why farmers don’t vacation, part II

Farmflash:

• New York mixes art, ag, and parties — The Times, of course, is there.
• Sonoma County farmers weigh in on California’s Proposition Two, which would ban veal, sow, and egg operations it deems inhumane. (I’ll dive into this hot-button topic more later…)
• In the “shrug” category, Alabama ranks #3 in the list of U.S. states with the greatest amount of foreign-owned agricultural land, behind Maine and Texas.

Foggy River Philosophy:

While I briefly mentioned the minor disasters Emmett and I faced on our first visit back to the field, I didn’t really go into the philosophy behind why they occurred. And I want to point out that our caretakers did a wonderful job — we harbor no complaints whatsoever, just immense gratitude for how well our farm was taken care of.

What, then, went wrong?

I have a theory: farming is 49% planning, and 51% reacting. So while our caretaker did a great job watering, weeding, and generally tending the patch — the planned things — he of course wouldn’t think of the tasks that Emmett and I would have undertaken, given changing situations. (E.g., when the salad wasn’t sufficiently sprouted after a week, planting a new bed. Or, when our tomato plants grew top-heavy — we pruned all runners at first but then decided to let the rest of the runners go — reversing our no-prune mandate. Or, when the beans grew too heavy for the fencing, adding in new fence supports or cutting back a few of the plants.)

Farmers work long hours in the field, but we’re not always digging, hoeing, sowing, or harvesting. In fact, Emmett and I spend a good, say, half-hour each day at the farm doing what would appear to the casual observer to be absolutely nothing. We stroll around the entire place, occasionally squatting in the middle of the row. We glance at the sky. I roll tomato leaves between my fingers; Emmett pops a Sungold cherry in his mouth. It seems like moonshine — and, okay, sometimes it is — but what we’re actually doing is observing. And observation is an important pre-req to that 51% of farming: reacting. So once a day, you’ll find us wandering around the whole farm to make sure that nothing has gone disastrously wrong — trying to catch symptoms of trouble before they turn into a disaster.

Which brings me to my final point: why farmers don’t have a weekend. Number one, at least for direct-market farmers, much of the actual, normal-people’s-weekend is devoted to the farmer’s market. (See photo above.) Since Emmett and I do two weekend markets, we work roughly 26 hours between Saturday and Sunday. By the time Monday rolls around, we’re pretty tired — but we can’t stop, because there’s simply too much to do. After all, we probably haven’t had time to stroll around the field for the past two days, which means something has probably gone wrong in the meantime and needs to be fixed. Or we’ll realize that we’ve just harvested the last of our radishes and have forgotten to plant a new crop. Or it’ll be one of one hundred other things that may not have been on our planned to-do list, but quickly jump to the top of the reactionary list. You can’t stop working, because you’re always reacting.

All that said, tonight is my farm-girl equivalent of Friday night. Ironically, I spent it the way I usually spend real Friday nights: harvesting until 9 p.m. (The beans are mad, mad I tell you! They have to be picked every day, or the next thing we know they’ll be picking fights with the grape vines.) But back to the reason why a Tuesday night is a Friday night — Emmett and I are, on a trial basis (and for the sake of my urban-girl sanity, which does not understand the concept of non-stop farmwork), taking Wednesday as our weekend. NB: we may have gone on a two-week family reunion tour, but this will be our first “actual” weekend since we started attending farmer’s markets in mid June.

It’s not going to be a perfect weekend by any means. Let’s start with the fact that, as I pointed out to Emmett, it’s only one day. “When’s our other weekend day?” I asked. Emmett responded, “We have flexible schedules. We only get one day.” (I’m still not sure what he meant about the flexibility of our schedules; sure, we can take lunch at 11 a.m. or 2 p.m., but we work pretty much all the time.)

This “weekend,” we’ll still have to go to the farm to water, and we’ll probably spend much of the day doing other work — be it Emmett’s part-time job, my freelance writing attempts, or normal living things like laundry and showering (I’ve showered once since we got back from our trip… don’t ask) — but gosh darn it, I’ve been meaning to swim in the Russian River all summer.

