Transforming Nature: Finding Food

We are fortunate to live in a place and time where finding food is not very difficult for most of us—just drive to the local grocery store or even the Walmart where you used to go only for your unnecessary plastic objects.  Some of us attempt to grow our own food.  My household attempts tomatoes and a few other randomly selected vegetables, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t; we love it when it works, and when it doesn’t, it doesn’t.  Growing food is kind of hard, and when you consider it’s pretty optional for most of us, the incentive for pulling out the shovel to dig a place in the earth for a seed or a seedling (and then everything that follows from that initial effort) may not be forthcoming. 

Our “Transforming Nature” group has been contemplating the way we use land in the watershed and one of our visits last week was to an organic farm, 5 Oak Organics in Oxford, OH owned by Kristi Hutchinson (that's Kristi in the picture below).  She comes from farmers on both sides of her family and says that her desire and passion is to grow things in a sustainable way. Organic farming is more labor intensive and from what Kristi said a lot more paperwork, but its food grown without chemical management which is healthier for the air, water, and soil (not to mention the farmer), and at least on Kristi’s farm represented a much more diverse agricultural endeavor.  From what we gathered, 5 Oaks Organics is a one woman show with some help here and there.  The vegetable plots we saw were small by agricultural field standards and diverse with greens, leeks, potatoes, tomatoes, and beans, which get rotated on a regular schedule.  The farm and plots were really quite a lovely place to be. It reminded me of one of Rachel Carson’s solutions to intense chemical management back in 1962: planting diverse crops rather than acre after acre of monoculture (which essentially requires chemical management).  A solution that seems so simple.

Our group was struck by the amount of work farming this 9.5 acres was (especially after doing a tiny bit ourselves) and by how small the profit margin seemed to be, despite the higher cost of organic food.  It does seem like the odds are stacked against the organic farmer with more paperwork and payment to ensure certification. Plus, the routes to selling her food are more limited mainly focused on farmer’s markets and a local grocery store, MoonCo-op. Although she says she doesn’t produce enough to sell to Kroger, she said she would have to double her liability insurance, which makes it unfeasible to her. So our organic produce from Kroger likely comes from faraway places.

Kristi’ mission is a good one that offers the hungry consumer another option and it’s an effort, I think, worthy of our support.  Even though I think about pesticide use and land-use a decent amount because of my research area, I have not (oh dear) maybe ever bought much food from our local farmer’s market in Ohio where Kristi sells some of her vegetables.  I certainly have never bought mustard greens.  But this week, I took a less leisurely approach to Saturday morning and ventured out to the tented market and returned home with some of Kristi’s beautiful vegetables.  Even though we cook most of the food we eat in our house “from scratch,” we will be trying a few new things this week like mustard greens and beets.  I grew up on canned beets, which terrified and horrified me, but I returned with three fresh and very real beets, mainly because my daughter wanted the red things on Kristi’s table.  Three beets seemed manageable, so we will see what happens. 

After our visit to the farm, I at least appreciate a little more all the hard work that went into growing these three beets, mustard greens, reasonably sized leeks, spinach, green onions, and radishes.  We are trying a few new recipes from the selection of food that was harvested locally and happy to feel a connection to the person who grew some of our food this week.