PESTICIDE EXPOSURE LINKED TO LOWER IQ IN CHILDREN

    A few months ago we read about some then newly publicized studies showing that higher levels of exposure to organophosphates (a class of chemical pesticides) in pregnant mothers corresponded with lower IQ scores in their children at age 7. Here's one article on the subject:
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/womens-health/articles/2011/04/21/pesticide-exposure-in-pregnancy-linked-to-lower-iq-in-kids?PageNr=1
   These were interesting studies to us, not just because they highlighted yet another unforeseen and imprudent risk of using chemical pesticides, but especially because they drew our attention to unexpected types of risks. We consider it old news that chemical use is responsible for various forms of cancer and other diseases that will make you sick or kill you -- the only new news about chemicals making us sick is connecting each new generation of chemicals to the specific illnesses they cause -- but it's a little different to think about pesticides causing problems that aren't illnesses (like lower IQ's.) Last year we heard from a beekeeper that pollinates low-bush blueberries in Maine that consumption of low-bush blueberries and a pesticide used on them has been linked to much higher levels of behavioral disorders like ADHD in children. (Low-bush blueberries are different from the blueberries grown locally; if you want to avoid pesticides, local blueberries are actually a much better choice than peaches or apples, for example. Frozen blueberries and other blueberries from up North would be the ones to avoid.)
    So what do we conclude from these kinds of reports? First, we conclude that the problems stemming from chemical use in agriculture are far, far too complex to try to navigate piecemeal. Trying to ban or avoid just the "bad chemicals" that we hear about in the news, etc., surely won't leave the "safe chemicals but rather simply other bad chemicals that cause less expected problems or chemicals that are more difficult to link to the problems they cause.  In other words, we believe the only reasonable response is to avoid chemical agriculture (and lawn care, home pest control, household chemicals, etc.) in general.  Regaining control of those things for which we've become dependent on the corporate system is the only response we find promising. For us that means, of course, not using any chemical pesticides (insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc.) in our own farming and accepting the ensuing costs and losses as our new baseline, but more to the point it means doing as much as we can for ourselves (instead of simply doing what's most profitable and then feeding that money back into the consumer economy), wild harvesting and buying directly from people we know (that likewise aren't using chemical shortcuts) those things that we aren't growing ourselves, and re-learning how to eat locally so that more and more we can do without the kinds of supermarket foods that we've grown up thinking of as staples. This means, for example, accepting the time and commitment it takes to hand milk or tether out a cow, even though supermarket-scaled dairies can produce milk far more cheaply. It also means we don't compare the cost of local, unofficially-organic strawberries to conventional strawberries (knowing that even five cents for a truckload of sweet, red lowered IQ's and behavioral disorders is no bargain), or compare the appearance of unsprayed apples to conventional apples, or the taste of homegrown fruit to chemical-intensive peaches, but rather we compare the cost of local, unofficially-organic strawberries to picking wild blackberries, and we compare the unsprayed apples to the alternative of unsprayed Asian pears, and we simply do without chemical-intensive peaches altogether and let that motivate us to plant more figs and to try making melon ice cream instead of peach and to freeze more blueberries for this winter.