Tomorrow, I’m going to do it.

first day of grape & bean harvest

Farmflash:

• ghosts of an LA farm continue to haunt; community members still protesting its loss.
• water conference discusses dangers and benefits of wastewater agriculture (yup, that means what you think it does), as well as extent of practice (more common than you think).
• similar to the ‘county bounty’ program recently discussed on this blog, Boston’s InSeason aims to provide customers with fresh, local food; it’s easy-to-use and guilt-free to boot (delivered not by boot, but by bike.)
• Canada’s concerned about the economic feasibility of local ag, given suburban sprawl and a lack of willing farmworkers.

And now for a bit of Foggy River news:

Today was the first day of the grape harvest — sparkling wines only, since they require less sugar and therefore less ripeness than traditional wines — so Emmett and I spent the morning helping out his dad in the vineyard. Translation: two and a half hours of grape picking before heading over to the veggie field to play beat-back-the-jungle.

If you’ve never picked wine grapes, it’s tough work. Apples, plums, cherries, green beans, and berries might be time consuming, but they’re pretty straightforward. Wine grapes actually require a fair bit of concentration and a heck of a lot of finesse. Professional pickers use a Captain Hook knife (curved like a hook, but serrated), reaching behind the bunch, swiftly yanking towards themselves, and letting the grape bunch drop directly into the harvest bin which is placed at their feet.

So far, so good. And while the bunches sometimes hang just so, right out there in the open to swipe and drop, with nice thin vines that cut through like butter — more often than not, they don’t. Sometimes two or three bunches will grow and tangle into one; the mega-bunch requires two or three passes of the knife. Sometimes the bunch will grow unfortunately around another vine, making it extremely difficult to find and sever the attachment point. Sometimes the vine is especially woody and tough to cut through — which means you have to apply a large amount of pressure with a sharp knife, endangering your other hand (which is positioned nearby, ready to funnel the grape bunch into the bin.) Sometimes the bunch will wrap around a supporting wire and you have to wrest it free, shattering a number of grape berries in the process.

Which brings me to my next point: harvesting wine grapes is extremely sticky work. The skins are thin, and it’s impossible to harvest without popping some of the berries. Each popped grape results in a miniature explosion of clear, sticky juice. Your hands become coated first; then the knife; then your shirt, face, hair — anything you touch. (So much for last night’s shower.)

After working for just a few hours, I developed a huge amount of appreciation for the men who harvest the grapes. The speed with which they harvest puts my clumsy attempts to shame. Not only are they quick with the knife, but they actually run — carrying full bins of grapes, which are quite heavy — to the tractor that follows them along the rows. They deposit their load and then run back to the vine where they left off. They’re paid by the bin, and work in teams, so everyone wants to harvest as quickly as possible. One team’s harvest is split equally among the men, and nobody wants to be the weakest link.

Speaking of the weakest link, Emmett and I spent the rest of the morning beating back the bean jungle — pounding two more posts into the fence to try and support the miscreant Blue Lake beans, and then harvesting the heck out of the insanely prolific Dow Purple Podded Snaps. It was our first time harvesting the beans (Emmett’s parents had harvested them on Friday for the market), and ooooowee was it an eye-opening experience. It took two of us one hour to harvest half a row of purple beans. (I think we’re going to have to do a cost-benefit analysis on our pole beans, or maybe pick a certain section to “let go” and harvest for soup beans.)

For now, I leave you with this thought: the next time you take a sip of wine or bite into a tender, tasty string bean, be grateful. Very grateful.

the jungle

I’ve dug up a few interesting farming-related articles from around the web: how high food prices can hurt — or at least not help — third world farmers, what Wal-Mart, cancer, and organic produce have to do with local farming in my hometown of San Diego, and when agricultural conservation gets contentious in New Jersey.

