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Photo By Geoff Raker
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Richard Cartwright and Mary Meyer transport their
Michaela Farm produce from Indiana to Findlay Market
each week.
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"The modern specialist and/or industrialist in his modern house can probably have no very clear sense of where he is. ... Geography is defined for him by his house, his office, his commuting route and the interiors of shopping centers, restaurants, and places of amusement -- which is to say that his geography is artificial; he could be anywhere, and he usually is. ... This generalized sense of worldly whereabouts is a reflection of another kind of bewilderment: This modern person does not know where he is morally either."
-- Writer, poet, teacher and farmer Wendell Berry
My weekly visits to Findlay Market date back to 1978. For years, most produce was sold by food handlers or brokers. Occasionally, "homegrown" local produce appeared.
One of the actual farmer families I knew well recently quit the business. Then came the Lunken Airport market, specializing in locally grown produce, grown by the vendor, leaving my shopping at Findlay largely for meat.
But in the last several years, at least from the perspective of a health-conscious physician/cook, something wonderful has happened in Cincinnati. Findlay Market has expanded with a new sidewalk dedicated to fresh, local and organic produce, not to mention one farmer who raises organic meat.
This isn't the poor-appearing organic produce we used to see in stores, shipped and dehydrated. I'm often buying vegetables picked the same day. I can talk with and get to know the farmers, mostly young to middle-aged, highly intelligent and knowledgeable.
They're also dedicated to sustaining not only our land but a virtuous way of life that's been threatened and all but lost.
Matt the Mushroom Man
I was originally attracted to Matt Madison's store because of shitake mushrooms.
Shitakes don't have the toxins that white button mushrooms do. Instead they have immune-enhancing effects and help provide vitamin D.
Madison's Ridgeview Farm Inc. in West Union, Ohio, has a totally organic mushroom operation, including shitake, morels, portabellas, oysters and others. Matt introduced me to truffles -- highly sought-after and expensive -- from Oregon, which allowed me to pretend to be a gourmet cook, making chicken and truffle rice.
Parents Bryan and Carolyn, brothers Mike and Mal, wives and children are all involved in the Madison operation. Shitakes are a large part of the company, involving the use of oak logs for growing, temperature control in the log building and so on.
"The mushroom part of the farm takes 40 hours of my time a week by itself," Matt says.
The Madisons have stands and a store at Findlay Market to sell also their squash and berries along with other produce. Their goal was to have a 100-percent organic farm, and the farm is certified through the Ohio Ecological Farm Association (OEFA). I was initially surprised to find out that Matt isn't seeking organic certification for the farm this year.
"For a while," he says, "organic certification could mean just about anything. Produce from California, for example, was certified organic based on promises by the grower. There's been a big need for a consistent set of standards for certification which are now being put in place by the National Organic Program out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)."
But these very standards, as needed as they are, have burdened small farmers already.
"Organic plants now have to be at least 100 feet from non-certified crops," Matt points out. "My farm isn't designed like that. For good squash production, I have to treat the soil once at the beginning of the season with herbicide. That disqualifies the squash and the organic crops growing in the next plot."
Plants have to be rotated to keep the soil fertile, which further complicates the situation. The Madisons have also decided to put effort into berries, which can't be called organic if the original rootstock isn't from organic sources. Developing his own rootstock would take three years.
"There is good research coming out of Ohio State University now that combines some technology with optimal growing practices," Matt says. "If I can get good at growing berries using the best of both worlds, I might make things pay. Unfortunately, to be totally organic requires a vertical integration that I can't afford to implement."
Matt Madison finds himself, while trying to participate in two worlds, in a sort of dilemma: By maintaining smallness and integrity, he can't really compete in the industrial farming markets. And neither is the customer demand for organic currently strong enough to justify the cost of maintaining a strict certification.
After a family meeting, the Madisons decided to forgo certification while still remaining true to freshness, quality and care of the land, Matt explains. They'll try to explain this to his customers.
"Organic standards have loopholes, and on-site inspections can't catch cheaters," he says. "Larger companies cutting corners can get away with it. To really be organic, things have to be done on a small scale based on quality and trust."
This week, Matt will be posting materials at his Findlay Market store explaining why the label of certified organic will be changing.
Lawyer, Teacher, Farmer
I knew Nancy Ogg of Shady Grove Farm in Corinth, Ky., in her other career as a hospital risk manager. Currently, she spends some time as a substitute schoolteacher and most of her time as an organic farmer.
