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USA - MARYLAND: Local Farmers Work Together To Sell Produce With Online Ordering And Delivery
“The goal of Garrett Growers is to feed our community, help our farmers and protect agricultural land in the county,” said Hannah Frazee, one of the coordinators for Garrett Growers
OAKLAND — Local fresh produce from a variety of local farms is now available for purchase online through the Garrett Growers Online Ordering System.
Individuals can order from the website and pick up at one of several locations throughout the county.
The online local fresh produce ordering system is one of the services provided by Garrett Growers to connect participating local agricultural farms with consumers.
Garrett Growers is a farmer’s cooperative located in Garrett County.
Currently participating farms include DeBerry Farm Fresh Produce, A.L.L. Produce, Naaman Miller Farm, Fawn Valley Farm, Whistle Pig Farm, Fred Petersheim Farm, Yoder’s Tomatoes, Lynndale Produce, Philip Schrock Farm, Jay Maust Farm, Backbone Food Farm, David & Martha Yoder Farm, Punky’s Place, Simon Yoder Eggs and Stemple Brothers Farm.
“The goal of Garrett Growers is to feed our community, help our farmers and protect agricultural land in the county,” said Hannah Frazee, one of the coordinators for Garrett Growers. “By opening up an online store, we can give individuals the convenience of being able to purchase fresh, local produce from our area farms anytime through their computer or mobile phone. This is extremely important for individuals who find it difficult to get to a produce market or who may be avoiding crowds due to COVID.”
Pickup is available on Thursday afternoons each week throughout the summer. Individuals can order online any time up until 3 p.m. on Wednesday for that Thursday’s pick-up.
Pickup locations include: University of Maryland Extension Office in Mtn. Lake Park; Deep Creek Pharmacy in McHenry; Firefly Farms Creamery & Market in Accident; and High Country Creamery and Market in Grantsville.
Other services offered by Garrett Growers include an ordering and delivery service of local produce for restaurants, grocery stores, caterers and institutions along with a weekly Veggie Box program.
According to Frazee, individuals who would prefer home delivery can purchase a Veggie Box on the same online ordering system.
Veggie Boxes can be home delivered as long as the residence is within the delivery radius. Residents can check to see if they live on the delivery route by emailing Garrett Growers at garrettgrowers@gmail.com.
“Some of the same challenges that have affected other industries because of the pandemic have also affected local farm sales, so it is more important than ever to support local agriculture,” said Frazee. “Fresh produce is often healthier because of the shorter time between picking and purchase, so the vegetables and fruits retain more nutrients. Plus, the one thing I generally hear is how much better local, fresh produce tastes. But something else that does not receive as much focus is the fact that local food production strengthens the local economy and helps to protect our local agricultural land. There are just so many benefits to purchasing local produce.”
For more information about Garrett Growers and the online ordering system, individuals can visit the co-op website at www.garrettgrowers.com or email garrettgrowers@gmail.com.
For information about other farms selling local products or to find a farm to visit, check out www.GarrettFarms.org.
Lead photo: Jacob “Jake” Hauser, delivery driver for Garrett Growers, stands in front of one of the delivery vehicles. Photo by Hannah Frazee
CANADA: Salad Days Vertical Farming Company Growing Business With Microgreens Subscription Program
For Scott Hyndman and Adam Dudek, the entrepreneurial learning curve has been as steep as their vegetable farm is tall — that is to say, very
For Scott Hyndman and Adam Dudek, the entrepreneurial learning curve has been as steep as their vegetable farm is tall — that is to say, very.
Years ago, the friends were sitting on Dudek’s Osborne Village balcony on a sunny summer day, admiring his tomato plants and grumbling about how difficult it was to find high-quality local produce year-round. The conversation became the catalyst for 3 Guys Greens, an urban vertical farm founded by the duo in 2016.
"If we’re frustrated with it, I’m sure there’s a lot of people who are frustrated with this too," Dudek says of Manitoba’s short growing season. "So we started looking into: how can we do this? There’s gotta be a way to grow this stuff indoors year-round."
Adam Dudek, right, and Scott Hyndman of 3 Guys Greens, a local vertical farming company, are offering a mixed greens subscription program. RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
They rented warehouse space and started experimenting with vertical gardening and aquaponic systems to grow microgreens for local restaurants. Dudek is a plumber by trade and Hyndman is a trained chef — backgrounds that made up for what they lacked in business and agricultural experience. "This sort of farming is pretty much all plumbing," Dudek says with a laugh. "We’re consistently learning and consistently growing."
Until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, 3 Guys Greens sold microgreens — young, nutrient-packed vegetable sprouts — directly to restaurants as a garnish. The public health crisis has thrown the industry into turmoil and cut off a major revenue stream for the entrepreneurs.
Nutrient-rich micro greens can be used on a sandwich, in salads or cooked as a side dish.
RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
"With the restaurants being shut down, there’s no real desire for them to have the added cost of garnish when they’re just putting it in a takeout box," Hyndman says. "That’s kind of why we wanted to go towards (selling) direct to the consumer."
This month, the company launched a salad subscription program that will see Winnipeggers getting greens and dressing delivered to their door once a week. The salads include a base of sunflower and pea shoots and a rotating blend of garnish mixes made from micro arugula, radish shoots, brassicas and mustard greens. They’ve also partnered with local catering company Loaf and Honey to create specialty salad dressings.
A monthly subscription costs $80 and each salad kit is expected to be enough greens for three to five days worth of meals, depending on how customers use the product. The microgreens can be eaten solo, added to other dishes or cooked as a side.
"The greens on wraps and sandwiches are absolutely amazing," Dudek says. "The pea shoots and sunflower I like to sauté with a little bit of lemon juice and some garlic."
