From Gene Logsdon
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

It was the first day of March, the first day the sun had shone warmly this year here in northern Ohio. The temperature was inching up to 40 degrees F. and it almost seemed summery. I wasn’t the only creature that thought so either. To my amusement, a slate colored junco hopped into a little pool of snow melt and splashed and fluttered around joyously. Looked like joy anyway. I had to laugh right out loud. It was hardly warm enough to go out without a coat on, yet here was this tiny bird obviously enjoying an outdoor bath. Why couldn’t I go for a dip too? Life just ain’t fair.

I decided to go for a walk to see if there were other signs promising an end to the cold. The first thing I noticed was that where my feet sank into the four inches of snow cover, the print of my boot filled with water. The snow was melting and the moisture was sinking to the ground, which was no longer frozen. I wasn’t too surprised at that. Every year about this time I see this happen. The constant soil temperature down about a foot or two is about 55 degree F. When the soil surface is insulated from cold air by snow that is about 32 degrees, it is not usual for the lower warmth of the soil to drive the frost up out of the ground, especially when the covering snow is melting in the sun. That’s why in snowy winters, the soil often thaws sooner in spring than in cold, bare-ground winters. Okay. We all know that. Hold that thought.

What I discovered next I could not believe. On the south side of the house where the snow was melting fastest, the winter aconites and the snowdrops were blooming wherever the snow was gone. Impossible, I thought. I had just checked the day before and there was nothing there except snow and my cold feet. Those flowers just could not jump up and bloom that quickly.

I tried not to get too excited. I needed to be the cold, logical scientist. Flowers just can’t spring out of the ground and bloom an hour or so after the snow melts. Just doesn’t work that way. I needed to hone my powers of observation on the situation more intensely— something I am not very good at doing. As I honed in on the edge of the retreating snow, I saw more snowdrops emerging into view. They had come up and begun to blossom UNDER THE SNOW.

Maybe this is just ho-hum for botanists who know how cold hardy snowdrops and winter aconites are, but I have never read any reference to it “in the literature.” It led me into totally wild notions. We’ve got all these monsantaclauses boasting about how they can save the world by genetically engineering fast-growing corn to produce fast-fattening food. Why don’t they put their minds to a really worthwhile goal. How about developing corn that will come up under the snow?

I can think of something even better than that. Why not genetically engineer a new biological thermostat for humans? If juncos can bathe in snow melt, why shouldn’t all of us be so blessed? Think how awesome it would be if science could jigger a gene or two that would allow us to enjoy winter without artificial heat. We are burning up our planet because we insist on living in climates that we aren’t supposed to be living in. We are tropical animals. If we were serious about saving the earth, we would have to admit that we haven’t evolved to live this far north. What if by some teensy weensy little genetic manipulation, we could endure the cold like polar bears do. I’m ready.
~
Image: Dark-Eyed Junco on Wikipedia
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From Jesse Cool

This simple recipe works with both wild mushrooms and domestic buttons. At my restaurants we are lucky enough to know a few local mushroom foragers who bring us treasures through the back door of our kitchens. It may seem wasteful to use expensive mushrooms in soup, but it’s a great way of stretching the expense while still maintaining deep, enticing flavors.

3 tablespoons organic butter
1 organic onion, finely chopped
24 ounces mushrooms (such as button, shiitake, cremini, and porcini), coarsley chopped
1/3 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
3 cups organic vegetable or chicken broth
2 cups organic milk
1/2 cup organic sour cream
2-3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 teaspoon paprika
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and mushrooms and cook, stirring occasionally, for 7 minutes, or until very soft.

Sprinkle with the flour. Cook, stirring frequently, for 3 minutes. Gradually add the broth and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes, or until the soup thickens.