And finally, as promised, the optimist’s version of our two-week vacation from the farm:

In our absence, the farm went from a vegetable patch to a vegetable jungle. The quinoa now towers as tall as I do, brimming with proto-grain. Remember when, three months ago, I dreamed of a bean thicket? Well, now I’ve got one — an impenetrable green mass whose weight has managed to partially collapse its fencing. And the winter squash field — oh, the winter squash field! Green jack-o-lanterns, three times the size of my head, lie casually in the dirt. A French variety of yellow pumpkin — which looks as if you took a bright yellow globe and squeezed it at the poles, so it’s slightly wider than it is tall — bursts through the green vines with an unexpected splash of color. The textures, colors, and sizes of the squash are all different, all energizing: the ribbed delicata; the smooth, ovular spaghetti; the pear-shaped butternut; the pleasingly round kuri. (There are also a few mysterious hybrids, such as the one that’s shaped precisely like a spaghetti squash but is ribbed and dark green, like an acorn. What will it taste like? Only time will tell.)

Yes, a few of the mysteriously diseased squash plants died, but a couple of them are reminding me of… oh, I don’t know, pick some great hero, Hercules in the Augean Stables myth, or Queen Elizabeth I resolutely refusing to wed, or Mel Gibson in Braveheart, or something.

This one could not be more gallant, stolidly hanging on just long enough to put all of its energy into a small-but-perfect kuri squash:

So these are the upsides. And more good news: at today’s market in Windsor, we made more money than we ever have before. We still haven’t added up all of our numbers to see if we’ve actually paid off our investment costs yet, but I’m not going to let that dampen my spirits! Instead, I’m going to drink a locally-brewed beer and toast to all of the wonderful customers who’ve helped us out — by coming back every week to see what we have, by telling friends, and for all the little things, too, like getting excited about purple bean recipes and armenian cucumbers.

why farmers don’t vacation…

…at least in the summertime.

Coming back to the field this morning was, erm, ahem, <choke>, a bit of a shock. There was good news, and there was bad news.

I’m a realist. Let’s start with the bad.

First of all, in two weeks, dawn has changed noticeably. Emmett and I arrived on the field at 5 a.m. in the pitch black, figuring we were just a bit before the blue stage of the morning — and that, at any moment, dawn would grab hold of the horizon with her rosy fingers and illuminate the greens for our timely harvest.

Newsflash: in San Francisco on August 16, the sun doesn’t rise until 6:25 a.m. Which means that civil twilight (when the sun is within six degrees of the horizon, aka “bright twilight”) doesn’t get going until 6. Which means we were yanking, washing, and sorting beets, not to mention harvesting chard, when it was utterly, absolutely, one hundred percent dark. Also: truck headlights do not work very well as a light source. They tend to blind you, and cast all sorts of horrible shadows which make it exceptionally difficult to actually distinguish the vegetables you’re picking from one another. We only had one headlamp between the two of us. The going was slow.

The next bad news came with the dawn (aka, when we could actually see things). The salad we’d sown three weeks earlier has barely germinated. Where we had expected to see densely-packed, decently-sized leaves ready for next weekend’s harvest, there were only tiny, itsy-bitsy lettucelets sparsely strewn across the damp earth. And the only harvestable salad (one that had been in seedling stage before we left) was bolting.

Crouching down to the overgrown lettuce, Emmett announced, “I’m going to cut like there’s no tomorrow.”

I interrupted. “…because there isn’t one for the salad?”

Emmett grimaced. “Because it’s really big, and it needs to be cut back.”

I mentally estimated the cost of our lack of harvestable lettuce. For this weekend’s markets, we’ll have lettuce (salvaged from the patch that was partly bolting), but next weekend we won’t. We make, conservatively, $200 a week off our lettuce and baby brassica mixes. So by the time we get our salad rotation back up and going — it’ll take another three weeks minimum — that’s a $600 loss to tack on to the cost of our “vacation.” (We did some non-farm work on our vacation, and family reunions aren’t exactly “vacations” anyway…)

That loss was a lot to swallow that early in the morning. Still, the worst news came from the corn patch, when we tried to determine whether or not the corn was ripe.

