2012 Tomato Taste Test Results

   We blindfolded each other (5 samplers in all) on Tuesday for our annual tomato taste test.  We actually held two separate taste tests this year, one for the slicing and paste type, and a separate one for the cherry and small salad type tomatoes.
   In the large tomato taste test the #1 rankings went to Aker's West Virginia, Mr. Stripey, Amish paste, and San Marzano redorta.  Those last two are our two paste types, but it's not the first time they've bested the slicing types for straight, fresh flavor.  Second and third place rankings this year also went to German Johnson, Illini star (our earliest red tomato), and Cherokee purple.  All five samplers ranked the Aker's West Virginia in the top three this year.  Amish paste was ranked in the top three by four samplers and was just barely edged out with the fifth.
   In the small tomato taste test the #1 rankings went to our orange cherry, our pink cherry, and a small red salad/plum tomato bred from our pink cherry (which took three of the five #1 rankings.)  Second and third place rankings also went to the black cherry, and Thai pink (which won the most #1 votes in our overall test last year).
   The tomatoes are definitely slowing down a bunch now, but you might still find another chance to try our taste test winners this year, and we certainly plan to grow all the winners again next year.  We'd especially encourage you to try some of the different colors and odd shapes (like the San Marzano redorta, which we grow more of than any other variety because its nearly solid flesh which makes it our favorite for salsa and sauce and canning and about any cooked use, as well as a fresh eating tomato as the blind taste tests show) and odd sizes (like the two-bite-sized Thai pink and sweet red plum.)

WWOOF Host Farm

  You may have noticed and wondered about the series of seemingly random young people at our farmers' market stand or the farm over the last three years.  In total we've had 19 people come stay with us on the farm, helping out with all the different farming and related activities we do (learning how to go through a bee hive, milk a cow, make simple cheeses, weeding, mulching, transplanting, scything hay, stacking mushroom logs, picking corn, threshing barley, canning tomatoes, shelling peas, etc., etc.)  Most of them have found us through a network called WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), although about a half dozen of them connected with us in other ways.  There are WWOOF networks all over the world connecting volunteers with organic host farms.  For a lot of the volunteers it's a way to take a cheap vacation (basically free after transportation), something like going to a dude ranch out West.  Michael was the first person to come stay on the farm, and he stayed for most of the summer as more of an intern, but since then everyone (so far) has come for shorter stays, mostly 3-5 weeks.  A couple Chinese graduate students studying as foreign students in New York City came for their spring break.  A manager of a World Bank watchdog organization in Washington, DC from a small farm in the Philippines took a little vacation time to get away from the office buildings to help us plant strawberries and dig peanuts.  Most of our "WWOOF'ers" haven't come with any thoughts of becoming farmers, wanting just to experience a different kind of work and life for a little while, although some have come exploring vocational options and a couple have even come with more serious desires to build on their farming educations.  We've had three separate volunteers come as part of international travels, all coincidentally from France.  A couple different WWOOF'ers have come from as close as the Winston-Salem suburbs.  It's been a fun experience for us as hosts.  We've enjoyed getting to "travel" to China and France, the Philippines, Alaska, and Miami, Florida.  We've also especially enjoyed continuing relationships with the North Carolina WWOOF'ers.  Two of last year's WWOOF'ers came back to the farm this spring to get started keeping honeybees of their own.  We're growing things like hops and Asian persimmons now thanks to our visitors.  Before they leave, we have the WWOOF'ers carve their names on a beech tree by the WWOOF'er hammock.  It's a living guest book of these random visitors' we've had the pleasure to get to know.  So that's a little introduction to WWOOF'ing and what we've been doing as WWOOF hosts.  If you know of any young people (or other adventurous souls)  that might be interested in leaving home to live and work on a farm for a period you might suggest the idea to them.

Our heifer had a heifer!

Pediobius foveolatus

Would you pay $100 for some dried up bean beetle larvae?

We did!  Here we are attaching the bags to the bean plants (and showing off a really bad farmer's tan).

  After two years in a row of losing most of our bean crop to Mexican bean beetles, we decided it was time to take a chance on some organic snake oil.  It arrived today via next day air: Pediobius foveolatus, a tiny wasp that lays its eggs inside the bean beetle larvae. 

