Farm Subsidies, Obesity, and a Zephyr Wind

In Mid-October we were interviewed by the CBS Early Show to give our perspective on US agricultural farm subsidies and the impact on not only American eaters, but on American farmers.

William and I have had first hand experience with farm subsidies and the culture of dependence that they breed.  We were young farmers in 1996 when we went for the first (and last) time to our local USDA office and asked for a small grant to get us started on our family farm.  We needed less than $10,000 to start a business that had the potential to grow into a profitable living for our family.  But they wouldn’t even consider funding someone who wanted to raise tomatoes and get out of debt in 5 years.  They tried to steer us instead to $250,000 dollars in farm debt to produce soybeans and corn, heavy pesticide and herbicide use, and the promise of finally paying it all off when we eventually “bought the farm” with our deaths sometime in our 80′s.  Is that what they marketed in words?  No, but it’s what we saw time and time again in the lives of the Mid-Western farmers that followed that system. We just couldn’t see ourselves jumping on the sinking ship of government supported farming when our hearts told us that success was in private ownership and small business.

We’ve been following that path now for over 15 years and I’m grateful for every mile of it.

Do farm subsidies really promote obesity? Yes…and no. At the end of the day I believe that every person is responsible for what they eat. No one, not farmers, politicians, large corporations, or anyone else is force feeding the American eater a diet of Twinkies, HoHo’s, and Oreo’s. We choose what goes in our grocery carts, our mouths, and in our children’s mouths and are ultimately responsible for that choice. BUT, the American farm subsidy program encourages the continued production of unnaturally low priced foods that are filled with highly processed, “food like substances” (go read Michael Pollan’s books…great!!!) derived from corn and soy crops.

Take a Twinkie for example. Have you ever made a Twinkie? I HAVE made the homemade equivalent of a golden creme cake and it’s a lot of work. It requires a lot of ingredients, a lot of time, and a lot of baker involvement to produce the final treat. The only way that a snack cake with that many ingredients and steps in it’s production can be sold for such an inexpensive price is if the ingredients it is made from are sold incredibly cheap. It leaves me wondering how a Twinkie can be cheaper than an apple when it takes so much more work to get the Twinkie. I’m inclined to agree with Joel Salatin’s statement in the title of his new book “Folks, This Ain’t Normal” (go read Joel Salatin’s books…they are also seriously great!!!)

On a lighter note our son Ezekiel came in this morning declaring “There’s a Zephyr wind blowing this morning! Come feel how warm it is.” He was right. There was a delicious, nearly tropical breeze blowing across the farm this morning and it felt like a touch of Spring even in the deep of December. It makes me want to go dig in the dirt and get muddy. That’s really saying something because I usually feel that I’m fighting dirt like the Romans fought the invading Huns. I think I’ll put down my weapons of war, the broom, mop, and vacuum and instead seek an audience with my beloved enemy. Maybe we’ll have a picnic lunch by the lake, or just a stroll down the farm road, anything that takes me outside, under the sky, and near the soil. It’s a good day to be a farmer.

Tilling Fields of Stone

One of my earliest memories as a child is of working in the field behind our house at Hillcrest Orchards.

We were moving stones.

Each year when my father would work the ground for the garden more stones would appear, almost as if they floated upwards through the earth just to get to the sunshine at the top.  My tiny hands could only carry the smallest rocks, but I carried what I could.  We made a tower of them at the side of the field and I recall thinking that they looked like potatoes.

Years later I once again moved stones with my husband William.  He hitched our draft horses, Jim and John the huge Belgian geldings, to our “rock boat” which was a piece of steel bent up on all sides, supported by rebar, and used to “float” the heavy rocks out of the field.  He had used it a lot growing up in the red rock country of Hurricane, UT.  His family’s farm fields were filled with stones, but they were determined to grow in them every year.  We used the rock boat on our family farm in Missouri to remove stones from the area where we planted 1,000 fruit trees.

My children have had the pleasure of moving stones from the fields we’ve worked, building their own potato looking stacks, spiriting them away to serve as foundations for play forts or Anasazi cliff dwelling replicas.

Moving stones is as much a part of farming as planting seeds or hoeing weeds.   We are accustomed to hard work, well acquainted with the weight and weariness of it, and have felt the absolute pleasure of falling into bed at night exhausted but satisfied with a good day’s effort.

But recently I’ve run up against hard places where I’ve never been before and I’ve labored in fields that baffle, confuse, and sometimes pain me.  I try to make sense of the rocks in my chosen professional “field” and I confess that I cannot make sense of them at all.

