yearofplenty

CSA Vegetable Box Programs Growing and Evolving

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is an innovation in food selling and buying that has finally broken into the mainstream. These kinds of programs that usually involve a consumer signing up with a local farmer to get a weekly box of seasonal vegetables. In some cases the boxes are picked up at a farmers' market, on the farm, or they can be delivered at an extra cost. These innovative arrangement first emerged in Europe and Japan as a response to hardships experienced by local farms and farmers, and in an effort to bridge the relational gap between consumers and growers. As the interest in locally grown food has skyrocketed in recent years these programs have proliferated.

My favorite CSA in Spokane is the one from Rocky Ridge Ranch, located in Reardan. Gary and his wife So have summer, winter, and spring CSA subscriptions. They also have a meat CSA that's the best deal in town for locally, naturally raised beef, chicken, and pork. The Millwood Farmers' Market, that I help manage, is one of their two CSA pick-up sites.

As more farmers have offered these programs and they have grown in popularity there are some interesting growing pains and ethical dilemmas that are starting to emerge, both for shoppers and farmers. One regular reader of the blog lamented last summer that, after putting up big bucks for a summers' worth of vegetables, the offerings in the box were sometimes dissappointing compared to what the farmer had on display at their farmers' market booth. She discovered the uncomfortale tension that come with a direct relationship with a farmer. What do you do when you're unhappy? It's one thing to talk to the produce manager at the grocery store, which seems safe, but it's a whole other thing to file your complaints with the person who planted, nurtured, and plucked the plants out of the ground. To complicate matters, the skill-set required to be a great farmer does not necessarily lend itself to having good customer-service skills. CSA's make buying food a relational experience, which brings with it the mixed-bag of what we experience in human relationships. Here's how the unsettled CSA customer put it last summer:

But I’m wondering – here, finally, is my question – how you think we might navigate those imperfect relationships, with all of us imperfect ourselves, when we’re talking about non-negotiables, about food? In a local, relationship-based economy, there’s no room for mistakes. What happens if I have a bad day? Grocers, middlemen, long supply chains, all create room for me (and the growers) to be imperfect. How do we live without that when we’re, you know, human?

She makes a keen observation - that one of the hidden efficiencies of our long supply chains in the food system, is that they remove the human, relational element. They give the illusion of a transaction based only on price and quality, and erase the fingerprints of the farmers who grew the food. But this is only ever an illusion. CSA program that put us face-to-face with a farmer ultimately force us to give up our romantic notions, maybe the very notions that led us to sign up for a CSA, and encounter food, people, and land in new and responsible ways. In my mind, the purpose of CSA programs is the formation of community. It's an intentional complicating of life. Yes it's probably cheaper, easier, and more time-efficient to just go to Win-Co and load up your shopping cart on a weekly basis - but sometimes more expensive, more complicated, and less efficient is better. 

Which brings me to my next observation about this fast-evolving market segment. I knew we were in new territory when I saw a "CSA" program show up on Groupon here in Spokane. Full Circle Farm was offering a deal on subscriptions to their CSA program. I was surprised, because I'd never heard of Full Circle Farm, and I take pride in having my finger on the pulse of our local food system. I did a little investigating and was intrigued by what I found. I have a call into Full Circle and will follow up on this post with more details and observations when I have to chance to talk to them. 

Top Ten Posts of 2010 at Year of Plenty

According to Google Analytics these were the most popular blog posts on Year of Plenty in 2010.

1. Newsflash: Dairy Industry Wants You to Eat More Dairy - What's So Controversial About That?

This post created quite a stir. It got picked up by the president of Dairy Management Corp. and was emailed to all of his contacts. The folks at Domino's Pizza linked it all over the internet. James McWilliams at the Atlantic Monthly credited Bill Bishop at the Daily Yonder with being the first to grasp the way this story was being misreported, but I think I was the first one on the story. My first official big scoop.

2. World Comparison: Fresh vs. Processed Food Consumption

Google placed this high on their search criteria, so it has received a steady flow of clickers all year and also got picked up in some online communities.