Add the milk, sour cream, parsley, and paprika. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 3 minutes, or until heated through. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Makes 6 servings

Kitchen Tip: A combination of mushrooms works well. I like shiitakes mixed with regular button mushrooms. Or, when wild mushrooms are available, consider a combination of the somewhat mild chanterelles with a porcini or other full-flavored mushroom.
~
Image Credit: Shiitake © Ron Chapple Studios | Dreamstime.com
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From Jeff Cox
Repost

You hear a lot about eating locally these days. It’s one of the three pillars of eating correctly: 1) eat organic; 2) eat local; 3) eat in season. And all three pillars are important. But let’s take a closer look at “eat locally.” Let’s see what that really means, and why that’s such a good idea. And why, in the final analysis, it may be the most important pillar of them all.

Some aspects are obvious. When we eat locally produced food—grown within our local “foodshed,” as the current argot has it—we shorten the supply line from farm to table. Less gasoline or diesel fuel is used to transport the food from where it’s grown to where it’s bought and consumed. That means less air pollutants from fossil fuels and less carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere on behalf of moving the food to market. So, eating locally produced organic food lessens the amount of greenhouse gases used to produce and transport that food.

Eating locally means supporting local farmers. This means keeping local family farmers on their land. Wendell Berry has written eloquently about the social benefits of strong, local farm economies. They translate into strong local communities. And they are the soil from which real democracy grows. Instead of being cogs in a massive production machine, family farmers are their own bosses. They are people who can voice their honest opinions without fear of losing their jobs. They can tell the truth, and the truth is contagious. It also sets us free.

Family farmers are also locally-focused, practical ecologists and environmentalists. Their environmentalism is not based on ideology, but on an intimate knowledge of the land under their care. They know where the pheasants and the quail lay their eggs, and can protect those spots. They can see climate change right in front of their eyes, as birds return earlier in spring, or plants emerge earlier or later. Instead of bulldozing their hedge rows, which are repositories of many of the elements of the local ecology, they understand the need to protect the hedge rows. That’s where the wild fruit grows, and where small, wild mammals make their homes. The family farmers live and work on their acres—they have every reason to farm organically, from the premium payments their food will bring, to the safety of family member, who will not be exposed to toxic agrichemicals. Family farmers are invested in the health of their land; they are the caretakers who keep the web of life under their protection strong and healthy.

When the person who grows your food is your neighbor, you interact with him or her. Your kids go to school with their kids. You may sit on a county commission or school board together. It is not in a local farmer’s interest to pollute the air, water supply, streams, or land he shares with his neighbors. It is not in his interest to farm in a way that erodes the soil. It is in his interest to be a good neighbor and fellow citizen.

From the consumers’ point of view, locally-grown food is fresher and may be of better quality than food brought in from far away. Because it doesn’t have to withstand the rigors of shipping, it can be one of the more tender and tasty varieties of the fruit or vegetable. It can be a variety developed locally as an heirloom—one perfectly suited to the local climate and soil. Here in Sonoma County, we have Crane melons. These extra sweet melons are an heirloom of the Crane family, grown along Crane Canyon Road. The roots of this fruit go deep in the local soil.

Locally-grown food is by definition available in season. When any fruit or vegetable is at the height of its season, it is most abundant, highest in quality, and lowest in price. Want to cut food costs to the bone? Eat fresh in season and can or freeze enough to last through the months when the food is out of season. In January, tree-ripened peaches from the local organic orchard frozen in a syrup of honey, lemon juice, and water are infinitely preferable to peaches from Chile, and for so many reasons.

Eating locally also keeps the money you spend on food within the community. More goes to the farmers. The farmers spend it at the local stores—it’s hoped. Keeping food dollars in the community is one big goal of the Eat Local movement.

There’s one other very good reason to eat locally-produced food, and that is the development of flavor diversity in foodstuffs. Preserving such diversity is what the Slow Food movement is all about. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the famous sourdough bread is made courtesy of some indigenous yeasts and bacilli that occur nowhere else. Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis naturally colonizes a bowl of flour and water here. The bacilli give San Francisco sourdough a flavor all its own. While San Francisco sourdough in unique to the area, every place in America has the potential to produce unique foods—and most did until the advent of national food corporations toward the end of the 19th Century. A case in point: About 90 years ago, Otto Mossholder, who had a background in cheesemaking, moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, and set about making some cheese on the kitchen stove and ripening it in the basement. Until a few years ago, his grandson Larry and Larry’s wife Lois still made small batches of cheese from their 40 Holstein cows, and still ripened it in the same cellar Otto used. I asked Lois what bacterial culture she uses. “None,” she said. “The mold that affects the flavor of the cheese just developed here—in the basement. Somebody told us that if we moved the business up out of the basement, we would make a different cheese.”

