Do you think of vegetables as being alive?

Most of us intuitively think of cutting a plant down, cutting off a branch, or digging up a root as separating that excised piece from the live part of the plant, and it's only a matter of time until the piece withers and dies. A lettuce leaf, once cut, can't recover and the head will grow no more--and the forgotten summer tomato quickly melts on the counter leaving behind only its finished product: the seeds.

But other vegetables are quite different... not dead and done, but alive, waiting. Their cells are respiring, warding off rot for months at a time until the warmth of spring arrives to move some collection of cells to action. From that mass grows a shoot, a leaf, and soon, a plant. We're all familiar with this from potatoes sprouting on the kitchen counter, and it isn't so inconceivable that some structure on a potato (the eyes) knows how to grow into a plant. What astonishes me every year though, is onions.

Onions seem complete, dead tops and paper-skinned. They seem to follow the familiar course from vibrancy to death, the way a winter squash plant grows and dies to leave behind the butternut. Every year, though, there are inevitably some odd onions left over somewhere on the farm—unsaleable, half-rotten culls left in a shed, some tiny onions in the cooler—all of which freeze and thaw and freeze again throughout the depths of winter, and seem entirely inanimate, if not decomposing. But then in spring, there they are—onion shoots wending their way towards the sun! In the fridge at home too, every year a delightful, almost comical, surprise—onions trying to grow their way out of their paper bag, out of the fridge, inevitably becoming the first fresh leafy green vegetables of the new year.

Somehow, pulled from the ground for nine months, frozen over winter, left without any care in conditions that would kill any other vegetable, each one of those cells knows what to do when the time comes. Each layer of onion is indistinguishable from the next, no kernel or germ in the center, it’s onion all the way through and yet: they know to divide, to build a green shoot entirely different from what was there before, and, as it grows, it consumes the energy stored over winter in the eatable onion, leaving it a withered husk as the new plant grows tall. It's exactly the inverse of what's happening with these onions right now: the onion leaves growing in the field put energy into the bulb and will decline and die as the bulb expands. The onion we eat isn't an end-point, but a mid-point. It's no surprise then that these are the vegetables that store the longest: onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots. Rather than being dead and finished with their life cycle, they're just in a holding pattern biding their time until the next phase.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween this week! Carving pumpkins don't make it into the CSA lineup owing to their inedibility, though they might be one of the most season-specific items out there! I'm sure you'll be seeing them all over town this week as we approach Halloween. This tradition began with the pagan holiday of Samhain, marking the beginning of the dark half the year at the midway point between autumn equinox and the winter solstice, and its Christian counterpart, Halloween. Both holidays honor the deceased and involve the passage of spirits and ghosts from one realm to another. To ward away evil spirits, people practicing folk Christianity in the British Isles carved large turnips and beets into grotesque lanterns lit with lumps of coal, and, in the 19th century, Irish immigrants to this country found American pumpkins to be well suited to the tradition. Soon enough what we think of as “Halloween” began to be celebrated across the country, with carved jack-o'-lanterns set out on porches decorated with dried cornstalks and gourds.

It's no coincidence that pumpkins, potatoes, butternut squash, and other root vegetables are what we decorate with and eat during October and November—and that these are the traditional vegetables of Thanksgiving dinner. These are the vegetables that were stockpiled for winter in the root cellar, before the advent of easy shipping and the modern industrial food system; in a very real way, these are the vegetables that kept people alive during the dark half of the year. Drawing much of our cultural touchstones from regions with long winters, it is no surprise that they are so encoded in our cultural memory.

The fact that these vegetables in particular are our seasonal favorites is simply a product of the principle of evolution—everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. These fall vegetables are produced by frost-tender plants that have all figured out a way to use the sun's energy from the year's growing season to persist in some way over winter to get a head start next year—potatoes with their starchy tubers sending up shoots when the soil warms; turnips, beets, and carrots ready to sprout a seedstalk first thing in spring. These same strategies allow us to keep them over winter for food; the stored energy nourishing us humans instead of growing a new plant next year.

Cabbage and the other hardy brassica greens are also considered traditional fall vegetables because they grow well in cool weather and do keep a while over winter. However, this cultural memory doesn't account for the fact that different types of plants are at home in different climatic regions (take brussels sprouts, which only taste good when grown in cold climates, yet have made it onto Thanksgiving menus nationwide). There's a reason tomatoes are a big deal around here; likewise, New York and Wisconsin are major cabbage growing areas.

Although most plants CAN be grown in most places, different types of plants thrive in the types of weather patterns found in specific regions at specific times of year. The more out-of-season or the less ideal the growing conditions, the more attention required to keep the plant in its comfortable conditions and the more easily they are knocked off course by weather outside of their comfortable range. Tomatoes and peppers, they just grow here in Virginia's heat, no special attention required; same for the fall crops like squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, since they to do all their growing in the heat of the summer. Cabbage and greens, on the other hand, really would love to grow in New York, with a mild summer and long, beautiful fall. Here we get a blazing hot summer followed by a short period of nice October weather quickly becoming too cold and dark for plants to grow. And how many emails have I written over the years about waiting for the exact conditions to seed spinach or the trials and tribulations of growing carrots? They definitely CAN be grown here, and we have had amazing spinach or carrot seasons, but being ill-suited to Virginian conditions it takes some effort and attention to guide them through the times when weather just isn't what they're expecting. I'd say about half the years see reasonable success; and the other years, slim pickings or outright failure. In any case, these are not the crops that we rely on to get us through the lean times.

So as we are immersed in the pumpkin spice everything season, with gourds and winter squash turning up in every major supermarket, and as you get ready to carve those pumpkins, rest assured! You are not participating in the fad of the season. Quite the opposite—you are celebrating culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.

Sliding Scale Report

You may remember from way back in January that the CSA has a sliding-scale pricing option. This allows people to elect to pay more than retail price in order to directly offset the cost of CSA vegetables for people who would otherwise be unable to access this healthy, well-grown food. More broadly, it is also a way for everyone involved with the CSA to engage with these ideas, whether or not they decided to pay more (and I do not keep track!). We're now in the third year of offering the sliding scale option, and, much to my surprise, not one person has ever inquired about what actually happened with the money paid extra. Thank you for your trust and all, but still I'd like to take a moment to tell you about it this year―as every year.

As I described the situation on the website: It's a reality that our country's food system maintains low prices through environmental degradation, worker exploitation, and government programs; that subsidy and regulation favor processed food designed to sell rather than to nourish; that access to fresh healthy food is difficult for those without the financial security and education to buy it; and that wealth is largely a product of the possibilities afforded by our parents' socioeconomic situation and our education―simply, of our access to opportunity.

On one level, the sliding scale is simply a way for someone to elect to price the CSA slightly differently depending on their present income. But, at a deeper level, the purpose of the sliding scale is to create a way to engage with historical disadvantage. While I didn't make a big deal on the website about linking the sliding scale idea to our history of racial inequality (since I know not everyone holds the same narrative on this topic), it is clear to me that in America generational access to opportunity and financial power is in large part based on race. This article in The Atlantic described how this familiar story played out for farming: from black land ownership, to white land ownership, to―in fact―corporate land ownership.

This year I joined forces with my neighbor Potomac Vegetable Farms, who had been inspired to start their own sliding scale model, to combine the driving and logistics work (one of the trickiest aspects, to be honest) and bring vegetables from both of our farms out to a community in southwest DC. Every Monday I set out 12 share's worth of vegetables to be picked up by PVF, and the next day it's driven into DC to the same apartment community we've been sending the sliding-scale vegetables to since the beginning. In fact, the person hired to do the driving is the person who knew that area and found the community in the first place. An organizer who lives there receives the vegetables and they're distributed to the folks who live in the building―elderly people first―and some weeks they say as many as 75 families will see at least a few of the CSA vegetables. All look forward to the weekly vegetables and appreciate the opportunity to cook with this food and be a part of the CSA deliveries.