3. How My Little Blog Out-Reported the New York Times

This was my follow up to the Newflash post about Dairy Management.

4. Roast House Coffee Newest Roaster on the Spokane Scene

This year I actually started doing some in-the-field reporting, visiting local businesses and writing up short narratives. Roast House was one of the first.

5. What Would You Do If You Had One Year to Live?

This was my first and only blog post to get "Dished," meaning Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish linked to it as one of his "Quotes of the Day". 

6. Wendell Berry: Gardening as Health Regimen and Holy Sacrament

This post got picked up a couple different places on the web.

7. American Farm Bureau President Declares War on "self-appointed and self promoting food experts" 

Unlike the post on Dairy Management where large ag interests were eager to see my blog as an asset, this post led to quite a push back from folks at the AFB and the conventional farming community. The AFB PR took issue with my characterization that the AFB president had declared war on consumers concerned with large ag. practices. 

8. Why You Shouldn't Rototill Your Garden

I did a whole series of gardening posts last Spring and this was the most popular of the bunch. Other popular gardening posts include; How to Turn Your Lawn Into a Vegetable Garden, Planning Your Garden Plot (Companion Planning, Rotation, and Location), How to Make Your Own Professional Seed Starting Soil Mix, Tips for Planting the Garden, 

9. How to Get Started Raising Chickens in Your Backyard: Choosing You Chickens

This was part of a series of posts on raising backyard chickens. The other posts included one on building and designing a chicken coop and another on convincing your spouse it's a good idea.

10. Year of Plenty | The Book

I'm told the book goes to print on January 15 and will be released on March 1, 2011.

Thanks for everyone who has contributed and commented on the blog in the last year. If you want to follow along in 2011 you can sign up for the RSS Feed here, you can follow the blog on Twitter here, or click the Like button below to follow on Facebook.

From Forest to Table: The Rise of Wildcrafting in the Local Food Movement

When I read Michael Pollan's book Omnivore's Dilemma a few years ago, the chapter on foraging for mushrooms in the forest didn't capture my imagination like the other chapters on farming. At the time, there was a default mechanism in my mind that believed harvesting wild mushrooms was a foolhardy venture that ended with a sojourn on the list of people in the region requiring liver transplants. Since then some trusted friends have slowly chipped away at my fears and misunderstandings to the point where wildcrafting for food in the forest has now fully captured my attention. I can't wait for Spring when morels will start popping up from the soil.

Northwest Food News has a story up today about the rising interest in foraging among the local food crowd. There are some folks pulling together a network of small forest plots for harvesting. The article notes that foraging can be big business:

Hanson says the most successful forest-to-table business in the region seems to be a Seattle-based company called Foraged & Found. It gets permits to forage on public and private timberland. The company’s founder says his formula for success is a minimum parcel size of four to five thousand acres.

One of the hidden treasures of the Inland Northwest are the Inland Empire Paper lands that are open for the public to get a permit for the purposes of wildcrafting. I feel a special connection to that because IEP is located two blocks from my office. In fact I can see the plume of steam coming out of the mill from my office window and hear their loud whistles signaling morning, noon, and midday from my home.

One cultural observation I have is that foraging has a much larger role in non-American cultures. In the INW it's the Eastern Europeans and Asians that dominate the wildcrafting scene. I suspect that most cultures around the world have a much more vibrant history and tradition of foraging. For example there was this article about 18 people dying a matter of weeks in Italy from harvesting mushrooms;

According to Italy's La Repubblica newspaper, mushroom seekers have been so relentless in their pursuit of their favorite fungi, they have been abandoning safety procedures -- donning camouflage and hunting in darkness in an effort to scout remote, highly-coveted troves, Reuters reported.

"There is too much carelessness," Gino Comelli, head of the Alpine rescue service in northwest Italy's Valle di Fassa, is quoted as saying. "Too many people don't give a darn about the right rules and unfortunately this is the result."

Eighteen people have died in just a 10-day period. Many of them had forgone proper footwear, clothing and equipment and died after steep falls down Alpine slopes.

