Food Options

I recently read Joel Salatin's book "Holy Cows and Hogs in Heaven," which promotes buying food direct from farmers you know and trust as a means of improving your own health as well as the health of local economies, communities, and ecosystems. Joel maintains that the single best thing you can do to save the earth is eat food purchased from local, ethical, trustworthy, sustainable farmers. I believe there is a lot of truth to that.

When I moved to Fergus Falls, my first priority was to stock my kitchen. I went shopping for produce at four vendors: the local supermarket; the local independent health-food store; a farm stand on the side of the road; and Wal-Mart. I visited these vendors all on the same day; the juxtaposition of the experiences during each purchase was enlightening. I felt very differently with each one.

By far the most satisfying was purchasing "the perfect tomato" from the Bluebird Gardens stand from a kind, thoughtful woman who admitted she had been coveting this particular tomato all morning. She had picked it herself, and thought it was the epitome of tomatoes. She said I would have to enjoy it right away -- that very day -- because it was just at the right ripeness. So I bought that tomato, feeling somewhat guilty for taking the produce she had been coveting all morning, and I felt very proud to take it home and eat it that evening.

At the health food store, I bought locally-grown swiss chard. It was beautiful, green, and large... and I felt good about buying local and supporting the independent store. I refrained from buying the peaches there -- despite their tremendous appearance and flavor -- because I felt they were "too expensive" at 90 cents per peach. But I do realize that, compared to the cost of growing my own peaches, 90 cents per peach is a steal! Nevertheless, I passed them up and headed to Wal-Mart.

When I walked in to Wal-Mart (which is brand-new in town) and saw the expansive, colorful produce section, I was impressed. When I looked at the prices, my initial reaction was "I'm in heaven!" I had never seen produce for so little money!! A container of strawberries for under $2? Unbelievable! Of course, most of it was conventionally-grown far away from Fergus Falls... and I realized the farmers were getting short-changed (to say the least) with what must be an insulting compensation for the "fruits" of their labor. Yet I was hungry and wanted good food (by which I mean produce), so I stocked up and ended up spending by far the most money at Wal-Mart. I got a large quantity of produce at bargin prices, and that made me feel like a savvy consumer. But my satisfaction was tainted with guilt, knowing I was supporting an industrial food system that was depleting the land, polluting our environment, and cheating farmers out of a decent way of living (by which I mean earning a good income from growing produce sustainably, without exposing themselves to noxious chemicals, and selling it directly to people who value the farmer and appreciate their products).

The supermarket was the least satisfying shopping experience. The prices weren't that great; the produce didn't have a story; and I felt no pleasure from supporting a chain store.

I am going to try to get most of my produce from Bluebird Gardens... but I hate to admit Wal-Mart is a tempting back-up. Who knew buying produce could be such an aggravating moral and economic dilemma?

Perfectionism & Farming Don't Mix

Today in class, one professor commented on how there is no perfect farm. No one can farm perfectly. It is simply too complex, involving a large amount of variables which are constantly in flux. You can never know everything; you can never control everything; you can never perfectly optimize your land by creating the maximum, ideal, unblemished yield of every marketable item the land could produce. In this way, farming is like an art. The farmer is always striving to make things better, aware that inevitably there still always will be areas that could use more improvement.

As a recovering perfectionist, this caught my attention. To maintain their sanity, farmers have to "radically accept" that there are always variables out of their control. Things will go wrong: there will be drought or flooding, chickens will get picked off by predators, or a plague of grasshoppers will eat all the forage. Ultimately, you are just a steward of the land trying to do the best you can at the moment.

First Day

Today was my first day of classes in the Sustainable Food Production program at M State. It was intense. I definitely felt like a city girl! We learned how to estimate the dry matter yield (i.e. grass/food) in pounds per acre, to figure out how many days a certain number of cattle could graze on a given paddock. This involved created a tool to measure the height of the grass; taking the height measurements in several sample areas of a field; averaging the grass height from the sample areas; and plugging the average grass height into a formula (DMY = 432 * average height) to estimate how many tons of grass were on a certain acre. Then, we visited a real farm -- with real cows, chickens, and oh, yes, GRASS -- and we figured out how much time 40 cattle could graze on the paddock next to their current pasture. We calculated that there was about a ton and a half of grass on the next paddock, so the cows could graze their for about a day before they needed to move on to another pasture.

In sum, I learned how to estimate the length of time a certain number of cows can graze in a given pasture (before they eat all the grass). This guess-work involves a lot of variables and a lot of assumptions; it's very complicated and by no means precise. Lesson learned: farming involves a lot of careful estimation on a number of complex variables that yield useful information, but with a healthy margin of error.