When I began the sliding scale three years ago, I felt it was one of my bigger risks in my CSA design, forcing everyone to at least see and click through the information about it. But it has proven itself to be overwhelmingly successful. Thanks to everyone who engaged--whatever your personal decisions or thoughts on the matter--and thanks for truly being Community Supported Agriculture members.

What is "Organic" on this sort of farm?

When I first worked on a vegetable farm back in 2005, we sold at dozen DC-area farmers markets each week with our tent proudly displaying, in brief, our farm identity:

NO PESTICIDES
NO HERBICIDES
NO FUNGICIDES

Sure, they used baking soda to ward off fungus on melons, and, in later years, a natural enzyme to prevent caterpillars from eating their crops, but the meaning was clear: we farmed without chemicals.

This simple sign differentiated our farm—in the 90s and until the farmers retired in the aughts (and later began renting to me, incidentally)—from how all the "regular" conventional farms grew: with plenty of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides as an integral part of their farming systems. At market we spoke with customers one-on-one and answered their questions about how our food was grown. Often people would ask, before committing to set foot under our tent, "Are you organic?" and we'd reply, "Well we aren't Certified Organic but we don't use any pesticides, herb—" "OH, of course, that's what I mean! Wonderful." We were one of the few farms of that type at the market, and we were the market stand they were looking for. I can't remember anybody ever being disappointed and leaving to go find a Certified Organic farm. This was, of course, at a time before Certified Organic vegetables were sold at Wal-Mart, before major brands had bought out the small, trusted Organic brands, before there was mass marketing of "natural" and "safe" food that met no industry standards, and before Certified Organic food became ubiquitous enough for customers to seek it out by name. At that time, organic was simply a shorthand people used to ask whether we spray stuff on the vegetables.

But as farmers markets multiplied across the country and Whole Foods became a household name, interest in organic food caught fire and the large-scale players in the food industry took notice, followed the money, and got to work developing the full line of Certified Organic products found in nearly every grocery store today. Many people think the Organic label means it was grown without any pesticides or herbicides at all, viewing Organic certification as an ideal reached by small, forward-thinking, maybe even 'hip', farms that are trying to do right for environment. Perhaps it was that way when organic food was a niche movement out of Berkeley in the 70s, but governmental regulatory standards are meant for the major economic players, and USDA Organic Standards are no different. As in any industry, big businesses try to do the least that they can while still complying with the rule, all the while working from the inside to alter the regulatory standards to be more favorable to their own interests.

Today, all that USDA Organic Certification actually means is that food was produced only with inputs listed on the Organic Approved List. While the ubiquity of Organic food is a big win in principle for the original organic farming activists, certification doesn't have anything to do with a farm's growing principles or actual environmental impact—the very principles that customers, not to mention the original organic farmers, are most concerned about. There are plenty of pesticides and fungicides on the approved list, and most Certified Organic farms use plenty of pesticides and fungicides as an integral part of their farming systems—they just happen to be from organic sources. And many products are completely safe yet not included on the list. I use a biodegradeable plastic mulch to block weeds, but since it includes an ingredient made from oil it isn't allowed (Certified Organic farmers use miles of regular plastic and just throw it away). The Organic regulation serves a critical purpose in providing an economic reason for agribusiness to use less-destructive methods, and when you buy from big business, I do hope you look for the USDA Organic label.

But for me, I use the same growing practices as those farmers I learned from: NO PESTICIDES, NO HERBICIDES, NO FUNGICIDES, not even the organic ones (apart from the occasional anti-caterpillar enzyme). As a small, local farmer that does care about the principles of low-input, environmentally-sane agriculture, trying to communicate those principles and methods with a governmental regulatory label meant for industrial-scale farms selling in a national market has never made sense to me.

Thankfully, I can talk to you all directly rather than referring you to a third-party certification. When you buy from local farmers like me, I hope you talk with them about what you care about, rather than finding meaning in the Organic regulatory label. Over the last decade, the more Organic products became ubiquitous in national supermarkets, with USDA Organic products from industrial-scale food producers on every grocery store shelf, the more customers began to demand that label in their local farmers market and other small-business settings as well. It is a triumph of the small activist organic farms that the big players have been turned to growing some food with Organic methods (even though Organic food comprises not even 6% of national food sales), but when this increasing customer demand for the USDA Organic label drives small direct-marketing farmers to grow and sell under the same rules as the industrial players, certifying under a program guided by and most appropriate for big business, agribusiness has won at our own game. This is why I am not Certified Organic, and why I encourage you not to care about such labeling when buying food from people like me. In choosing to sign up for this CSA—whether just last year or many years ago—I appreciate that you read the information on the farm website, asked me any questions that were important to you, and decided that my un-certified, old-school, somewhat-contrary farm is the sort of farm you're looking for!

Old-School Weather

Most years I write about the weather from time to time, except this year it hasn't come up as often. Perhaps that is because this summer we've only had two periods of weather: HOT & DRY and now, COOL & WET. The dry period sort of snuck up because it didn't quite feel like it was never raining. Rain was very often in the forecast, and that threat of rain very often determined the worklist on the farm. But every time rain was predicted, the skies darkening promisingly, the small storms missed us out here and then bloomed into giant thunderstorms by the time they reached the city. The ground got drier and drier, limiting tillage, until I gave up hoping for rain and assembled the overhead sprinklers in an unplanted field just to get the ground into a condition where it might eventually be able to grow something.

And yet last week I went up the road to visit the local welder, who in conversation about the weather (an obligatory topic), noted how well his neighbor's soybeans are doing next to the shop. He mentioned getting consistent rain, much to my surprise, but I knew what he was going to tell me next because he'd told me about it before: "It's just like back in the 70s when there were a number of great growing years..." He went on to describe this year's storms all coming up from the south, dropping just the right amount of rain... And I went on to describe how, yes, I know those rainstorms well... I watch them skirt my farm to the north and head right up here to you!

My neighbors, from whom I learned to farm and now retired after growing vegetables here since the 70s, often mention that back then a storm came through just about every week to drop an inch of rain, the perfect amount. They didn't even use irrigation until the 90s, the rain being so reliable. But weather patterns are changing. For example, every year there is usually 5 days of cool and rainy weather during the first part of August; I watch the forecast closely, for this is the fleeting window to sow spinach seeds in the ground. This year the cooler period came right on schedule...but with no rain in sight, I waited until the next window of good spinach-planting weather: a true rainy week towards the end of August, too late to re-plant if it didn't come up well. I had high hopes given that week's rainy forecast, but, as it turned out, that week kicked off these last 4 weeks of rain (pretty much every Wednesday, like clockwork, and on other days as well), which turned out to be too MUCH rain for the tiny spinach, many of which didn't survive germination. The survivors are fine, there just aren't as many as I'd hoped.

Sure, all weather is local and no trend predicts the weather at any particular spot at any particular time, as the welder's quite different growing season indicates, his shop being not 5 miles north of me. But old timers talk how the summer weather these days is just not like it used to be--and, unlike most "back in my day" lamentations, this one is empirically true! The year-to-year variability has increased; the range of weather considered "normal" and unremarkable is getting broader all the time. So much of farming relies on predictable weather, because plants like predictable, stable growing conditions. This widely varying weather, from drought to deluge, late freeze to blazing July, creates new rhythms we don't yet understand and can't adapt to on the fly.