The beauty and variety of her peppers is what I first noticed at her Findlay Market stand several years ago. She's also shown me how to use lambsquarters, sorrel and arugula -- all nutritious greens -- and has taught me a thing or two about herbs.
"Many have the mistaken notion that organic means it looks bad," Ogg says, "but that's incorrect."
She's chosen from the start not to seek organic certification, and she has quite a lot to say about her decision.
"The term most of us prefer to merely organic is 'sustainable,' " Ogg says. "The standards don't incorporate the concept of sustainability. They emphasize only a functional definition of organic."
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Photo By Geoff Raker
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Matt Madison tends to mushrooms at his farm in West
Union. His family’s Ridgeview Farm offers some of the
best-known organic products in the Tristate.
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Sustainability, or sustainable agriculture, means giving back to the land what is taken -- maintaining the nutrient content of soil, for example. It also means sustaining the family farm: The farm can grow food and, at the same time, have leftover seed to grow again as well as enough produce to sell for basic needs and a decent life.
Sustainability means having producers instead of just consumers, and that means maintaining a direct relationship from land to farmer to the rest of us. It also means that farm activities aren't depleting natural resources or creating greater costs to all, such as contributing to global warming.
"The standards address pesticides, some care of the soil and proper care of animals," says Sean McGovern, executive director of OEFA, "but they do not address issues of scale (tailoring requirements to the size of the farm) and region (tailoring requirements based on location)."
Ogg takes this explanation further: "If the public's main concern is price, a cheaper, mass-produced, allegedly organic product could quickly drive out the sustainably produced quality product. Regulations can act similarly to farm subsidies when it comes to big business. All farms will be regulated, but the negative impacts of regulations, such as costs, fall more on small business."
Factory model farming, or agribusiness, tends to operate on a model of "large debt, buy more land to make more profit, consolidate and monopolize, take on more debt and expand again." This drives prices so low that the government has to subsidize the price paid to large growers.
"Without such subsidies," says Gene Logsdon, author of Living at Natures Pace, Farming and the American Dream, "agribusiness, as it continues to ruin land and burn excessive fossil fuels, would be exposed for the economic and cultural failure that it is."
"Small farms take risks, innovate and change," Ogg says. "They set trends instead of jumping on them and wearing them out. I'm fond of reminding larger growers that, with all of their superior cash flow, there are two things I can afford better than they can: integrity and pride."
No pesticides, sustaining our resources, reducing global warming -- so why else should we pay more for organic products?
"Customers need to understand that you can pay $7 for a whole organic free-range chicken from the guy who raised it and the grain to feed it," Ogg says. "Or you can buy a ready-to-eat chicken from the supermarket for the same price, realizing that from factory farm to slaughterhouse to shipper to wholesaler to local distributor to supermarket, the farmer made about 57 cents on that chicken."
She then smiles and instructs me that habañero peppers aren't the hottest in the world as I claim -- just the hottest cultivated pepper. The bird pepper, or chiltepin, originally from the Amazon River area, is hotter.
The Man Who Stopped Me from Becoming a Vegetarian
There are logical and intuitive reasons to buy organic vegetables. With about 8 billion pounds of toxins dumped into U.S. land, air and water last year, pesticide-free produce makes me feel like I'm doing something for the environment and my body. I also feel like I'm protecting my family.
Of course, we can wash and then peel our non-organic vegetables, but freshness also counts for something. Just go look at an organic cucumber picked the same morning, without the shelf life extending wax normally sprayed on store cucumbers. You can really wash, slice and put a fresh-picked cuke on sandwiches, skin and all, without worrying about wax-impregnated fungicide going into your stomach.
Completely fertile, natural and organic soil probably conveys more nutrients to the vegetables. Perhaps the vegetables, in a sense, feel healthier because of such care, secreting less natural, self-defense toxins, improving flavor.
These principles are more scientifically proven when it comes to animals. Most of us have seen or heard of the animal torture involved in the feedlot raising of cattle, hogs and chickens.
Such confinement, force-feeding and abuse stimulate fear. We're now learning in medicine that such neurohormonal effects contribute to disease. And while pasture-fed, free-range animals tend to be healthy, 30 percent of factory model livestock are ill in some way at any given time, stuffed full of antibiotics as a result and creating more dangerous bacteria that come after us.