Two of our fellow farmers and friends were recently raided on their farm in Overton, Nevada.  Their “crime”?  They were planning to serve fresh food from their garden, free range beef and lamb, prepared by a certified chef in a certified kitchen to their friends and farm members.

Does it confuse you too?  I’m baffled.

In fact I’m beyond baffled, I’m appalled.   I confess that in the past when I’ve seen some of the “food raid” videos I have thought to myself “they must have done something they shouldn’t have, they must have crossed a line somewhere.  A government agency wouldn’t do that…would they?”  But I happen to personally know Monte and Laura Bledsoe, the Nevada farmers who were raided, and what I know of them speaks so loudly of integrity, commitment, and dedication to principles of kindness and service that I can’t believe that they didn’t do everything in their power to comply with any regulations given to them by the health department.  I’ve been to Quail Hollow Farm multiple times, and the Bledsoe’s were just here at our farm in Oregon City two weeks ago.   I’ve seen the amount of effort they put into serving the people in their community, the efforts that they go to bring not only food, but comfort and compassion to their farm members.  I’ve watched Laura travel to Africa to bring the hope of education and freedom to countries that are looking for both.  I’ve heard her, a quietly diligent woman, stand and teach youth and adults alike to work hard, study harder, and to stand up for what they believe in.

Here’s Monte…he really looks like a nefarious character doesn’t he?

And here’s Laura with the Las Vegas chapter president of Slow Foods.  Yup…really suspicious.

Then I watched the videos of the raid, the responses of the Quail Hollow farm members and I ask myself:  if this is what food safety means where have our American freedoms gone?  You can watch the video yourself and read Laura’s words in this article: http://shanonbrooks.com/2011/10/people-live-dirt-roads-monte-laura-bledsoe-quail-hollow-farm-csa/

When friends are not allowed to eat a meal together to celebrate the bounty of the year, when a government official tells a state certified farmer that her food is only fit for a landfill, not even good enough for pigs, when people who have hired a farmer to raise their produce for them are not permitted to eat that food, when that same official tells a concerned citizen “that’s all the information you need to know” …I would say that it is well past time to speak up and say something.

This past year I testified in Salem before a committee that was considering the Oregon Agricultural Reclamation Act sponsored by Friends of Family Farmers.  I asked them to defend my right to produce the food that consumers want.  I was one among a good crowd of farmers asking for the same right, and lobbyists for big ag who were opposed to it.  Several of our farm members made it down to that meeting to show their support, not as farmers but as EATERS, for the freedom to obtain more easily the food they wish to consume.

But it’s not enough.  We MUST keep talking.  We must be diligent in defending our right to consume healthy food…because as this video demonstrates there are people in positions of power who do not believe you have that right.  And we need more voices.

What can you do to make a difference?  Let me give you a couple of suggestions:

1. Join and support Friends of Family Farmers.  I have been working with them for a while now and I am nothing but impressed with their commitment to preserving your food freedom and the right to farm.  They need more committed members to keep their vision going.  Visit their website at http://www.friendsoffamilyfarmers.org
2. Join and support The Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund.  I am currently a member and have found their advice to be a great help.  By helping them defend farmers on a national level you are defending the right to eat the food of your choice. You can see the mission and work of the fund at http://www.ftcldf.org
3. Last but not least…whenever possible buy your food directly from a farmer.  We are so blessed in this area to be surrounded by farms that are willing to sell direct to consumers.  Find them, buy your food from them, and let your purchasing habits send a loud and clear message that you want to be free to eat good food.  You have no idea how powerful your choice to buy farm fresh and local is to food freedom.  It’s what keeps the farmers growing, it’s what keeps the food available for next year, it’s what help drives the desire to farm sustainably, using natural methods that protect the soil, the water, and the animals and plants that take their living from them.

If we work together we can maintain our right to eat healthy food, raised in a way that builds healthy families and healthy communities.  Is it something you believe in?  Is it something you can defend?  One of my favorite quotes is from the pilot and author of “The Little Prince” Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

“Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart.”

I learned while I was a young girl picking rocks out of a field on my parents farm what sacrifice for the farm meant.  I learned at their side as we traveled the country on back roads and scenic byways, visiting memorials and historic markers along the way about the lives of men and women who sacrificed to give me this land that I farm.  I have felt an obligation to them and to myself to preserve and defend what they lived and died for.  William and I have spent our married life defending it together.  We have labored with the land even when it hasn’t been popular, when our neighbors have accused us of being crazy, evil, or stupid for trying to raise our crops in a regenerative way.  We recently had a neighbor tell us in a very confrontational tone that we were doomed to fail, he didn’t want cows and chickens near his property and that we were fooling ourselves if we thought we’d grow anything but rocks in our fields because this land won’t produce anything else.

