GREEN Farming the Future (from SF Gate)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2005/08/03/gree.DTL
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Wednesday, August 3, 2005 (SF Gate)
GREEN Farming the Future/Your organic food box is a delicious step towards a sustainable tomorrow
Gregory Dicum, Special to SF Gate


Out near Winters, in Yolo County, there's an unripe Sharlyn melon with my
name on it. It's growing within shouting distance of Putah Creek, which
keeps it moist in the murderous Central Valley sun with water from Lake
Berryessa, in the Coast Range. This little melon will be sitting out there
at the edge of the Central Valley for another month or so until it's
perfectly sweet and juicy, then it'll be picked and brought to the City --
for me.

This is the kind of relationship that Terra Firma Farm, which tends 170
acres of organic fruits and vegetables about an hour from the City,
fosters with its community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscription
program. The concept isn't new -- subscribers like me pay a local farm in
advance for a regular food supply -- but now that this kind of direct
partnership between farmer and city dweller has been around for a while,
it's starting to reap rewards for everyone involved and show how we really
can live in a sustainable way.

"The first CSAs in the country were in 1984, on the East Coast," says
Guillermo Payet, founder of Local Harvest, an online directory of local
food options for people across the country. (The idea originated in Japan
in the 1960s.) "Pretty soon -- like the next year -- a few more popped up.
And in the last few years there have been about a hundred new CSAs founded
every year. It's hard to keep track, but there could be 1,500 nationwide."

The largest CSA in the United States, Angelic Organics outside Chicago,
has 1,200 members. Payet estimates that 130,000 families around the
country get their food from CSAs. Thirteen different farms integrate CSA
programs for Bay Area dwellers into their other operations, providing city
residents with access to everything from my eagerly anticipated Sharlyn
and other fruits, nuts and veggies, to duck eggs, pheasants and natural
beef -- all at farmers' market prices. Thousands of families in the Bay
Area participate; Terra Firma alone has 700 subscribers.

Michael Marriner is one of them. "It took a while to get used to it," he
told me, "because you really do find yourself eating differently, cooking
differently. I was used to buying grocery store produce where you can get
grapes year round or lettuce year round; it's coming from all over the
world. And now what I'm eating is very seasonal, but the rewards are
incredible. The quality of the produce is just amazing."

Indeed, Marriner fell so in love with his CSA that he volunteered to
become a drop host. Now each week about 20 wax boxes of produce are
dropped off at his home in the Mission for other members in his
neighborhood to pick up. He has to be around for a few hours one day each
week, but he says it's not a hassle: "There's something nice about the
community aspect of having these people come by. It's social in a very
light sense -- sort of like seeing people at church. I am connected to
what we're eating, and to my community, in a much different way."

Farms that operate CSAs find themselves operating in a different realm
too. Paul Underhill, one of Terra Firma's co-owners, says that in the
decade that Terra Firma has been offering a CSA it has become an important
part of the farm's overall business. "We've figured it out over time," he
says. "Besides the CSA, we sell at farmers' markets, we sell to
restaurants, we sell to stores like Rainbow Grocery and Market Hall in the
East Bay, and we grow some stuff for wholesalers who sell to produce
markets. We've figured out what stuff we need to grow just for the CSA and
what stuff we can grow efficiently for other people too."

In the hit-or-miss world of the farmer, CSAs can be critical. "The CSA has
made the difference for us between staying in business and going out of
business," says Underhill. "We have years when we make a profit on the
wholesale crops and years where we lose money on them, and the CSA
stabilizes the whole thing. It's extremely predictable and it really
smoothes out our cash flow."

"A lot of small farms are struggling," adds Local Harvest's Payet. "They
don't have the economy of scale to grow a couple of big crops and sell
them to a local packer, where they're really competing with the big
industrial farms."

"Some of the most common vegetables that people eat are actually not
profitable for small growers to grow at wholesale," agrees Underhill.
"Something like carrots -- it's a labor-intensive crop and the wholesale
price is very low, but we can grow carrots that are better than the ones
in the store, and we get a good price for them by selling them retail to
our subscribers."

And this quality is increasingly in demand. "It's not just that there are
more CSAs," says Payet, "but the CSAs are doing more business. A lot of
them are selling out. Most sell out, actually."

Underhill agrees. "Our CSA has reached the point where there is a natural
limit: We have basically maxed out our truck driver," he says. "It's nice
to be in a reasonably stable situation -- it actually feels sort of
sustainable. Nobody's making a lot of money right now in agriculture --
including the owners -- but folks who work for us have a year-round job."