Hyndman is a big proponent of the nutrient value of microgreens. One 2017 study out of Idaho State University found that broccoli sprouts had larger quantities of certain beneficial nutrients compared with their fully grown counterparts.
"You can eat your whole entire (microgreen) salad and you’ve eaten your 30 pounds of greens for the week," Hyndman says. "(Or) you can replace your normal lettuce on your burgers and in your tacos or whatever, and you still get to eat what you love, but now you’re incorporating these highly nutritious, nutrient-dense microgreens into your diet."
Operations manager Michelle Lecnik checks the status of the towers of basil.
RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
The microgreens take 10 days to mature and are grown to order.
Since 2016, 3 Guys Greens — which was named when there was in fact a third business partner — has moved three times and now operates out of 26,000-square-foot building with rows upon rows of heavy-duty growing racks and four staff members. The system uses energy-efficient LED grow lights and minimal water, which gives traditional agriculture a run for its money, according to Hyndman.
"One of our towers grows roughly 50 plants on it, so basically in one square foot of our growing space we’re able to do roughly 100 feet of row farming," he says.
The company started growing basil last year and hopes to raise different kinds of produce in the future. They’re also working to develop vertical farming systems within northern Manitoba communities.
Visit 3guysgreens.com for more information and to sign up for their salad subscription program.
Twitter: @evawasney
eva.wasney@freepress.mb.ca
Eva Wasney
Arts Reporter
Eva Wasney is a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press.
As Food Supply Chain Breaks Down, Farm-To-Door CSAs Take Off
Redmond, a founding partner of the 450-acre, organic Full Belly Farm, is busier than ever trying to ramp up production to meet soaring demand. "The interest in getting local, fresh, organic produce just has skyrocketed during this crisis," Redmond said.
By Eric Westervelt | NPR | May 10, 2020
Images of some American farmers dumping milk, plowing under crops and tossing perishables amid sagging demand and falling prices during the deadly coronavirus pandemic has made for dramatic TV.
But it's not the whole story.
"We had a reporter call here and say, 'We want to see some produce rotting in the field and milk going down the drains,' " said Judith Redmond, a longtime farmer in California's Capay Valley, northwest of Sacramento. "And I said, 'Well, actually, that's not what's happening in the Capay Valley.' "
Redmond, a founding partner of the 450-acre, organic Full Belly Farm, is busier than ever trying to ramp up production to meet soaring demand.
From California to Maine, the movement known as community supported agriculture (CSA) is booming. Members buy a share of a farm's often organic harvest that gets delivered weekly in a box. CSA programs almost everywhere report a surge in memberships and growing waiting lists.
"The interest in getting local, fresh, organic produce just has skyrocketed during this crisis," Redmond said.
As with many farms, the restaurant and farmers market sides of her business have cratered. But the CSA side, which includes business across the San Francisco Bay Area, has jumped to 2,000 boxes a week. "We've doubled our CSA box numbers and quadrupled our add-ons like wheat flour, oils like olive oil, nuts, fruit juices, even yarn," Redmond said.
CSAs have long been something of a niche market that have never really penetrated the mainstream. Yet, the coronavirus just might prove to be sparking community supported agriculture's breakout moment.
"In all the time that we've worked with CSAs, which is several decades, we've never seen a surge as quickly as we have of the last few weeks," said Evan Wiig with the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, which supports and lobbies on behalf of CSAs across California.
"It's sort of a heyday for CSAs," he said. "Farmers that were starting in March struggling to get enough members for the season – which we see every year — by mid-March were dealing with waiting lists with hundreds of people trying to get in."
The coronavirus has exposed the vulnerabilities and fragility of the U.S. global agribusiness supply chain. The CSA model's focus on local and fresh is ideally suited for a crisis that has people deeply worried about germs on lettuce, beets or broccoli as the crops make their way from the field to the kitchen counter.
People "don't want that many hands on their food right now," said Sarah Voiland. "And we can offer that."
She and her husband, Ryan, run the organic CSA Red Fire Farm, in the Connecticut River Valley outside of Amherst, Mass.
The low-touch factor is an especially big draw at a time when a trip to a supermarket can involve masks, social-distancing lines, hand sanitizer and angst. "The supply chain with CSA is very short. It's like, we harvest the produce and you come pick it up" at a local site, she said.
"We think people's habits will shift because of this" pandemic, said John Tecklin, who runs the CSA Mountain Bounty Farm, serving the northern California communities around Truckee, Nevada City and Lake Tahoe, as well as Reno, Nev. "For a lot of them, it's kind of a wake-up call: 'what's really important to you?' "
In a move spurred partly by the pandemic, and a sign of the changing times for CSAs, Tecklin's farm is now entering into a partnership called Forever Farms with a non-profit land trust, a local food advocacy group and a food cooperative to help secure ownership of part of the farm's land in perpetuity.
"It's local food security for our community," Tecklin said. "In these times it's more important than ever now."
He believes that's the same motivation driving the recent doubling of interest in his CSA. "Everyone is just all of a sudden, 'Wow this is the kind of thing we need, we need local farmers who we're dealing with directly.' "
Some farms, large and small, that relied on restaurant, hotel, school and university food-service contracts have been hit hard. Many are now scrambling to adapt to a CSA-type model, at least in the short term, to survive. Some are now partnering with CSAs in a mutually beneficial pact that helps CSAs meet growing demand while offering an outlet for suffering farms.
Federal and state governments are also now taking a page from CSAs. As part of its coronavirus relief, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has put out a call for $3 billion in contracts for farmers to produce and deliver fresh produce and dairy boxes to food banks, many of which are struggling to support the growing ranks of Americans who are hurting and out of work.