Emmett wrested an ear of corn from its stalk, and gently pulled back the silk. The kernels were still slightly transparent and watery-looking, suggesting the ear wasn’t quite ready yet. Emmett shucked the rest of it anyway just to try a taste — revealing two fat green bastard worms chowing down on our pre-natal, organic, well-watered, well-tended, well-fertilized corn.

We went to a different plant, a different ear, and pulled back a bit of its silk — revealing another fat bug.

“Well, I guess this is all chicken feed,” Emmett said. He shrugged. “Crop failure.” Matter-of-fact destruction: It was just that kind of morning. (Our chicks, by the way, will arrive Wednesday. Perfect timing, right?)

Emmett flicked off the green bastards off the first ear, and we each gingerly took a bite far away from where the grubs had been dining. Not even Emmett — a true king of eating disgusting things — would eat the rest of the damaged ear. I don’t have a problem with buying spotted apples, cracked tomatoes, or funky three-legged carrots. But there’s no way I would buy wormy corn, so there’s no way I’m selling it.

Was there good news? Right, I’ll get to that part tomorrow.

-Lynda

p.s. — OK, this morning I mentioned I was going to snazz up the blog. Here’s the plan: I’ll comb through the daily online media onslaught and try to find relevant articles about local food, organic agriculture, pastured poultry, integrated pest management — whatever seems relevant. Then I’ll post links for you guys to peruse, so this blog won’t just be about Foggy River Farm, it’ll also be a portal for all kinds of interesting farm news.

I’m also going to (once I plant some salad, stake tomatoes, and generally catch up on the farmwork) try to offer more complete, detailed instructions for planting and maintaining some of my favorite, most successful crops. Which, as of now, does not include corn!

back from vacation…

Well, Emmett and I traveled for 15 hours yesterday, from Mendham, New Jersey, to Healdsburg, California, via Newark, Phoenix, and SFO. Now it’s 4:30 a.m., I’m feeling a bit like an internet addict — how many bloggers post at 4:30 a.m.? probably more than you think — and it’s time to go to the field for the first time in two weeks. We got back to the house at 10 p.m. last night, and I’ve been up for half an hour already, helping Emmett pack the car and fixing us both a quick breakfast. No rest for the weary!

Anyway, this is just to say that the reason there were no posts yesterday was the 15 hour journey. (Next time, I swear, I’ll pay more money to fly non-stop. Why is it cheaper to spend more time in the air, using up more gas? I don’t get it.)

Once we get back from the market, I’ll update you on the farm — and unveil a new, exciting addition to the blog!

the price of a radish: part two

Yesterday, Emmett and I ventured into the Big Apple… and stumbled across actual apples, not to mention apple cider (which we purchased and swigged straight from the half-gallon jug), apple sauce, and hundreds of varieties of non-apple fresh produce.

We were there on business, meeting with our literary agent on Fifth Ave. to finally put a face to someone we’d only interacted with via email or phone. She was the one who pointed out her eleventh-floor window down the block to Union Square, where literally thousands of customers were flowing in and out of a farmer’s market like so many tiny, hungry ants. After the meeting, we dove straight into the anthill — and were shocked at the wildly different prices we found there.

Let’s start with the radish. Our radish bunches were put firmly to shame: at the Migliorelli Farm stand, you could purchase twenty radishes for $1. (Remember, we charged $1.50 for half that many.) But the same stand was charging $2 for small and — I say this with all due affection and understanding about perishable greens and farmer’s markets lack of refrigeration — very wilted, sad-looking chard. So even if my radishes are overpriced, my chard bunches are a pretty good deal.

