Something To Chew On - Why CSAs Are So Important

From The Gardens Project's weekly column in the Ukiah Daily Journal:

If you choose to read one thing today, read this, as the concept of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is incredibly important to our future in Mendocino County and quite possibly holds our salvation.

CSA is an increasingly heard but not often understood term that refers to an arrangement whereby customers commit to buying the production of a farm for a season (everything from fruits and vegetables to meat, grains, and flowers), pay a sum of money upfront, and then receive the farm’s bounty throughout the season. Typically, the customer receives a basket of fresh vegetables every week from a farmer with whom they have a personal relationship.

In our modern, hyper-choice-happy culture, a CSA takes some getting used to. In a CSA, customers buy a “share” in the farm and become “members” of that farm, sharing in the risk and glory of the production. You don’t get to pick and choose what goes in your basket – you just get a share of what the farm is ready to harvest that week. To some, this lack of choice is unappealing. If it requires giving up the option of getting exactly what you want, why buy your food through a CSA? Why is it SO INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT?

To help answer this burning question, I talked to Gloria and Stephen Decater who founded Live Power Community Farm in Round Valley and started one of the first entirely community based farms (CBF) in California. [Note: a Community Based Farm (CBF) is the original ideal from which modern Community Supported Agricultures (CSAs) derive. The Decaters prefer to use CBF to describe what they are doing, but more people are familiar with the term CSA. Both are used in the rest of the article, essentially interchangeably.] When I asked the question, “Why are CSAs important?” Stephen replied, “[because] we’re not going to be able to create a local food economy leaving it up to chance and the market.” According to Stephen, a community based farm “takes it [food production and a farm’s survival] out of the market realm so that it’s not based on chance. Eaters partner with the farm to create economic viability.” This economic viability allows a small farm to survive in the face of the daunting market forces created by industrial agriculture and an unbridled, global capitalism; the market forces that we witness and participate in when we shop at Walmart, Safeway, the Coop, and even the Farmers Market, and that cause most farms in Mendocino County to farm at a loss each year while the farmer pours their heart, soul, and 14 hours a day into the operation.

When I posed the question “why is a CSA better or different from just shopping at the Farmers’ Market on Saturday?,” Gloria responded that “community based farming goes deeper” adding that the Farmers Market often acts as a stepping stone for both customers and producers towards community based farming and a CSA, and that “we need everything – the Coop, Farmers Markets – but what we especially need is awareness and depth of relationship (between farmers and eaters) and mutual support expressed through community based farms.”

Stephen expressed the desire for eaters in Mendocino County to become aware of “the potential they have to spend money consciously,” and to see food consumption as a “window of opportunity” to create a local food economy. “How they spend their money will decide what kind of agriculture we have…farmers can’t do it just by themselves.”

If creating a sustainable local food economy in Mendocino County is important to you, I encourage you, with every fiber of my being, to become a member of a CSA. Live Power needs 20 more members for this season. You can reach them by calling 983 – 8196 or emailing livepower@igc.org. The Ukiah High School Hillside Farm is also trying their hand at a CSA for this summer season. They need members and you can reach them by calling 468 – 8493 or emailing ecrawford@mcoe.us .

A Speech to the Garden Club of America

Here is a poem by the indomitable Wendell Berry - farmer, poet, essayist, inspirational human being - about giving up our fossil fuel burning existence and going back to school, this time in gardens. It's particularly relevant at this moment in time, as we see the true cost of our fossil fuel consumption spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, and as gardening remains as true and beautiful as ever. I have this poem on the wall above my computer and am often inspired by its sense, its simplicity, and its joy. I hope you enjoy it.

A Speech to the Garden Club of America

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
As prophesied—our world! We speak of it
As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges, poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as to make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

Something To Chew On - Proposed Slaughterhouse in Mendocino County

As part of my job at The Gardens Project, I have begun to write a weekly column for the Ukiah Daily Journal entitled "Something To Chew On." The column will explore topics related to the local food economy in Mendocino County, with hopes that it will generate much needed thought and discussion on how to create a sustainable local food economy here. Last week was my first column and it addressed the proposal of a slaughterhouse in Mendocino County. I hope you enjoy reading it one tenth as much as I enjoyed writing it. I'll post the column I write every week on the RealDirt Blog, so stay tuned. Thanks! - Lucy

This is the first of a new weekly column about the movement to localize the production and consumption of food in Mendocino County - the local food movement.

A bit of background: I moved to Ukiah in August (instead of San Francisco) because here I can know the people who grow my food, and because I obtained a job as an AmeriCorps VISTA with The Gardens Project, a fantastic spark of a non-profit working to increase access to fresh local produce in Mendocino County through community and school gardens. The Gardens Project also helps support the local food movement in Mendocino County in general, and my job is so awesome that I am going to write this weekly column as part of it. So, here goes:

On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors heard a presentation from the Economic Development and Financing Corporation (EDFC) about the potential of a slaughterhouse in Mendocino County. The proposed slaughterhouse rejects the modern, indecent slaughterhouse model we know from driving I-5 and passing the atrocious Harris Ranch. The facility proposed for this County is instead relatively small, environmentally benign, and employee friendly. The facility would process meat from Mendocino and surrounding counties, taking advantage of the growing niche market that is local, ‘natural’ meat as the grape industry in The County reaches a saturation point and timber is increasingly uncertain. The EDFC stated that the facility would not be in the Ukiah Valley.