Some states are trying to redirect to charities farm produce that in normal times would have headed to restaurants and hotels. California has expanded funding to help cover the costs of harvesting, packaging and transporting fresh fruits and vegetables from farms to local food banks. The state's Farm to Family Program, a partnership with the California Association of Food Banks (CAFB) and the USDA, provides fresh produce to needy households across the state.
CSAs still represent a very small slice of America's $100 billion farm economy. But their renaissance marks a rare bit of good economic news for an agriculture industry battered by trade wars, threatened by climate change and now facing a global pandemic.
And the new success brings new challenges. Many CSAs are now scrambling to find additional labor to plant, harvest and deliver produce to meet the moment. "We're totally able to produce so much more than we are, but we don't have the workers," said Redmond, of Full Belly Farm. "We're so stressed out by that that, you know, just knowing that there's going to be a difficult time getting workers, it just doesn't make any sense to ramp up production."
A big question for CSAs is whether the renewed interest represents a fleeting reaction to fear or a more sustainable, long-term trend.
"When the lockdown or shelter-in-place started in March, people were just a little panicked," Redmond said. "And what we're trying to do is turn it into a longer-term relationship with our farm and those members so that they see that there's a tremendous advantage of getting food locally from people that they know."
The Sickness In Our Food Supply
The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided
By Michael Pollan | The New York Review of Books | June 11, 2020 Issue
“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.
The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.
How did we end up here? The story begins early in the Reagan administration, when the Justice Department rewrote the rules of antitrust enforcement: if a proposed merger promised to lead to greater marketplace “efficiency”—the watchword—and wouldn’t harm the consumer, i.e., didn’t raise prices, it would be approved. (It’s worth noting that the word “consumer” appears nowhere in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890. The law sought to protect producers—including farmers—and our politics from undue concentrations of corporate power.)1 The new policy, which subsequent administrations have left in place, propelled a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the food industry. As the industry has grown steadily more concentrated since the 1980s, it has also grown much more specialized, with a tiny number of large corporations dominating each link in the supply chain. One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace.2 That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets.
On April 26, John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, the second-largest meatpacker in America, took out ads in The New York Times and other newspapers to declare that the food chain was “breaking,” raising the specter of imminent meat shortages as outbreaks of Covid-19 hit the industry.3 Slaughterhouses have become hot zones for contagion, with thousands of workers now out sick and dozens of them dying.4 This should come as no surprise: social distancing is virtually impossible in a modern meat plant, making it an ideal environment for a virus to spread. In recent years, meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Some chicken plant workers, given no regular bathroom breaks, now wear diapers.5 A worker can ask for a break, but the plants are so loud he or she can’t be heard without speaking directly into the ear of a supervisor. Until recently slaughterhouse workers had little or no access to personal protective equipment; many of them were also encouraged to keep working even after exposure to the virus. Add to this the fact that many meat-plant workers are immigrants who live in crowded conditions with little or no access to health care, and you have a population at dangerously high risk of infection.
When the number of Covid-19 cases in America’s slaughterhouses exploded in late April—12,608 confirmed, with forty-nine deaths as of May 11—public health officials and governors began ordering plants to close. It was this threat to the industry’s profitability that led to Tyson’s declaration, which President Trump would have been right to see as a shakedown: the president’s political difficulties could only be compounded by a shortage of meat. In order to reopen their production lines, Tyson and his fellow packers wanted the federal government to step in and preempt local public health authorities; they also needed liability protection, in case workers or their unions sued them for failing to observe health and safety regulations.
Within days of Tyson’s ad, President Trump obliged the meatpackers by invoking the Defense Production Act. After having declined to use it to boost the production of badly needed coronavirus test kits, he now declared meat a “scarce and critical material essential to the national defense.” The executive order took the decision to reopen or close meat plants out of local hands, forced employees back to work without any mandatory safety precautions, and offered their employers some protection from liability for their negligence. On May 8, Tyson reopened a meatpacking plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where more than a thousand workers had tested positive.
The president and America’s meat eaters, not to mention its meat-plant workers, would never have found themselves in this predicament if not for the concentration of the meat industry, which has given us a supply chain so brittle that the closure of a single plant can cause havoc at every step, from farm to supermarket. Four companies now process more than 80 percent of beef cattle in America; another four companies process 57 percent of the hogs. A single Smithfield processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, processes 5 percent of the pork Americans eat. When an outbreak of Covid-19 forced the state’s governor to shut that plant down in April, the farmers who raise pigs committed to it were stranded.
Once pigs reach slaughter weight, there’s not much else you can do with them. You can’t afford to keep feeding them; even if you could, the production lines are designed to accommodate pigs up to a certain size and weight, and no larger. Meanwhile, you’ve got baby pigs entering the process, steadily getting fatter. Much the same is true for the hybrid industrial chickens, which, if allowed to live beyond their allotted six or seven weeks, are susceptible to broken bones and heart problems and quickly become too large to hang on the disassembly line. This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand.6
Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals. So are the factories in which they are killed and cut into parts. These innovations have made meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans; we now eat, on average, more than nine ounces of meat per person per day, many of us at every meal.7 Covid-19 has brutally exposed the risks that accompany such a system. There will always be a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience (not to mention ethics); the food industry opted for the former, and we are now paying the price.
Imagine how different the story would be if there were still tens of thousands of chicken and pig farmers bringing their animals to hundreds of regional slaughterhouses. An outbreak at any one of them would barely disturb the system; it certainly wouldn’t be front-page news. Meat would probably be more expensive, but the redundancy would render the system more resilient, making breakdowns in the national supply chain unlikely. Successive administrations allowed the industry to consolidate because the efficiencies promised to make meat cheaper for the consumer, which it did. It also gave us an industry so powerful it can enlist the president of the United States in its efforts to bring local health authorities to heel and force reluctant and frightened workers back onto the line.