It may very well be that we harvest a few rocks from our farm…but then we’ve done it before and we are willing to do it again.  Because those who come after us will have fewer rocks to contend with if we care for our fields well today.  And in the meantime our fields of stone are yielding some pretty delicious “weeds” like these…

And these…

And these…

Thank you so much for supporting C’est Naturelle Farms.  Thank you for speaking up for food freedom with your grocery money.  We know that with the difficult economic times we are in every dollar counts and we don’t take them for granted.  Your commitment gives us the ability to keep going and we don’t take the sacrifice you make lightly.

Together we can till fields of stone and build the foundation of a healthy, free society.  It’s a battle, but if Napoleon was right and “an army travels on its stomach” then at least we’ll go to war well fed.

Why do I have a fee on my account?

Dear farm member who owns a part of a cow on our lovely farm:

Thank you for your recent inquiry about bottle charges.

We have kept records each and every delivery day for who has returned bottles.  Our policy is: Return the same amount of bottles you picked up full with milk the week before.  You picked up 2 last week?  Return 2 this week.  We at the farm like simple math.

We don’t require you to make extra trips to get there before our delivery guy.  We just calculate returned bottles from two weeks prior delivery document.

What? How does that work?

Answer: when you pick up fresh milk, leave same amount of empty bottles from previous week’s delivery. They sit there for a week until Jon comes back to deliver fresh milk.  He picks up those lonely bottles, which as that point have been away from the farm for two weeks and miss us. He lines up those bottles, records the names and quantities and sends that info right from the drop site in an email to our office.  We have a long list of these emails.

It is has been a very busy summer, so it has just been now that we are tackling these records.  At this point, the fees you see listed are from bottles not returned from the first half of the summer.  We DO, however, check each time before we charge the fee whether a customer has been on vacation that week.  If so, we don’t charge for the missing bottle as we understand you weren’t there to return it.

Why such a big deal? We need bottles returned each week to be able to fill milk orders for the coming week.  We are at a point now that because we could not calculate bottles returns all summer and people became relaxed about returning, we are scrambling at the beginning of each week to have enough bottles for our deliveries.

So if you see a charge, there was a week where you did not return bottles.  There is no way we can check bottles delivered weeks later as being accounted for that particular week it should have brought back (so we could fill it up and send it back out again when we needed it.)  However, upon your word  we will refund fees if you have indeed at some point sent all your bottles back to the farm.  And in the future, always return the same amount of bottles you picked up the week before when you pick up your fresh milk.

Thank you for your efforts to help us continue on our road to sustainability.  We are a small operation, run on the power of vision and volunteers and it takes our farm members support and efforts to make it all work!

Sincerely,

Your Farm Team, C’est Naturelle Farms

And for your entertainment: A Video on how to mark your bottles for return

Books, Bradbury, and Knowing Beans

My mom called me this morning at around 6 am.  She lives in rural Missouri and tries to wait until a “decent” hour before she calls in the morning.  I am usually awake, but not always out of bed when she rings.  We’ve kept in touch this way for years.  She calls to tell me about all kinds of things: the worshipers at church, births and deaths of anyone I might know, marriages, the latest recipe she found, the last book she’s been reading.

This morning she called me about an article she read in her little hometown paper, Bethany’s Republican Clipper.  The author was lamenting what he had discovered at a university bookstore during a recent trip to the Mizzou campus in Columbia.  “Where are the books?” he asked.  In their place he had found cosmetics, movies, toys, candy, and gift cards.  He pondered what was becoming of our society when we have become so dependent on digital knowledge.  He argued for the continuing necessity of physical books, those glorious works of art upon whose pages is recorded the best and worst of human thought.

It’s a good question…where are the books?

I see many of them on thrift store shelves.  I come home with a stack of them almost every week from Goodwill.  Their prices range from $0.10 to $2.00 each.  I don’t often check books out from the Library.  I’m incredibly grateful for the library, my children adore it, but I never remember to bring the books back on time.  I’m forever paying late fees and I’ve found it’s just cheaper to buy my own copy.  Besides that I’m a compulsive re-reader.  I seldom read a book just once…unless it was drivel the first time around, in which case I don’t waste my time.  I love words, the sound of them as they move through my mind, the texture of them on my tongue when I say them aloud.  I love the combination of words that lead to meaning, to thought, and to action.  There are passages in the books I’ve read that have the flow and cadence of poetry.  I like to reread it just for the depth of feeling and soul resonating power they engender.

