What’s Growing This Week:  Carrots —- % Salad mix Strawberries Potatoes —- # Snap peas Walnuts Fresh onions (M, L)  English peas (M, L)  Grapefruit (M, L)  Fava beans (M, L)  Green garlic (L) Valencias (L)             all items are in all box sizes unless marked

Pablito .... 

FOOD PATRIOTS
Wendell Berry is an American philosopher who writes about rural society.  He is an opinionated guy.  In fact, many Americans these days might find his thoughts on our society to be downright elitist, with his scorn for the way in which our lives have come to be so completely dominated by consumption of mass marketed products, from fast food to suburban homes.

I picked up one of his books this weekend after spending the afternoon driving to San Luis Obispo through the Salinas Valley — the epicenter of vegetable farming in California.  I did my best to avoid becoming a traffic hazard while driving through that disturbing moonscape of lettuce, broccoli, spinach, and other crops we also grow at TFF.  The excerpts in italics are from Berry’s “Conservation and Local Economy”, the regular type is mine.

 For most of the length of the Valley, there are no trees.  No bushes.  No vegetation at all but the perfect rows of vegetable crops.  The river and creeks that meander through the valley have been converted into water conveyance systems, graded perfectly and sprayed to kill all the weeds and vegetation that might grow along them.   The crops are grown right up to the edge of the waterways.  People cannot be adequately motivated to care for land by general principles or by incentives that are merely economic.

“Hillsides” — really just graded slopes between fields of different elevations — are similarly barren, and thus eroded by rain and wind.  And while the fields in the lowest part of the valley — the best soils and oldest farmed — were leveled years ago, the slopes at the edges of the valley are now being farmed.
A quick aside -- while leveling land for farming seems environmentally destructive on the surface, it actually serves to protect both soil and surface water by preventing erosion.  New irrigation technology has allowed farmers to grow crops on much steeper slopes without grading them, but the downside is that rain and weather can much more easily cause the soil to run off into creeks and rivers, degrading both the water and the land.  I saw vegetables growing on fields that I would consider too steep to plant trees on.  People are motivated to care for land to the extent that their interest in it is direct, dependable, and permanent.

 Further up into the valley, where the ground is too steep even for vegetables, there are thousands of acres of grapes planted on slopes that would rate a black diamond if they were covered with snow and located in the Sierra.  For reasons I cannot begin to understand, the farmers that planted these vineyards chose to run their rows parallel to the slope — allowing the soil to run downhill — rather than across the hill as any responsible grape grower does in Napa or anyplace else in Northern California.   There is a limit to how much land can be owned before an owner is unable to take proper care of it.  The need for attention increases with the intensity of use.  But the quality of attention decreases as acreage increases.

A nation will destroy its land and itself if it does not foster the type of thrifty, prosperous, permanent rural households and communities that have the desire, the skills, and the means to care properly for the land they are using. ..Almost the whole landscape of this country is in the power of an absentee economy, once national and now increasingly international, that is without limit in its greed and without mercy in its exploitation of land and people.  Between the prosperity of this vast centralizing economy and the prosperity of any local economy or locality, there is now a radical disconnection.  The accounting that measures the wealth of corporations, great banks, and national treasuries takes no measure of the civic or economic or natural health of places like (the Salinas Valley) and does not intend to do so.

As a vegetable farmer, I like to believe that I am growing crops that make people healthy, and I do it in a healthy way.  A significant percentage of the vegetables now grown in the Salinas Valley are certified organic.  But I cannot see how anything grown in that once beautiful, now-barren stretch of factory farming can be considered healthy.  Very few farmers in Yolo County, conventional or organic, big or small, practice agriculture so destructively.

Sure, there are thousands of acres here owned in absentia, but most of the farmers who farm them also own some land of their own.  In Salinas, almost all the land is owned from afar — it is all too valuable for any farmer to purchase, and has been for quite some time.   The resulting pressure on the farmers to extract every dollar possible from the land has pushed them to ignore even the most basic rules of good land management.  To me, this is the only possible explanation for the difference.

The great, greedy, and indifferent national and international economy is killing our country.  Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community.  All true patriots must find ways of opposing it.

IN YOUR BOXES
  Thanks to whoever did the rain dances, said prayers, etc.   While the rain on Sunday did turn a day’s worth of strawberries into mush, the change in weather patterns is likely to give the field a new lease on life and extend the season well into June.  Even if hot weather returns next week, which it is not forecasted to do, a week long respite will give the plants time to finish setting fruit on a new round of flowers.  Also, the cooler temperatures will allow the ripening fruit the extra day or two it needs to develop a little more sugar than the berries we’ve been picking for the last two weeks.

 Sadly, the same cannot be said of some of our other spring crops.  The hot weather accelerated our plantings of peas, causing them to come into harvest all at once.  This week will probably be the final week of peas from Terra Firma, however, other local farms put in later plantings that will continue to produce into June given the right weather.  We will include these peas in our boxes when appropriate.

 Fava beans, on the other hand, should continue here as our second (and final) planting is just beginning to swell pods.

 Carrots in this week’s boxes come from the Willeys in Madera.  They have a warmer climate than ours, and so while our spring planted carrots will be ready for harvest next week, theirs beat us to the punch.  Spring planted beets — both red and golden — should be ready next week here, with nice tender greens for eating as well as the roots.

 Our first plantings of summer squash enjoyed the heat wave of early May, and are now beginning to flower.  The cool weather will slow them down a bit, but we expect to begin harvest in two weeks.

 Last, I am hesitant but excited to mention our discovery of marble-sized green fruit in our earliest tomato field.  They won’t be ready by July 4th, but maybe a few soon after...

Thanks,
  Pablito

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

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