Stick and Stone Farm & the Full Plate Collective

I was able to visit Stick and Stone Farm which is about 10 minutes drive from Sweet Land, just outside of Ithaca, NY. SSF is part of a collective of farms called the Full Plate Collective. This is a really interesting approach to CSA and combines the produce from multiple producers in the shares offered to members. This approach supports smaller growers by giving them an access to resources and a guaranteed market as well as allowing growers to specialise in a particular crop (e.g. peppers) rather than having to generalise.. 

Being able to start at a smaller scale also can help provide a stepping stone for an apprentice farmer who wants to farm for themselves. This is exactly what Mahra is able to do – she is growing a variety of sweet peppers for the collective this season on Remembrance Farm. This setup means Mahra can access land, resources and advice and in exchange for the labour she provides for this crop she will get a share of the income received from the distribution of these peppers.

FPC offers summer shares and winter shares.The produce is distributed through pick-up days, where the members come to the farm to collect. These days are structured in a similar way to Sweet Land Farm – one bag of whatever you choose from selected crops, plus a selection of unlimited extras, as well as rotating u-pick crops. As well as the direct pick-up, members can have their share delivered (they don't get to choose the make-up of their share in this instance), either to their home or to a group pick up point. The delivery logistics are handled by Garden Gate and the price of this delivery varies (there is financial incentive to have your share part of a single group delivery, for example).

There are three main farms involved in the collective - - as well as smaller producers who offer bread shares (Wide Awake Bakery), prepared food shares (Naked Carrot CSK), mushroom shares () and more. Sara, who helps coordinate the collective also offers 'side-dishes' – e.g. a dairy share which allows her to carefully curate a selection of milk, yoghurt, butter etc. from local producers. I love this 'curation' approach to food. It certainly flies in the face of a supermarket which offers 50 brands of everything or jumbled together without any critique or coherance. And, like getting a recommended reading or listening list from a friend, it's an entrée into another person's tastes, values and experience.

We were only at the farm for a couple of hours but we were lucky enough to accompany Andrew on his chicken-run (members can also sign up for an egg share).  We started out by throwing out a tub of fresh greens ('seconds' from the CSA distribution) to placate/distract the ladies while we privateered their eggs. Andrew was clearly passionate about the flock and knew what every chicken-custodian should – who's ok and who you should just leave on the nest. Apparently the hens were getting a little on the broody side and were becoming more pecky during the harvest. This was the first time I have helped collect more than a hundred eggs at a time and the scale was satisfying.

The hen setup seemed really good. There are three movable chook-mobiles (my dumb phrase, not theirs). Two are nesting/roosting places and one is an area where the hens can scratch and forage. This has a pretty deep litter floor and various forage materials are scattered in there to supplement the diet and to accommodate what chickens do best – scratch! Next to the area where the houses, feeders and waterers are is a sizeable row of triticale– a hybrid of rye wheat. The chickens can graze on this crop to supplement the mixed, ground feed provided. Hmm...I'm running out of computer patience, so for now, here is a montage of the chicken 'shanty town'.

Good Life Farm

Ithaca is a really great (small) town. While having a coffee at The Shop we picked up a flyer for the 'Ithaca Free Skool” which listed all kinds of creative and mind-expanding activities delivered for free by community members. To cut a long story short we went along to the “Affordable Housing Forum” (in a park) which turned out to be convened by Matt Gordon – one of only about 5 people I actually have met in the area, who I actually played a couple of shows with last time I was in the area. Nuts. 
During a good discussion on the assigned topic Matt mentioned that he is taking a course on Sustainable Agriculture offered through the Groundswell Centre for Local Food and Farming (by the way, through a work exchange Matt is studying this without any hard currency transaction – awesome). This course, in Matt's impression, was like the perfect theory course to supplement a farm intern or apprentice's training. While you learn a ridiculous amount by just working on a farm you often miss out on important details or broader context and planning theory just because, well, you need to get those beets out of the ground now! So the small cohort that Matt is studying with gets to visit different farms around the area as well as listen to lectures and, presumably workshop ideas.

It was like every half hour or so Ithaca was just showing off how cool it was – upping the ante every time. I was pretty sure I wanted to live there after an hour so and was like “take it easy town, you had me at hello”.