Perhaps the most shocking price of all could be found at Windfall Farms. (I found the name ironic for reasons that will shortly become obvious.) They were charging $6 for 1/4 pound of baby lettuce heads or mesclun mix! And $12 for 1/4 pound of arugula or mesclun with flower blossoms! I mean, sure, I’d been thinking about growing some flowers and adding them to our baby greens mix and maybe bumping the price up a buck or two. But our starting price is $3 for a bag that has at least 1/3 of a pound of greens. That means Windfall is charging 3-5 times what we charge. Even for “unconventionally grown” produce, there’s no way you could charge $12 for 1/4 lb of anything in Healdsburg and have anybody buy it. Is it just because they sell in New York? Or because they have a bit of a monopoly on baby greens at this particular market? Who knows…

There were other interesting things at the farmer’s market: dragon’s tongue beans, which are unbelievably cool looking. These guys made my purple beans feel mundane! Dragon’s tongues are flecked with yellow and purple in a psychedelic spattered-paint theme.

Other interesting items: stinging nettles (which had a sign suggesting that potential buyers handle them carefully, as they can cause itching), the foodie-chic sometimes-weed purslane, heaps of purple basil, and squash runners. The customers I talked to had no idea what to do with the squash runners, so I did a bit of research on the topic. According to the Bureau of Plant Industry, squash runners can be eaten as a vegetable. Back home, our squash plants are invading our walking paths between the rows. Instead of hacking them back and putting them on the compost pile, apparently I could be converting the runners into cash at the farmer’s market! I guess I’d better try cooking them first, because I doubt customers will buy them if I can’t suggest a good recipe…

One last humbling thought: one of the farmhands we talked to said that on a good Wednesday market day, they’d sell $5,000 worth of produce. Saturday markets can bring in $7,000. (Suffice it to say that Emmett and I are so far from even cumulatively earning $5,000, it isn’t funny.) The seller also suggested that the biggest stands can bring in $25,000 on one day — but of course they also employ something like 60 workers, so while their income is sky-high, so are their costs.

If all of this makes you want to get into the Union Square market to sell baby greens for $12 per quarter pound, good luck: getting a stall is practically impossible. It’s a very carefully-managed market, so there are are rarely more than 2 vendors selling the same specialty item. (Course, lots of folks have tomatoes and zucchini right now, but try finding multiple cider sellers or goat cheese vendors.) According to some of the farmers we spoke to, the only way to get in is: come up with something that nobody else is selling — again, good luck — or start selling at other Greenmarket farmers markets around New York (there are 46 locations, with over 250,000 customers each week) and wait, hoping that someday one of the Union Square vendors (some of whom have been selling for decades) decides to call it quits and you can sidestep in.

shopping for local food online. (yes, really)

Lynda and I are just back from visiting upstate New York, where we met some folks who are working on an innovative program that combines the internet and local food producers to create an online ordering system. It’s for all those “buy local” supporters who don’t have time to get to the farmers markets, cheese shops, or roadside stands.

It’s called Chenango Bounty (a play on Chenango County). The basic concept is this: farmers and other local food producers can post their weekly availability on a central website, and then customers can shop online–almost as if they were on Amazon.com–for everything from syrup to fresh produce (including cheese, milk, bread, eggs, apple cider, jam, mustard, etc). A weekly delivery truck will bring their order straight to their door.

It’s a pretty new system, with some hiccups still to be worked out. The local agricultural economic development specialist told us about challenges with delivery trucks breaking down, limited funding, and farmer hesitations–but overall they’re happy with their progress and upbeat about the future. The biggest challenge they face now is boosting customer demand, so that farmers can rely on the web system for relatively steady orders. Currently, they might get a huge order one week and no orders the next week, because there just aren’t enough customers using the system yet. Getting those customers will require marketing, which is in short supply since the county funding is tight. Hopefully if they stick with it long enough, word of mouth will help do the job.

Who would have thought that online shopping could play such a positive role for the local economy? I guess if you can’t beat ‘em, you’ve got to join ‘em.

