase the price of our eggs in the process.
   We generally hope to find ways to keep the dollar cost of a "full diet" somewhat lower than the Essex Farm model.  We wonder how much the all-you-can-eat model adds to the cost of their CSA by not providing an incentive for their customers to choose the foods that their farm can produce most economically.  We can also see that some people might want to pay more to eat high on the hog and other people might want to save money and eat pig's feet.  Similarly, we can see that some people might want to buy tortillas and other people might just want whole kernel corn to make their own tortillas.  There would be a lot of those kind of choices, and we wouldn't want to limit options at the low cost end of the spectrum. We also hope that as a family farm we might be able to keep overall costs down better than a farm with regular employees and the larger scale that might tend to demand more purchased solutions.
   We're not sure what the best way is to get there, but we do want to keep moving toward a variation of a "full diet CSA":  In addition to the beef, eggs, vegetables, cornmeal and grits, honey, mushrooms, peanuts, strawberries, etc. that we've been offering our CSA members, we're already working to greatly increase our selection of perennial fruits and nuts, and we'd like to find ways for our CSA members to share in dairy from our goats and cows... we'd similarly like to find ways for our CSA members to eat all of the grains and dry beans/peas that we've grown for ourselves... and goat meat and some kind of poultry...  There are good reasons that these additional crops aren't very much sold to the general public, and those reasons mostly apply to us, too, but we hope that moving toward something like Essex Farm's "full diet CSA" model can help us together realize a lot more potential with these additional foods.

At our table this past week

   Eating very local is possible and enjoyable.  We thought it might be inspiring and maybe informative to share photos of our meals occasionally.  Here's a look at our table over the last week (maybe more).  Not every meal is documented as many meals are leftovers and I don't think any breakfast shots got taken either.  Confession - breakfast is probably our least local meal of the day.  While we have a good rotation of breakfast items, many of them are based on wheat or oats, both of which we currently buy.  We have raised wheat and harvested it so the goal of local organic wheat is hopefully around the corner.  [As of 2018 we've been growing all our wheat for several years and oats not as long, but not yet enough oats to meet all our needs.]  And we do enjoy a good share of corn mush or  grits with our own bacon, goat cheese, and tomatoes for breakfast or our yogurt with fruit and nuts.  Anyway, hope this all makes you hungry for some local food.

   It's funny to look back and see what I actually came up with for a meal!  I'm (Melissa) pretty much the sole cook here though Nora is in training and Eric is king of waffles.  Three times a day there are 6 of us to feed (plus a WWOOFer at times).  I try to think ahead with some menu plans - at least having some meat thawed, but often I'm less than an hour away from a meal with NO idea what will go on the table.  There are no boxes of instant mac and cheese in the kitchen.  I remember this meal  was a last minute idea.  Leftover grits, some shitakes the slugs had eaten on -- what we call "farmer grade" -- and my own craving for spring peas (out of the freezer.)  I  often feel like a cook on the cooking challenge shows with the extra challenge of two little ones crying with hunger on my legs.  Anyway, a white sauce from our milk with our onions and shitakes and frozen peas from this spring.

   I have way too many cookbooks that I often scan for ideas.  But talking about food to customers is equally inspiring.  A CSA member upon looking through his box noticed eggplant.  Hesitantly he asked, likely not knowing what to do with them, can you roast these like with onions and such?  Yes I said and suddenly had plans for our own meal that night.  Peeled and cubed eggplant seconds, small potatoes, and onions that were getting soft all tossed in plenty of our butter and some pesto from a batch I was making with basil leftover from the market roasted until soft.

  Bread - made with organic but not local wheat.  Sweet corn our neighbor grows and gives us.  Sliced venison from from a deer a neighbor gave us.  Our tomatoes and beans.  Elsea's milk.  Homemade mayo with our egg but purchased oil.  We have dreams of local oil and have even looked into manual oil presses available in Africa.  But for now we try to enjoy our butter and lard as our main fat sources.  Not so great for making mayo though.