Anyway, I digress. That night we went to a pub in Trumansberg and the only other people there happened to be the course coordinator of said farming course as well as the owners and farmers of the Good Life Farm, Melissa and Garrett. In the end we were invited to tag along with a Groundswell class who were visiting Good Life farm (Interlaken, NY) the next day. Like I said, we had been in the area about 2 days and this is the greatness that was transpiring.

While looking over the pages of frantically scribbled notes I took while at the farm I realise I am sort of holding my breath (breathe in) - I just don't know how to sum up this place in a blog entry. So I'll just add a little disclaimer here that the vision is massive, the processes complex and the ideas often beyond my tiny brain.

“they are like super heroes”

(Mahra describing Melissa and Garrett)

Melissa and part of their asparagus crop

The Good Life farm plan, in their words, "pairs perennial vegetable production with organic orchard management, high quality forage for poultry and horses, season extension and reduced fossil-energy systems. As we grow, our farm becomes more self-reliant and robust". What we got to see, on the tour, is just the tip of the iceberg. These guys are planning decades ahead and have three overarching goals that guide this planning;

1. Prepare for climate change - cultivate plants and animals that can cope with the only certain consequence of climate change -  unpredictable weather.


2. Energy descent - use fewer fossil fuels each year to farm. Initially on the farm there was huge capital investment - which equated to huge energy investment - but these investments were made with careful thought and will allow the rate of fossil fuel energy to steadily decline rather than stagnate or increase each year. A central aspect of GLF is they use horses to farm and produce all of the food for the horses on the farm.


3. Care for community - one way that this is manifested is through sharing resources (both material and immaterial) and in particular, the 'incubation' of another new farmer, who, currently, is Liz. Sharing also means having multiple generations of the farmers' families living on the land as well as knowing, in the first instance, what is being done and grown in the area and meeting what is needed (filling some of those niches - for example, a Spring CSA share).

"Our area has an abundance of good food during the other three seasons of the year, but we’ve noticed that Spring can be a lean time for local food availability.  Spring is a chancy time to predict growth and yield, and guaranteeing a harvest requires a certain amount of additional infrastructure.  While there are still many unknowns involved in growing primarily fresh vegetables for these lean months, we are ready to go for it! 

Our farm site near Cayuga Lake allows us to harvest earlier than many other regional producers.  Thanks to our early-producing site, our greenhouses, perennial crops, and our relationships with other producers, this Spring CSA offers diverse and nutritious food!"  
- from the GLF website

 During the farm tour Melissa shifted seamlessly between scales of consideration. In describing the turkey-forage system in the asparagus bed she touched on general principles of polyculture, ethics of farming with said turkey breed (and related tension and balance between experimentation and output), contrasting forage behaviour of turkeys and chickens and everything in between. This ability to hold multiple scales, theories and experiences in one brain is impressive and a little intimidating. It was a 95 degree day but I don't think that's the only reason my brain felt a little too hot. This is complex stuff and what Melissa and Garret are doing is simultaneously traditional and absolutely cutting edge.

For example...


We were lucky to get a tour of the "ice house" - GLF's approach to preserving fresh food without relying on non-renewable energy. It's a work in progress and it's very exciting. Ice houses, historically, have been a way to store ice and perishable foods over winter and summer months and work on basic principles of airflow and insulation. I say 'basic' though there is a lot to making it work in practice. The ice house that GLF is building makes use of thousands of re-purposed 1.25l plastic soda bottles filled with water to provide the cool-mass in the purpose built basement of the barn. 

It's mad scientist stuff and I am in awe. 

During the whole tour, while listening to Melissa, it became clear that she was acutely aware (and transparent) about what she was proud of and what she wasn't in terms of her decisions on the farm. She also seemed clear about what she was and wasn't willing to concede to. This also reminded me of Evangeline and Paul's "morality list" - deciding what and what could not be compromised in running Sweet Land Farm.


As Melissa explains, conceptions of permaculture typically focus on production on a smaller scale (less than an acre) and often relate to more of a hobby sized garden, rather than a scale that encompasses both sustenance and livelihood (i.e. farm business). 