Pesticides and other poisons, including synthetic hormones, concentrate in animal fat, and there's plenty more fat than normal due to hormone growth stimulation and other feed-to-make-fat practices.
Mark and Doris Dobbs and their children, Dyllon (9) and Keri (8), live on a 105-acre farm in Hillsboro, Ohio, they call Dobbs Hill. They raise completely organic livestock. That is, completely organic feed crops are raised on the farm, with no herbicides, pesticides or chemical fertilizers used. Animals range about and are not treated with hormones or antibiotics.
I've bought beef, chicken, turkey, lamb, duck, pork and eggs from Mark at his stand at Findlay Market. He'll soon add rabbit (the lowest cholesterol meat) and fish to the organic menu there.
I pay the Dobbs more than I would at a store like Kroger, but I don't mind. The eggs have dark orange yokes, because the chickens eat mostly grass, making the healthy beta-carotene content higher. The proportion of good fat to bad fat in the meats, even the beef, is improved because of pasture feeding.
Since becoming certified organic in 1997, the Dobbs' farm has never had an animal come down sick, at least not to the point of requiring drugs. A few animals not born on their farm, before they achieved organic status, had to be treated and sent elsewhere.
Mark uses a system of intensive rotational grazing, which completely preserves the topsoil on his land. The animals trample their own manure into the soil in this self-fertilizing method.
"It uses half the manure and none of the fossil fuel," explains Gene Logsdon, author, small farm advocate and small farmer in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, who also uses this method. "Usually, a lot of fuel is burned raising and processing enormous amounts of corn and soybeans as feed. It doesn't destroy the top soil as has happened so much out West."
Mark Dobbs works a third-shift "regular" job to supplement his farming. Logsdon says that's typical for small farmers these days.
"I wish people would act and vote with their pocketbook," Dobbs says. "These methods are healthier for people, more humane to animals and protective of an environment where resources are dwindling. Once those are gone, they're hard to get back. That's why I'm really down here, to educate the public."
Although his farm is fully certified, Mark believes the things he's doing are important in the order of, from first to third, the relationship between himself and the customer, the freshness and quality of his meat and the organic status of the product.
"The consumer and the farmer are working in opposite directions when they should be working together," he says. "Nothing upsets me more than seeing a father driving his family to McDonald's in a $40,000 car."
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Photo By Geoff Raker
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Cricket at her Findlay Market stand: “A farmer who
loves the work has something more, something that is
lost if he only loves money.”
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In Fast Food Nation: The Darker Side of the All American Meal, Eric Schlosser documents the atrocious symbiosis between fast food, harmful meat products and worker abuse in the meat packing industry. The negative effects of fast food culture on our families have also been well illustrated.
"The fact is that I want to bring families back to the table," Dobbs says. "Fifty percent of our meals are eaten out, and 10 percent are eaten in the car. I want to bring families and communication with our children back to the dinner table."
For small family farmers, the cost of doing business makes things difficult. Big farm business and competition for remaining land have driven up the price of farming.
"Tell me two people, just two, who are starting out with families and have done this (made a small farm work) and I'll give you a $100 bill," Dobbs says, sighing. "Technological-intensive, productivity-oriented farming is unnecessary. It's not the lack of technology that's the problem -- it's what we've forgotten how to do."
To do this at all, he points out, requires an openness to alternatives, a complete need for sustainability, the willingness to have a second job, openness to change, family orientation, knowing your market and breaking out of the model of consumerism.
Dobbs is opposed to genetic engineering on principle -- "simply not natural." As to certification and national standards, he says, "When the national standards start (Sept. 1), who do you think is going to define those standards? Let's face it. The big boys are already buying up organic farms, which scares me.
"To be honest, I don't want to be working on the level of big business/government. This will get the so-called organic product into the model of short cuts and consumer convenience. Where does that leave us? Out of business."
Non-Profit Community-Supported Agriculture
Richard Cartwright and Mary Meyer live on Michaela Farm in Oldenburg, Ind. The Sisters of St. Francis own the land.
In the 1970s and '80s, when holding the land became unprofitable, the religious order looked to organic farming as a way to avoid real-estate development. In the early '90s, Richard and Mary were the first folks to join the farm, building a straw bale house on land they leased for 99 years.
Requirements in the lease include not using toxins on the property. The farm is certified organic. The house exists "off the grid" (no electricity), uses a gray water system (collecting, recycling and purifying water for conservation) and a composting toilet.