And so a system of farmers returning crop wastes to the land through composting, as organic farmers do, makes a closed loop that can lead to interesting variations in the flavors and kinds of food from place to place across the continent.

The bottom line: to eat well, eat local.
~
Photos by Dave Smith, taken at Full Circle Farm
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From GENE LOGSDON
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

I define “new agrarian age” as a society in which rural and urban lifestyles become indistinguishable. Roof top vegetable gardens in downtown Manhattan for instance. A more typical example is a landscape where urban agriculture and rural manufacturing exist side by side in harmony.  I saw a photo recently of horses plowing a large garden plot with the Cleveland, Ohio, city skyline in the background. Some years ago I visited Paws Inc., where Jim Davis, the creator of the comic strip “Garfield” has his business headquartered. The location in rural Indiana (where Davis grew up), is so far out in the country that there was no suitable sewage system to handle the waste from his three big office buildings and fairly large number of workers. He had engineers design and build a greenhouse where plants, fish, and other aquatic animals flourished by feeding on the nutrients in the wastewater while purifying it before its return to natural waterways. Aquaculture and urban culture surely joined hands in that greenhouse. Silviculture too because Davis was also raising tree seedlings in the greenhouse to reforest wornout farm land in the area.

Last week I attended the annual conference of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA), spending the day signing and selling books and gabbing with people. Those of us who remember the early days of OEFFA were stunned and jubilant at the overflow crowd. So many people wanted to come to the conference in fact, that about 200 had to be turned away because of space limitations, Carol Goland, OEFFA’s executive director told me regretfully.  I looked around the main exhibit hall (a highschool gymnasium) crammed with booths where all sorts of organic and natural farm supplies were being sold. I was remembering the early days, when, said Mike McLaughlin, a farmer and OEFFA official since the early days, “we thought that four exhibitors was a major achievement.”

It is difficult to make generalities about any group of humans, but I’d say that today’s OEFFA member is more sophisticated about the possibilities of the new ecological trends in agriculture.  Back in the early days, I’d say that we were mostly angry and rebellious at being called radical just because we didn’t like what industrial agriculture was doing. Today’s OEFFA members are more assured about the way forward. They would rather figure than fight. If someone called them radical, they would merely be amused. They are convinced that the agribusiness methods of the past are so obviously unworkable that there is no need to fight anymore. Move on.

And they are moving on. There was something electric in the air. I could feel it. At meetings of industrial farmers these days, the talk is fairly bleak, but here, among new farmers and gardeners with a hundred new ways to produce food and sell it locally, the people just seemed to glow with optimism. I’ve been sitting at tables selling books it seems like forever. This time, buyers would approach me with victorious little smiles on their faces. Something about the way they would pick up a book and plop it down in front of me for signing while they got out their billfolds bespoke an exuberance that was full of quiet confidence. Sometimes a buyer would briskly pile three or four books up and say “How much?”  An author’s dream.   OEFFA itself had a long table of books for sale. I was told that on Saturday, the big day (I was there on Sunday), people stood three and four deep in front of that long table, buying books. A couple of attendees who stopped to buy a book from me were carrying— you’d never guess what. Brand new pitchforks they had also just purchased. When a farmer buys a new fork and a new book in the same breath, that’s new age agrarianism.

I could be wishful dreaming again. This could be just another spurt in the ancient back to the land idealism I’ve seen come and go twice in my lifetime. But maybe something more permanent is in the offing. Money farming is pricing itself out of the food market, and maybe government, which continues to prop up this kind of farming with artificial money, is being forced to realize that. As farmer and author Joel Salatin, the keynote speaker, symbolized to the world:  ecological and organic farmers are here to stay and they are ready to take the helm.
~~

From GENE LOGSDON
Garden Farm Skills

I am not a real farmer, my neighbors say, because I don’t do it for money. That’s almost funny because the economists are saying that nobody’s farming for money this year. Although the corn crop is good in most of the midwest, there’s not much profit in it. Some go as far as projecting that on average, corn farmers will lose $8 per acre over the whole midwest. If that is the case, I’m not a real farmer for sure because I figure on netting $550 an acre on my corn.