I have often set down a book that has just filled my heart and mind up and been appalled to see the $0.25 price tag.  How could those thoughts be worth only twenty-five cents?  Grateful as I am that I could afford to purchase it, I am still appalled.  It comes too close for comfort to Guy Montag’s initial belief that books had no value in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.  And just how close to the hedonistic society described by Bradbury have we become when a box of Trojans has replaced a copy of Tolstoy on the shelf?

The act of bookmaking used to be an art form.  The illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages, the beloved and well-tended scrolls of the ancients, even the carved clay tablets of the early Mesopotamians were all created, cared for, and preserved because they were beautiful both in being and in content.  They were valued not only for the words on their pages, but for the time it took to create them, the joy that went into every stroke of the pen or brush.

It reminds me of farming.  “Vernie,” you say “Everything reminds you of farming.”  It’s true.  I’m a farmer…what else can I say?

We’ve had the most fascinating experiences over the last 10 months as we have been busily building a successful farm here in the Willamette Valley.  We have done our best to marry the joy of our ancestors farming methods with the modern technology of marketing.  We’ve tried to make it easier for our customers to order our farm goods while maintaining our commitment to raise our produce naturally.

What does that have to do with books or more specifically the value of books?  Just about everything.

We have become accustomed to the digital information age.  With our Kindle’s, Nook’s, and iPad’s we have access to 1000’s of books right at our fingertips.  Not only that, but we can search our books by keyword and idea, thereby chunking our texts into little tidbits, tiny bite size pieces that don’t take too long to consume.  We see this paradigm shift in our farming business as well.  We’ve made it so easy to order products on line that sometimes potential customers are unaware that we actually do raise the food they are purchasing; an effort which takes time.  I recently had several customers experience some difficulty with ordering a product in our web store.  I received multiple emails informing me that the system was not working because they couldn’t order what they wanted.  I had to explain, in a couple of instances several times, that it wasn’t the system…there simply weren’t any more (eggs, milk, kale, etc.).  “What?” is the response I heard “But I want to order some.”  It’s a producer’s nightmare, people want your product but you don’t have enough.  All I could do was explain that the chickens, cows, and garden can only produce so much.  We don’t force feed them, or put them in cages to make them lay, or sprinkle the ground with chemical fertilizers that would make them bigger.  We grow in harmony with the seasons and with the needs of the animals.

And it takes time.

Time.  That is the crux of the common dilemma between books, farming, raising children, cooking a healthy meal, or creating a work of art.

We can gain enough information in 15 minutes of skimming a book on the hand-held gadgetry of our choice to hold our own in a college class or coffee shop discussion.  We can walk or drive to the closest restaurant and have a fully cooked, ready-to-go meal in the same amount of time.  We can get on YouTube and pick up child rearing helps in little 3 minute bites.  We can bring home a well-balanced, supposedly nutritious pre-made meal that can be served up piping hot in less than 20 minutes.  We can take a mediocre digital snap-shot, run it through Photoshop to make it brighter, clearer, more colorful and voila! we have an instant work of art.

We can do all these things that save us time… but has it really saved us?  What have we done with all this extra time we are saving?  Is this kind of internet style book, food, and art surfing enough to change our heart, nourish our bodies or to move us to action?  When I have to explain that it takes time for the chickens to lay eggs, much the same as Aesop’s fable “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs”, I’m inclined to think that something is grievously wrong.  I often get off the phone or finish answering an email and I think “Don’t they know that it takes time to raise and grow good food?”  Many of our farm members do, I hear quite often from our amazing customers how glad they are that we persist in a farming method that costs more, pays less, but provides a superior crop.  They value the work that we do because they recognize the time it takes to do it.

Value is in direct relationship to effort.  We value what we work for, what we expend our resources for, what we sacrifice for.  We value what we take time to pursue.  That which comes too easily I’m afraid we discard just as quickly.

Farms, families, literature and art are not created overnight.  They take effort, commitment, and an intense dedication to whichever principles drive the creators.  Like Thoreau we must be “determined to know beans.”  To know the value of a book we must read it, hold it, ponder it, and discuss it.  To know the value of a work of art (be it painted, sung, played, or acted) we must spend time in observance, contemplation, and discovery of it.  To “know beans” we must plow the field, plant the seed, pull the weeds, and labor against mice (woodchucks for Thoreau), grasshoppers, and mold.

We must put the time in to reading, listening, seeing, and doing.  So that the next time someone asks the question “Where are the books?” we will be able to say with a surety, not unlike Bradbury’s Granger, that the books are in us.