Another vulnerability that the novel coronavirus has exposed is the paradoxical notion of “essential” workers who are grossly underpaid and whose lives are treated as disposable. It is the men and women who debone chicken carcasses flying down a line at 175 birds a minute, or pick salad greens under the desert sun, or drive refrigerated produce trucks across the country who are keeping us fed and keeping the wheels of our society from flying off. Our utter dependence on them has never been more clear. This should give food and agricultural workers a rare degree of political leverage at the very moment they are being disproportionately infected. Scattered job actions and wildcat strikes are beginning to pop up around the country—at Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, and some meat plants—as these workers begin to flex their muscle.8 This is probably just the beginning. Perhaps their new leverage will allow them to win the kinds of wages, protections, and benefits that would more accurately reflect their importance to society.
So far, the produce sections of our supermarkets remain comparatively well stocked, but what happens this summer and next fall, if the outbreaks that have crippled the meat industry hit the farm fields? Farmworkers, too, live and work in close proximity, many of them undocumented immigrants crammed into temporary quarters on farms. Lacking benefits like sick pay, not to mention health insurance, they often have no choice but to work even when infected. Many growers depend on guest workers from Mexico to pick their crops; what happens if the pandemic—or the Trump administration, which is using the pandemic to justify even more restrictions on immigration—prevents them from coming north this year?
The food chain is buckling. But it’s worth pointing out that there are parts of it that are adapting and doing relatively well. Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. Small, diversified farmers who supply restaurants have had an easier time finding new markets; the popularity of community-supported agriculture (CSA) is taking off, as people who are cooking at home sign up for weekly boxes of produce from regional growers. (The renaissance of home cooking, and baking, is one of the happier consequences of the lockdown, good news both for our health and for farmers who grow actual food, as opposed to commodities like corn and soy.) In many places, farmer’s markets have quickly adjusted to pandemic conditions, instituting social-distancing rules and touchless payment systems. The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy.
The pandemic is, willy-nilly, making the case for deindustrializing and decentralizing the American food system, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience. Somewhat less obviously, the pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well.
It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. That’s because it takes remarkably little labor—typically a single farmer on a tractor, working alone—to plant and harvest thousands of acres of these crops. So processed foods should be the last kind to disappear from supermarket shelves.
Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.9
Why these particular conditions should worsen Covid-19 infections might be explained by the fact that all three are symptoms of chronic inflammation, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system. (The Western diet is by itself inflammatory.) One way that Covid-19 kills is by sending the victim’s immune system into hyperdrive, igniting a “cytokine storm” that eventually destroys the lungs and other organs. A new Chinese study conducted in hospitals in Wuhan found that elevated levels of C-reactive protein, a standard marker of inflammation that has been linked to poor diet, “correlated with disease severity and tended to be a good predictor of adverse outcomes.”10
A momentous question awaits us on the far side of the current crisis: Are we willing to address the many vulnerabilities that the novel coronavirus has so dramatically exposed? It’s not hard to imagine a coherent and powerful new politics organized around precisely that principle. It would address the mistreatment of essential workers and gaping holes in the social safety net, including access to health care and sick leave—which we now understand, if we didn’t before, would be a benefit to all of us. It would treat public health as a matter of national security, giving it the kind of resources that threats to national security warrant.
But to be comprehensive, this post-pandemic politics would also need to confront the glaring deficiencies of a food system that has grown so concentrated that it is exquisitely vulnerable to the risks and disruptions now facing us. In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform.
—May 12, 2020
An earlier version of this article included an incomplete credit for “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” which was a collaboration between FERN and Mother Jones. The footnote has been amended.
This history is recounted in Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Wiley, 2011), pp. 135–138. ↩
See Claire Kelloway, “Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty?,” Washington Monthly, April 28, 2020. ↩
See “In America, the Virus Threatens a Meat Industry That Is Too Concentrated,” The Economist, April 30, 2020. ↩
See Leah Douglas, “Mapping Covid-19 in Meat and Food Processing Plants,” Food and Environmental Reporting Network (FERN), April 22, 2020. FERN has covered this story extensively and compiled statistics. Also see Esther Honig and Ted Genoways, “‘The Workers Are Being Sacrificed’: As Cases Mounted, Meatpacker JBS Kept People on Crowded Factory Floors,” FERN and Mother Jones, May 1, 2020. Civil Eats, FERN, and Mother Jones have done an excellent job of covering the outbreaks in the meat industry. ↩
See Magaly Licolli, “As Tyson Claims the Food Supply Is Breaking, Its Workers Continue to Suffer,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. ↩
See Tyler Whitley, “Don’t Blame Farmers Who Have to Euthanize Their Animals. Blame the Companies They Work For,” Civil Eats, April 30, 2020. ↩
It’s worth remembering that the federal government actively promotes meat consumption in myriad ways, from USDA advertising campaigns—“Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner”—to exempting feedlots from provisions of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, to the dietary guidelines it issues and the heavy subsidies it gives for animal feed. ↩
See, for example, Daniel A. Medina, “As Amazon, Walmart, and Others Profit Amid Coronavirus Crisis, Their Essential Workers Plan Unprecedented Strike,” The Intercept, April 28, 2020. ↩
See Shikha Garg et al., “Hospitalization Rates and Characteristics of Patients Hospitalized with Laboratory-Confirmed Coronavirus Disease 2019, COVID-NET, 14 States, March 1–30, 2020,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 69, No. 15 (April 17, 2020). ↩
See Xiaomin Luo et al., “Prognostic Value of C-Reactive Protein in Patients with COVID-19,” medRxiv, March 23, 2020. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Successful CSA Strategies For Small Farms
With grocery store shelves empty in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, customers all around the United States are beginning to consider their regional food systems in a new light
BY ALLIE HYMAS
With grocery store shelves empty in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, customers all around the United States are beginning to consider their regional food systems in a new light.