The price of corn as I write is $3.90 a bushel. Some farmers I talk to say they have to have $5.00 a bushel to break even this year because of the high cost of fertilizer, fuel, and weedkillers recently. Economists say the break-even price is closer to $4.00 a bushel. The price seems to be inching that way. Whoopee.

So how do I figure on netting $550 an acre from my corn? I grow only half an acre for one thing, but don’t laugh. My figures would hold fairly well up to thirty acres worth.  Comparisons can be odious especially when someone with a feeble little crop like mine seems to be disparaging the professional grower of a couple thousand acres.   Nevertheless, I am going to do some numbers  because commercial farmers really aren’t thinking very well at the moment and some of them admit it.

Those ears of corn in the photo are from my crop this year. They measure up to 14 inches long, as you can see by the foot long ruler beside them. The longest one has 20 rows of kernels. It will shrink a little as it dries, but as far as I can learn from researching,  this is as big as any ear of yellow dent corn has ever gotten and is almost twice the size of any of today’s hybrids. (There are strains of maize in Mexico that produce ears two feet long but are very skinny.) I’ve had in previous years one or two 16-inch ears but they were frowzy on the tips, with only 16 rows of kernels. The fatter, slightly shorter ears in the photo above contain 22 and 24 rows of kernels, and I know from experience that the kernels will weigh as much per cob as those from the 14-inch ears.  There will be about a pound of kernels on each of these ears. If I had an acre where all the stalks produced one such ear and I planted 18,000 stalks per acre, which is about right for open-pollinated corn, (hybrid growers are planting as many as 30,000 stalks per acre) the yield would be 300 bushels per acre, right up  there with the world records for corn. If I could live 200 years maybe I could produce a crop of all fourteen inchers.  After all it took the Mesoamerican Indians thousands of years to get ears of maize up to five inches long.

I hasten to say that most of the ears on my corn are not as big as those in the photo. Most are still bigger than hybrid ears, but some smaller and quite a few nubbins. I will get fifty bushels from my half acre or a hundred bushels per acre this year. Commercial corn growers are averaging 160 bushels per acre, so my corn is deemed to be poor by comparison, giant  ears or no giant ears. But let us look at the numbers. My fertilizer cost was zero. I rotate corn with three or four years of pastured clover so I don’t figure I need any more fertilizer. Surely it is significant when 14 inch ears of corn can be grown without any commercial fertilizer at all.  My herbicide cost is zero. I control weeds with a  hoe and  a rotary garden tiller. If I were growing a couple of acres of corn or more,  I would have to have a tractor or horse cultivator but that would add only a little to my costs.  I paid zero for my seed corn because I save my own.  Farmers are spending upwards of $300 now for a bushel of GMO hybrid corn seed, which is just ridiculous. I have no land rent cost because the land is my own.  Farmers renting land are paying upwards of $150 to $200 a acre for it or more this year, almost guaranteeing a loss at today’s market prices.  I count no labor cost because experimenting with my open-pollinated corn is my golf game and a whole lot cheaper than golf. I have no harvest cost other than husking the ears by hand and throwing them in the pickup. Farmers used to husk 20 acres or more  by hand but if you used an old cornpicker instead, the cost would be minimal on 20 or 30 acres except for fuel. My drying cost is zero; the corn dries naturally on the cob in a crib that is so old it has long ago paid for itself. That could be true for larger acreages. Commercial farmers some years (this year for sure) have a huge cost in natural gas to dry their shelled corn. My hauling cost amounts to driving my pickup 500 feet from field to crib. Commercial farmers are hauling their corn in semi trucks half way across the county, sometimes farther. I do have fuel and machinery cost for plowing and fitting the land which I estimate at about $30 per acre. I put my total cost per acre at $50 to be sure to cover everything.