The scale they are working with means that design is necessarily long-term and will 'pay back' over many years (rather than just in the next season). I hope I can revisit Good Life farm in 10 years to see how their brave and value based planning is panning out. I expect I would see things that will take my breath away and probably make my brain hurt even more.  

Sweet Land Farm - Trumansberg NY

"Farmers need a place to farm and make a viable living. Farmland needs to be enriched and nurtured so that it can yield bountiful harvests year after year. Members need a dependable source of vibrant, richly grown food. All of these needs must be kept in balance. Sweet Land Farm is a CSA-only farm, so everything that we grow is for you, the shareholders. This makes the above-mentioned balance nicely transparent"

(- SLF member's handbook)

We were lucky enough to not only volunteer at Sweet Land Farm but also stay on the property with our friend, Mahra.

This farm covers 34 acres - a third of which is used for growing annual vegetables, about an acre for perennials and the rest under cover crops. Currently the farm offers 350 summer shares and 150 winter shares. That's a lot of food for a relatively young farm.

Evangeline and Paul use a combination of elements to get their produce to the people. First of all, the members come to the farm. They are supplied with a bag (which they must bring each time) with which they can fill with whatever they choose from selected crops. This means the members, if they choose, could take a whole bag of chard or potatoes etc. or they can choose to diversify. There was a great selection when we visited, considering how early it is in the season. As well as the one-bag selection, members are able to pick from an extras section which is unlimited, though there are particular guidelines around this section (e.g. you can take as much as you can eat, but not as much as you want to share with others or preserve). 

On top of this there is also a u-pick list each week. These are the crops that you can harvest yourself and contain both unlimited and limited items. The week that we visited the u-pick list included sugarsnap peas and strawberries as well as unlimited blue cornflowers. Pretty dreamy. The u-pick element is great for a number of reasons. It gets people out into the farm and literally in touch with their food and how it is grown. It's a productive education for adults and children alike. It also transfers responsibility from the farmers to the members in harvesting those relatively time consuming crops and I think, affords those harvests the adequate time for real pleasure – in the picking and the tasting. Have you ever smelled a field of ripe strawberries in the summertime? It is worthy of some meditation.

The quantity of each crop put out for distribution is recorded which allows the farmers to track demands and trends of what's proving popular or not, and informs their harvest for the next week and their planning for the future. They 'tally so the customer doesn't have to'.  


During distribution days SLF also hosts other CSA's including Wide Awake Bakery ('best bread ever' - Colin), Crooked Carrot Community Supported Kitchen ( 'best kohl rhabi pickle ever' - Bridget), The Piggery (we tried their pulled pork sandwich - yep, best ever) and more. Each of these deserve their own post, which I'll hopefully get to.  
There is also an egg share on offer which includes a dozen eggs per week (you can buy as many shares as you need). The flock is rotated over fresh pasture every week or two - read more about it here.

SLF also offers a winter CSA share (impressive, considering the climate) and allows them to offer a niche product to the community. They are able to provide a good range of crops throughout both seasons due to effective root storage and the use of passive solar tunnels to lengthen the season for greens.

This kind of smart system design is based on years of shared experience in farming and particularly in CSA schemes. Evangeline and Paul are incredibly experienced and this wisdom permeates design and process. From the few hours we spent volunteering we could see the farm just runs well. The equipment is appropriate, the relationships between elements are considered and accomodated, even the feng shui of the distribution shed is great. And, from all accounts, the workers are very happy. This, I'm sure, is in part due to the commitment to tea breaks which seem to always include freshly baked treats and percolated tea or coffee. It is the basic things that make all the difference.

Paul, Colin and Evangeline - tea break

We felt incredibly welcomed by all of the team at SLF and were especially grateful for the time that Evangeline and Paul took to answer our many questions and share their hard-earned wisdom. My head was buzzing and after the information over-stimulation wore off I was left with a resounding impression of optimism, hard-work and courage. These guys have really done it themselves, building not only a home and a business but a multifaceted community asset. I remember looking across the fields at kids picking peas, at new young farmers working together and at community members getting excited about the latest harvest of harukei turnip and thinking, this really is something. It's definitely set a bench mark for the way I imagine a CSA of this scale. Thanks, ya'll.

