Hi Everyone,
In this update:
1. Our last week of the 2009 Summer Session
Many of you have been asking when the Summer Session ends. This week is the last week. We are now in our 20th week of the 20 week Session. This month happens to end on a Saturday, so it turns out that no matter what day you get your share, your last pick-up will be in the last week of the month.
2. The Fall Session
I think most of you know that the Fall Session comes right on the heels of the Summer Session. This year, as noted above, Summer Session ends for all of you in the last week of October, with the final pick-up being, for the Saturday folks, on the 31st. The Fall Session starts the following week, with the first boxes of the Fall Session being delivered on Wednesday, November 4th. You can sign up on-line at www.jubileefarm.org.
Because of the uncertainty of our flooding situation we don't have anyone in the Fall Session pick up at the farm - all Fall Session boxes are delivered, and all deliveries are on Wednesday at designated depots. I should knock on wood when I say this, but we've never failed to make a delivery in the Fall Session because of flooding. But we've certainly had to work around rising and descending water and it just works best for us to get the boxes to the depots rather than ask members to try to come to the farm during flooding season.
It is inevitably the case that to assure steady production of vegetables through the end of the Summer Session we will still have a lot of food in the ground when November rolls around. This is especially true this year! So, we're hoping a lot of you will join us for the Fall Session that runs for six weeks from November 4th through December 9th.
As I hope you all know, during our 20-week Summer Session all the items you receive in your share are grown right here on our farm. That makes all of you who are with us through the Summer Session true summer-time locavores! During our "off season" sessions (Fall, Winter, Early Spring, and Late Spring) our boxes contain as much produce from our farm as possible. In the Fall Session the boxes contain a very high percentage of items from our farm, and that will especially be the case this year. But we do at times purchase food grown from other farms. When we do that we purchase as locally as possible.
When you sign up for any of the off-season shares, you have the option of selecting a "Locally Grown" box. Many of you like to do this to support local agriculture through the year and to support an economy with a smaller ecological footprint. Usually there is about a fifty-fifty split between members who choose the "local only" box and those who don't.
In the local only box we make every effort to buy in produce (when we have to) from within a one-hundred-mile radius. There are a few times we go as far as 150 miles to include some items from eastern Washington and Southern Oregon, but only in very rare circumstances would we go beyond that.
For members who don't designate "local only," we buy some produce from California. But for a variety of reasons we just can't bring ourselves to purchase food for our members from outside our country; so, no, you won't get mangos, pineapples or bananas in your shares. It's not that we're trying to impose our values on others, nor do we mean to judge the many delivery services that do include items from around the world. We just have to be at peace with ourselves about what we do; that this is where we stand.
If you have questions about the Fall Session, please drop us a note at jubileefarm@hotmail.com. We have a lot of food, and are hoping for a large Fall membership!
3. Signing up for the 2010 Summer Session
I'd like to encourage you to sign up now for the 2010 Summer Session. We know the Summer Session is a long time from now, but your applications help us so much in planning for the upcoming season. There's also a benefit for you in signing up early.
We are zeroing in on the number of shares our farm can sustainably produce. I know that to say anything like "this much, but not more" (which Wendell Barry calls the "agrarian standard") is probably contrary to all conventional business wisdom. But how can we really talk about "sustainable agriculture" unless we recognize that there is some limit to what we can produce? It could be that it is the "conventional business wisdom" that always demands "more, more, more" that is causing us to become a nation that can no longer sustain itself - at least not without some major changes in the near future.
I've mentioned many times in these newsletters that one of the important things any biodynamic farm needs to establish is how much cropland (for us, how many "shares") can be sustained by the number of cattle that farm can simultaneously sustain. Going over that number means non-sustainability. We still don't know what that number of shares is for our farm, but we are getting a better idea and it may be fewer than we thought at first. We didn't have to close applications this past season. But I can easily foresee the day when, as we balance the number of shares with the fertility we can provide on-farm, and as the nutritional benefits of biodynamically-raised food become better known, the number of shares we offer will fall short of the demand for shares. Signing up now not only helps us in our planning, but it also insures that you and your family will be a part of our CSA next year. We've been told that the "smart money" doesn't commit itself until it has to. But the heart of the CSA is a mutual commitment. Maybe it is time for us individually (and collectively) to recognize that sometimes accepting the risk of commitment yields gains that the wary consumer never knows about. (This is the economic analog to Blaise Pascal's famous aphorism: "The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.")
So, if you intend to be members of our farm in the next Summer Session, please go on-line (www.jubileefarm.org) and send us your application. The one hundred dollar deposit guarantees your commitment to our farm and your share of the 2010 season.
