Farming - A lesson in community and civics.

I'm so excited to have been asked to guest blog for the America's Farmers blog about strengthening rural communities, sustainability and the role of family farms. Its near and dear to my heart because as I say in the blog, we pour ourselves into our local community.

The link below will lead you to the blog which is called:

Farming - A lesson in community and civics. 

And I LOVE the info-graphic that was created highlighting some of the major 

benefits family farms bring to their local communities!

Thanks America's Farmers for recognizing the many benefits farms provide

to rural America!

Eating Local Foods Exclusively Year Round?

I recently read a Facebook post that advocated for the closing of all grocery stores so that people would simply have to buy all their food from local farmers.... A response posted said "What a great idea!", so I started to really think about this in a literal sense, NO grocery stores!  What do I as a farmer have to provide the millions of urban neighbors in the Baltimore/DC/Philadelphia metro region who need to be fed all year round?

The nearest grocery store to my house is 5 miles away. I get the majority of my food there because since I work on our family farm, I have little need to drive any further. All other grocery stores are 20 miles away. I tend not to go there unless I am needing to do other errands in that town.  I highly value my time and my fuel, so the closest grocery store gets 99% of my grocery business. I don't traipse all over looking for "deals" or special items. I shop in one place and get what I need and get out. (By the way, I hate shopping, period).  I would never drive 6 or 8 places to get "all" of what I would need to feed my family. I wouldn't go to the dairy farm, then the beef farm, then the pork farm, then the grain farm, then the fruit farm, then the chicken (broiler) farm, then the chicken (layers) farm, then the vegetable farm.  I don't have the time, nor do most of these farms have direct to consumer sales in January or February.

Eliminating grocery stores throughout our country would leave a lot of hungry people in the winter.  Below are pictures from my farm in Maryland in February along with 2 of my neighbor's farms. None of us have products to sell this time of year. While there are some farms who have year round greenhouses, there is not enough supply to replace grocery stores entirely. It would also mean a huge shift in infrastructure needed on local farms to support the damage that cars and customer traffic create. I personally prefer my farm without parking lots thank you very much, but if we need to feed everyone because there are no grocery stores, then paving over farm fields for parking lots would be necessary. After all, our lanes are not paved and people shopping for food after work in dress shoes don't like to step in mud or manure.

So what do we have growing in the winter? Below are some pictures of our current crops... or lack thereof:

 Rotting tillage (daikon) radishes.... yum?? We do have folks come pick them, 

obviously before they begin to decompose. 

We grow these for cover crop, not for food.

Winter wheat crop, ripe for harvest in July, not now.

No grape harvest till September. 

Our neighbor's peach trees... no fruit till July.

Our neighbor's blueberry bushes, no fruit till summer. 

Which also means the Maryland Food Bank gets no food until harvest.

My neighbor's CSA has cabbage, kale, and leek seedlings... 

but no harvest!

Our farm still has some corn, soybeans, and wheat in grain tanks. Theoretically, we could sell these to folks to make their own meal, flour, and tofu. My guess is, less than 0.05% of the US population has any idea of how to go about this. I also think that 99.5% of the US population would not want to make their own meal, flour, and tofu. Who frankly has that kind of time? 

For 2 years after college, I lived in the Southern African nation of Botswana. We had no running water or electricity. We spent a lot of time on a daily basis hauling water from the community hydrant, collecting wood to start fires which we used to heat water and cook food, and pounding sorghum or corn into meal to use for cooking. This grinding process used a hollowed out tree trunk and solid, thick tree branch to pound the grain into meal. Sort of like a mortar and pestle. Incredibly time consuming and backbreaking and was a DAILY chore. Pounding grain, every day, day after day. 

I would also miss the items that we have grown accustomed to in our diet such as orange or pineapple juice and bananas. None of these grow here in Maryland.  While I "get" the local food movement, I don't believe the average American has any concept of what it would take to source all their dietary needs directly from farmers.Nor the time required to do so. Nor the resources required to do so. Not every one has a farmer's market nearby. Many farmer's markets couldn't support the mass of people who would need to be fed without grocery stores. And believe it or not, not all farmers want to be retail operations. How would I find enough people to buy the 8.5 million pounds of Roma tomatoes that we grew last summer? We'd never be able to sell 20 tractor trailer loads of tomatoes a day on the fresh. local market, which is why we grow them for a cannery, so that consumers eat them in tomato products year round!

Local food is great and benefits the local economy in season, but a number of our US growing regions do not support year round food production to the extent that it would replace grocery stores.

Support local farmers, in season! Remember that farmers also grew the items you buy at the grocery store so that we have a wonderful selection year round!

Get to Know Your Farmer

I love it when I get asked to guest blog for another site.This month I was asked to guest blog for "Stone Soup", the guest blogging section of Food and Nutrition Magazine of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.  I hope you'll read it. Its a remake of a blog I wrote called "Locavore" or "Globavore".  Its features some of my favorite  women farmers, who like me, are passionate about agriculture and the food they raise for consumers.