Several years ago, I gave up on the idea that I could trust the old-time weather patterns from the era of the farmers I'd learned from, and began to intentionally diverge from the rubrics learned from those older farmers. I began doing fieldwork when it is possible, rather than waiting for conditions to be ideal, as ideal conditions became more elusive, and adjusted other practices to be more adaptable to changing conditions. And as weather continues to become more unpredictably extreme, I'll continue to shift to more resilient growing systems, like transplanting rather than seeding directly into the ground. These sorts of things take more work and used to feel silly if most years are all right, but the more those "outlier" years become the norm, the less silly it feels to instead see the "regular" times as the outliers and be sure to be prepared for an ever-widening range of possibilities in the future.

Farm Olympics

Did you watch any of the Olympics? It's hard not to see a few parallels to farming's physical feats, although I did only catch the highlights due to my full-time participation in the tomato-picking event here on the farm. In fact, for a long time, in Summer Olympics years, the farmers around here held the Farm Olympics, complete with all the events you might imagine: square bale tossing, speed market tent set up, round bale hurdles, triathlon (including pond swim), and the quadrennial favorite, the tractor & trailer back up. It was full of good-natured rivalry between neighboring farms, stories passed down year to year, and, in general, a celebration of the community of many farms all coming together at the hardest-working point of the season for the big neighborhood event.

And farming itself--at least this type of small-scale, seasonal, manual-labor based farming--often seems like an Olympic event done year in and year out. Surely farming would fall into the marathon category. A six month marathon, that is, with vegetables as pace setters, one foot in front of the other until the finish line, invisible on the horizon, inevitably arrives in November. Or perhaps, considering all involved, it's more like the pentathlon (or the dodecathlon, with one event per month): right now we are in Tomato Pick, having arrived here from Squash Pick, and before that, Transplanting.

In any case, here we are in the middle of the season. Up until the April starting gun I plan and prep for this year's trial, finding my niche and developing my style over the past 10 farm years, and then we're off! The event underway, it is up to me to rely only on that training and planning to see how well I can do. After a winter off it takes a bit to hone the relevant muscles, to acclimate to long days of physical work in the heat, to remember the technical skills of doing all the repetitive tasks quickly and accurately--the muscle memory and cognitive training built only through experience. For workers--and I remember this acutely--the first two weeks are nearly impossible; even for long-time farmers the first two weeks each year are a shock. Since the output of the farm is all physical objects (delicious vegetable objects!) created from physical processes, the work put in is entirely involved with manipulating things in the physical world.

One of the farm neighbors, whom I used to live with, ran marathons--no, ultramarathons--50 miles in the woods from which he came home unable to walk up stairs. I didn't get it, and still don't quite, except I realize I feel the same way about farming: there is the satisfaction in voluntarily setting up an almost absurd physical challenge, and then seeing if I can complete it--whether that's the big picture of picking vegetables for 20 weeks straight to pack and deliver 60 beautiful shares three times a week without fail, or the smaller challenges of picking squash every day for weeks on end, picking ALL THE TOMATOES, or getting an unreasonably giant list of fieldwork done before rain or darkness on a 90-degree day, then getting up early to do it again the next day. All of these things are objectively difficult, strenuous, and exhausting, and yet, just as someone might choose to run an ultramarathon, or climb a mountain or twelve, this challenge of the objectively absurd is what offers the satisfaction of completion. (And at least farming yields tasty vegetables!)

Tomato Tomtahto

Let's talk tomatoes! You may have noticed that there are two kinds of tomatoes in the bags this year: a regular firm, round, red, modern hybrid variety, and an heirloom-type that's dark, soft, oddly shaped, and very tasty. Although both are tomatoes just the same, we farmers and food writers somehow always talk about hybrid tomatoes vs heirloom tomatoes, with heirlooms definitely the gold standard in the tomato world. But what exactly is it to be an heirloom tomato?

The "social" definition of an heirloom tomato is one with a story: an open-pollinated variety cultivated year after year by careful seed saving which, because of superior quality, was kept in a family or achieved a measure of local or regional fame. Many heirloom types are from other parts of the world--cherished varieties that can be specifically tied to a group of people and were brought to America by early immigrants. The preservation of these seeds was not due to sentimentality, but because these were time-tested varieties bearing an implicit seal of approval. Heirlooms represent, quite literally, the interwoven fabric of both natural and human history.

But many backyard hobbyists and commercial breeders still create new open-pollinated varieties with standout "heirloom tomato" qualities even today. In fact, this year I'm growing out some seeds I saved from two fruits of unknown cross that turned up in the field a couple years ago. These new "heirloom" tomatoes have none of the lineage or history, but have all of the characteristic exciting stripes, colors, irregular shapes, and strong flavors we associate with other soft, thin-skinned "heirlooms." All these modern tomatoes meet the "aesthetic" definition for "heirloom tomatoes"--and yet, some of the historically kept heirloom varieties from 100 years ago or more were, in fact, plain red tomatoes, entirely uninteresting and which would never pass as heirlooms today on any restaurant menu or farmers market table.

Moreover, as much as the dark, soft, tasty tomatoes in your bags meet this definition of "heirloom tomato," they do not, in fact, meet the "scientific" definition--and, surely, science should be the one to settle all this confusion, right? Botanically, an heirloom tomato is simply any open-pollinated variety, as opposed to a hybrid variety of tomato. That is, pollinating the flower with pollen from the same tomato variety makes fruit containing seeds that will reproduce the tomato, true to type. Growers can save seed from their crop and sow again in following years. A hybrid variety, however, is grown from seeds produced by mating two open-pollinated varieties together.

And truth be told, the "heirloom" tomatoes in your bags today are in fact hybrid tomatoes produced by crossing two different heirloom tomatoes together. Scientifically, the heirloom tomatoes in your bags are just plain-ol' hybrids...but seeing them as heirlooms may offer a more useful understanding of culinary reality.

Some tomatoes are easily categorized, such as a hard red shipping hybrid from the grocery store or Radiator Charlie's storied heirloom Mortgage Lifter, but the more ambiguous the tomato, the more it pushes the boundaries of its label, the less these seemingly-intrinsic scientific categories help us understand the world.

And that might sound subjective and un-scientific but in fact, this is exactly how biological categories are applied even in biology itself. In conversation with a botanist friend once, I tried to pin down with them the essential features that scientists use to distinguish one plant species from another, and was quite disappointed to find my layman's understanding of science to be incorrect: plants are out there doing their plant thing, and nothing differentiates one species from another but scientists themselves, making up labels in their effort to describe and understand the world. Boundaries are ill defined, and, to my great consternation, the very same plant growing in two separate parts of the country may be called a different species, although they are otherwise identical!

In many scientific disciplines there is big debate between opposing factions of "Lumpers" and "Splitters" about how labels are best utilized; the lumpers feeling like putting similar-enough things together under the same label describes their world well, and the splitters feeling that slicing & dicing to fine-grained labels allows for better understanding.

This imperfect human interplay may be the real reason this whole idea of "what is an heirloom tomato" is so complicated in the first place--leaving us with, in the end, no "real" answer at all. All I can do, at this point, is to come down on the side of the lumpers for the weekly vegetable list and simply call them all "tomatoes."

We made it!

Well, we've made it through another farm season, and with one more week to go after tomorrow, you've just about eaten everything up! The cooler has been jam-packed for weeks with all the stockpiled potatoes, sweet potatoes, and squash, but we've just been sending it out little by little each week, and now all of a sudden there's plenty of room in there. And in the field, it seems like just about every week now there's some crop we've reached the end of, some new section of rows that are finally ready to be turned into cover crop.