RAINBOW IN THE TOMATO PATCH

  A tomato plant for the most part looks like a tomato plant.  For months, we've been looking at long rows of these green plants.  Now suddenly the plants are giving forth their signature colors and shapes.  We do have a map of the tomato patch, but it's been more fun to let the fruits form and then color.  This way we recognize the arrival of our old favorites and meet for the first time our new trialed ones.  But we don't look at them long - tomatoes are for eating!
  When tomatoes are this beautiful, they simply need to be served as is.  A favorite side dish of ours is a plate of sliced tomatoes - with the whole spectrum of colors.  Starting from the bottom of the rainbow, we have our repeat favorite 'Cherokee puprle.'  It's often the first to disappear from the platter with it's tempting maroon/purple fully ripe color and rich flavor to match.  Next, greens: ripe tomatoes can be green - they actually get a bit of yellowish hue which, in addition to the softness, clues you they are ready.  Our greens this year include a smaller salad one 'green zebra' with its delicious tart bite and yellow stripes.  'Aunt Ruby's German green' is a new full-size green slicing tomato that Melissa's mom saved seed from for us and we're trying for the first time this year.  In the orange/yellow spectrum we have 'Djena Lee' a very pretty, slightly oval shaped yellow-orange tomato.  'Azoychka', a Russian heirloom, ripens to a taxi cab yellow with a hint of citrus flavor.  We love the way it contrasts, in taste but especially in color, with the red tomatoes.  Another very unusual tomato is the 'white queen,' which is such a pale yellow that it's really about white.  And then we get to the reds and pinks.  'Akers West Virginia' has been our long-time favorite large red slicer, the one that says put me on a slab of mayonaise lathered bread.  With homemade mayaonise (very easy to make), even our kids love this regular lunch time meal.  'German Johnson' the pink version of a large slicer, are a locally recognized favorite and for good reason.  They come on early and big.  'Peron sprayless' and 'Illini star' are reds, and a bit smaller than the previous big guys, so they can go for a sandwich or something smaller.  But if you're undecided on color, 'Mr. Stripey' is the tomato for you.  It's a gigantic, gorgeous red tomato with yellow stripes or is it a yellow tomato with red stripes.  Either way, cut crosswise it's a treat for the eyes.  But don't stop there.  Eat it up and we'll have more for you next week.
  In the just for fun category this year, we're trialing 'vine peach', a seed gift from a friend.  And true to their name they are covered with a peach-like fuzz and a peach-like color enough to really make you think you're holding a ripe peach in your hand.  'Thai pink' is a smallish "plum tomato" new to us this year from the same seed-saving friend.  And we love our cherry tomatoes.  Just mentioning the names and you certainly can envision a bowl-full of mini color balls - 'orange cherry', 'red pearl', pink cherry, 'black cherry', Harry's yellow grape, and 'tommy toe,' a well-known red heirloom.
  And finally, what we refer to as our processing or 'winter' tomatoes - 'Amish paste' and 'San Marzano redorta'.  'Amish paste' actually is a wonderful multi-purpose tomato.  If we had to grow one tomato, it would be this one.  In fact, a neighbor who claims not to really like tomatoes, now only grows this one.  A repeat winner in our blind taste tests, it excels fresh in the summer and is a winter treat out of the jar on pizza or pasta.  We can't say enough about 'San Marzanos' either so we just planted about a quarter of our tomato patch to them!  They are big.  Forget hours peeling baby romas to can.  One of these equals 5 romas, with much less trouble and double the flavor.  They are nearly juiceless and seedless (which can make seed saving an effort) so canning them is a joy.  Their meatiness means that they don't cook down nearly as much as other tomatoes, so for making a sauce or anything you want to thicken up, a pound of these San Marzano seems to be worth two pounds of slicing tomatoes.  Stick 5 or 6 peeled tomatoes in a quart jar and they are ready to go into the canner.
  All our tomatoes are open-pollinated varities grown from seed we saved (except for the ones we are trialing for the first time).  They are put through a rigorous taste test each year to make sure they perform where it counts the most.  Let us know what you think as you enjoy this year's tomato season!

Helping Visitors

We've had a string of visitors come stay on the farm and help out this year, starting with Gildas (pictured weeding the strawberry patch), followed by Tim (whose picture we failed to take -- didn't mean to leave you out, Tim!), then Zeke (pictured milking the cow), and most recently Melanie (tying up onions).  Thank you again for the help!  We very much enjoyed the time we got to spend with each of you on the farm.  Keep in touch, and come visit whenever you get the chance! 

Homegrown Beer: the Barley Harvest

A good sharp sickle -- we got a sharper sickle in time for
the wheat harvest -- seems like the best harvesting tool.

Our threshing system gets the job done,
but we'd love to find a better way.

Paul and Hattie playing on the tractor as it starts to get dark.

Bringing in the barley harvest.

DIVERSITY AND KNOWING WHAT WENT INTO GROWING YOUR FOOD

  One of the several reasons we maintain a highly diversified farm -- we grow well over 100 varieties of garden crops; manage permanent pastures to feed cattle and goats for dairy and meat; grow grains for food and as a supplement to forage for our chickens; grow fruit trees, brambles, bushes, and vines; keep honeybees; raise mushrooms on logs; etc. -- is so that our customers can have a realistic option of knowing what went into growing their food.  The modern food economy has gotten so complex that it's impossible for normal consumers to know what goes into growing their food (which we see as a fundamental step to exercising good stewardship of the earth.)  Diversifying our farm is a way we offer to simplify your food economy.  The alternative would be for us to sell a much smaller variety of farm goods to a much wider pool of customers and, correspondingly, for our customers to buy just a small number of things from each of a much greater number of farmers, but that would mean that consumers would have that much less reason to get to know any one farm -- and it's hard enough for farms and consumers to make meaningful, informative connections as it is.  So we want to make it worth your while to get to know us, to learn what we do and why we do it.  In order to farm in a truly different way, we believe that truly different relationships with the consumers of our farm goods are absolutely essential.  Along these same lines, here's a little excerpt from a Wendell Berry interview:
Berry: Shorten the supply lines. Bring your economic geography back into your own view. That's not to say that we don't need tuna fish here [in Kentucky], but even if we were catching ocean fish in the least destructive way, it would still be wrong for us to be too dependent on tuna in Kentucky. We ought to eat more catfish.
We ought to see to it that our rivers are unpolluted here, and eat the local fish from them. And we ought to fish in a way that preserves the supply and, therefore, preserves the livelihood of fishing. What I'm trying to talk against is the idea that a so-called environmental problem can ever be satisfactorily reduced to a simple moral choice. It's always complex in its causes, and so its solutions will also have to be complex.
Fisher-Smith (Interviewer): It seems to me that you've turned these words "complex" and "simple" upside down, in terms of their usual positive or negative values. You've said you wish to complicate, not to simplify, every aspect of daily life.
Berry: Absolutely! Simplicity means that you have brought things to a kind of unity in yourself; you have made certain connections. That is, you have to make a just response to the real complexity of life in this world. People have tried to simplify themselves by severing the connections. That doesn't work. Severing connections makes complication. These bogus attempts at simplification ignore or despise the real complexity of the world. And ignoring complexity makes complication--in other words, a mess.
Interviewer: But that complication is considered to be outside the accounting?
Berry: It's left out of the accounting. That's right. People think either that they'll die before the bill comes due or that somebody else will pay for it. But the world is complex, and if we are to make fit responses to the world, then our thinking--not our equipment, but our thoughts--will have to become complex also. Our thoughts can never become as complex as the world is--but, you see, an uncanny thing is possible. It's possible to use the world well without understanding it in all of its complexity. People have done it. They've done it not by complicated technology, but by competent local adaptation, complex thought, sympathy, affection, local loyalties and fidelities, and so on.