4. Summer Session Survey
As we close out the 2009 Summer Session, we hope you will take the time to complete the attached survey and return it to us either electronically (copy the linked survey and paste it into an email to Jubilee Farm) or by mail (Jubilee Farm, 229 West Snoqualmie River Road NE, Carnation WA 98014). Wendy and I read each survey every year and value immensely the comments, suggestions and insights that they contain. Thanks in advance for your participation!
5. Reflections on the "unsoiled" life
"The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled" (from Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins).
I understand that many people become sad or even depressed when the days get shorter, colder, wetter, and we experience many more hours of darkness. But I look forward to this time of year, because times of cold/wet/dark afford the opportunity to read more. When the weather is good and the demands of the farm are ever before me, I find it hard to sit down and do the reading I'd like to do.
So it is that in the shorter days that come with October, even though each day is a busy one with farm activities, I've had time to pick up a novel that I've wanted to read. The book is by a well-known, local author: Tom Robbins. In it I came across the wonderful quotation found above - a gem that I hadn't really expected. It expresses an idea whose truth has become clear to me over the years.
I've thought a lot about what underlies what I sense as a common distain for, and bias against, dirt. You see it everywhere. Many (though certainly not all!) of the children who come to the farm on school tours in October become seriously distressed if they get dirt on their hands. Many parents share (project?) that horror as is witnessed by the mad dash to get hands extricated, post-haste, in the event of their child coming in contact with . . . dirt.
It seems that for so many of us just getting mud on our shoes is equivalent to being exposed to some kind of plague. Several years ago, after spending some time in New York City, I became aware that it had been many days since I had stood on the ground. It took a special trip to Central Park to even see any dirt, and there it was roped off so no one could/would actually step on it or make any "contact"!
The word "fastidious" is an interesting one. Today this word is often associated with hygiene and/or cleanliness and is, I believe, generally considered to be a virtue. But the etymological roots of this word are found in the French and Latin expressions for "arrogance" and "irksomeness," and originally it referred to "having high and often capricious standards."
We live in a society that in many ways is obsessed with hygienic fastidiousness. Having made the corporate discovery that disease is often caused by unsanitary conditions (which even pigs seem to know), we've made the further, illogical and unsound inference that being dirty, or that dirt itself, is somehow unsanitary (and a harbinger of disease, prolonged illness and probably death). The logical inference of this illogical belief is that getting dirty is something to be avoided like the plague, which is just one short step away from the belief that dirt is the plague.
What an odd thing this is as a belief of people who are "made from the dirt" and whose existence is completely and utterly dependent on dirt. What does this wide-spread societal prejudice suggest about us? How can we be content and satisfied when we've identified the very thing that we are made of and that we depend on as being a dangerous or a bad thing? Which brings us to the quotation from Tom Robbins: "The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled."
What I wonder is how far we can go with the craze to create or exist in a state of hygienic fastidiousness. The physical irony is that in avoiding dirt and the rich diversity of microbes which constitute not only our life but also our health, we are becoming increasingly unhealthy. We have a medical "industry" that is obsessed with treatment but says little about how to experience health.
My interest here is not merely in the state of physical health, which is why I like Robbins' quotation so much, but in our deepest existential sense of who and what we are. What do our lives become when we are separated from ourselves, when what we are is the thing we seem to abhor? We become alienated from our own selves. Carried to its logical conclusion, we end up denying and hating our own existence. I wonder if our modern obsession with "cleanliness" and our concomitant distain of dirt is a secular descendent of the old (and, by the way, generally held to be "heretical") religious bifurcation of body and spirit. Of the many things that come to mind in this context (the waters here get very deep, very quickly!) is the powerful thesis of Earnst Becker's Pulitzer-winning book The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues that our inability or unwillingness to accept one of the salient characteristics of our existence-our mortality-underlies many of the social evils and psychological maladies that are rampant in the world.
All this because we just want to stay clean? No. But I have had many of you express having experienced a kind of inner healing that is associated with something as simple as coming to a farm and picking beans. That such a simple act can provide this kind of existential solace is perhaps an indication that as a society there is a limit to how much artifice we can stand, and a threshold of how much dirt we need.
6. Where do we go from here?
We feel a lot of excitement about the future expansion of Jubilee Farm. But in thinking of "expansion," we're not necessarily thinking about growing more food, enlarging our CSA, or even making more money. What we really want is to become better farmers and to manage the farm in such a way that it becomes even more diverse and more sustainable.