  Okra, onions, and tomatoes on grits with our goat cheese.  Now that the goats are in milk and we're making goat cheese again we seem to find a way to enjoy it with every meal.  It's a very simple cheese - we simply add buttermilk and homemade rennet to the still warm milk and let sit overnight.  Come morning, it is solid.  We then pour it into a cheesecloth lined colander, salt and let sit in the fridge for 24 hours.  Done!  Oh, that paddy thing is a venison "burger."  Somehow I got in my head to finely chop the rest of that venison roast in the food processor.  Then added egg, flour, cumin and rolled it in cornmeal and fried.  You'll have to ask the family what they thought of that idea!  (Eric objected without tasting.)  Oh, and the cumin wasn't local - yet.

There's that venison paddy thing again!  Trying to push off those leftovers.  In any case, beans are usually a hit for the family.  These are dried Oct. beans from our small harvest this year.  Grits, beans and tomatoes.  And goat cheese.

Soup - I think some of that venison roast ended up in there, chopped up and added to our canned beef broth with some potatoes, carrots and onions.  Cornbread and goat cheese!  Probably some butter and honey, too, for a dessert slice of the cornbread.  Maybe an extra pan of cornbread for the much loved breakfast of cornbread crumbled in milk with honey.

Okay, there was that venison roast again this time cooked with okra and onions.  It was a big roast, I think it was a ham that went whole in the freezer to be made into venison jerky at some point but didn't.  With mashed potatoes, shitakes and the first of the summer peas - pink-eyes.  And on the side, the first of the Asian pears, maybe a little under ripe but the chickens who pecked on them first didn't seem to think so.

Nora's nick-name has long been Noodle so it's quite appropriate she's become the pasta maker.  She is much more patient then I am.  Here she's making spaghetti - our eggs, purchase wheat we ground in the mill.

Worn out from pasta making or fun on the farm.  In any case, the pasta with tomato sauce or pesto went over quite well.

Even if you look at this picture up close I bet you'll never guess what Nora fried in the pan.  Inspired by our friend from the Congo, the kids went on a grasshopper search, came home and fried them.   And gulp, we all actually enjoyed them.

I've been craving sweet potatoes.  We used up our supply in late spring.  So I was excited to pull some already decent size potatoes from a few plants and put them directly in the oven.  Of course, some aging makes them much better but with butter and salt, they were good.  Irish potatoes cause we have plenty of "farmer grade" ones.  Tomatoes, okra and onions and our beef steak.  And beer from a customer who makes it, bringing us beer when he comes to pick up his veges.  It's time to harvest our hops for him.  We have some barley hand-harvested, too, just needs to be malted for a really local brew.