You've seen the farm through its whole cycle start to finish, from the first leafy sprouts in May, through the heat of summer, then back again to leafy greens, and now moving towards the root crops of November. We've felt abundance, scarcity, and perhaps monotony--but never the same thing month to month, since your cooking moves through the seasons along with the farm. So too on a smaller scale, you've watched each crop tentatively arrive, flourish in its prime, and eventually decline as its time comes to a close. The grocery store may have just about every single thing just about every single week, sourced from somewhere in the world unknown, but here we eat from the same plants the whole time, and so we see the change as each plant moves from its peak of production to its eventual death and decomposition back into soil.

Take this week's peppers for example. These are the last intrepid remnants of plants germinated way back in March, transplanted in May, blasted by hail in July, finally bearing fruit in August for a few short weeks of big, beautiful peak-season red peppers, only to begin to decline soon after, with green peppers mixed in with the slowly-ripening reds. A week or two ago, as the real freeze was coming on, we spent all afternoon picking everything that remained: reds of any sort, half-ripe peppers mostly green with a stripe of red, and the true green peppers to save for later. So last week you saw those last true-reds; this week you have those peppers that were half-red when picked and have now ripened in the cooler to interesting shades; and next week will be the last true green peppers. As for the pepper plants? They're no more, all mown down just like they never were there at all, disced under and seeded to cover crop before Wednesday's rain.

These peppers are a bit on borrowed time, here in the second week of November, but then again, so is most everything else. These plants grew when there was warmth and light and there just isn't so much of that anymore, and so the CSA is coming to a close not because we've decided to stop, but because plants are no longer doing much of anything new! We're working through the last of what was produced during the growing season; soon enough there won't be anything left and it will be time for the season of rest.

Origins of seasonal culture

We are now deeply in the apple and pumpkin-craze season, which is what we have come to expect after the berry craze of late spring and early summer, and then the tomato frenzy of high summer. Have you stopped to wonder where these seemingly-recent seasonal fixations came from? It's not just the power of advertising.

Plants have over millions of years developed some pretty specialized strategies for getting a leg up on the competition. Some vegetables, like alliums (onions and garlic) form a bulb in the sun's summer energy to persist, alive, over winter, using that stored energy to beat the competition, and sending up a shoot first out of the gate when the weather warms. In spring they're some of the first vegetables we get.

In the summer, as you may know, most of the "vegetables" we eat are actually fruits. A fruit, botanically speaking, is a part of a plant that contains seeds–surrounded with something tasty to help spread the seed or to decompose, offering fertility to the next year's germinating seed–such as a tomato, squash, strawberry, or apple. But it takes a lot of energy to grow a fruit (first the plant, then flowers, and finally the delicious fruit) and that's why these are our summer vegetables, needing a long time to accumulate enough growth and sunlight to produce the food we want to eat. Other fruits solve this problem by using stored energy from last year to get the job done earlier (strawberries) or have figured out how to survive year-to-year as bushes or trees.

Now, in the fall, we are back to brassica greens–biennial plants gaining a foothold in the cool, meager growing conditions of fall where other plants decline, in order to grow just enough to survive the winter and send up a seedstalk at the first hint of spring. And of course, we have the fall storage crops like potatoes, carrots, squash and, yes, pumpkin spice.

Seasonality is no accident, but a product of the principle of evolution--everything developing its niche to succeed; to every thing, its own season. Why pumpkins for Halloween? Why potatoes and butternut squash for Thanksgiving? These are the plants that arrive in this season, and these are the fruits and tubers developed to last through the cold months–surviving without rotting to keep people alive during the dead of winter, just as they would otherwise survive to put up new plants in spring. Of course, it's not to the squash's plan to produce a butternut only to be eaten up in December... but isn't that, in fact, botanical success, to be cultivated on purpose, grown with care year after year, its genetics persisting for having found the niche of sustaining human life? As we take in the Halloween displays since September, pumpkin spice for weeks yet to come, then turkeys, everywhere, it's a small comfort to know that all this amped-up insanity of the advertising world is based entirely upon pre-industrial agricultural reality. It's merely marketing finding its niche.

So, enjoy your Halloween pumpkins and your butternut squash at Thanksgiving, and even your pumpkin spice. You're not just being trendy after all! The opposite of recent fad, this is culture tied to the botanical world that sustains our lives.

Clockwork

Before starting farming on my own ten years ago I had already spent a couple seasons on farms in this area and elsewhere. And, despite that farming experience and having grown up spending my free time wandering the outdoors of the DC suburbs, I hadn't spent any particularly focused time paying attention to the minutiae of the Mid-Atlantic seasons. So when it came around to August, and suddenly there were grasshoppers everywhere, whole flocks of them rising up in front of the trucks as we drove through the grass, I was a bit surprised–and amazed by their density. How could I not have noticed such an entomological bloom before? I chalked it up to the vast fields of grass out on the farm as opposed to the neatly mown cul-de-sac lawns of my childhood.

The following year, when I struck out to farm on my own, I eagerly awaited the return of the grasshoppers in August... but they never arrived! Had I mis-remembered and was actually somehow astounded at several grasshoppers flitting away from me in a field, now an unremarkable sight? I was confused. And then I forgot about the grasshopper clouds, one of those memories that feels true but might in fact be a function of its time in one's life filtered by the vividness of being in a new place. I forgot about it, that is, until 2016, when in August, as on cue, again there were dozens and dozens of grasshoppers stirred up from where they sat, invisible, but now floating clumsily out of harms way whenever we drove past, looking like little brown butterflies until, near the ground, wings folded away and all of a sudden a regular old grasshopper dropped to the earth. 2016 was a Grasshopper Year.

I used to assume that each year the same animals appeared at the same time like clockwork, a product of the Newtonian seasonality of climatic cause and effect, inevitably the correct species materializing at its proper time. In fact, I used to assume the same of plants on the farm: that given identical inputs of seed, water, and calendar, results would be predictable from one year to the next. But it turns out--as all the returning CSA folks already know--each farm year is different, a product of unseen and unknowable factors.

2018 was a Wasp Year. Wasp nests in the shed, expected. Wasp nests in rolls of irrigation line, unexpected (and painful!). Wasps residing inside the tubular metal frames of farm equipment so often that, before hitching the tractor, I began to sight down the framing tubes (from a distance) to be sure they were clear of wasps. I dispatched wasps with boards, with poles, and when necessary, with wasp spray.

This year, there are no wasps. Nobody has been stung anywhere on the farm, not even once, and when it became clear that this was not a wasp year I began to feel safe and secure yanking old pieces of metal from the weeds and reaching into storage containers. What would have been dangerous in a Wasp Year holds no risk at all this season.

Because this year, it turns out, is an Ant Year. I have never thought of anthills as anything but a somewhat comical nuisance of working outside, a surprise to deal with from time to time (“OH! --ants here. Hm.”), but of no real consequence. This year, though, there are ant colonies in the potting soil bags and between stacks of wood, in a box of seeder parts (then scurrying away down the one blade of grass leaning up against the box), and in crates of onions curing in the greenhouse, no matter that we elevated them off the ground; under regular CSA-bag delivery spots forcing temporary relocation and, most recently, even living inside the weatherstripping of a seldom-used walk-in cooler door. This is entirely unusual, and no longer surprising–“OH. Ants, of course.”

Each year I scratch my head a little and try a little less to understand the unknowable, yet perhaps somewhere in that secret is the reason that each vegetable, equally mysterious, does not offer the same result from year-to-year even though I follow more or less the same planting schedule each season.