Visitors come every year during "open house" sessions to see the house and the farm, which is run as a non-profit. Richard and Mary do farm business via a Community Supported Agriculture system -- consumers join for a fee and get a weekly box of organic produce every season for 24 weeks -- in addition to sales at Findlay Market. They also have a business called Hearth Light, selling books on sustainable living, health and well-being.
"I believe I could go anywhere and live off the land," Richard says, although he doesn't come from a farming background as his wife does. "Doing this is a matter of being connected. In order to be connected, things have to be done differently.
"Agribusiness is the accumulation of the capitalistic model, but people are becoming more alienated from their food. We've all been hoodwinked into thinking that food should be cheap, so what we're seeing is a mechanized form of food. The whole culture has been mechanized. So we see less vibrant beings. Instead, since more and more of our food is made by machines, we're becoming more like machines ourselves."
Mary and Richard agree that a big part of the reward for what they do consists of phone calls and letters from folks who give glowing testimonials about the health affects of Michela Farm products.
"Studies are showing that this type of farming is economically viable," Richard says. "Therefore, I believe small farms will grow stronger. We know things have to change, and this model might be the way.
"Genetic engineering is an unknown at this point, but profit motives obscure public discussion and appropriate use. Monsanto worked on genetic alterations for 12 years with very little to no public discussion. There are already indications of problems -- using herbicide-resistant beans can promote super weeds, for example."
Mary has expanded the farm produce line into flowers, calling it "a real value-added activity." She's now planting more flowers to enhance the visual aspect of the farm and to act as pest control.
Farm members now can buy a flower share as well as a produce share.
Richard says he has "another life as an artist." Mary, besides farmer, is a writer and massage therapist. Both are actively involved in trying to build a farm community through their own efforts.
"This is a good place to be," Richard says. "This is a good place to live."
Listening to Cricket
If we're lucky, we find ourselves with people where outer trappings of personality and conflict fall away, dissolving into, well, something that can go by many names: light, clarity, grace. When I first met Cricket, she impressed me as both old (as in wise) and young (as in vibrant), aggressively intellectual yet full of heart and soul, receptive yet constantly clear of purpose.
She lives on her organic farm in Lawrenceburg, Ind., with husband Mark and nine children, all of whom are homeschooled, help on the farm and were born on the farm -- the first four with a midwife and the rest without.
Their business, called Winterland, specializes in organic produce, natural fine soaps and skin care preparations, culinary and healing herbs and traditional crafts. Cricket is farmer, herbalist, seamstress and artist. Mark works for a non-profit organization.
When I'm with Cricket, I find it best to forget about our intellectual exchange as soon as possible so I can spend my time, at least when it comes to farming, listening to her. Here is some listening I've done:
Motivation: "Farming is a vocation and my calling from God. It forces incredible challenges, and we deal with disasters all of the time. I can understand how farmers of the past felt a part of nature. It's a hard life full of sorrow yet a deep and great joy. Right now we're in harvest distress trying to process all of the produce."
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On the Dobbs’ family farm, free-range chickens roam
from their unusual coop.
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Cricket does intensive seasonal growing, raising three crops in a season, which requires composting. She prefers not to seek organic certification, basing what she does on human relationship and trust.
The first principle: "First is subsistence. We grow for ourselves, and then we market. This is a family farm. The whole key to recovering sustainability and basic common sense is to raise children, thus handing down education, culture, labor and tradition. Along with this is what I call subsidiarity: Don't do things at a more complex level of organization when they can be done simply. In other words, power needs to be distributed through decentralization."
Human relationships and the market: "The market does not heal us. We respond to the person and his/her needs, and that heals us. Paul Hawken, in Growing a Business, indicates that forces that aren't necessarily human always challenge the micro enterprise. What is the scale? Does the activity enhance the human person? If not, something is wrong. I can get big or I can get intense, always trying to rescue what is human from that which is industrialized.
"We have to start defining the future of civilization. There's something in this handiwork that transcends. A farmer who loves the work has something more, something that is lost if he only loves money. Using the market to create needs is abusing the market and abusing the nature of business."
Self-reliance: "Just taking care of ourselves is a significant human contribution. People don't understand that they have power: Not everyone can be a farmer, but everyone can produce. When we don't do what we can do, we become more dependent and don't mature. People don't have to depend on the government/corporate complex. This they don't understand."