The GMO Labeling Debate

   The debate over whether genetically modified food should have to be labelled as such has heated up recently with Proposition 37 coming up for a vote in California.  Proposition 37 would require that all food sold in California as grocery (as opposed to restaurant food) be labelled as GMO if it either is a GMO crop or contains GMO crop ingredients.  If Prop 37 passes and survives the court challenges that would follow, then it will likely be the model that federal and other state GMO labelling laws would try to follow.
   It may sound like the kind of idea that farmers like us would be all for, but even though we're altogether opposed to GMO's, we think it's pretty ambiguous whether a law like Prop 37 would even be a good thing.  The thing that we find most troublesome about Prop 37 is that it effectively defines the fight against GMO's in terms that disregard most of the GMO crop acreage in the country.  There are currently only 8 GMO crops being grown commercially, although they include a few of the most widely grown crops.  Corn is the most planted crop in the US, and its leading use is for fuel ethanol. Its second leading use is animal feed.  Soybeans are similar. Cotton falls even further outside the Prop 37 definitions (although cottonseed oil is used as a food ingredient.)  Alfalfa is strictly an animal feed, so it falls entirely outside the Prop 37 definitions.  The other four crops are relatively minor: sugar beets (granulated sugar, etc.), rapeseed (canola), summer squash (zucchini/yellow squash), and papaya.  So our biggest concern is that Prop 37 gives GMO's a free ride for their most significant uses (particularly in terms of acreage): animal feed and non-food uses. Meanwhile we wonder what good the law might achieve.  People that care about the GMO take-over of our farms can easily find out what ingredients (i.e. the 8 crops we just listed) are GMO.  If they haven't even done that are they going to change their shopping habits when its on the label?  And if folks really cared about where their food came from or what went into growing it, then they probably aren't buying fossil fuel- and chemical-intensive, corporate-industrial food from supermarkets, whether it's GMO yet or not.  In other words, if they're already growing their own and buying from local farms that they know and trust, then the law can't help them any further.
   So that forces the question on us: what then should those of us opposed to GMO's do?  Here's something we wrote in answer to that question for another purpose:
   Insofar as we're opposed to GM crops, we think we should all be trying hard to get away from the whole commodity crop system. Relying on the commodity crops that haven't been genetically modified yet is perhaps better than nothing, but it's a hopeless strategy for the long-term (even the "medium-term.")  If we want to continue having non-GMO options, we think we need to take responsibility for starting to develop those markets and sources and growing methods/know-how, etc. now.
   What's most important to us are the issues of what -- if we understand the term correctly -- people are calling food sovereignty.  If farming communities in North Carolina can't control what they grow and how they grow it (and therefore also what they eat), then I think all the other kinds of problems (GMO's, chemical dependency, fossil fuel dependency, exploiting laborers, loss of farmland and soil erosion, etc.) are bound to follow, so we believe any real solution needs to start with wrestling control back from the global powers to which we've given control of our food supply.
   Those of us that would voice opposition to GMO's have developed a pretty good alternative model through farmers markets, CSA's, home gardens, etc. when it comes to in-season garden crops, but we think field crops are our neglected step-children.  There are something like 382 million acres of crops grown in the US.  Only 3.3 million of those acres are vegetables or 4.6 if you include Irish potatoes. We're always disappointed when customers come to us and suggest that they're going to fight the GMO tide by buying vegetables from us. If we're really going to make a difference in how the land in our communities is farmed -- and we think that's one very important way to look at things -- the other 99% (besides vegetables) is what really counts.  (Our numbers, by the way, came from more than one source, none of which we kept track of, but we're assuming they're nonetheless accurate enough to make the point we're making here.) Field corn, soybeans, and wheat apparently make up 198 of the 382 acres of cropland in the US.  Hay (59.9 mil) is right up there. (Land for hay is apparently counted with cropland, but grazing land isn't.)  Cotton is about 4 times as significant as all vegetables combined in terms of acreage.  Grain sorghum has a little over twice the acreage of all vegetables combined.  So the point we're trying to make is that we think the local-organic food movement should be giving a lot more attention to field crops.
   So to talk about answers, we see two kinds of solutions.  One, obviously, is for the local-organic movement to take more responsibility for growing the field crops it consumes, for human consumption but especially for animal consumption (and then also non-food uses like with cotton.)  We'll come back to that.  The second kind of solution we see is finding ways to raise animals without depending (or depending so much) on field crops (on corn and wheat and soybeans and North Dakota peas and alfalfa pellets, etc.) for feeding our animals.  It seems to us the easiest answer on that front and one which is available enough already to customers that want to seek it out is grass-fed beef.