THE CHALLENGES OF SIMPLICITY

   Talking about poultry and eggs last week we mentioned some things in passing about how we feed our chickens, and it occurred to us that we might have given a false impression about the simplicity of keeping chickens the way we do, so we thought we'd tell you more this week about what's involved. Straight heirloom corn, for example, is certainly a simple chicken feed, but feeding simply corn (or barley or wheat, depending largely on the season) presents a whole array of other challenges, which is why most small farmers and even most people with backyard chickens opt for the store-bought, “scientifically formulated” chicken feed mixture with the long list of mysterious ingredients (whether conventional or USDA organic) like we discussed last week. So the question we want to address here is why feeding a homegrown kind of feed to chickens is so uncommon. In other words, what's not simple about feeding simple, homegrown feed?
   The first challenge is that locally grown, non-GMO (not genetically modified) grain -- which is the only grain we feed -- isn't typically for sale anywhere, so generally our only options are to grow grain ourselves (and hand-hoe and hand-harvest it, etc.) and to find local grain farmers willing to deal with us in relatively, by today's standards, very small quantities. However, a small quantity for the grain farmer is typically a large quantity for us. The heirloom corn we bought from a nearby “retired” hobby farmer last year -- it took years just to locate a farmer growing a surplus of heirloom corn like this -- wasn't for sale by the bag as needed; really the only way we were able to buy it was to buy the entire crop at harvest time. And the corn came on the cob, so we had to have built a corn crib to store it (about 70 bushels on the cob) and finish drying it. Then in order to feed it we had to remove the cobs by hand and pass them one at a time through our corn sheller. That's one series of logistical hurdles, but since we don't use insecticides we can't simply store large enough quantities of corn to feed our flock of chickens through the summer and early fall without the corn getting destroyed by little grain-eating insects. So to make it through those months we've been buying wheat from some brothers that keep an old combine running and grow a few acres of grain, as best we can tell, just as a hobby. (That the only farmers growing the kind of grain that we'd want to buy can only justify their farming as a hobby shows how badly we need to increase our awareness and the value we place on local grain farming and grain-fed products like pork and poultry, etc.) Together with another friend that raises livestock and poultry, we've been buying these brothers' entire wheat crop as feed for our animals. What that means for us is that we wind up with a row of 55-gallon drums full of wheat lined up in front of our barn, where the brothers are able to unload the wheat. Then we had to get those drums under shelter. This past year we borrowed a hand truck for moving appliances, which was a big improvement over brute wrestling, but with uneven ground and barn bedding, etc. still took two plus hours of strenuous work. As nice as it would be to avoid that kind of work, it was the most efficient way to get the job done, given the scale necessitated by breaking with mainstream ways of farming, which is the broader point we're trying to make: breaking with mainstream ways of farming isn't easy and it often dictates a scale incompatible with modern, labor-saving machinery.
   But the challenges to simply feeding locally grown grain don't end with the grain, because grain isn't a complete feed. Corn or wheat only work as feed for our chickens because all day long, until we top them off in the evening, they're eating grubs and worms and grass and weed seeds, etc., etc. In order to make that kind of foraging possible, we have to manage predator threats, we have to keep the chickens out of the gardens and away from all the crops they would eat or scratch up, and we also have to deal with infringements on people spaces. We keep predators shy mainly by keeping a couple outdoor dogs (which have their own set of requirements) and by being here, working outside and walking back and forth, all day long almost every day. We keep the chickens out of the gardens and away from our crops at the expense of fencing, and by chasing down the occasional fence jumpers with a fishing net (i.e. at the expense of our dignity) and then finding someone else to whom we can give or sell those hens. Furthermore, allowing chickens to free forage means allowing chickens to poop in all sorts of places we would rather not have chicken poop, like on the walkway from our driveway to the house. Fortunately for the sake of our chickens' forage we don't have neighbors within 1/8 mile or too much traffic on our road -- that comes with the cost of being further from town and market and customers -- but for most other small farmers providing comparable forage would probably mean daily setting up new rotations with poultry netting. All this to say there are plenty of hurdles and costs to keeping things simple. We hope understanding some of these things will help you appreciate the end product.