As an aside, couple of pieces of equipment really caught my eye at this farm , so here are two odes to technology...

Ode to the Cool Bot

The Cool Bot is one of the cheapest and efficient ways to (electrically) power your cool room. The Cool Bot is a $300 'brain' that allows you to use a typical air conditioner in a cool room – as opposed to a fan based system that will be simultaneously generating heat (by the spinning fans) whilst trying to cool the air.

Without the Cool Bot an air conditioning unit would eventually freeze if you try to get the temperature below 60 degrees (f). The CB contains a thermostat controlled element that keeps the unit from freezing. The Cool Bot also bypasses the switch that an air con unit has to stop it from trying to cool below 60.  Evangeline and Paul have had great success with this unit – they have used it for 5 years straight without a hitch. So cool. You can read more about it here.

The Beauteous Barrel Washer

Here is another great design (which we saw in other farms in the area). 'Tis the Barrel Washer.

Paul said he saw this type of machine being used in an Amish farm to great effect and knew it was a priority on the capital investment shopping list.

It's used to quickly wash quantities of all kinds of root crops while rolling them along to eventually fall into the packing tub. Here it is in action. It's a kind of big investment but, from all accounts, certainly pays off.

A couple of days at Gravity Hill

"Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how  the world is used"
- Barbara Kingsolver  from "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"
 (quoted on the G.H. website)

Garlic scapes

Garden beds, community building
and Jurassic Park tour vehicle

Lacinato kale

I just had the privilege of volunteering at Gravity Hill Farm, a certified organic market farm in Titusville, New Jersey. I tried to play it cool but yep, I was a little starstruck. Mainly because this is the first big-ish organic farm I have visited so just the quantities got me excited. When we went down to the bottom garden and started picking 70(!) bunches of rainbow chard I got a little emotional about the sea of greens. Three kinds of kale, the most abundant silverbeet I have ever laid eyes upon, florence fennel, chinese cabbage, kohl rhabi, collard greens...(breathe)... it was just  gorgeous.

And then there are the farmers. I was lucky to work beside three awesome women. Fern and Amy - kickass farm co-managers (who I now add to my list of role models) and Lauren who has grown up on farms and is now working part-time for Gravity Hill. Amy and Fern work so well together, have a lot of experience and knowledge and such good attitudes. One of my favourite moments was listening to the two sing the jurassic park theme while we drove around in the kawasaki, daydreaming about dressing up the alpacas in dinosaur costumes. And just generally getting a lot done on the farm and working as a team. There were definitely moments when the phrase "girl-power" ( a little embarrassingly) sprung to mind. 

Amongst other things, I was introduced to the transplanting implement (which enabled us to plant a heap of curcubits in a short amount of time), picked a bag of garlic scapes - really just a meditation on form - and helped to harvest beautiful purple and green kohl rhabi and corral an escaped bevy of animals. Best. Days. Ever.

Curcubit seedlings sprayed with kaolin clay
to deter hungry cucumber beetles

Transplanter implement

Oh, the greens!

Gravity Hill farm was established in 2005 by David Earling who was inspired to create a farm that was - like all farms 'back in the day' - organic and family run. You can read more about that on the website. The produce harvested from the farm is sold at four different markets - two days at the Stockton farmers market and two days at the farm itself. This, I love. Because it draws people out to see how their food is grown and it gets them together. 

A great component of the farm is the community building. It's where we ate lunch on stools around the expansive kitchen; it's where a big group of 'rug hookers' (their words, not mine) gathered to, well, hook and share food; it's where kids can learn about food and about animals. It is just a wonderful purpose built space for coming together to do cool things. 

Inside the community building

I hope to spend more time at Gravity Hill. The young energy of the place was invigorating, the people fantastic and the ethic of the place, at least to a newcomer, just, well, good. I am curious about the longer-term viability of the place (I'm sure it's not all sunshine and earthworms). But they do have some great things going on. Thanks for having me guys.