Getting geared up in camo looking for mushrooms? I suppose hunting season might be the American equivalent to this Italian phenomenon, but in my mind, the lack of a foraging tradition in the US is yet another sign that the American food culture is far more disconnected from the land and the ryhthms of the seasons than most. It's a tradition that I'm glad to see making a comeback.

If you live in the Inland Northwest and are interested in learning more you might want to consider membership in the Spokane Mushroom Club.

picture: Noel and Lily holding some monster tooth mushrooms harvested from 20 feet up in trees.

Washington State Artisan Cheesemaker's Battle with FDA a Case Study in Food Safety Debate

The New York Times has done a great service by writing a story on the Estrella Family Creamery in Washington State, as an example of how the current national debates about small farms and food safety land in the real world. (Go here, here, and here for background)

The Estrella family, pictured to the right, left the city to make world-class artisanal cheeses. Here's how Kelli tells their story:

In 2001 we left home and business for an abandoned dairy on 164 acres. They laughed at our young family and said it couldn't be done, and I'll admit I had my fears! My faith was put to the test during the blood, sweat and tears of the early years. But we started with three cheeses and now have a list of 18, and at last the farm even feels like home.

Sometime last year I noticed that there was a lot of food on our table and some empty chairs, so we adopted 3 more kids from Liberia. Together the kids are learning that hard work won't kill them, and that the pursuit of excellence in our craft and careful nurturing of the creatures placed in our care yield a tremendous reward. Over and over at our farmers markets and in our emails they say thank you, thank you!! And they tell us stories of some of the finest moments of their lives that were enriched by our cheese. We are so blessed.

We hope you enjoy the fruit of our labors as well, and thank you. 

Since establishing their cheesemaking operation with 36 cows and 40 goats they have gone on to win a a series of awards that would make any cheese-maker jealous, and a loyal base of customers at farmers' markets and Manhattan restaurants.

But according to the Times, recent actions of the FDA threaten to shut down the whole operation after they found the presence of listeria in her cheese and in the building where the cheese is aged. They did a thorough clean-up of the facility but the FDA found the bacteria again:

Last month, the F.D.A., which does not have the power to order a recall (the food safety bill in the Senate would give it that authority), went to court, saying the “persistent presence” of listeria meant all of Ms. Estrella’s cheese should be considered contaminated. In response, a federal judge sent marshals to effectively impound the cheese, preventing her from doing business.

No one is arguing that the Estrella's shouldn't have a safe product, but there is a debate about the role of the FDA in overseeing small artisinal operations vs. the large industrial cheesemakers.

“If the F.D.A. wanted to shut down the U.S. artisan cheese industry, all they’d have to do is do this environmental surveillance and the odds of finding a pathogen would be pretty great,” said Catherine W. Donnelly, co-director of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese of the University of Vermont, referring to the listeria testing at cheese plants. “Is our role to shut these places down or help them?”

Kurt Beecher Dammeier, owner of Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, an artisan cheesemaker and retailer in Seattle, said the F.D.A. needed to work harder to understand artisans like Ms. Estrella. “The F.D.A. comes from an industrial, zero-defect, highly processed, repeatable perspective, and she comes from a more ancient time of creating with what she gets,” he said. “I’m not sure they can really even have a conversation.”

The key question is, do we want a food system where there is room for artisanal operators, or do we want a system where only industrial, highly processed foods are legal? There is concern that without the small farms amendments in the Food Safety Modernization Act, the American food system will be so inflexible, small farmers will be unable to comply. Just as the American food landscape is beginning to localize and diversify, the Food Safety act could undo the progress that has been made in recent years.

The Bill that passed cloture was essentially tabled this week when big ag lobbyists rallied legislators to halt the passage of the bill because of the small farms' amendments.

h/t Northwest Food News

UPDATE: For another, less sympathetic, take on the situation go here and here.

Year of Plenty on NPR Show "Locavore or Globavore? The Debate Over Local Food"

Go here to the NW Food News site to listen to me and others engage the debate over local food. The radio show will air today in Boise and then later in the week throughout the Pacific Northwest at NPR affiliates.

Is Peak Soil the New Peak Oil?