We all know that specialization is the path to the kind of efficiency that leads to high volume production and wealth. But how much "volume," high-production, and wealth can we stand? There seems to be a kind of enmity between quantity and quality, and I, for one, don't accept the idea that more of everything is necessarily better. I'm thinking of a different kind of "efficiency," the kind that doesn't ask "how can we do/make more?" but "how can we do better?"
One measure of how a farmer could do better is the degree to which his or her farm is self-sufficient. Farmers are in the "business" of producing food. But I believe we also need to be in the business of being stewards of the land. A stewardship plan is not a balance sheet, nor an efficiency design, where efficacy is measured in terms of the greatest financial return for the least amount of effort and/or risk.
We feel that the next step for us is to solidify plans for a small dairy that will be integrated into our cattle (fertility) operation. The harsh reality of living in a flood plain in which we have seen flooding increase dramatically over the last two decades makes this challenging. But one way or another, it is doable, and that is the direction we wish to pursue. It's not so much a bottom-line decision as it is a decision to further diversify and hence increase the kind of symbiosis that occurs in nature between animals and plants. Now having gotten our house in order (quite literally!), we are ready for the next phase!
7. Agri-political update
I'm not often shocked anymore by what I read in the paper. But I have to admit I was shocked and appalled by something I read in the Capital Press (a northwest, farming-centered newspaper) recently. It seems that Michael Pollen had been invited to speak at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo. When alumni heard about it, there was outrage expressed to the college, and threats of withholding promised donations to the school if Pollen were allowed to speak. After this expression of outrage, it was decided Pollen will be allowed to speak, but rather than have him speak alone, he will be a part of a panel. Pollen has graciously accepted the new terms of the speaking opportunity.
This episode (which was also played out in our own state when Pollen's Omnivore's Dilemma was placed on the reading list at WSU) reminds me how far we have to go, and just how insidious and entrenched the agricultural profit-barrens are in the US. Pollen is a full professor at Cal-Berkeley. He is an excellent, engaging, entertaining, provocative, informative and highly sought speaker. There is nothing in Pollen's credentials that would prevent him from being an excellent candidate to speak at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo or any other institution of higher education, and everything to recommend him. It is only his message that has raised the ire of agricultural alumni: he dares to criticize processed foods and "factory farming."
We see here the modus operandi of the powerful agri-business interests that wish to preserve their monopoly on food production in America--even it is done at the expense of the health of our people and the environmental health of our land. There is no desire to engage the issues, only to censure the voice of the opposition. Pollen is pilloried in the Capital Press as a religious preacher at a pulpit with a caption reading: "The food industry will kill you - my Good Book says! Can I get a big organic AMEN! Lemme hear you!"
Mockery, censure, threats of financial reprisals for those who would dare to listen. But this, sadly, is the world we live in. I wonder where they would stop if they could have their way. The mono-culture factory farms of the US are fighting back with their only weapons - power and intimidation. It's ugly, and it may get even uglier.
On a more local note, and not unrelated, I have some sad news to report. This is news that, though not as blatant as that expressed in the would-be repression of Michael Pollen, comes, I fear, from the same source. Many of you wrote to the King County Ag Commission to ask them to use the forum of the "future of farming" (which was occasioned by Sno-Valley Tilth's direct appeal to King County Council) to express to the Council the need to define agriculture in our APDs to exclude recreational uses of farmland. The Board of Sno-Valley Tilth unanimously supported such a definition, and made that position clear to the Ag Commission. But I have learned that when the Ag Commission makes its report, a definition of agriculture will not be on their list of recommendations. I've been told that the Ag Commission thought it is "too controversial."
I guess we just have to remember that although non-toxic and diversified agriculture has made great gains in the last few years, we still represent less than 3% of total agricultural in the US. Those among the other 97 percent obviously feel threatened.
I wish I could end this piece on a happy note, but I can't. We are missing a golden opportunity to preserve farmland in King County's designated Agricultural Production Districts for the purpose of "food for people" farming. Instead, the Commission seems bent on avoiding "controversy," and by default allowing any venture that calls itself agriculture (i.e. the owner of a golf course who boasts of being a "farmer" because he grows grass) to be the beneficiaries of benefits that have been hard-won by organic farmers and were expected to accrue to small, diversified, organic farmers rather than to recreational endeavors. I know how it's happened. I just feel completely unable to do anything about it and to be honest, I am quite frustrated. There's a lot of money and power behind maintaining the status quo. I won't give up doing the one thing I can-tending my garden-but I must say I am discouraged and disheartened about the future of agriculture in our County.
Our best to you all,
Erick and Wendy