   On the other hand, if we wanted to go out and buy it, we wouldn't know of any North Carolina milk or cheese we could buy from comparably grass-fed cattle (or goats.)  And so far as we know including organic (certified or otherwise) grain feeds wouldn't open up any more options.  There may be an exception or two that we don't know about, but the rule seems to be that the small dairies making cheese are feeding conventional grain to their animals and the large, certified organic dairies producing liquid milk are depending substantially on organic grain (much of which, in addition to the hay, we'd guess isn't at all local) and then sending their milk out of state.  So when it comes to local-organic (certified or otherwise) dairy, we feel like there's a lot of catching up to do just to get to where we're at with grass-fed beef.  Replacing grain with grass does seem to us like the most realistic path to dairy food sovereignty in the face of GMO's, perhaps made more feasible by lower producing genetics, longer dry periods, more seasonal milking, and/or multiple species grazing.  Whatever the technical solutions, we don't mean to suggest, though, that the problem is fundamentally technical.  The fundamental reason for the absence of local, grass-fed dairy in North Carolina markets, we believe, is simply that farmers and consumers don't care enough to want to take on the inevitable expense and trouble.
   From a food sovereignty perspective it appears to us that things only get worse when we consider pork, poultry, or eggs.  At least pasture plays a significant part in the macro-nutrition equation of a lot of small-scale/unconventional (and even some conventional) dairy animals.  There are plenty of producers that pasture poultry or pork for reasons of animal welfare, etc., but little if any of the pastured pork or poultry movement seems to be doing anything to redefine the macro feed equations.  What we mean by that is that these producers are depending every bit as much, both in degree and quantity, on the same sorts of dry feed mixes as confinement producers.  It would be theoretically possible for farmers or communities to grow their own grains and oilseeds (and possibly even press oil and generate oilseed meal) and peas/beans to produce substitutes for the standard feed mixes, but we think that would more than likely demand a scale of production incompatible with the amount of pork/poultry the farmer could find any way to sell, especially when most customers don't ever take any concern for where the feed comes from (so long as they see the happy image of an animal in a natural-looking setting, if they're even educated enough to realize that chickens and hogs are being fed any purchased feeds at all.)  So the best hope we see would have to lend itself to a smaller scale of production, i.e. entry-level for a very marginal enterprise.  We think that would most likely need to be some kind of low-input, low-production, extensive acreage system.  We'd see relying heavily on extensive forage, possibly planted forages, but more likely forest floor kind of stuff (grubs, mast...) and maybe some crop gleaning.  We think just a simple grain feed (like straight corn) that a farmer could conceivably grow himself could then suffice to fill the gaps and make the whole system come together.  The chief challenge would be that a "pastured pork" producer could sell his pork or poultry so much cheaper -- we'd guess on the order of 1/2 to 1/3 the price -- if he just took advantage of the economies of scale that come with the large grain production systems.  (Those economies of scale have, of course, nothing to do with ecological economy.)  The main point here, though, is that accepting those dollar savings of the large-scale systems leaves us without any footing to resist the GMO tide.
   No matter how much the kind of strategies we've been discussing can reduce our consumption of GMO field crops, we're still surely going to depend on field crops at least for supplementing our animals, and we're also going to want to consume field crops directly (i.e. human consumption), so there's still the hugely significant, terribly neglected question of actually growing local-organic (certified or not) field crops.  Suggestions that we can "close the local food loop by feeding locally milled, organic grain" -- and such comments seem commonplace, as do the even weaker assertions that simply feeding any kind of feed to local farm animals offers a real alternative agriculture -- say to us that we as the local-organic movement haven't even looked at the huge hole in our "local food loop," let alone begun the huge task of closing it.  ("Locally milled"?  That's nice, but is that as deep as our local agriculture goes before we happily abandon responsibility to the global economy?  Can't we, if we're really any kind of local food movement, at least aspire to have some community control of the actual agriculture, of soils and photosynthesis?)
   There are, of course, some genuine alternative efforts being made in North Carolina toward local-organic grain, at least for human consumption.  We're too far away to know much about the rice grown in Chatham County last year, but we read about it, and that's remarkable.  We know there are slightly larger things happening with local-organic corn and wheat and soybeans (and not just a byproduct of global-organic.)  There seems to be potential with malting barley, if efforts haven't begun in North Carolina already.  We think the fight against GMO's demands that we particularly embrace efforts to grow heirloom varieties of these crops.  And we think it demands that consumers learn how to use more of the crops that can be and are being grown locally with whatever the local processing limitations are.
   One upside of the small scale we would say is necessitated by local-organic field crops is that large backyard growers should have it within their means to do a lot of what would otherwise have to be left to larger farms.  A 50 foot square garden space could produce a bushel or two of wheat (60-120 pounds) for a family and be harvested, threshed, and winnowed by hand, ready to grind, in an afternoon.  It's an encouraging sign that a second edition of Gene Logsdon's book, Small-Scale Grain Raising, just came out.  We think it's quite conceivable, for example, to keep a few laying hens on a large backyard scale with just hand-harvested field corn, as much forage as possible, plus kitchen byproducts and whatever else can be locally scavenged for feed.