Growers of open-pollinated corn tell me, as I have also experienced, that livestock eat it more eagerly than today’s hybrids. And why not. Hybrid corn is bred today to resist injury from  machinery, weeds, bugs, and adverse weather. Why wouldn’t it resist animals and humans trying to eat it?  Commercial corn is dried by heating, sometimes overheating, with natural gas, which can reduce nutritional value. I don’t know how to put a dollar number on  that kind of profit.

If my 50 bushels are priced at $4.00 a bushel, that’s $200 worth of corn or $400 an acre. With a cost of only $50 on a per-acre basis, my net profit per acre is $350. If I had to buy those fifty bushels from the elevator, the cost would be around $6.00 a bushel (the elevators charge for handling, especially for handling and bagging small amounts), so I can say that my puny crop has a net return of $550 per acre. Compare that with losing $8 an acre on 2000 acres.

Whose the real farmer? One I know well farms 200 acres. He has most of his acres in rotated pasture and maybe 30 acres of corn— a commercial model of what I do. He will have more machinery and fuel costs per acre than I do,  but he will have no fertilizer, chemical spray, drying, or transportation cost to the elevator. He does not use high-priced GMO seed corn.  His machinery cost are much less than that of typical grain farmers because he is using older, smaller tractor equipment. His total costs will be only a fraction per acre of the large commercial grain farmer’s costs. Then he feeds his corn to his cows to make organic milk and sells it at a premium price.

So I ask again: who’s the real farmer?
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From GENE LOGSDON
Garden Farm Skills

The sentence nearly leaped off the page and knocked me down: “No one with land should be without a job.” Jennifer McMullen, writing in Farming magazine in the current Fall, 2009 issue (“Good Food Depends On Local Roots”) was quoting Jessica Barkheimer, who, like Jennifer, is deeply involved in developing farmer’s markets in Ohio. I was at the time wrestling with a closely related concept but had not thought to put it in those words. I might have said it a bit differently— “no one with land is without a job” but the meaning would be the same. If you have some land, even an acre, you have the means for making at least part of your income and in the process gain a more secure life. Surely that is what it means to “have a job.” Our society hasn’t endorsed that notion yet, but I think that we are evolving toward that kind of economy.

We are only beginning to recognize how many income possibilities that a little piece of land can provide. We know about market gardening but most of us do not yet appreciate its reach. It’s not just sweet corn and tomatoes. It’s about all the fruits and vegetables on earth. Tasted any pancakes made with cattail pollen lately? Neither have I but it is treasured in some gourmet circles, I understand.

Market gardening goes beyond the plants themselves. A whole new world of marketing can open up from inspired ways to package the products. At a market in Bellefontaine, Ohio, a couple of weeks ago, shelled lima beans were going fast at five bucks for a half pint!

There are far more products you can grow than just fruit and vegetables. Meat is beginning to show up at farmers’ markets, as well as dairy products and grains. Flowers, fresh and dried, too. Uncommon seeds are a possibility, especially of heirloom varieties or uncommon wildflowers and trees. Medicinal herbs. Mushrooms. Nuts. Baked goods. Plants for holiday decorations. We are all familiar with the success of pumpkins, but have you ever seen corn husks that in the autumn develop streaks of red and green and purple in them, fashioned into wreathes and bouquets? Magnificent. If you get into cattail pollen pancakes, you can use the dried cattail leaves to weave handsome, durable baskets. There’s a market for uncommon native tree species coveted by people who want to use only native plants in their ornamental landscapes. Local nurseries sometimes sell wahoo trees with their bright reddish pink berries. This small tree grows wild all over the eastern U.S.

Forest products are not just the purview of the commercial timber industry. Some small woodlot owners saw out blanks and boards from logs not profitable for the larger timber market. They sell the wood to woodworkers or turn it into products they sell themselves. Have you ever seen a bowl fashioned from a blank of boxelder which has the highly-desirable reddish grain in the heartwood? Awesome. Some farmers make good sideline money selling cedar, black locust, and other long-lasting woods for fence posts. There’s always a market for firewood and as energy prices soar, its value will continue to increase.