2020 is a Lettuce and Squash year, as you well know. Never in the history of the CSA has there been lettuce for you every single week! But peppers? Where are they? 2019 was a Pepper Year--there were so many that we sold boxes of seconds peppers for weeks--but not this year. We've had Sweet Potato and Carrot years, and even Eggplant Years (the most confounding vegetable). No matter how much I try to have just the right amount of everything, invariably a few vegetables end up defining the year with their abundance–or failure. Fortunately it always seems that whatever conditions depress one vegetable will boost another, so that on balance there are always the right amount of vegetables. I like to think it keeps the CSA exciting and fun--kind of like tie-dye, always plenty of color, always interesting, but the pattern unknown until the fabric unfolds.

Seasons on a farm

We've turned the corner to autumn, as you might have noticed by the slight color changing of a few leaves, the blissfully cooler nights, or maybe the the dramatic influx of pumpkin spice everything flooding the advertising space around us--nevermind the first winter squash and salad mix in the CSA shares and the obvious decline of tomatoes.

It's funny how the onset of September evokes such images of autumn and change for so many of us--back to school, the end of carefree summer, the beginning of sweater weather; the time to pick apples, resume baking, and cook hearty meals rich with winter squash. Even though astronomical fall begins three whole weeks from now on the 22nd at the equinox, perhaps our sociological Fall begins this weekend, at Labor Day.

But there's no conflict in that; even though spring, summer, fall, and winter seem integral to our understanding of yearly time, even though they're based on something as scientific as the celestial equinox/solstice cycle, our culture pretty much just made them up. In ancient Japan the year was divided into 24 seasonal stages and 72 microseasons, each lasting a few days, with names like, "mist starts to linger," "wild geese fly north," "first lotus blossoms," and "deer shed antlers." The Cree and Hindu calendars each recognize six seasons; Thai divide the year into three seasons. Science writer Ferris Jabr takes a big-picture view: “If we zoom way out, we can see certain global rhythms: the ebb and flow of light; the bloom and wither of plants; the expansion and retreat of ice. Earth has a million seasons, or just one, depending on your perspective." Jabr even suggests, what if we imagined seasons from the perspective of creatures other than ourselves?

Popular supposition might be that we farmers, being outside all the time, would see the shifts between the four seasons more keenly than most. However, the truth is just the opposite: we're zoomed in so close that we see such detail as to obscure the lines between the "four seasons,” leading us to mark time in the year based on small changes rather than quarter-year shifts. The culturally assigned seasonal categories are fairly irrelevant in our day-to-day experience of farm life; we have our own markers in the farm year, no doubt invisible and meaningless to others (just as you may have, in your own lives). Our year begins with the Groovy Bird singing “GROOvy GROOvy GROOvy” in April as we plant onions, then when it gets hot the June Bugs arrive, dozens of them buzzing slowly about. In Late July, around brassica-planting time, the Curious Wasps swarm low to the ground circling circling circling, never threatening, just curious to see what's going on, and then, now, we hear the first of many geese honking through at dusk as they look for a place to spend the night on their way South.

Seasons allow us to know not only where we are, but what's coming next. Those who have been with the CSA for a while may mark time in the CSA year, knowing that the season of cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes declines and then gives way to the season of storage roots and greens, culinary seasons eliding one to the next without clear division--except to notice in retrospect that we no longer see the vegetables we used to, the food once rare and fresh now our common staple, letting us know that next season is on the way.

The Game of Farming

I hardly know the first thing about poker, but I like knowing how things work so when I came across How To Be A Poker Champion In One Year in The Atlantic, I opened it right up. To my surprise, I realized the author's approach to becoming a poker champion in one year is similar to what I enjoy about farming--although with a longer learning curve.

"Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn’t quite realize it wasn’t just uncertainty about the outcome of the cards. It’s uncertainty about the 'right' thing to do."

I can make all the plans in the world--and I do, over the winter--but the longer I farm, the more I accept that there is no certainty in them. How can there be, when the implementation of those plans is necessarily reliant on weather yet to come and other unknowable factors related to the essential problem of farming: imposing human order and human desires on inscrutable natural systems.

I used to aspire to the perfect season, where all the ground was perfectly prepared, the seeds all sown according to winter plans, each vegetable abundant--because surely if I made the perfect plans, with the perfect execution, that would inevitably lead to perfect agricultural results. But as much as that is my starting point, in the end I am not working with a mechanical system; there is no certainty here on the farm. Being good at farming is not about knowing how to grow stuff (plants just do their thing, really) or even the methods (although there are indeed incremental improvements and new innovations each year), but about honing one's decision-making ability and making the best decisions each day, moment-to-moment, based on the situation at hand.

There is no "knowing" what to do, as if it could be learned in a textbook; my job is to figure out what course of action is most likely to work out best, accounting for some intuitive sense of how bad and how likely the worst results might be, as well as how likely the best results might be. For sure the longer I've farmed, the more conservative I've become, favoring decisions that are very likely to work out acceptably, and with little downside risk--even though this inherently leads to a similarly small chance of perfection. To borrow from a different card game, to "shoot the moon" is not a viable farm strategy; that perfect result is an impossibility.

“Less certainty. More inquiry,” Seidel relates to Konnikova in the poker article.

Assessing what may happen and understanding why past results were the way they were is a more useful approach here than feeling any certainty about how to proceed. I realize that I use my years of observation of my own successes and non-successes--as well as the much longer experience of my neighbor farmers--to game out what might happen as a result of any farming decision, in order to assess the likelihood of positive results. Will the soil crust before the seeds emerge, or perhaps the rain will come--or what happens if it rains too much, and would it be a net advantage to delay until later? The longer I farm, the more chances I get to observe and understand why things worked out the way they did, and the more granular detail I can build into my imaginary model to make more informed decisions about what is most likely to be the most advantageous course of action in any given situation. I enjoy, each year, being able to understand deeper levels of detail, to be able to act with closer tolerances during short windows of opportunity--not to know what to do, but to have a clearer sense of what is most likely to work.

"The object of poker is making good decisions....When you lose because of the run of the cards, that feels fine. It’s not a big deal. It’s much more painful if you lose because you made a bad decision or a mistake.”

So too with farming. I can't know what's best, and I surely can't get it "right" every time--there may not even BE a "right answer" every time. The best I can do is to make good decisions, good gambles, and know that I've played my best hand no matter how it ends up going in the end.

Happy August!

Typically July is the hardest month for a farmer, since it's the month of picking overlapping with planting, the satisfaction of summer crops competing with concerns about fall crops yet to be grown. The main focus becomes simply getting the food out of the fields, with our schedules now determined by the plants rather than our own desires. In past weeks I could decide in advance what was going into the shares and knew that vegetable quantities were going to add up after we completed the picking. But now that we're picking squash every day, cucumbers four times a week, tomatoes twice a week, only after the harvest comes back can we determine how much exists and figure out how to divvy it up for the CSA. This is the first week that has felt for me like the vegetables are fully in control.

And during all this, of course, we've still got to get the fall crops like cabbage, carrots, and spinach in the ground! Being fall crops, they really aren't a fan of hot dry weather, so it's a matter of keeping a close eye on the forecast and making best guesses on when is likely to be the best opportunity to put out the plants--and being ready to go when that moment arises, since this moment is invariably on a Monday or Thursday during the big CSA prep day.