P.S. If you think Gravity Hill is a strange name then get educated - here

sandor and why making 'kraut is a political act

"...naked - standing here without a head of cabbage"

I heard about Sandor a couple of years ago when I learned about making sauerkraut. Some photocopied recipes were being passed around and many delicious and - admittedly – alien looking ferments were bubbling away in our sun room. Our share house at the time went through a real kraut craze around the same time one housemate, Alex, coined the phrase "fusion cuisine" to refer to what was really just combining everything we had left in the kitchen and calling it dinner. Since then though I haven't made or eaten much homemade fermented food - some beer here, pizza dough there but nothing regular. So I was ready to receive a pep talk from public educator and demystifier, 'fermentation revivalist', Sandor Katz.

And he delivered. This talk, as well as being an introduction to his new book "The Art of Fermentation" was also a Q and A sessions which ranged from "why is my yoghurt runny?" to "what's your opinion of mass-produced kombucha?". And this spectrum just about sums it up. As Sandor so eloquently put it - "we can't reclaim our food without also reclaiming fermentation”. The personal is political. That crockpot of vegetables in the kitchen matters not only because it delivers a whole bunch of beneficial bacteria to your gut but also because you made it. And you share it with your friends. And they swap their kefir, bread, whatever and so what is also being cultivated is community. 

Sandor described his first fermentation workshop and what really stood out for him was a persistent and generalised "fear of ageing food outside the refrigerator". His observation and concern about those fears led to Sandor becoming a public educator who seeks to demystify fermentation. This focus really comes through in his book (what little of it I have delved into - it's big!) with lots of encouraging words like "don't worry", "don't throw it out yet" etc. And, personally, I need the encouragement.

"Fermentation, like all food production, was taken out of households and instead happened in labs, controlled by 'experts' in the interest of 'safety' and 'hygiene.....but sauerkraut & yoghurt don't have clinical trials!" 

In his new book Sandor does not focus on exact recipes and directions but broad principles which can be used to confidently experiment with all kinds of ferments. 

- - -

"...fermentation is a way to make foods more stable and more valuable. Milk to cheese. Cabbage to sauerkraut. Grapes to wine...ferments are the classic value-added products... (and) fermentation is central to a lot of the food we put in our mouths" 

As Sandor was speaking I thought of all those times I had a huge harvest of something (usually broad beans) which I would need to preserve. Now you can bottle, dry or freeze beans but you can also ferment them - with perhaps more interesting (and surprising) results.

What really is clear is that these are vital skills (or perhaps a better word is "approaches") for growers, or those in the community of growers, who need to deal productively with a glut of food and carry over supplies into the leaner months.

I could write forever about this, and I'm sure I'll return to it as I seek out and sample ferments from this part of the world, but for now I'll leave you with this - it's Sandor describing some Indonesian tempeh and, perhaps, (I think) a kind of benchmark for a sustainable and ethical food system...

 "elaborate communities of organisms which self perpetuate very easily"

finding food in stockton with a forager who knows her stuff

 

After a sketchy first wild food foray Amy Manning kindly took us for a walk around her neighborhood and she really knows what to eat and what to avoid. We didn't go more than a couple of hundred metres from the house yet we found great varieties of edible plants. As well as showing us how to identify certain species (and how to beware of poisonous look-alikes) Amy gave us some simple ideas for uses - both culinary and medicinal . 

It was really inspiring to learn from someone who really does make everyday use of these abundant plants. 

My favourites on this walk were wild garlic, lambs quarters (or wild spinach) and mulberries. So delicious!

Thanks Amy.

 

Dan's deer huntin'

Another good news story in a sometimes depressing food universe. 

This is Dan. In the last year he hunted and dressed five deer and got a butcher to process them into many varieties of venison meat products - which have been feeding him, his parents and his friends for a while now.


Now not everyone has the resources to harvest a deer overpopulation in Pennsylvania, but Dan does and he did. He is getting closer to his meat than most of us will ever get and is learning a lot in the process.


Taking responsibility for his meat is not something Dan learned from generations of hunters in his family - rather he was inspired when a friend took him hunting on the West Coast. Awesome. Humans are incredibly adaptable creatures - we can learn new skills and ways of living if we have the will and the way.


There is a lot of wisdom out there and speaking with Dan just adds to my appreciation of and aspiration to become a generalist - to know something about a lot of things, especially those things that pertain to my sustenance and everyday existence.

In this vein check this out for a really excellent introduction on how to kill and prepare a whole pig.