Think also of insect and animal products that the small acreage homeowner might explore for sideline cash. Think out of the box. Earthworms. Honey bees. Pigeons for squab. Aquaculture products in ponds or backyard tanks.

In more traditional livestock ventures, the Nigerian Dwarf goat is being touted as the best dairy animal for small acreages. (There’s an article on these goats in the same issue of Farming as the article cited above.) A mother Nigerian weighs only about 50 lbs. but can supply enough milk for a family at least part of the year. The cream, like that of cows, makes great ice cream. Ice cream always sells.

I could go on for pages, but you get the picture. We all accept the fact that most of us must invest in a car to keep our jobs. I think the day will come when most of us will also invest in a few acres of land to keep our jobs.
~~

From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

My wife, Carol, doesn’t normally call herself an artist, but the images accompanying this post could be called some kind of still life art, even though rendered with her own hands using real objects, not with brush and paint. The multicolored shapes in the basket are an assortment of peppers she just harvested before the first frost, and the red shapes on white background are tomato slices in the electric drier. Our son-in-law loves peppers, the hotter the better, and so he and our daughter have supplied us with pepper plants of varieties I never knew existed and most of which I can’t eat. But who would want to eat such a beautiful table decoration anyway?

It is no surprise that gardening and farming inspire art. The partnership between nature and humans in the act of producing food can’t help but produce beauty too. A shelf full of home-canned vegetables means food security, but the real reason we delight in them is that the food just looks so pretty sitting there in rows in the cellar. The act of laying by food is its own reward even before we eat the stuff.

I made a shock out of the spent sweetcorn stalks in the garden last week and put a few pumpkins around it. Visitors ask me why I went to the trouble. I had to shrug. Not sure. Just think it looks pretty. Reminds me of whole fields of shocked corn, the subject of who knows how many paintings and photographs from the past. Many Amish farmers now have hitch carts which they are allowed to use to pull corn pickers and grain harvesters with their horses. So they don’t really have to shock all their corn and oats anymore. But many of them go on doing so anyway. If you ask them why, they will say that the straw they thereby harvest as a sort of byproduct of threshing is worth as much as the grain. But down in the deeper recesses of their souls I will bet anything, they do it because fields of corn and oat shocks look pretty.

Pumpkins make another good example. We grow pumpkins, even weird kinds like Cinderella which we don’t even eat. We grow the Cheese pumpkins for that. One of our Cinderellas this year was so heavy we had to get our muscle-bound grandson to carry it out of the garden. So why do we grow the big, stupid things? Because, well, they’re pretty.

In fact, the market for pumpkins is soaring, even in these recessionary times. Why? Pumpkins make nice homey decorations. The same with gourds. The same with bittersweet, a bouquet of which adorns our entrance way at this very moment. There is so much artificial and plastic crap around, the human spirit yearns for the homespun and the real.

One tends to grow philosophical about it, even, heaven forbid, metaphysical. Last night, here at the beginning of October, I was still able to pick a pint of luscious yellow raspberries that we grow, courtesy of another person’s kindness. They just look so beautiful in the basket. Years ago, I wrote that yellow raspberries are hardly worth the work because they are too susceptible to diseases. A man in Minnesota, whom I do not know to this day, sent some plants with a note: “Try these and change your mind.” I don’t know the variety, but he was right. The philosophical question is: Do they look beautiful to me because I love their taste? Maybe they look beautiful because they remind me of the beautiful person who sent them to me.

The notion that good taste might come before beauty doesn’t hold true, actually. To me, an eggplant is profoundly beautiful. That deep purple color is just so stunning. But I don’t much like the taste. I just like to look at them.

Perhaps I should view this question psychologically rather than philosophically. Maybe the colors of the harvest glowing in the slanting harvest time sun quickens the human spirit in a very special way, as Monet would say. A psychology book I once read claimed that purple was the favorite color of geniuses. I don’t know how anyone could arrived at such a non-sequitur but hey, sounds good to me.
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