Welcome to a frosted edition of Lost in the Farmer’s market.
As all of you know there was supposed to be a double post over the weekend but
the recently cold weather has had me scrambling to handle field work. As noted
in the frost preparation post that meant deploying tarps and moving the most
tender plants inside for their own survival. Today I’ll cover the particulars
of the frost, this week’s plant list for the market and the assigned topic for
the double post.
Now for those of you reading this who are regulars to this
blog you know I’m utterly dedicated to the organic sustainable agriculture
movement. There is no doubt in my mind that the time for this is right and it
is precisely what the nation needs. My primary logic for such is simple enough;
we are facing a severe food shortage. As Cumberland County Agriculture
Extension Director Lisa Childers said to me during an interview regarding our
greatest ecological threat; “The loss of farmland, we have to double our
food supply by the year 2050. When you look at all the challenges facing our
farms, the average of the farmer is 57, so you have concerns about farm land
transition and who’s going to take on that farm and keep it going. You have
issues with loss of farmland to sale, development and such which makes it a big
challenge. We’ve got to figure out how to double the food supply by 2050 so
we’ve got to research, research research. We do grow more on less land but even
that is not enough so we need to find a solution.”
Most people would never realize that we will have a food
crisis in the next forty-seven years. Indeed I also never expected that statement
during the interview, but it makes perfect sense. As farmers grow older and
land is snapped up by development or sold off little or no new farmland is
being dedicated and a handful of corporations seek to own it all. In short we’ve
got a bit of a problem and call this the canary in the coal mine. The challenge
is the changing of minds people want change but they don’t want to wait for it.
Lowering the cost of real fresh organic and local food takes time and significant
changes to the buyer’s market. But for now it seems all organic will cost more
because it’s in theory harder to grow.
The reality is that this is not in any way true as has been
proven in three successive years of test garden operations where it costs me
per pound the same or slightly less than it costs at the supermarket per pound
of food. This leads to a conversation from a few weeks back at the Market booth
where I found myself verbally sparring with someone who was determined to talk
smack about organic and what it meant. The conversation started with the usual
greeting and polite conversation as the individual looked at the plants as
arrayed on the booth. I told him they were non-GMO, organic with no chemicals
used in any phase of production. He responded with a statement that such wasn’t
possible. So I said “If it’s not possible
what are you holding in your hand right now?” He of put the collard plant down he was inspecting
and said to me “There is no way you grew
this organically, organic stuff is typical bull**** to raise prices.” Needless
to say I’ll spare all of you the rest of the conversation as it spiraled about
over the next half-hour or so with this visitor going on about how he didn’t
like organic and so on. In short it
reminded me of a line from an old Supertramp song called Goodbye Stranger.
“Now some they do and
some they don’t,
And some you just can’t
tell.
Some they will and
some they won’t,
And some it’s just as
well.”
Some folks are hard set against change and understanding of
things that are different that in theory appear to challenge what they consider
traditional. This visitor at the booth was one of those sorts, so of course
instead of trying to change his mind I switched to taking the legs out from under
his arguments. But that aside let me show you all a picture of what a real
organic grown tomato actually looks like. The below image is of my prize Paul
Robeson Tomato measuring at 8 ounces even it was about as big as two apples
side by side.
 |
| DEEEEEEEEEEEE-LICIOUS! |
Oh yes it’s not perfectly round or evenly red or for that
matter uniform in any measure of the word, but you can imagine that for
nutrient value it blows the doors off those perfectly round red balls that pass
for tomatoes at the supermarket and it required precisely zero pesticides or herbicides
to produce. I imagine that if we were to produce more nutritious food per
square mile without the need for chemicals the environment’s health as well as
our own would improve. But, let us see what an organic tomato looks like on the
inside as this earlier pair of Underground Railroad tomatoes sliced and prepared
for addition to chili.
 |
| For note, I decided to take the picture after some of it was added to the pot. |
Note the color of the flesh is very dark crimson and the
lack of excessive gel, seed and some such, here we have tomatoes that could
said to have a lot of ‘meat’. Since this came out of my back yard most if not
all of the nutritional value is still present. But more so I have a tiny
chemical footprint because in reality other than water runoff and organic
fertilizer residue the land upon which the test garden sits only gets better
every year. This alone is what organic really means, stewardship of the land,
helping nature do what it does best and preserving a balance of coexistence
between you and nature. It’s going to
become important in the coming years as the economy will likely continue to
stagger and stumble and the population‘s food needs increase while something has
to be done to counter the loss of our countries greatest resource. It’s clear
we can’t keep importing basic food stables any more then we can keep growing
non-productive food crops for ethanol and so on. The diet of the country must
adapt, and we too must adapt or risk succumbing to the changes in our world.
The choice is simple enough, risk becoming an anecdote for failure to future
generations or become the first world nation that embraced critical changes and
blazed a trail towards continental sustainability that other large nations
could readily follow.
But moving on from the organic debate, this weekend I will
be at the Fayetteville City/Farmers market on Saturday. The Fayetteville
farmer’s market is located at 325 Franklin Street on the property of the
Fayetteville transportation museum. The market runs between the hours 9:00 am
and 1:00 pm and you can find my both over by the art studio side of the market.
As always the plant list for this week is below:
Perennials:
6x Spineless Prickly Pear
Salad &
Fixings:
3x Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce
2x Cilantro
Cole Crops:
3x Georgia Collards
7x Morris Heading Cabbage-Collards
2x Stonehead Cabbage
2x Charleston Wakefeild Cabbage
2x Savoy Cabbage
1x Mustard-Spinach ‘Senposai’
1x Napa Cabbage
Available Soon:
00x Swiss Chard
With exception to a final note about precipitation and
weather this brings this episode of LITFM to a close. As you may have noticed
we had one major frost on Wednesday evening where wind and cold conspired to
kill all tender crops where they sat even when semi-protected by proximity to
structures and stonework. This came on the heels of Tuesday’s sleet which signaled
the end of the warm season crops. Unfortunately the sleet produced negligible precipitation
to the point there was nothing worth measuring in the rain gauges. At the test
gardens, the cosmos, basil, Meringa, tomatoes and eggplant were all stricken
down. We are in a presumably brief warming trend with no freezing temperatures in
the immediate future so that means you as gardeners can wring a few more weeks
of planting with an careful eye on the weather forecast.
As always folks, Keep ‘em growing!
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