Last Thursday it was likely to rain two inches or more beginning late afternoon, and I had a decision to make. Do I seed carrots before the big rain, and risk them getting compacted into the ground by driving rain, struggling to break the surface four days later? Or does the big rain mean great germination, with more rain possible in four days to soften the ground and allow them poke up above the surface? Or do we wait out the big Thursday rain because it might be dry enough to plant over the weekend, and avoid the downsides of the drenching rain? But--what if it ISN'T dry enough, or even worse, what if a storm happens to come through on the weekend and keeps things wet--and then it rains Monday and Tuesday, and suddenly things are very delayed. The deciding factor, for me, was knowing that if the carrots didn't come up, there would still be time to re-plant and try again next week. If I waited until after the rain, it would be too late to make a second attempt if the first seeding didn't work out. And hey, if it WAS the perfect window of opportunity--well, I wouldn't want to miss it!

So in a flurry of Thursday afternoon activity, in the midst of CSA picking and prepping, we got the beds ready, seeded the carrots, and covered them with fabric rowcover to protect the soil from from driving rain and lock in moisture to keep those finicky carrot seeds happy. And... wouldn't you know, although the sky looked consistently ominous, the rain came hours later than expected, and so we just kept going, seizing the window of opportunity to get even more fall bed prep done. I ended the day picking squash by headlamp--but tradeoffs must be made. And instead of two inches of rain, we hardly got half an inch that night. The perfect amount--enough to keep it moist, but not enough to firm up the ground! Today, four days later, the seeds have grown little root "tails" and are ready to send up their shoot just as tomorrow's probable deluge will liquefy the soil surface and make it so so easy for the little carrots to emerge. At least, that's the hope. I feel very lucky so far, but we'll find out what happens!

As luck would have it, today is a repeat of Thursday; again it's a CSA prep day and again it's forecast to rain two inches. With four days of cool rainy weather on the way, is this the window to plant spinach? Encouraged by the (presumptive) success of the the pre-deluge carrot seeding, I decided to chance it and seeded all six spinach beds. So this afternoon, once it clouded over and got cool and before the rain began, we got the spinach done. And then I picked squash not in the dark, but in the rain. Because again, tradeoffs must be made. In this season of hot weather, the windows of opportunity are brief and not to be missed.

And so, with the last seeds planted, it's on to August and its relentless vegetables to pick and pack, but with the fall crops safe in the ground, gambles made, to hopefully bear fruit in a few months.

Eat like a farmer

Right about now is the point in the season when some folks start feeling like they're "falling behind" on keeping up with the vegetables. Many people join a CSA with goals to up their cooking games and try a new recipe every week. And even longtime CSA folks tend to earmark the farm vegetables as "special ingredients" instead of basic staples, wait for the perfect special recipe to use them, and end up with the dreaded vegetable stackup (or worse, waste). Moreover, this local-farm CSA thing is not the same as standard market shopping, since there is no way to meal plan when you don't even know what you're getting until the night before! But regardless of the reason--self-imposed goals or CSA-imposed vegetables--this decidedly different cooking experience can get overwhelming.

However, having a larger quantity of vegetables around than you would ordinarily purchase isn't necessarily the same thing as too many vegetables--it just takes a different strategy to eat them than you would normally employ. Now, I've had some practice at eating vegetables, and so I thought I would offer a few tips: First, don't treat these vegetables as special. They aren't. They're just fresh, good-tasting, regular-old vegetables, and you have my permission to eat them up without any special preparation or special occasion. And second, although we love to send you new recipes, a focus on recipes can lead to a backlog of vegetables not yet assigned to the perfect meal plan. So here is my tried-and-true farmer-approved method for eating ridiculous quantities of vegetables: CUT THEM UP AND EAT THEM.

Yup. That's right. The busier the season gets, the simpler a farmer's meals get. Any cookable vegetables (like zucchini and cabbage) plus salt, oil, and a protein (meat or beans) will likely taste great. Any raw vegetables will also taste great together, like cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes. By all means, try that delicious new recipe, but if you feel like you're falling behind...just eat them up.

In fact, to help you breathe easier, I'll share with you my summer cooking process:
1. Pick a base: rice, tortilla, pizza crust, corn chips, pasta, etc.
2. Saute the cookables: squash, onion, garlic, some greens like chard/kale/cabbage, + beans/meat. Literally cut up as many vegetables as will fit in the pan (do not skip this step). Be sure to include something acidic, like a tomato or some lemon juice, and cook until well done and just starting to brown and stick, adding a little water when necessary.
3. Pile that onto the base and add some fat (cheese, sour cream, etc).
4. Voila, you've got stir fry, quesadillas, pizza, loaded (and I mean loaded) nachos, or pasta. Just put as much vegetable on as you can stand--tis the season for vegetable luxury!
5. If it fits your dish, cut up the raw vegetables (tomato, cucumber, onion, + raw corn cut from the cob), along with salt and olive oil to make a fresh salsa. Or experiment with fresh salads -- canned beans, rice, or tuna all combine with a fat (sour cream, olive oil, etc.) and any raw vegetables in various proportions to yield various dishes.

This method will work for everything else we've seen so far. It may not be as exciting or nuanced as seeking out that special recipe, but if you are looking to go through a quantity of vegetables, I recommend process over recipe:
1. Cut Vegetables;
2. Eat Them Up.

Coronavirus

I am sequestered here on the farm and although our own lives are distracted and disrupted, the natural world pays no notice and things proceed as usual. The squirrels and birds outside my window continue their lives as before; the plants sprout on cue with the change in the seasons, preparing for the heat of summer that will come as it always does. The vegetables will be as fresh and good as ever. Since the farm is much more dependent on natural systems than human systems, it is a fairly resilient place and I do not forget how fortunate I am to be able to spend my time outdoors and have a steady supply of fresh food. Still, while I am confident about the farm itself, the uncertainty about the future is a real force in my life now, as it likely is in yours.

As you know, each farm season is based on long-range plans made in the winter and executed in the summer. Not knowing what this year will bring, I've been re-thinking this year's plans and figuring out how to build in the most flexibility for yet-unknown challenges. I have scrapped plans to add more office pickup sites as many people begin to telecommute, and I have only added new sites where I have an existing strong connection so we can adjust quickly if needed. I am planting more storage crops than usual so that if necessary we'll have the flexibility to alter the timing of the CSA weeks themselves. I don't know exactly what will happen, but we've certainly handled many complications in past years, and the CSA has gone out every single week. The coronavirus may offer a new genre of issues to solve, but I am confident that we can figure out this one too.

You, too, will have the flexibility to adjust. We can offer more skip weeks if necessary, and if someone needs to cancel the CSA or switch pickup sites mid-season because their circumstances change, it will not be a problem. We'll all need to be flexible to meet these new challenges, and we will do what we can to be sure that the CSA can work for you.

We all are thinking about safety and social distancing.  Fortunately, there are only about 5 people who work on the farm, and it is fairly easy to limit our contact with the wider world. We are lucky not to be going to any farmers markets. Most CSA pickup locations are outdoors, and we may look at ways to move the few indoor sites outdoors as well. We are of course doubling-down on handwashing protocols and making sure that nobody comes to work sick. We'll look at offering paid leave if it's not included in Congress's relief package.

Many of us are suddenly spending more time cooking at home and putting more energy into making healthy, nutritious meals. There is no more reliable source for fresh ingredients than a local farm that grows food with natural systems, and there is no better way to get this food than from a CSA. Spending dollars on real food produced by people close to home is what makes us more resilient in uncertain times, and now, more than ever, is the time to be a part of our local food economy. We're not sure what will happen with farmers' markets this year, but the CSA will be here. We are ready to get creative to find ways to feed people. And we are open to suggestions.

Seasonality

Well, it's happened again, you've eaten the entire farm. That's all the vegetables we've got. The cooler has been jam-packed for weeks with all the stockpiled carrots, potatoes, squash, and cabbage; after tomorrow morning the cooler will be emptier than it's been in a long time. That's the plan, of course. You've seen the farm season through from start to finish, from the first leafy sprouts in May to the last of the root crops in November, and now it is no more.

