Stephanie & Benjamin Buchalter CSA Members & Cutie Pies

What’s Growing This Week:      Spinach Strawberries Snap Peas Grapefruit Salad Mix (M, L) Asparagus (M, L) English Peas (M, L) Spring Onions (M, L) Carrots (S, L) Beets (L) Fava beans (L) Kiwis (L) @

The market for organic food has also gotten some attention from the media.  When food was cheap two years ago, industry analysts were predicting a continued expansion of the market for years to come — this despite a mini inflation cycle due to demand exceeding supply of most organic crops.  The landscape has changed now.  One factor is the rising prices for conventional crops, which is causing farmers to reconsider transitioning more land to organic.  For livestock producers, there is another factor:  high prices for organic animal feed have led  dozens of organic dairy farms in New York State to give up their certification this year.  Economists are predicting that when the prices for organic milk and other products that rely heavily on grains are raised accordingly, demand will drop.  The current recession may exacerbate the switch away from organics.

 Finally, the New York Times today had a piece exploring whether a global food shortage would give a boost to the genetically modified food industry.  While the industry’s main lobbying group has declared that it won’t use food riots to push its message, it hasn’t stopped other policymakers from doing so.  As always, the argument goes that genetically modified crops have the potential to feed more people on less land, thus making food more affordable.  The reality, of course, is not so simple.  Most GMO food crops continue to focus primarily on the goal of guaranteeing a profit for the company that makes the seeds (Monsanto, etc).  The seeds for these crops are far too expensive to be used by the small farmers that provide most of the world’s rice crop, for example.  The continued emphasis on GMOs will only serve to continue the concentration of the world’s food production on a smaller number of ever larger farms.

Meanwhile, governments here and around the world continue to cut funding for the basic plant breeding which is needed to create crops with improved drought resistance, lower fertilizer requirements, and other improvements that would actually make a difference in how the world produces food.  Along the same lines, most countries in the world have de-emphasized training for farmers and rural technicians, allowed rural areas to stagnate economically, and neglected funding for rural roads and irrigation projects.  Instead, they have focused on industrializing their economies and moving people into cities.  The handful of countries that have bucked this trend, such as Brazil, Chile, and Thailand, have laid the groundwork to become economic giants in a world of scarce food.

Then there’s the story of rice farmers in Australia, who have abandoned their fields due to drought and are selling their irrigation water to winegrape growers.  It seems that the booming wine business is far more profitable than growing the world’s most important staple crop for millions of poor Africans and Asians.

These stories have a common theme:  In the U.S. and much of the world, cheap food was assumed to be a given, just like cheap oil.  That appears to be changing, and if it does, our civilization is going to have to reorder its priorities.  The process we undertake to do so might be painful, but if we do it right, it could end up saving our civilization and our world.  If we screw it up, well...

IN YOUR BOXES
More spring produce debuts this week in your boxes, despite us having some of the coldest weather we’ve had in a month:
Spring Onions:  Like Green Garlic, these are simply immature versions of their future selves.  We plant red and yellow onions as scallion-sized shoots in the fall and then harvest them in May and June when they bulb up and form dry skins.  Every year, we plant extras so that we can begin harvesting them green, once they begin to bulb up and when our leek crop is finished for the winter.  Spring onions are juicy and mild, and can be used in any recipe that calls for onions.  They are also particularly wonderful when brushed with olive oil and grilled on a barbeque until almost burned.

Fava Beans:  Along with English Peas, these may be the most labor intensive crop we grow at Terra Firma; labor intensive for you.  To prepare them, you must first remove the beans from the pods.  Then, you need to microwave, boil, or steam the beans until their outer skins split open.  You then pop the beans out of their skins and use them without further cooking.  Favas are considered a delicacy in Latin American and the Middle East, but we understand that for many of our subscribers they are a very time consuming item.

Strawberries:  The warmth of March gave us an enormous crop of berry blossoms, and then green fruit.  Then it got cold again, and they seemed to take forever to ripen.  Nonetheless, we are sending the first strawberries of the year along in your boxes today.  As is almost always the case, our harvest is a harbinger of rain — now forecast for Tuesday night — which destroys most of the ripe or almost ripe fruit in the field at the time.  Luckily, the forecast gives us time to harvest enough fruit for most of the week’s boxes, and will probably give the plants time to recover by next week.  We look forward to a bumper crop of berries this year, and hope that the heat of summer — which tends to spell the end of the season for us — holds off at least until June.

Thanks,  Pablito
 

Please make sure to include your account name, the one on the sign off sheet & on the box, in every correspondance to Valerie

Recipes............................

CSA membership fees ~payment due day is first of month.~~ Quarterly discounts are given for any 3 month period only if paid in advance.
They are given as an extra credit when the payment is applied, you won't see your monthly rate change.

For mid-month changes,  Up/downgrades are $5 per week per increment.  Small to large is $10.

Vacations & Billing Inquiries
We need seven days notice before a vacation hold or other change of service.
Contact Valerie through voicemail at (530) 756-2800, or e-mail Goldenbell@aol.com.  Include your account name in full (what's on the sign off sheet).

Account Balance Inquiries The account sheet is hiding under the sign off sheet each week with your account balance on it.  Mid month I've been e-mailing statments, so if you're not getting it send me an e-mail requesting to be added to the list. To be able to read the statements you need to be logged in as an administrator on a PC, and virus programs may corrupt the file. Some Mac operating systems do allow the file to be viewed.  We can't resend them, and it wouldn't work any better the second time anyway.

MAILING ADDRESS:
Terra Firma Farms, Inc
P.O. Box 836
Winters, CA 95694
(530) 756-2800
www.terrafirmafarm.com
Goldenbell@aol.com

New?  Sign up! 

Pickup Sites

Online Payments

Member's Answer Zone

Back to Basics

Newsletter Archives

Is it safe to eat Spinach?