Earlier this week I came across the catchy phrase "Peak Soil" in the headline of a Grist article. It plays off the concept of peak oil, which asserts that we are at or quickly approaching the point of maximum extraction of oil on earth, after which point we will enter a phase of terminal decline and constraints on the supply of oil. Peak oil has captured the imagination of the general public and has spawned any number of apocalyptic warnings.

The phrase "peak soil" plays off the same concept of depleting natural resources and the terminal decline of production, only the resource in this case is top-soil and the product is food. I reported previously on the book, "Dirt" by David Montgomery

I ventured up to Peone Prarie last week to take some pictures and they just happened to be harvesting the wheat. The dust was flying and I couldn’t help but think about the book I’m reading titled, “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations” by David Montgomery. In the book he looks at history through the lens of soil fertility, erosion and depletion concluding that the rise and fall of civilizations can often be traced to the exploitation and depletion of soils.

It is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it. Soil, or the thin brown line as Montgomery calls it, is much more complex than I thought. One example from the book describes a WSU study done in the mid ‘80’s comparing two dry land wheat farms near Spokane. Both farms were first plowed in 1908, one never using commercial fertilizers and the other using commercial fertilizers since 1948. Both farms boasted the same income, one leaving the field fallow every third year for a cover crop and the other harvesting continuously but paying big bucks for fertilizers and pesticides. They harvested more wheat but had much higher expenses that canceled out any economic advantage. Most importantly the researchers found that the organic farm was building soil while the conventional farm had shed 6 inches of topsoil between 1948 and 1985.

Montgomery sums up the study by saying, “With fifty more years of conventional farming, the region’s topsoil will be gone. Harvests from the region are projected to drop by half once topsoil erosion leaves conventional farmers plowing the clayey subsoil.” I’m assuming that the whitish soil I see peaking through at the top of the rolling ridges of freshly plowed palouse is the clayey subsoil peaking through.

Last night I was up on the prairie again and the topsoil was once again floating away into the atmosphere as farmers dug in their fields. I didn't have a catchy phrase for the problem last year, but I do now. Go here for another post on Montgomery's book. Go here for a post about what local grain co-op Shepherd's Grain is doing to address the issue of erosion of topsoil on the Palouse.

Idaho Potato Commission: Local Food Movement a Threat to Idaho Potato "Global Brand"

Picture: Mashed potatoes from last year's potato harvest featuring the natural colors of the potato flesh.

Northwest Food News has a great report on how local food advocates and the Idaho Potato Commission recently butted heads in the Idaho legislature.

A resolution was brought before the ag committee simply proposing that the Idaho legislature endorse local food. In response to this rather tame, teethless proposal Frank Muir, the CEO of the Idaho Potato Commission stood up as the lone opponent;

Well Mr. Chairman, Representatives it will probably come as somewhat of a surprise that the Idaho Potato Commission is here to testify in opposition to HCR-56 and on the surface I would be shocked too because it sounds positive, in support of the grower, in support of eating locally and the problem that we have with this is that Idaho Potatoes is not local.  Idaho Potatoes is a global brand.

He went on to explain that the growing emphasis on locally grown food led Walmart to shift gears;

The largest retailer in the country discontinued Idaho potatoes in 5 distribution centers – not 5 stores – 5 distribution centers.  Not because Idaho potatoes wasn’t selling; it was because they were now focusing on buying from the local farmers.

There are several fascinating aspects to this development. For one, stores as big as Walmart are shifting gears in the way they distribute food. I've always said that any substantial shift toward local food would take change at the large retailers and it looks like that is actually happening.

The other interesting aspect is that this shift creates dilemmas for places like Idaho that have low populations and high production of food. A big portion of the Idaho economy is built on exporting milk, potatoes and other agricultural products. When McDonald's in Seattle starts bragging about using Washington grown potatoes that's a problem for Idaho potatoes. They can't compete with that. People that have gone to great lengths to nurture "global brands" are coming to grips with a new marketplace that values local brands.

The whole story is worth a read or listen. If you're interested in local food in the Northwest, Northwest Food News is a must follow on Facebook or Twitter.