“We have never seen this kind of demand,” Vera Fabian of Ten Mothers Farm near Hillsborough, North Carolina, says. “If ever there was a time to be getting into the CSA business, this would be the moment.”
For the last ten years, Fabian and her husband, Gordon Jenkins, have been raising organic vegetables using the Community Supported Agriculture model. Today, Ten Mothers Farm supplies boxes of vegetables on a seasonal subscription basis to 184 households, and they’re pleased with how this format has allowed them to feed their local community, both in good times and bad. “Something that gives me hope in this time is that people are trying to figure out how to have more resilient communities, whether we’re talking about climate change or the coronavirus.”
Ten Mothers Farm’s CSA strategy and offers timely lessons for farmers who wish to build their business around this model and those who simply want to try this approach to reach customers during the stressors of a health crisis. For Fabian, running a CSA is more than just a method of moving her products. “We are more motivated than ever to feed more people and spread the word. If more businesses were run like a CSA then the world would be in a different place!”
Gordon Jenkins, Vera Fabian and Luke Howerter run Ten Mothers Farm. Photo credit: Scott Kelly.
The Ten Mothers Farm Story
The Ten Mothers Farm website explains their name: “there’s an old saying from India that ‘garlic is as good as ten mothers,’ which to us means that food is medicine, as nourishing and powerful as ten whole mothers.” Having met as employees at the Edible Schoolyard in Berkley, a school started by Alice Waters, Fabian, and Jenkins bonded over a mutual love for cooking and an interest in farming, both as a means of social justice and for supplying food.
While Jenkins’ food journey began in the restaurant industry, Fabian discovered gardening with the intent to participate in agricultural relief work in sub-Saharan Africa.
“I wanted to save the world, but simultaneously I found that I loved cooking, which felt like a frivolous thing, and I felt conflicted between the two of them,” Fabian says. “I studied abroad in West Africa in a women’s garden cooperative and I observed these women solving these huge problems of hunger and education through growing food.” Upon her return, Fabian was gripped with the sense that organic agriculture would be her opportunity to make an impact. “I thought maybe my love of food and desire to fix problems could come together.”
The couple took a diligent, methodical approach to begin their farming journey. After working for food-related nonprofits for five years, Fabian and Jenkins took their saved resources and years of research and apprenticed themselves to Bob Cannard at Green String Farm and then to Eliot Coleman at Four Seasons Farm.
“These were two farmers that we really looked up to and knew we would get a great education from. We learned a ton and shook the city life off,” Fabian says.
Having weighed their options between finding land in Jenkins’ home state of California and Fabian’s of North Carolina, the couple chose the more affordable land prices and water accessibility of North Carolina and spent two years working at Maple Spring Gardens, learning how to farm there.
In 2015 Fabian and Jenkins felt prepared to start their own operation and began renting land from a local family. “For our first three years we started really small,” Fabian says. “Farming is definitely an expression of your personality, and we are pretty careful, methodical people. Farming is so risky and we wanted to reduce as much of the risk as possible.” With Fabian working halftime off their farm for a nonprofit agricultural organization serving refugees from Burma, the initial Ten Mothers Farm endeavor was rolled out with the bigger timeline in mind. “We had thought we would be a market farm, but the markets around here are difficult to get into, so we said ‘Okay, I guess we’ll be a CSA!’” Fabian says. Having operated the CSA successfully for five years, she is grateful that circumstances dictated this model for this business. “It’s especially great during this moment in time!”
“We started with 34 CSA families, and we’ve gradually increased it as we felt ready,” Fabian says. Ten Mothers Farms served 54 households the second year, 74 the third year, followed by 125, and this year they will feed 180 families. “We sold a little bit to restaurants too, but the demand for the CSA has felt strong, so over time we’ve focused more on the CSA and less on restaurants.”
Junie with the whole farm and rows of green in early November. Photo credit: Scott Kelly.
Collaborative Land Purchasing Success
The first iteration of Ten Mothers Farm was on a rented quarter acre. “It was really just a big garden,” Fabian says. “Those first three years we stayed at a quarter acre — but we got better, so we were able to grow more food.” Throughout Ten Mothers Farm’s early years Fabian and Jenkins were searching for land in a pricey real estate market. Aware that they could access a more suitable property by joining forces with other buyers of a similar mindset, the couple chose to search for land with several friends. “It was challenging,” Fabian says. “We almost gave up.”
Their search became more heated when the owners of their rented land sold the property. “At the eleventh hour, when our lease was almost up in the summer of 2018, we happened to find a piece of land that was perfect both for us and the friends we were searching with, and we all bought it together!” To make the purchase, Fabian, Jenkins, and their friends formed an LLC through which the purchase was made and then subdivided the land with a parcel for each of them and a parcel held in common. “We’re all folks that want to have a land-based life but also people who want community out there and not be isolated.”
In the winter of 2018, Ten Mothers moved to its new location. “It was a bare field!” Fabian says. “There was no electricity, no water, no infrastructure of any kind. We quickly did the work of turning this field into a farm.” Fabian and Jenkins are currently building a house on the land and hope to move in June. “There are a lot of wonderful things about sharing the land,” Fabian says. “What we were able to afford as just the two of us would have been really small and unsuitable for farming. ”
Fabian says their space-saving strategies at Ten Mothers Farm have come from limited access to land, but their efficiency can actually offer encouragement to others who might never be able to afford a large property. “For our 180 shares, we farm only one acre of land. Being able to farm on such a small footprint means that it’s so much more accessible to people.”