-Emmett

pastured dairy

Yes, that’s pastured, not pasteurized.

Emmett and I are currently visiting a grass-fed dairy operation — a sustainable ag topic which, unlike pastured beef, hasn’t gotten too much media attention. While many restaurants and consumers have clamored for pasture-raised beef, organic milk seems to be the dairy of choice for the discerning, eco-oriented foodie. But if you’re really looking for a sustainable, humane milk option, grass-fed milk might be the way to go.

In a conventional dairy, cows live out their lives in stalls — stalls that are maybe eight feet by four feet (rough estimate, after seeing a barn that had been converted from a confinement operation). These ladies eat, poop, sleep, and are milked in the same space. They produce milk year-round, and are often milked three or four times per day. By contrast, pasture-raised dairy cows wander the fields in search of grass, their diet supplemented by a bit of grain — and in the winter, plenty of hay.

Pastured dairy seems a little more labor intensive, and yet in some ways it isn’t. The dairy owner’s son rose this morning at 3:30 a.m. to move the cows from the field into the barn and milking parlor. These four hundred-plus cows don’t need five cowboys to move them — just one young man and a well-designed system of lanes and small fields, all hemmed in by electric fence. The cows know the routine, too: they form a mile-long bovine line en route to the milking parlor. Once they’re finished milking, they simply go out the back door and find their own way back. They’ll saunter up the lane and go into whatever field is left open to them.

While it does take time to move the cows around the field — as opposed to simply milking them where they live — there are clear benefits to the farmer. It costs less to feed the cows, since they’re eating grass. The cows are healthier, because they’re eating grass — which is exactly the food that a cow’s 8 stomachs were designed to digest. They’re also allowed a dry time, during which they don’t produce milk. This pastured operation — located in snowy upstate New York — doesn’t move the cows into a barn in the winter. The herd overwinters outside, among windbreaks. And before you go all PETA on me about this, consider this: according to the dairy owner, a cow’s ideal temperature lies somewhere in the 40s (Fahrenheit). If the cow is well-fed, healthy, and in a herd (body heat!), it will have no problem whatsoever with snow. In my humble opinion, it’s a heck of a lot better than being stuck inside year-round — although apparently concerned tourists sometimes call to express concern over snowy cows.

Oh, and I mentioned that there are other benefits to the pastured dairy farmer. Dairy farmers work 7 days a week, with required hours from 4 a.m. - 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. - 6 p.m. That’s only the milking part; there’s obviously more work to it than that. If you let your herd dry up in the winter, you can catch up on all the stuff you’ve been meaning to do — and maybe, just maybe, take a vacation.

I’ll post some pictures when I get home and am able to upload them… and maybe give a more detailed description of how the operation works. For now, I’m off to explore the wonderful world of dairy!

growing fancy: purple pole beans

Decorate your garden, tout your heirloom pride, and nurture your inner gourmet: grow purple beans.

When purple beans blossom, their flowers are a lovely shade of lilac. The stems are purple; the green leaves are edged in purple, too.

And boy, do these babies grow. They handily out-grew our Blue Lake Beans (a classic, tender green variety), and beat the Blue Lakes to the top of the fencing — and then, just to be sure that their victory would remain uncontested, they out-grew the fencing, too, waving several feet of vine in the air and in some cases growing back down the fence.

In terms of pests, the cucumber beetles did attack them and make lace out of their first two leaves. But they recovered quickly and put out leaf after leaf until the cucumber beetles couldn’t possibly eat them fast enough. Although our clay soil holds moisture, especially since it’s on a drip system, these guys had no problem with ‘wet feet’ — they grew splendidly. (By contrast, we found that Blue Lake was more likely not to recover from the cucumber beetle attacks, and more likely to stunt in over-wet conditions.)

The variety we grow is an Illinoian heirloom variety from Seeds of Change: Dow Purple Podded Snap. (We’ve also had success with purple bush beans, but that’s another post.)