The audience at the meeting was largely wearing cowboy boots and Carhart vests and favored the proposal, calling ranching the ‘green economy.’ One local restaurateur remarked that “the closer to home we produce our food the better off we’ll all be, no matter what you eat.” Fewer audience members stood to voice concern and criticism, citing the unsustainability of a heavy meat eating society, skepticism over the ‘local’ nature of the project – “it’s just changing the direction the trucks are driving” – and over the economic feasibility of the proposal, questioning whether there is enough livestock in The County to support the facility.

Negative karmic implications of creating a facility intended specifically for death aside, I’m in favor of the idea. The proposed facility would increase livestock production in the county, encouraging responsible land use and alleviating the dangerous monocropping of grapes in Mendocino County by grazing livestock between vineyard rows. It would create new jobs and a product the county would be proud of (if done right), and take advantage of the resources we have available to us.

But I do wish the slaughterhouse would be located as close to downtown Ukiah as possible, with glass windows, so that people understand the reality of their meat consumption. I also hope the 44 jobs created at the slaughterhouse will include a position solely responsible for the spiritual aspect of the process – leading the animals to their death in a way that honors and respects life. And it seems like the real challenge will be finding investors to take on the $18 million project, so perhaps a cooperative business model should be considered? This could be the most radical, humane, life affirming slaughterhouse in the United States, and it seems more likely for it to happen in Mendocino County than anywhere else.

The Mendocino County Local Food Summit took place this Wednesday at the Redwood Fairgrounds. Over 100 policymakers, health advocates, farmers, food buyers, concerned citizens, and more gathered to hear presentations on the state of our local food economy and brainstorm steps necessary to make it stronger so that health and wealth stay within The County. In his presentation entitled “Local Foods as Economic Recovery,” world renowned food economist Ken Meter specifically recommended pursuing livestock and dairy as sustainable industries in Mendocino County.

Local Food Summit !

Re-building our Local Food System was the theme of the Local Food Summit attended by over 120 local food stakeholders and advocates on May 19th at the Redwood Empire Fairgrounds. Participants were presented with the losing economics of our current commodity based food system by national local food economic analyst, Ken Meter of the Crossroads Resource Center in Minneapolis. Ken's presentation posed the data to the Food Summit that our county ships approximately $68 million a year out of the region to buy farm inputs from fertilizers, seeds, equipment, and fuel. Additionally, Mendocino County consumers spend approximately $210 million dollars a year buying food from outside of the county. As we re-build our local food system, there is a tremendous economic opportunity of almost $300 million dollars a year leaving our county that could be captured here!

The Summit also presented numerous local initiatives underway to address the challenges of access to land, labor, capital investment, healthy food in schools, community access to garden space and food stamps and food banks. Local farmers, schools, and non-profits shared their models and participants broke into discussion groups to make connections and brainstorm solutions to the challenges.
The Summit was hosted by North Coast Opportunities and Community Health Services of Mendocino County. As the movement builds momentum, organizers will continue to foster connections and seek funding and support for the numerous initiatives underway.

Ken Meter's presentation can be viewed at: --> -->http://www.crcworks.org/crcppts/camendo10.pdf

What to do in Your Garden This Month

What to do in Your Garden this month

by Suzanne Millard, Mendocino County Master Gardener

Finally we plant! For those crops susceptible to frost, we are now on our way out of the frost danger zone and we can fill our garden with starts and seeds that will become the bounty of our summer.

What to plant?

For May and June you can directly sow beans, carrots, chard, corn, lettuce, cucumber, squash, melons, turnips, potatoes and pumpkins. You can also start heat tolerant lettuce and chard for planting. Plants ready for transplant are tomatoes, tomatillos, chard, eggplant, peppers, cucumbers, melons and lettuce.

Flowers and herbs appropriate for May and June direct sowing are dill, Lobella, Alyssum, Limonium, Zinnias, Amaranth, Petunias, Marigolds, Cosmos, Tithonias, Ageratum, Strawflowers, Calliopsis, Cleome, Celosia, Sanvitalia, Morning Glory, Nasturtiums, Dahlia, Heliotrope, Gomphrena, Geraniums, Sunflowers, Impatiens, Nicotiana, Thunbergia.

For more Gardener's Tips, please click Greater Hopland Planting Guide (Peter Huff and Kate Frey's Monthly Planting Calendar for Inland Mendocino, also found at the "How to - Grow Food" page on The Garden's Project Website).

What to look out for…

· Make sure young starts have been properly acclimated to the outdoors (hardened off). Do this by exposing them to the elements each day for a week, lengthening the time of exposure each successive day.

· For young starts in the garden, be sure that they are protected from strong winds early on.

· Once starts are planted, ensure that your irrigation connections are working properly. Make sure that irrigation filters are cleaned out and water is flowing freely to each plant.

· You’ll want to plant starts with similar water and sunlight needs together.

For a healthy garden, you’ll want to continue to keep your weeds to a minimum. Pests such as aphids, earwigs, slugs and snails will want to snack on your tender starts and established plants. Aphids can be controlled with strong will and persistence. Wash them off plants with a strong stream of water. Earwigs can feast on aphids but they can also feed on your plant leaves. Roll up wet newspapers or cardboard at night next to your plants. These will attract earwigs. First thing in the morning, dispose of the rolls of newspaper and cardboard and you’ll be disposing of a multitude of earwigs. Snails and slugs can be controlled either by hand or by surrounding garden beds or plants with cooper tape.

Just a friendly reminder that there is a tremendous body of knowledge about gardening in California, provided by University of California Cooperative Extension. This site, geared toward the home gardener can be found at http://cagardenweb.ucdavis.edu/.