Similarly, on a smaller scale, you've watched each crop tentatively arrive, flourish in its prime, and eventually decline as its time comes to a close. Take the spinach, which has transformed from new and fresh and small, to full size and vibrant, and now is diminished by cold. Within another month, by the time winter begins, the leaves will be small, wilted, looking nearly dead. But though some plants may die, the spinach in its stalk, the carrot in its taproot, the potato in its tuber, and the cabbage in its leaves all consolidate strength to lie low through the winter then send up the first shoots as the weather warms in spring, racing with the other plants to be the first to drop seeds for the new year.

Like the plants, so too the farm recedes into winter after a season's growth, the tomato stakes put away, irrigation hoses rolled up, the supplies stacked in the shed, and the remains of our carefully planted crops tilled under to turn back into soil. Although the life, the complexity, we built here this year is no longer, the farm is not destroyed and dead, but decomposed into its constituent parts ready to spring forth not five months from now with new growth next year.

As the farmer, I too feel quite the same way...quite ready to rest at the season's end and hunker down to rejuvenate over winter, sustained by stockpiles laid by while the sun offered enough energy for life–the food I've frozen, canned, and stored in the cooler in preparation for the cold and dark ahead. And, after spending every week for the last six months thinking about you all and what vegetables to send out in the shares each Friday, the biggest change will be to suddenly have no more CSA planning and picking.

I imagine the end of season may be a big change for many of you, too. You'll most likely have eaten vegetables from my farm more weeks than not this year! Come Spring, I bet you'll be looking forward to fresh, new vegetables as much as I will be looking forward to growing them again, and I hope you'll stick with the farm next season.

Underlying Soil

Many people think farmers are engaged in some sort of idealistically bucolic lifestyle, with the traditionally meager pay more than offset by the rewards of working outside in a pastoral setting. And, to be honest, I know a lot of farmers who hold this perspective as well: Farmers who are more than fulfilled by the agricultural life even though USDA data says that in most years most farm operations lose money, with family expenses covered by off-farm income.

I didn't get into farming because of these pastoral qualities--I happened to take a job on a vegetable farm during college, saw it to be a good fit for my interests, and found that I enjoy the work of running a farm business and the possibilities afforded by the enterprise. I have enjoyed the project of growing top-notch vegetables with responsible farming methods while providing a livelihood for myself by carefully expanding the business bit by bit. I can't imagine running this sort of farm, and then having to work a winter job just to make ends meet.

Small businesses like mine make up the the vast majority of American businesses; together, small businesses generate nearly half of US economic activity, and nearly one-fifth of employees work for a company with under 20 workers (that's me!). But these businesses aren't the ones we hear about in the newspaper. Instead, companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Boeing are making the headlines. And, even though these corporations have shown their business methods lead to incredible business success, the neighborhood small business probably isn't being run in the same way as these headline-generating firms that supposedly prove the American Dream a reality.

What if I DID act like a big corporation, and measure my success on corporate metrics? As far as I can tell, big business tends to seek profit above all else--except, perhaps, that fairy-tale of endless growth. So if I were trying to sell as many vegetables as possible to as many people as possible with regard for little else but the bottom line, what would I do? Would I secretly violate your trust assuming you won't find out? Would I cause environmental harm because there aren't regulations to stop me or, if there are, the chance of enforcement is low or penalties inconsequential? Would I maximize profit at the expense of everything else and somehow earn hundreds of times as much as my lowest-paid worker? Or, perhaps, would I marry my farming roots with American big business and act like Certified Organic agribusiness, pushing my growing methods right up to the letter of the law, and then getting a seat on the Organic standards board to try to change the regulations in my favor?

Even though I think of my farm as a business, that sort of approach isn't the least bit interesting to me, and the idea that the only success is endless growth, with dollars the only metric, isn't how I set my goals for the farm. Don't get me wrong; of course I am trying to sell you vegetables. One of my main goals with the CSA is to create something you will want to sign up for again next year--the farm provides my livelihood after all. I've worked to grow the business and expand the farm, but only to be able to do more of what I enjoy, and to do it in a way that sustains a long-term farm future. I feel like I'm almost (but not quite!) to the size of farm that can support a sensible workload, sustainable income, and stable farm crew--and someday work on daydreams like transitioning to solar power.

While Amazon's customers are mined for cash and Facebook users offer up endless data, that raw material of modern business, I choose to remove my farm from that extractive business environment – in just the same way as my farm's sustainable growing practices work with the natural environment rather than destructively extracting all that is there. In our sort of farming the soil is not simply a substrate from which to mine dollars; neither are the customers simply a source for cash. And just as it is the soil which allows the plants to develop, fostering their growth throughout the season to finally bear fruit, so too it is you all, the CSA folks, whose involvement with this project allows the farm to grow and bear fruit in its own way.

Climate Action

This past week was Climate Action Week, bookended by walkouts, protests, and attempts to disrupt “business as usual” of the people in DC whose decisions inflame our global crisis. The United Nations climate scientists, the IPCC, released another dire report and, at the UN climate summit, world leaders again urged action to little effect. Here at home, we CSA farmers are coordinating this week to focus our newsletters on the topic of climate change.

I have always, it seems, been at least peripherally aware of climate change. I remember hearing in elementary school that the earth was warming—the sort of factoid someone might share at a party. We learned about the greenhouse effect and how CO2 reflects sunlight back to earth. “An Inconvenient Truth” came out and it became clear that global warming was an important issue that should be taken seriously, but only in the “Glad somebody is protesting to save the whales, but it's not something I pay much attention to” sort of way. I remember passing through a museum exhibit on “The Sixth Extinction” about how humans were causing the disappearance of the very animals that are part of our cultural history. It felt sad to know that the next generation might grow up in a world that looks quite different, but it didn't feel like this would disrupt the global ecosystems upon which humans depend—as is likely.

A few years ago, when the Paris Accords were being negotiated to try to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, we heard a lot about what that 2-degree warmer world would be like: oceans rising and coastlines receding, hotter summers and heavier rains, and climate refugees putting stress on international stability... but nothing that seemed particularly dire (even though the science says it will be absolutely dire). Even if everything comes to pass I figured I can deal with more rain by controlling the plants' climate with hoophouses, transition mostly to solar power, and sure it'll be hotter but 2 degrees doesn't really sound like very much.

All along, I just assumed everything would be okay in the nick of time. To believe otherwise was to believe that, even though we have all the information we need, the technology to turn this around, and enough time left to avert disaster... in the end we will not do so. Surely we couldn't possibly continue to sit back and just allow it to happen.

But that is what is happening. It does look like we as humans will get our comeuppance in a 2-degree warmer world, the result of our self-centered inaction. And I agree that, while all those changes sounds uncertain, and different, and a little scary, they doesn't sound unmanageable. It's not terrifying. What IS terrifying is the trajectory of that warming. What nobody made a big deal about, in the discussion of whether we could keep temperatures from warming 2 degrees, was that as long as we do nothing, the warming will continue on the same steep trajectory indefinitely—from 2 degrees, to 3, to now nearly 4 degrees projected warming by the end of the century unless we dramatically change course. I didn't understand how huge these small numbers are until googling to find out that during the last ice age, the world was only about 4.5 degrees colder than today. If earth is such a fragile equilibrium that a few degrees colder meant mile-high glaciers over New England, I can't imagine it would be no big deal to go 3 or 4 degrees in the other direction.