Selecting Varieties to Offer in a CSA
In choosing varieties, Ten Mothers Farm started with what they enjoyed cooking and eating. “For a CSA, we have to grow a ton of different things to keep our customers happy,” Fabian says. “We grow 60 different vegetables.”
Fabian recommends CSAs keep close tabs on what their customers want.
“Every year, towards the end of the year, we send out a survey and use that survey directly to crop plan for the coming year. That way we’re growing more of what people want and less of what they don’t want.” Always mindful to make sure their products pencil out financially, Fabian notes that there are vegetables they can’t offer because the numbers don’t work, or their methods won’t allow them to grow or harvest those offerings. “For example, we don’t grow potatoes because we’re not a tractor farm,” Fabian explains. “The labor just doesn’t work out.”
As long as a vegetable offering can be produced with financial, space, and labor efficiency, it’s just a matter of taste.
“We are into strange vegetables!” Fabian says with a smile in her voice. “One year we tried molokhia, or Egyptian spinach, which does beautifully in the hot, humid summers that we have, but people hated it! It’s just too weird!”
They’ve found at Ten Mothers Farm that customers enjoy experiencing one or two new vegetables occasionally among a steady offering of recognizable staples. “Most of the time people want to see the things they love and know how to cook.”
Amid the changing climate, Fabian thinks about how certain varieties of vegetables offer more resilience and have adapted to their bioregion better than other foods that may enjoy customers’ favor. Using their weekly newsletter, Fabian is constantly working to educate CSA members on how to use new foods or varieties that are particularly hardy to their bioregion.
“We’re constantly explaining why we grow things and when, and as people have that kind of background information they become more open to trying things and more understanding when they don’t have broccoli in July.” They also host events at Ten Mothers Farm to teach their customers about the farming process. “That really brings it all to life; some of our CSA members haven’t been to the farm yet, and it’s our goal to get them all out here.”
Overcoming Challenges
Fabian encourages farmers to consider starting a CSA to be aware of its unique quirks. “It’s a lot of logistics: lots of crop planning and then executing to make sure you have enough vegetables for everybody. It’s a lot of different crops.” Fabian recommends that potential CSA farmers get used to staying aware of details and putting in place good tools to help keep abreast of the various tasks and considerations. “Making sure you’ve packed the right boxes and didn’t pack boxes for people on vacation.”
The second element Fabian brings forward is marketing and customer service. These elements are both critical to this direct-to-consumer, subscription-based model and will either make or break the business. “When we talk to new and beginning farmers we recommend you go with your personality,” Fabian says. “We happened to really like customer service stuff. We like answering our questions and writing the weekly newsletter. But if you don’t like customer service, you probably shouldn’t do a CSA.”
Fabian also recommends that new CSA operators pad their estimated timeline and hold it loosely. “Everything has taken longer than we’ve planned.” She says. “We try to be patient and not too hard on ourselves when things haven’t happened as quickly as we’d hoped.”
Jenkins and Fabian had part-time off-farm work and slowly built up their customer base before making a big land purchase – an excellent example of how being flexible with the timeline is necessary for smart business planning. “Farming and land are so long-term. We’re talking about either the rest of our lives or at least the next 30-40 years. You have to have a long-term vision or else you’ll get frustrated that it’s not all happening in a year or two.”
Collaboration has been another winning strategy of Ten Mothers Farms. While Jenkins’ and Fabian’s landmates are not partners in the farm, they are working on adding another business partner, Luke Howerter. Fabian says adding additional opinions and voices must be done thoughtfully, but such collaborations can make big things happen on the farm. “You have to keep reminding yourself what can we do together that we can’t do alone: it’s a lot of things! We’re more resilient as three people than just as two of us.”
Regenerative Farming is Giving Back
“Farming regeneratively for us means giving back more than you take,” Fabian says. “ We try to think about how we can give back more both in terms of the land and the people. We often leave humans out of the equation when we talk about sustainable agriculture. One doesn’t really work without the other.”
In addition to structuring Ten Mothers Farming practices and land-use strategies around environmental considerations, Jenkins and Fabian are mindful of how their farm can care for those who work there. “A lot of customers ask ‘is this GMO’ or ‘is this sprayed,’ and our methods address those issues, but they might not be asking if the person who grew their food is making a living.”
Given the legacy of extractive agriculture, both of the soil in extensive tobacco farming and of humans in the enslavement of African families, Jenkins and Fabian are hyperaware of how their farming model needs to put nutrients back into the soil and resources into the community. “If you’re going to farm organically in NC you have to be giving back a lot more than you’re taking because you simply can’t grow anything if you’re not giving back a lot.”
In their first year on their current property, the Ten Mothers Farm team amended their soil according to soil test results and found their soil nutrition was still so low that their spring crops would not grow. “We spent the past year doing so much to increase soil fertility.”
No-till farming is another aspect of how Ten Mothers is practicing regenerative agriculture. “We started out no-till for practical reasons: we heard it reduced weed pressure, we didn’t have money for a tractor, we weren’t particularly interested in tractors and we preferred small hand-scale tools. It turns out doing those things is really great for the soil!”
Thanks to their small footprint and their on-the-ground approach, Ten Mothers Farm has been able to improve their soil quickly through major additions of compost and close observation of soil and plant health.