They, like me, won't have our faces on the products we provide at the grocery store, so I hope this helps connect the reader to the fact that of the plethora of food choices you have on the grocery shelves, the majority of it was grown by farm families like ours.

Get To Know Your Farmer

Know Your Farmer: Locavore or Globavore?

I love eating. I think a lot about where my food comes from and the farmers who produce it.  

My family predominantly lives on food we grow ourselves or which is grown locally by our neighbors. Our kids raise 4H hogs and one always goes to the freezer each year once the county fair is over. Our other main source of protein is venison, hunted on our own property. I was taught canning and freezing by my mom, and so I continue the tradition of “putting up” food when it is in season for use in our menus in the off season. I buy local peaches, strawberries, blueberries and other produce to can or freeze and use to make yummy dishes all year long. In this sense, I am very much a “locavore”.

The “buy local” movement has a lot of momentum and has done great things for local farm economies, not to mention the health benefits of eating food produced in season and from within your own community.

But as I sit here in New England, nearly 400 miles from “home”,  visiting my family for the holidays, and thinking of all the farmers I know around this globe, I’ve decided there are merits to being both a locavore AND a globavore.

I love being a globavore mainly because we know so many farmers in so many countries around this world. My family hosted International 4-H Youth Exchangees (IFYE’s) and young farmers for nearly 30 years. These young farmers and IFYE’s came from over 20 different countries making our connection to “Knowing Your Farmer” very meaningful and personal. In turn, members of our family have been able to travel to visit and spend time with several of these farm families on their farms in foreign lands.  “Know Your Farmer” takes a whole new definition when you’ve lived and worked with farm families around this globe.

I LOVE New England maple syrup, made by my dear friends who still tap trees and boil sap the old fashioned way. I think of them every time I use their syrup on my pancakes or French toast.

A couple of New England ice cream and cheese processors are my favorite brands because I know dairy farmers in the New England area whose milk is in the product.

Our Maryland neighbors milk cows for the Maryland-Virginia Milk Producers Cooperative. Supporting those brands the buy from the cooperative helps our neighbors.

I love pickles. I think of my cucumber-growing, fellow Eastern Shore woman-farmer Hannah who grows for a local pickle company every time I eat pickles.

I can’t count on my fingers and toes the number of friends I have who are poultry farmers. I know how much they care for their chickens and know I am getting a quality product supporting a fellow farmer when I buy the brands for whom they grow chickens.

When our freezer runs low on our own meat, I look for certain brands pork. My friend Jen is a hog farmer. I’ve been to her farm. I know how she operates and look for the brand that buys her hogs.

Distant Schmidt cousins who immigrated from Germany to Chile when our branch of Schmidt’s immigrated to America, are one of the largest table grape growers in that country. I think of them every time I buy Thompson seedless from Chile at my local supermarket. A relative grew those grapes.

We have dear friends who farm paprika peppers in South Africa. I think of them and remember my time in South Africa every time I use paprika as a seasoning.

I was fortunate to travel to Vietnam in January of 2011. I think of the rice and tilapia farmers I met when I consume either of those food items and hope they are doing well. While I don’t “know” them well, a face-to-face meeting with a farmer makes you have a better connection to how your food is produced, regardless of location.

That trip highlighted how food is globally interconnected and how important U.S. agriculture is to so many people outside our borders. Visiting Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Taiwan, I understood the importance of U.S. farm exports to feed people in countries with too little land mass to feed their own population. U.S. farmers support so many people beyond our own farm-gates, supporting globavores by choice and necessity.

On the flip side, the majority of what we grow on our family farm stays within 100 miles of our farm, a well used “rule of thumb” for defining “local” by many who have hitched their wagon to the local food movement. From our farm in MD, 100 miles reaches to PA, NJ, VA, WV, DE and DC. Whether its tomatoes to a cannery, fresh market green beans to a distributor, grapes to a winery, corn to a grain elevator, or soybeans to a tofu-maker, much of what we grow stays “local”. Our family farm supports many other local businesses both as a buyer of items we need to operate our farm, or as a seller of raw food or feed items to another family-owned local business. The fabric of the rural economy is very much a “locavore” economy, not only of food, but of products and services to and from family farms.

Locavore or Globavore, food is about relationships.  “Local” to me can be grown thousands of miles from me, but grown by a friend or distant relative. Knowing your farmer isn’t about distance, it’s about relationships. Consumers can connect their relationship to food by patronizing farmers markets, CSA’s, farm stands, creameries, or wineries, and by looking for local products in the grocery. But don’t lose sight of the fact that my friend Hannah may have grown those pickles you’re crunching, my friend Jen may have raised that bacon you had for breakfast or that my tomatoes may be in the spaghetti sauce you had for dinner last night. Just because our faces are not on the product, or you didn’t buy it direct from one of us, doesn’t mean that item wasn’t grown by a family farmer whose main interest in producing a safe and healthy food for your consumption.

Have a safe and blessed New Year!