We may not know exactly when disaster will come, but it is certain that the global temperature graph's terrifyingly steep rise does lead to certain disaster. And so, seeing no global action, I too am beginning to take action in my own life rather than trust that everything will work out in the end. Part of that is to join other CSA farmers in writing about this topic this week. More concretely, the farm has endorsed the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act as a business, and my farm-neighbors and I are working to get our Loudoun congressional representative to cosponsor it. The bill puts a fee on carbon at the source then gives the proceeds to households, letting market forces do the work of reducing carbon emissions. It's the best method, endorsed by thousands of economists. Those of you picking up shares in Jennifer Wexton's district will receive a postcard that I hope you will write a quick note on and drop in the mail to her. No matter how small our own personal carbon footprint it's going to take government action to get us out of this mess. Our voices, combined with the voices of CSA folks from other farmers, can be enough to make a real difference.

Sliding Scale Success

I'm experimenting with a sliding-scale pricing option this year, as you may remember from when you signed up for the CSA. As I described the situation on the website, “It's a reality that our country's food system maintains low prices through environmental degradation, worker exploitation, and government programs; that subsidy and regulation favor processed food designed to sell rather than to nourish; that access to fresh healthy food is difficult for those without the financial security and education to buy it; and that wealth is largely a product of the possibilities afforded by our parents' socioeconomic situation and our education―simply, of our access to opportunity.”

On one level, the sliding scale is simply a way for someone to elect to price the CSA slightly differently depending on their present income. But, at a deeper level, the purpose of the sliding scale is to create a way to engage with historical disadvantage.

For the past few weeks, since August 20th, I've been hearing a lot about 1619 in the news. On that date 400 years ago the first Africans were brought to America, where, for the next 250 years, black people were enslaved to build our economy, and then for another 100 years terrorized and legally kept from the opportunities to gain education and financial power. It's no surprise that this legacy has not been washed away in the 50 years since the climax of the Civil Rights movement. In my own schooling I remember learning about the Civil Rights era as past history, but it's really still present history to many. Fifty years of legal equality does not erase 350 years of social inequality, especially when most of our parents―our cultural and economic starting point―were born in a time when open discrimination was accepted and black people were kept from education, owning property, getting jobs, etc.

While I didn't make a big deal on the website about linking the sliding scale idea to our history of racial inequality (since I know not everyone holds the same narrative on this topic), it is clear to me that in America generational access to opportunity and financial power is in large part based on race.

This recent article in The Atlantic described how this familiar story played out for farming: from black land ownership, to white land ownership, to―in fact―corporate land ownership.

This is what I wrote on the CSA website: “Sliding Scale pricing allows people with financial resources to elect to pay more for their share in order to make the CSA available to people who have not had the opportunity to build financial security and thus, under our inequitable food system, are unable to access the healthy, well-grown food that CSA members enjoy.”

Since this was a trial―an experiment―I didn't know what to expect. I just wanted people to consider and decide for themselves. It turned out that about 45% of CSA folks decided to pay somewhat more than retail for their CSA. That was the simple part, it turned out. Since I knew there was little chance of anyone writing in requesting to pay on the lower end of the sliding scale (and indeed, nobody did), I figured I would work with a nonprofit to find the people who could make best use of the reduced-price shares. However―of course―social service organizations focus on the people in greatest need, not people who are doing okay but don't have the resources to prioritize spending on a CSA! Nevermind the fact that there are many barriers to CSA membership besides money, like the time and energy to prioritize cooking dinner, a kitchen to cook it in, and a stable schedule with transportation to pick up the share, to name a few.

I talked with my fellow farmer friends about how to bridge these barriers, about what to do with the reduced-price shares that I, in fact, had no audience for. We talked in the spring. We talked in the summer. We talked to friends of friends and eventually we put all the logistical pieces together and tried it out. And everything has been working smoothly. The money paid beyond retail price offset the CSA cost for 12 people in Southwest DC who, for the last few weeks, have been receiving CSA shares every Friday. All are extremely appreciative of the opportunity to cook with this food.

This was one of the bigger risks I took in designing the CSA this year so thank you, to all of my CSA folks, for engaging with these ideas and truly being Community Supported Agriculture members.

Idealism is perhaps the best answer

Yesterday Greta Thunberg arrived in New York City, via sailboat after a two-week trip here from Sweden. She's a 16-year-old activist known for organizing student strikes to protest inaction on climate change and in NY to attend the UN climate summit later next month. Although personally I'd only heard of her recently, she is somewhat well-known. Still, The Guardian's live updates about her arrival in the harbor and the subsequent press conference sure did surprise me. I don't think the news story was so much about the fact of her arrival, but the method of her arrival--by sailboat! That was the only way to traverse an ocean without burning fossil fuels.

Greta's boat trip is an example of change outside the current system, rather than within the confines of our current expectations. But her trip is merely an example of that change--a way to show the kind of bold thinking we'll need in order to get ourselves out of this mess. Despite the idealistic statement of her arrival, two sailors will fly here from Europe to bring the boat back east. It seems that even an idealistic teenager can't avoid the downstream effects of something so modern as a transatlantic commute to a meeting.

I can't help but compare all this to the ideals surrounding CSA. Whether it's supporting ecologically sane growing methods or reducing the carbon footprint of food transportation, many people join the CSA, at least in part, for environmental reasons. And, just like Greta made major changes to live out her values, some people join a CSA to make a small changes in their lives to live out their own values. In turn, people reasonably ask how I can make small changes to CSA bag packing to make it more in line with our environmental principles.

In particular, people ask about plastic. We DO use plastic bags. We use clamshells for cherry tomatoes. Isn't there a way around that?

With this in mind, last year I transitioned from using plastic bags to using the paper lunch sacks in the CSA bags, which seems to be working well. I can see why opening the blue bag to find a sea of plastic baggies would be a bit disappointing. (When I asked people to return the clamshells so they could be reused, none of them came back—! I gave up on that idea.) Using brown paper bags certainly feels like the environmental choice.

But then I really looked into it... and guess what? The jury is out on whether single-use paper bags are better than plastic bags that get recycled. Or even whether using and recycling paper bags is better than using and recycling plastic bags. Paper itself is renewable, of course, but the processing is much more intense. (Interestingly, nobody's ever suggested I use more plastic bags, even though they are much more reusable at home and more recyclable too.)

Similarly, it feels ecologically sound for food travel only a few dozen miles from farm to plate compared to across the country, but my back-of-the-envelope math indicates that a full tractor trailer uses the same amount of fuel to move a vegetable across the country as my inefficient, partially-full delivery van uses to drive a vegetable around DC. People tend to think more about the fuel used in tractors, but the overwhelming majority of fossil fuel used by the farm is used to drive the food to the CSA pickup site.

We all try to live by our own values and want to feel like we’re helping to push the world in the direction we wish to see it move. Unfortunately, the reality is that while these incremental changes (paper bags vs plastic bags, driving shorter distances or longer distances, etc) are all better than the alternative, they are all fairly ineffective in the big picture.

As I see it, the real issue here is that there are no good alternatives with the way our world is set up. We can do what we can to change the inputs to the system, but the modern society we've developed is not a regenerative, balanced system. Since it's our consumptive, non-regenerative system that got us into this climate disaster in the first place, there probably isn't any solution to it that involves substituting one input for another while keeping the same system intact. If only it were so simple!

Greta Thunberg has been an accidental environmental activist for a year now, the face of the next generation of climate activism. She says, “In a way, I am more optimistic, because people are slowly waking up and people are becoming more aware of the situation. But also ... one year has passed and still almost nothing has happened.” And so, what to do? The best we can do may be to live our ideals as thoroughly as possible while not losing sight of the ways our own actions fall short of creating the change we wish to see. Even if that means throwing convention out the window and traveling by sailboat.