“I think a lot of growers hear about no-till and they’re skeptical. They assume it wouldn’t be too labor-intensive or just wouldn’t work. We’re so used to tillage it’s hard to give it up.” Fabian says. “A turning point for us was when we were able to visit Singing Frogs Farm. They were a small, no-till operation and their soil and vegetables were beautiful and they were making it work. Then, we knew it was possible! Now, so many small farms are switching to no or low-till. We visited Singing Frog Farm in California just to see an example of how it was done, and they have such great soil. It’s so productive. They made it feel totally possible, and now we’re seeing so many farms doing no-till.”
Fabian recommends the No-Till Growers podcast to hear directly from farmers practicing no- or low-till methods.
Building Trust is the Best Strategy
Fabian is always excited to hear about farmers who want to try the CSA model. “Make sure it’s something you’re excited about – you’re asking people to become a member of your farm, and that’s a big commitment,” Fabian says focusing on just one or maybe two sales strategies have worked for them. “We’ve been able to build a loyal customer base through the CSA because we weren’t trying to do a bunch of markets or different income streams. It takes a lot to keep customers engaged each year. If you spread yourself thin, your CSA members will notice and your retention rate will decrease.”
Fabian’s secret sauce for CSA success is gratitude, trust, and sharing. “Your members are making it possible for you to farm,” she says. “Part of them coming back the next year and the next year is giving them the feeling that they’re deeply appreciated members of the CSA. They have to learn a whole new way of meal planning, cooking, and eating, and you have to be their coach. You have to share your love for your produce and the farm with your customers. Part of what they’re buying when they join a CSA is you, your story and your passion for the food and the work.”
To this end, Fabian says it’s tempting to take on too many members at once, but this should be avoided. Doing well with a small batch and working out the kinks in production and distribution will establish the trust that will lead to more customers. “Build a loyal customer base and they will be your marketing; they will get their friends and neighbors on board.”
Having established trust also helps when crises like the COVID-19 pandemic arise. Showing customers online and in a newsletter the additional sanitation practices should be a reinforcement to the work that’s already been done all along in maintaining a good relationship between producer and consumer. Fortunately for Ten Mothers Farm, while farm sales outlets like restaurants and farmers’ markets are drying up, the boxed CSA model is already compliant with increased health restrictions.
Fabian says, “I’m very inspired to see how farmers around here are figuring out ways to cooperate more to sell their goods during these uncertain times.” In addition to their partnership with additional local farms to include a flower and grain share in their boxes, Ten Mothers Farm is working on adding meat and maybe eggs from other local sources, both to help their fellow farmers and to safely provide customers with more local food. Fabian and Jenkins are also working out ways to offer boxes to unemployed members for little to no cost. “Everything’s happening so fast, and we certainly haven’t figured this all out yet, but it’s clear that we’re all going to have to cooperate more and be more generous in the days ahead.”
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'Taste The Difference': Farm-to-Fork Movement Takes Off In Urban Flanders, Belgium
Flanders, famed for its medieval cities and most urban corners of Europe. Yet this densely populated area is seeing a mini-boom in a new type of agriculture where farmers sell direct to consumersmotorways that can be seen from space, is one of the
'Taste The Difference': Farm-to-Fork Movement Takes Off In Urban Flanders, Belgium
The densely populated area of Belgium is seeing a mini-boom in model of farming where growers sell direct to consumers
Flanders is one of the most urban corners of Europe. Photograph: Arterra Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo
Jennifer Rankin Brussels
19 Apr 2018
Flanders, famed for its medieval cities and motorways that can be seen from space, is one of the most urban corners of Europe. Yet this densely populated area is seeing a mini-boom in a new type of agriculture where farmers sell direct to consumers.
The movement, known as community-supported agriculture, is the antithesis of the sprawling global distribution chains of modern industrial food production. CSA farming means no supermarkets, no fertilizers, and no monoculture.
Advocates say the most important feature is the direct link to consumers, who pay upfront and often pick the produce from the fields.
This model of farming – sometimes referred to as farm-to-fork – originated in the United States and the Netherlands, but has quickly taken off in the Belgian region of Flanders. More people are eating CSA-grown food in Belgium than in the more populous UK, according to a 2016 report by Urgenci, the international CSA network.
Since the first Flemish CSA farmer struck his spade into the soil in 2007, at least 45 similar businesses have sprung up in the region.
Koen Tierens, a plant biologist, is one of the newest on the scene. Tierens swapped his desk job as an agrarian expert for the 5.30am harvests that come with running his own vegetable farm. He has a 1.2-hectare (2.96-acre) plot in the village of Kampenhout just outside Brussels, where the rich, loamy soil is ideal for growing.
Koen Tierens on his farm in Kampenhout, Flanders. Photograph: Jennifer Rankin for the Guardian
Tierens’ father, a retired farmer, was sceptical when he outlined his plans; a small holding, no fertilisers and a few old-fashioned, second-hand tools: “My father told me, ‘Koen what are you doing? You studied at university, you have a PhD! Are you going to be an ancient Belgian farmer doing how they did it in the middle ages?’”
Tierens says there is nothing primitive about his business, and stresses he is not against conventional farming or fertilisers. “The market is evolving in this [CSA] way,” he says, describing the combination of care for the environment and close connection to the customer, allied to marketing and a website that allows consumers to choose their vegetable boxes. Now in his second growing season, Tierens has 72 households paying him to grow their vegetables and hopes to increase this to 90. His father is now convinced, he says.
He grows 200 varieties of vegetable in a year – a much wider range than typical farmers. As well as the more common peas, carrots and potatoes, he grows less familiar varieties – purple cauliflowers, green zebra tomatoes, black radish, salsify and cardoon.
But Tierens does not grow Belgian endive, the most emblematic vegetable in the national cuisine. Although he farms in a region that is famed for the bitter white lettuce, he decided it would be arrogant to grow his fellow farmers’ best-known crop.