Terra Firma has 25 full-time employees and hires some seasonal labor in
the summer. Underhill says that the CSA lets him provide better jobs than
other farms: "Everybody's able to pay the rent and put food on the table
-- it's a much more stable job. The yearly incomes are significantly
higher because we don't have long periods of no work."

That is not the kind of thing we normally hear farmers say about their
operations, and it gets to the core of the CSA rationale -- the idea that
urbanites and nearby farmers need one another to make the entire region
work. If we city dwellers want to enjoy fresh local produce, then people
on nearby farms need to be able to make a decent living growing it. That
basic balance of market forces has to underlie true sustainability.

But farmland in Northern California is threatened by development pressure
-- 82,000 acres are developed statewide each year, squeezing places like
Terra Firma, which is halfway between the sprawling cities of the Bay Area
and Sacramento.

"There's a demographic thing going on," says Paul Underhill. "People want
to move out of the city and get a little ranchette in the country and have
a little garden and all that. I'm sympathetic to that desire, but it's
putting a lot of pressure on farmers. It's much better for people who live
in the city and are committed to living in urban areas to stay there and
support regional small farms through a CSA or farmers' market, or shop at
someplace like Rainbow Grocery. It's really important to preserve a local
food supply, and in order to do that it's important for everyone in San
Francisco to not move to the country."

"There's really no doubt that California is one of the best places in the
world to grow the stuff that we're growing," Underhill continues. "It
would really be a tragedy for Californians to be importing most of their
fresh produce, but that's what's going to happen if we keep paving the
state over."

CSAs don't just help preserve agricultural open space. In a very tangible
way, they help re-establish the kinds of human relationships that once
characterized our society.

"Our economy used to be much more personal," says Payet. "You knew the
cobbler that made your shoes and you knew the farmer that gave you food,
and that was actually really great. It was built on really rich human
interactions. Nowadays we're mostly pretty much isolated; we're like
little islands. You just go to this impersonal big store and you buy your
stuff and that's it. CSAs are bringing back the relationship between the
consumer and the farmer."

The farms encourage members to visit, and they include a newsletter with
each week's box of produce. "I take the responsibility very seriously,"
says Underhill, who writes Terra Firma's newsletter under the pen name
Pablito. "Because of it I think our subscribers understand more about
agriculture in general and organic agriculture in particular than people
who don't live in a farming area of California. News stories about
agriculture tend to be either really negative or silly positive. There's a
lot gaps to be filled in."

I've certainly developed a healthy respect for the people who grow my food
from reading Terra Firma's newsletter. It's humbling to know that the
winter storm passing overhead is going to have Underhill and his employees
up to their armpits in mud just so I can have my salad greens a couple of
weeks later.

This month's yellow, green and ruby-red heirloom tomatoes taste all the
sweeter because I can remember being concerned about them when they were
mere seedlings struggling through this spring's unusually wet weather.

"Just by getting the newsletter from the farmer and getting a box of
veggies that are seasonal," says Guillermo Payet, "you learn about the
environment and you learn about your community."

As a farmer, Underhill is more pragmatic: To him CSAs are part of a
movement to reclaim food quality. "Food is just a really basic thing," he
says. "Most people in the U.S. should be able to enjoy good fresh food. We
spend less of our per capita income on food than anyone else, but so much
of it is bad. In the drive to make everything super-efficient everyone
forgot that this is food -- it's supposed to taste good, and we're
supposed to pay attention to that."

"With the CSA you're avoiding the whole system that screwed up the food,"
he continues. "Because your customer is the person who is eating the food,
you have a direct relationship with them. You're avoiding all the people
in the middle who came up with the idea that, for example, we should breed
tomatoes that can sit around for a week in the store without getting
mushy. The produce manager is one of the villains responsible for screwing
up the average American's enjoyment of produce. With the CSA we pick most
of the stuff the day before you guys get it. That's about as fresh as you
can get."

And ultimately that's what keeps people like me and Michael Marriner
coming back each week. "I get the best produce imaginable," he says. "The
strawberries we get from the farm are not the same strawberries you get in
the store. These are very juicy, very sweet, very ripe strawberries. Same
with the tomatoes. We get the same garlic and tomatoes that Terra Firma
sells to Chez Panisse. I'm eating pretty good."

Gregory Dicum, author of Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air,
writes about the natural world from San Francisco. A forester by training,
Gregory has worked at the front lines of some of the world's most urgent
environmental crises. For more of his work, see www.dicum.com/list

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Copyright 2005 SF Gate