Our field of onions  Leeks in their Teens & Baby age

What’s Growing This Week:  Carrots Chard Sweet Potatoes Green Onions Satsuma Mandarins Persimmons — # Baby Spinach (S, L) Broccoli (M, L) Escarole (M, L) Tokyo Turnips (M, L) Salad Mix (M, L) Fuji apples -- # Walnuts (M, L) Leeks (L) Celery (L)             all items are in all box sizes unless marked

Pablito .... 

RUMORS OF MY DEMISE…
Returning from a short vacation, I opened an email from a colleague to find that CareerBuilder.com has made it official:  Farming is the #1 “Dead End Job” in the U.S.A.    According to the website, there is negative growth in the ag jobs market, and opportunities will only be available to those replacing retiring workers.  “Aha!”, I say, but they didn’t factor in that so few young people are going into farming now that there aren’t enough of them to take the places of all the older farmers.  How’s that for an optimistic outlook?

I don’t follow lists like this very well, but I seem to recall that ten years ago, similar predictions advised parents to send their kids to college at all cost, because good blue collar jobs would be disappearing.  Now, auto dealerships and construction companies are importing high skilled technicians, paying white collar wages, and lobbying every politician they can find about boosting funding for technical training at the high school level.  Of course, food can be (and is) easily imported from overseas, while construction and auto repair are a little harder to outsource.

TURNING GARBAGE INTO GOLD
Back when farming was a more popular occupation, farmers were way ahead of their time as recyclers — for centuries there was no such thing as a “byproduct” on a farm.  Even things with no other purpose could almost always be used as fertilizer — dead leaves, animal waste, seaweed, fish guts, you name it.  But in the mid-20th century, U.S. farmers followed society’s wasteful lead into “increased efficiency”.  It was “more efficient” to buy chemical fertilizer, grow animal feed in one place, ship it to the place where the animals were kept, and then dispose of the manure as you would any other sort of trash.

Well, you may teach a farmer to wastefulness, but you can’t get rid of the basic farmer instinct that says “everything has value.” Combine that instinct with government regulations and a tough economic picture, and a lot of farmers now see recycling in their future.  Energy production is one of the most promising markets, especially from dairy methane gas and biomass/food processing waste.  New food products also offer an opportunity — those “baby” carrots that are now so popular are machined-shaped pieces of broken carrots that were once fed to cattle (thus not technically “thrown away”) and the shavings that are left over become that deliciously rich and nutritious carrot juice now available almost anywhere.

 I’m going to claim that organic farmers were among the forefront of this movement to reclaim recycling as a central principle of agriculture.  The market that we represent for products (fertilizers, mulches, and crop protection especially) remains a powerful incentive, because everything we use has to be derived from natural materials.

 A team of researchers in Oregon are currently exploring the benefits of Meadowfoam meal for organic and conventional farmers.  Meadowfoam is grown on thousands of acres in the state, and is processed for its oil, which is used in cosmetics.  For decades, processors have simply discarded the leftover meal, believing it useless.  Like many other byproducts  — cottonseed, corn gluten, fish guts — containing byproducts, it was discovered by companies making organic fertilizers and has developed a small market.  Meadowfoam processors funded a small project to help promote their byproduct.  What the researchers found is that Meadowfoam seems to have benefits to plants far out of proportion to what its nutrient analysis might suggest.  Also, used at higher levels, the byproduct acts as a natural herbicide, suppressing the growth of weeds.  To date, the researchers remain unable to explain the benefits they have shown.

 Add meadowfoam to the list of farm-raised crops with previously unknown and unexplored biological benefits — the oils of garlic, cloves, peppermint, and cedar all have been found to protect certain plants from certain insects.  It is now common to hear scientists talk about the unexplored benefits of the millions of species in tropical rainforests, but the reality is that many biological agents right here at home may hold incredible potential to help humanity without the toxic repercussions of synthetics.

Biology is complicated and messy — just ask the researchers scratching their heads about the “magic” of Meadowfoam.  But after a century of cooking down ancient oil for fuel and chemicals, everyone knows that synthetic chemicals aren’t as simple as they seem — especially when they escape into the environment.  Farming might be a dead end career, but I hope that organic farming can help keep catalyzing a new generation of scientists who want to take on the challenge of tricking Mother Nature into giving up her biological secrets.  Maybe if more of our fuels and chemicals were coming from farm fields instead of oil fields, the career picture might brighten a bit.

IN YOUR BOXES
We don’t grow green onions (aka scallions) as a regular crop.  They are very labor intensive, both to (hand) weed and to harvest, and they aren’t worth much.  However, we do grow our own onion transplants from seed in what we call “nursery beds” — the 100,000 plants or so needed to plant an acre can be grown in a single bed.  When they are roughly the size of green onions, we harvest them and replant them much less densely, so they can then develop into bulb onions over the winter and spring.  This technique allows us to conserve space for 3 of the nine months it takes onions to grow, and makes weed control easier.  We grow leeks the same way.

It’s almost impossible to plant exactly the right number of seeds that we need, and we never want to have too few, so we almost always have extras.  Happily, these unused onion transplants make pretty good substitutes for green onions — although they are red or yellow instead of pure white.  We finished planting our overwintering onions last week, and we’ve got lots leftover, so we’re sending a bunch along in each box today.  Unlike commercial green onions, these have not been cleaned, only washed.  To clean them, simply peel the lowest leaf off the plant — the outer layer of skin will come off with it — and cut or snip off the root.  It takes about five minutes to do a bunch.

Chard is our “entry level” cooking green — it tastes very similar to spinach, cooks relatively quickly, and is very versatile.  If you’re baffled by what to do with it, simply steam it and drizzle with soy sauce or a little lemon juice and salt.  I think it’s better sautéed with garlic, though, because it will soak up more flavor that way.  The stems are completely edible— sweet, actually — but they are crunchy and take longer to cook than the leaves.  Chop them in small pieces and sauté with the garlic first..
 

Thanks,
  Pablito

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

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Produce 101: preparation & storage  # APPLES and PERSIMMONS in today’s boxes are from our newest orchard, which was farmed conventionally until last September.  The trees have not received synthetic fertilizer since then, and the fruit in your boxes has not been sprayed with any synthetic pesticides.

We Up/downgrades are $5 per week per increment.

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Terra Firma Farms, Inc
P.O. Box 836
Winters, CA 95694
(530) 756-2800
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