Bad rain

   We had a terrible, damaging rain this past week: way too much rain, way too hard and fast. Since we moved to this farm we only got this much rain in a short period once before, but the other time was in early winter. Of course, we'd love to tell the story of how resilient our way of farming is and how it stood up to the stress test, but that's not our story, certainly not the story we're feeling. We lost soil. We had done a lot to prepare for a storm like this, carefully studied where the water comes from and where it wants to go, and then dug ditches and left permanent grassy waterways accordingly. More important, we've kept about three-quarters of our farm in permanent pasture, not wanting to expose any areas susceptible to erosion. Our farm isn't really hilly, but it's definitely rolling, so we've only plowed the flatest ground. But we definitely weren't ready. The ditch beside what we call the triangle and long gardens that's dry 358 days per year was roaring with so much water that we were afraid of getting pulled in and drowning as we were working to clear a small redbud tree that the storm had somehow pulled into the ditch and that was impeding the flow of water and threatening to overflow the banks of the ditch into the garden. That wasn't our big problem, but we say that just to give you an idea of how much water we were dealing with. The big problem was on the side of the long garden opposite the ditch. Probably over a hundred acres drain past the far end of the long garden into the main ditch beside the long garden. We had banked the ground up at the end of the long garden to send any surface water directly into the ditch and to prevent it cutting a diagonal through the long garden, but so much water was seeping through the bank and springing up at the far end of the long garden that we had two or three channels flowing down the length of the garden each with what we would guess was a gallon or two of water per second.

   Who would have known and been prepared for that much water to spring up out of the ground at the far end of the long garden? The answer to that question is clearly a family that had lived and intimately farmed on this land longer than we have. We're reminded of the Wendell Berry quote that we shared with you just before this storm hit: “The only sufficient answer to bad agriculture is good agriculture, which is not just an application of science and technology but a locally adapted way of living and working.” We're sorely feeling the need for better adaptation to our place right now, but that kind of knowledge can't be purchased from an agribusiness corporation or brought in by a white-collar expert. Adaptation takes time. We're learning the hard lessons of first generation farmers on this land. What we really need is the wisdom that comes from generations of intimately farming the same land. There's a saying that the best time to plant a fruit tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. Similarly, we believe the best time to start farming our land was at least two or three generations ago, but we only have the second best option.
   But what might we have done differently and how might we have been farming when the heavy rain came if we had had a more mature farm model? “No-till” farming is the easy answer commonly thrown about nowadays (and practiced on most of the farmland around us), but as Berry said in preface to the above quote, “while there are some advantages to no-till farming, it is a way of growing grains that is totally dependent on toxic chemicals. Moreover, nutrient contamination from no-till agriculture remains a significant problem. The hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico is not going to be remedied by no-till farming...Abuse of land and people cannot be corrected by a scattering of technological 'perfect fixes.'” A lot more could be said about no-till farming, but we'll just add a couple more thoughts here. First, besides the total dependency on toxic chemicals (which alone is reason enough to reject it), the chemical herbicides that “no-till” farming depends on (which are just one set of chemicals) are already failing to kill weeds as weeds are developing resistance to the herbicides. Of course, the “solution” the agribusinessmen and universities promise is new chemicals and crops with additional “stacked” genetic modifications to accomadate multi-chemical herbicidal cocktails. As a brief aside, the second point we'd make with regards to the “no-till” idea is that even if we cleared all our woods and grew “no-till” crops on all our rolling ground -- a practice which inevitably leads to erosion as we've seen on our neighbor's “no-till” land -- our 43 acre farm still would barely be 10% the size of the smallest farm providing a living from “no-till” farming in our region. So even if “no-till” were the answer, it would be no answer for us. But that brings us back to the proposed “solution” of a perpetual string of newer and more powerful chemicals to be used on ever larger and “more efficient” farms. What is a “very small” farmer with 400 acres of “no-till” crops going to do when the herbicides he depends on no longer kill the weeds? What if, even apart from all the mysterious risks, he has specific reasons to believe that the next round of chemicals and genetic modifications is terribly unsafe? His options at that point are, of course, to use the chemicals anyways or give up farming and let someone else use the same chemicals in his place. But a huge part of the reason we're farming is to gain some independence from the course of faith in future chemicals. As if we didn't have problems enough from the chemicals we already have in our air, soil, water, and food!
   So where are we left? We're still farming without any easy answers but with hopes of slowly attaining that generational wisdom. This rain certainly taught us some lessons that we hope we can use to prepare for any more rains this bad. Digging ditches, etc. isn't work we relish, and we'll have to sacrifice some of the garden space near the house (where we can easily irrigate, where deer pressure is least, and that for other reasons, too, is generally most valuable), but it clearly needs to be done. None of this year's crops were really damaged, although there's still plenty of clean-up work to do, and the ground is still so saturated that the tomatoes look like their roots are about to drown. The worst trouble to this year's crops may have been from all the rain keeping us out of the fields for several more days when the Irish potatoes and dry beans and field corn and several other crops already badly needed hoeing before. So those are our big thoughts after the hard rain!

What's wrong with USDA organic?