Another big difference with conventional farming is the limited use of subsidies, although he received EU funds to start his business and cover the costs of gaining organic certification.
Koen Tierens at a brewery in Kampenhout, the collection point for his vegetables. Photograph: Jennifer Rankin for the Guardian
Other things are constant – the unpredictability of the weather and early starts. Tierens works in his field every day, wearing a head torch on dark winter mornings. During the peak growing season from May to October, he works 12 to 13 hours a day, seven days a week. His customers share the risk of a storm or a bad harvest. “It would be a disaster for them as well, but the chance of that happening is not that big because I grow 200 types of vegetables,” he says.
Unlike most CSA farms in Flanders, Tierens’ customers do not pick their own vegetables. In the UK, a quarter of such farms are pick-your-own, but in Flanders, 85% fall into this category.
Belgium is an enthusiastic latecomer to CSA farming, which traces its roots to the biodynamic movement launched in the US in the 1980s. But there were other inspirations. The first known CSA farm in Europe was Les Jardins de Cocagne, an organic vegetable cooperative near Geneva founded in 1978. Japanese farmers were experimenting with similar models at around the same time.
“It is not only about the food, it is also about the community and being outside,” says Nele Lauwers, a policy adviser at the Flemish farming union Boerenbond. She belongs to a CSA cooperative near Ghent and describes harvesting days as “a weekly outdoor trip” for her children.
Demand for pick-your-own vegetables is growing among medium to high earners, she says. But price may limit its appeal. “It’s quite a different market. You have to pay in advance and it is not possible for everybody, although some CSA groups may offer social prices.”
CSA farming is therefore likely to remain marginal to food production – 0.1% of the population of Flanders are paying customers.
Land is also limited. Pepijn de Snijder, an independent expert, says would-be CSA farmers face competition from nature reserves, traditional farming, horse paddocks or city sprawl. “If we don’t change anything by 2050, 50% of the area of Flanders would be paved concrete,” he says.
The Flemish government has agreed a ban on new urban development from 2040 unless an equivalent area of land is returned to nature.
Another feature of CSA produce is that it takes longer to prepare. Vegetables arrive in customers’ kitchens with earth clinging to roots and leaves, rather than shiny and neat in plastic packaging. “Not everyone likes to bring soil into their kitchen,” says Tierens. “With me you need to invest a little bit more time, but you can taste the difference.”
This article is part of a series on possible solutions to some of the world’s most stubborn problems. What else should we cover? Email us at theupside@theguardian.com
We Are Building A Farm Out of Shipping Containers in Downtown Mobile
We Are Building A Farm Out of Shipping Containers in Downtown Mobile
JULY 2, 2017
“We are building Shipshape Urban Farms, eight hydroponic farms, on St. Michael Street in downtown Mobile. The whole space is the equivalent of a 20-acre farm on less than 1/4 of an acre and over 56,000 plants can grow at once. We will harvest nearly 9,000 heads of lettuces, herbs, leafy greens, and small vegetables a week and the growing season is 365 days a year. The farm is built from repurposed shipping containers because shipping containers were developed in Mobile in the 1950’s. The first harvest will be the end of November or the first of December. We can also host garden parties and events there.
Baldwin County was all farmland when I was a kid and now it is track houses. We are creating a way to take farmland back in a very small space by growing vertically instead of horizontal and using three-dimensional space. We have also taken out environmental pressures by using LED lighting and drip irrigation systems so plants don’t have to grow in soil. Everything is dense and the root structure sits in a permeable mesh. The water recycles through, it gets to the bottom and goes back up again, so we use the equivalent of 10 gallons of water a day. That is 90 percent less water than a traditional farm. We will be non-GMO and won’t use any pesticides
We will also grow herbs on a vertical wall that is about 700 square feet. We are doing an annual CSA, which is Community Supported Agriculture, and people can buy a share of a crop. It is a way to keep food local and support farmers.
Angela and I have been working on this for nearly two years. I have a background in landscape architecture and urban planning and she has a background in horticulture and she researched hydroponics. I worked for the Bloomberg team and went to work for Auburn as an adjunct professor then we started Shipshape. I am an Iraq war vet and this will have a certification for Homegrown Heroes, certifying this farm is produced by a veteran family. Starting a business is stressful and financing is challenging. It took a while to get our first dollar and show the banks that Mobile wants this. People can support it now by signing up for the CSA.
“This farm has been the focal point of all of our conversations the last two years. We had to figure out how to do bring this to Mobile. We are lucky that our backgrounds compliment each other.”
“We plan to sell to restaurants downtown, farmers markets, and directly to the consumer through CSAs. A lot of the local restaurant owners are interested. Nothing that is worth doing comes easy. Several years ago, people thought we were crazy to live downtown, now everyone thinks it is amazing and asks how they can get an apartment. It is cool to be in Mobile at this time. We are 20 years too late to hit the big cities like Seattle and Austin but you can make a” big difference here. Downtown Mobile two years from now is going to be a very different place from where it is today. It is totally different than it was two years ago.”
“We talked about going to a big city where it would be easy to start this farm, but we wanted to stay here and bring it home. We would like to expand it to other areas on the Gulf Coast.I look forward to seeing our name on a chalkboard outside of a restaurant. It gives me chills thinking about it.”
“Science brought us together. We met in a Biology lab at Faulkner. I walked into class late and she was sitting in the front row. I sat next to her because I thought she was cute.”
“We started as study buddies. I am sure we made the people behind us want to throw up. We were taking night classes and the labs were long. We had the highest grades in the class because studying was an excuse to be together. I guess it worked.”
(You can support Shipshape Urban Farms by joining their CSA)