Effects of globalization: "As Pope John Paul II said, the only way to judge an economic system is to see if it pays a decent family wage. If you can't have a family, everything dies in the next generation. The Amish put their families first. They have the good ideas because they never sacrificed the good ideas. Currently, globalization and business 'economies of scale' are serving the rich.
"We can break this trend at the local level. If I sell to my neighbor, I develop a local community. Those who understand are looking for alternatives. This is reforming rather than revolutionary."
The true market place: "Where the market place becomes human, people give and receive, in communion with each other, satisfying needs instead of passions, free of exploitation. With our entire technological prowess, we're breathing dirty air and drinking gray water. When others undermine human need, build on your own. Open up your dream and prepare your children. They will bring it about, because they'll have hope."
Technology: "What effect will it have on my family and my community?"
Integration
"The concern with having organic standards in the hands of a national bureaucracy is a valid one," Sean McGovern of OEFA says.
Local level farmers used to vote on the standards, but now they've given up their voting power to a USDA committee. Making the situation worse, to "avoid conflicts of interest," certified organic farmers are not going to be represented on the committee -- although big business farming most assuredly will be.
"Most of us agreed that the standards are excellent, especially in keeping pesticides out of our food," McGovern says. "But now the multinationals are usurping a market niche that the small farmer has had, and that's a legitimate concern."
He says the answer is to start exploring the other side of the niche "and have a desperately needed conversation about the benefits of local farming, especially in terms of reducing greenhouse gasses, providing high-quality produce and keeping community money in the local community."
I asked McGovern what he would add to the current standards if he could amend them right now.
"A 100-mile transport radius around an organic farm to cut down on fuel use," he says. "Also standards for treatment of workers, especially migrant workers; limit the scale to avoid high-density operations like feed lots; make sure the bureaucracy doesn't become cumbersome by cutting down on the hoops we have to jump through to get certification; and ensure democratic control by having adequate input from the local level."
These are all practices surrounding sustainability, but the association with large and global businesses is problematic in some way for everyone I talked to. The fact is that agri-business methods do deplete soil and destroy farmland, with 77 acres or more in Ohio disappearing every day.
The hope is for sustainable farming on many, many small family-type farms -- which is shown to be ecologically sound and cost effective -- with enough consumer awareness and demand to feed knowledgeably.
"Given agribusiness marketing and consumerism, that's a tall order for consumers," Mark Dobbs says.
As to help from USDA small-farm initiatives, "I'm not impressed with a lot of the recent initiatives by government, which generally means big business," Gene Logsdon says. "I mean, I'm glad they're doing these things, but government, business and the universities ignored us for years, until now that they see there might be a buck in it."
The executive director of the Ohio Fam Bureau Federation and the seated head of the Swank Chair for Rural and Urban Policy at Ohio State University couldn't be reached for comment.
Logsdon says he's not as optimistic as he used to be about what the future will bring. "I still think that as companies like Monsanto continue to attempt monopoly on farming, they'll realize they just can't do sustainable farming on that scale. There will always be some big farming companies, but I think they will wind up raising grain, primarily for ethanol production. These days, it's the back-yard, part-time and even urban farmer who are increasing in numbers. That's what is going to change things."
The farmers I've come to know are all highly intelligent and knowledgeable in a connected way, not necessarily an institutional way. They understand what they're doing and its effects on our world and on our health. More importantly, they recognize the difference between short-term profit presented as an end in itself and long-term, more socially responsible goals.
"People always ask me how and where I learned what I know," says Mark Dobbs, "but one thing a little different about me is that I have no education to speak of. I know, however, that most executives can't add figures in any meaningful way. What I say is, well, Mr. Monsanto, here are some costs you haven't calculated: If you keep your current ways up, for one thing, we might all become extinct. If that's too much for you to contemplate, add the costs of extinguishing the land's natural resources, the cost of poison to human health overall and the cost to society of losing intimate and productive communities. Let's see you write a real equation."
As I prepare to email this article to the editor, National Public Radio's Morning Edition is running a story about the demise of the farming middle class in Broken Arrow, Neb. A special agency has formed to teach farmers modern accounting ways and business practices.
The agency is also teaching farmers' wives, many of whom have an all-day, out-of-home job to make ends meet, how to pick up store-bought prepared chickens on the way home in the evening in order to put dinner on the table. ©