Points for purple beans:

• Amazingly fast grower; quicker to mature than some green beans.
• Hardy: tolerant of clay soil; not finicky about water; and grows too quickly for the bugs to take over!
• Beautiful at all stages of growing: tinged purple leaves and stems, lilac flowers, deep purple beans.
• I’ve mentioned this before, but you know when these beans are done cooking: as soon as they turn green in the pan or pot, they’re good to eat. (The green they turn, incidentally, is different from a traditional green bean: these turn a slightly more blue-grey green, like a moody sea.)
• Some people don’t even realize beans come in purple. Surprise your friends with a gift of your home-grown purple beans — they’ll be delighted. (And if you plant even a short row of these beans and harvest them regularly, you should have plenty to share. NB: You’ve gotta keep picking beans for them to keep producing. If they get too big, the plant will figure that it has done its job for the year and stop trying to make seeds.)

Fast-growing, hardy, beautiful, and somehow gourmet because they’re purple, these beans are tough to beat! I give Dow Purple Podded Snap two thumbs way, way up.

do your farmers a favor

 

I want to bring up the idea of food consumers doing things to help their farmers.

Why should we help our farmers?  What’s at stake?  The fundamental answer comes in two simple parts: 1) the global food system is fragile; and 2) food is vital to human success and happiness.  Relying on a complex and unstable global food supply is risky business, so we should do what we can to help build a strong web of local food suppliers in our local regions, wherever they may be.  As oil prices shoot up, food from far away becomes less viable.  We need strong local seed banks, a diverse seed-saving network, and a deep local knowledge of how to grow our food.  So support your farmers, especially the ones nearest to you.  It might make a big difference in your life in the not-too-distant future.  If you think about it, doing a favor for your farmers really amounts to acting in your own self interest.

What can you do for your farmers?

I use the phrase “your farmers” because anyone who grows the food you eat can be considered your farmer… in the same way that the person who delivers your mail is your mailman, the person who leads your yoga class is your yoga instructor, the person who collects your garbage is your garbage man.  Talking about “our farmers” encourages a closer relationship between food consumers and food producers (Slow Food’s Carlo Petrini calls consumers “co-producers“).

The first thing you can do for your farmers is get to know them. And if you find that this task is easier said than done, maybe you ought think twice about the food you’re eating. Where does it come from? Who grew it? Is it healthy? Reliable? It’s your sustenance, your routine nutrition, your daily bread–so it doesn’t make sense to rely on far-off, unknown agribusinesses to grow it for you.

The second thing you can do for your farmers is to buy directly from them whenever possible. Direct purchasing usually means more money going straight to the people raising and caring for your food supply. It also means you get to know more about the food you eat.

The third thing you can do for your farmers is to pay them fair prices. If you’re buying directly from the farmer, fair prices don’t necessarily translate into expensive food, since you’ve cut out the middle man. Without making a decent living, farmers are tempted to turn to other livelihoods. And each time this happens, our food supply is less secure. If it’s hard to pay those prices being asked by your local farmers, think about cutting out as much expensive processed food as possible. According to a Seattle Times article, shopping at the farmers market is cheaper than the grocery store.  And by building your menus around fruits, vegetables, grains and basic animal products, you can eat affordable, healthy, fresh (and tasty!) food. Oh, and you’ll be doing a favor for your farmers.

Finally, I have a personal favor to ask of farmers market shoppers. Stop and talk to your farmers! Even if you don’t buy anything, it makes my day a little bit better when you sidle over and say hello, have a chat. As a farmers market shopper, I used to hang back from the stalls and scope out the produce and prices from a distance, not making my move until I knew what I wanted.  I was a lurker.  But now that I’m a farmer–selling at the market–I know that I much prefer shoppers who come right on up and say hello, even if they don’t buy a thing.  So please don’t be a lurker.  Make a farmer happy, and don’t be shy at the farmers market!

-Emmett   (usually Lynda is the blogger, but I (Emmett) will chip in now and again…)