   We've talked before about big business lobbyists distorting the organic rules to allow synthetic additives, about outright fraud followed by organic certifying agencies arguing for the safety of chemicals used on produce they're certifying as organic, about rules that allow organic "farms" to operate as confinement feeding operations without growing anything at all (and therefore not feeding anything green or fresh to their animals, etc.)  In addition to the structural problems with the USDA organic system there are, of course, also all the little stories of farmers that take the easy chemical solutions to their problems when no one is looking.  We bought some USDA certified organic buckwheat recently and noticed afterwards that the bag said "product of China."  (We need to figure out how to harvest our own buckwheat! [In 2014 we grew enough for our own limited use, and now, as of 2015, we're offering shares of buckwheat we grew as part of our Full Farm CSA].)  Of course, it's absurd for China to ship staple grains clear around the globe to the US, but it also strikes us as wishfully absurd to think that organic integrity can survive that kind of supply chain.
   But those are just the most superficial problems we see with the USDA organic system.  We could go a step deeper and argue that USDA certified organic farms shouldn't be allowed to directly support the production of chemical-intensive, genetically modified soybeans in order to use the soybean meal on their fields for fertilizer (which is quite common practice.)  Perhaps you'd want to tighten the rules so as not to allow for organic farmers to directly purchase conventional crop products like that, but where then do you draw the line?  If it's not okay to use GMO soybean meal, is it better to feed GMO grains to conventional beef in concrete feedlots or to hens packed thousands or tens of thousands to a building and process bloodmeal or feathermeal from those operations instead?  Or to even simply use that manure?  Of course, there's nothing inherently unnatural about soybeans or blood or feathers or manure, and a fully organic system would incorporate all of these things in one way or another without sending them to landfills or dumping them into rivers and streams.  The fundamental problem here may very well be that the USDA system really isn't any kind of alternative "system" but rather an inseparable offshoot designed to accommodate the mainstream consumer model.
   Before we bought our first couple of feeder pigs we read a publication by an organic agricultural extension service on how to organically control intestinal worms in organic hog production systems.  The answer was to maintain a carefully timed model that would allow for routinely medicating all sows in the first trimester to optimize the loophole in the USDA organic rules.  Organic poultry demonstrates even less systemic integrty: USDA organic poultry farms aren't given any reason to incorporate reproduction into their farms at all.  The whole process of raising breeding stock, laying and hatching eggs, etc. is simply left to the conventional mainstream and then 7 weeks later the bird is legally sold to the consumer as USDA organic.  The USDA organic response to chemical and pharmaceutical use is not to develop an alternative system but rather to outsource their use.
   So how would one develop a real alternative to our dependency on chemicals and pharmaceuticals?  We think the most important part of the answer is to shorten supply lines and rebuild connections between eaters (consumers) and the land that feeds (and clothes and houses) them.  Instead of putting a seal of approval on buckwheat from China we want to build relationships that can foster organic agriculture in our community, relationships that we can trust to deliver real integrity.  Probably our biggest and most basic objection to the USDA organic label is that it's all about replacing community-based trust with trust in bureaucratically governed certifying agencies.  The organic label is designed to replace the need to personally know anything about where or how your food was grown.  The trend in organic agriculture has certainly been overwhelming in the direction of larger scale, more heavily industrialized, and greater distances between consumers and the source of their food since the USDA rules took effect, and that's no accident.  In more respects than we can list here, the USDA rules have given the edge to the industrial-scale producers.  Is it any wonder that industrial abuses are the result?  If how food is farmed matters (i.e. if we're going to take on any organic concerns), then the first step to organic integrity is to know more of where and how and by whom food is grown.

Our excuse

   Mid-March is a very busy time of year on the farm.  There are onions, lettuce, and other greens to transplant, spring crops to seed in the garden, potatoes to plant, summer crops like tomatoes to seed in the cold frame, ground to work up...  The bees need attention; we try to keep the bees from swarming along with making up colonies for next year.  The grass is starting to grow, so we set up fences in the pasture for the cattle and goats.  The mushroom logs need to be stacked.  Then there's the winter projects we try to finish up before it's too late - like spreading manure or picking up firewood before it gets lost in the growing grass.

  Suddenly, mid-March this year, everything on the long to do list was put on hold.  Christina, our then 7 week old baby, developed a serious case of a respiratory infection (RSV).   For 7 days, she was on a ventilator in the pediatric ICU, followed by another 3 days in the hospital.  It was a harrowing experience.  Yet, God was abundantly merciful, and Christina is now completely fine.  Just a few days shy of 3 months, she is a happy growing girl.  We are so grateful.  We too were well cared for during her hospital stay.  We were richly blessed in prayers, visits, meals, offers to help, gifts, and phone calls from our friends, neighbors, and family.
    But what happened to that long mid-March to do list?  What about the farm?  Where are we at?  By God's provision, we're about as caught up as ever.  Of course, on a farm, you're never caught up!  But the spring crops are coming along with some of them even ready to harvest, the bees are making honey (earlier in the year than they ever have due to the hot spring we've had), the cattle and goats are out on pasture, and the firewood is mostly picked up.  And most important, the children are well.  That said, losing a week and half at a busy time of year does have consequences - some crops are probably going in a bit later than they otherwise would have, a few more hives swarmed than they might have otherwise, etc.  So we've decided, if anything doesn't go as we'd like this year, we'll just use this as our on-going little excuse.