Why does feeding a chicken have to be so complex?

   Last year we recommended Organic Valley to you all as a relatively better choice for milk by supermarket standards. We figured any company that big wouldn't maintain much integrity very many years, but we didn't foresee having to issue a retraction so soon. We know there are still a lot of good farmers supplying Organic Valley, but a recent comment by the CEO, George Siemon was enough to spoil any endorsement we could make for the brand. The CEO's comment actually had nothing at all to do with dairy; his comment was made in defense of using synthetic methionine in organic broiler feed -- apparently eggs are sold under the same brand name: “I don’t understand what the big deal is. There are tons of synthetics in your life; now we are saying none in animals?” You see, a diet of strictly grains and oilseed meals (i.e. corn and soy) is so unnatural for chickens that they're unable to get all the essential amino acids they need, and because a natural diet is so incompatible with modern, large-scale ways of keeping chickens, the people that write the rules for the USDA organic program made an exception for synthetic methionine in poultry feed, so that modern, large-scale farms could continue to supply "organic" consumers with poultry products.
   There would be several ways to avoid the need for synthetic methionine in poultry feed, but the solutions all get in the way of industrially defined efficiency. One solution would be to supply chickens with fresh, green feeds. Another solution would be to let chickens scratch up things like earthworms and grubs. Another solution would be to simply raise chickens that grow at a more natural rate and don't run into nutrient deficiencies as readily as the modern hybrids bred for intensive factory farming. Another solution would be to give chickens the kind of surpluses (like dairy byproducts) that small farms generally find themselves with. All of these things happen as a matter of course on a farm like ours, and any one of them would likely be a solution to the USDA organic methionine problem. Unfortunately, all of these solutions are too far removed from the reality of “USDA organic” practice, so the people in charge simply wrote the rules defining “organic” to accommodate industrialized farming methods by allowing synthetic amino acids in poultry feed. Now, maybe synthetic methionine isn't as harmful or risky as many of the other synthetics used in agriculture -- we don't know and for our sake we don't need to know -- but the kind of farming made possible by synthetic methionine, thousands of chickens crowded into buildings never eating anything fresh, fed by Midwestern mega-farms, is certainly harmful, and it's a far cry from what organic ought to mean.
   We found the following mystery ingredients in one blend of USDA organic feed (which we're sure is more natural than what's fed to the flocks supplying supermarkets, whose feed ingredients we've never seen disclosed) -- keep in mind this is a USDA certified organic feed:
Sodium Silico Aluminate, Dicalcium Phosphate, Yeast Culture, Vitamin A Supplement, Vitamin D3 Supplement, Vitamin E Supplement, Choline Chloride, Menadione Nicotinamide Bisulfite Complex, D-Calcium Pantothenic Acid, Niacin Supplement, Riboflavin Supplement, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Thiamine Hydrochloride, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Biotin, Folic Acid, Manganese Sulfate, Ferrous Sulfate, Calcium Iodate, Zinc Sulfate, Copper Sulfate, Sodium Selenite, Dried fermentation product of Enterococcus faecium, Dried fermentation product of Bacillus coagulans...
   Some of these ingredients have more natural sounding names than others, but surely none of them was fed to poultry 200 years ago. Where do all these things come from and at what ecological costs? Would you know how to grow or mine or synthesize any of these things? Why does feeding a chicken have to be so complex? For comparison, we don't feed anything to our chickens that farmers didn't feed 200 years ago. According to the season and what we can grow ourselves or buy directly from neighbors (besides surpluses from our own farm like garden extras or surplus dairy from our animals) we simply supplement free range forage with barley or wheat or heirloom (non-GMO) corn. It really doesn't seem to us that normal chicken feed ought to require sophisticated modern science. For us eating organic doesn't mean eating processed foods with long lists of ingredients that came from who-knows-where and were produced who-knows-how; why should eating organic be defined so differently when it comes to feeding animals?
   USDA organic is a huge improvement over conventional -- don't get us wrong, it gets a LOT worse -- but it still leaves a lot to be desired, and as a system it's nothing we find hope in.