Organic Food 101

Lesson 2: Getting to Know Your Organic Farmer

Greg Reynolds used to be an engineer with a suburban St. Paul, Minnesota Corporation. In that role he was able to travel around the world to serve his company's customers. He got tired of that and became an organic farmer.

Kristan Doolan attended the University of Maine. While she was working on her Masters degree there she, along with her husband George, lived in a yurt. (Yurts, or Gers, are round tents used by Mongolian shepherds - for more info see: yurt. It was during life in a yurt that Kristan decided to become a dairy goat farmer.

In this chapter you're going to go on a tour of Greg's farm, which he calls Riverbend because it's on a bend in the Crow River, and Kristan's farm. Kristan calls her farm Doe's Leap because, in the early days of her farm life, her goat does kept leaping over the fence. Goats are as playful and intelligent as three year olds.

Both Kristan and Greg are intelligent and innovative farmers. You're going to read about some of the interesting things they do - Greg's invented a bicycle operated flame weeder and Kristan has experimented with types of grazing so she won't have to use parasite killing chemicals - and you'll get an idea how hard it is to get organic goat cheese and vegetables to market.

We're also going to discuss how industrial agriculture produces cotton and why you should consider using organic cotton clothing and bed clothes.

As you read the articles on Doe's Leap and Riverbend Farm do pay attention to how they produce what they sell. Their organic production methods are important to them and to the people who buy and eat their products. But also take a look at how they sell their food.

They are both certified organic. But neither of them sell to large processors or whole sale suppliers. They do a lot of what is called direct marketing. They sell to either the people who are going to eat the food or they sell to restaurants who prepare the food. Greg also sells to food cooperative grocers and Kristin sells to a small food processor. In general, these two farms are closer to the end user than most farmers are. That allows the individual, restaurant owner, produce department manager, or food processor to know who raised their food. It also allows them to ask questions about how the food was produced. In the case of the individual customer, restauranteur, or produce manager, they can go and visit Greg or Kristin's farm. I know for a fact that they do visit Greg's farm and I know that Kristen has hosted tours of her farm.

Direct marketing creates a level of accountability between farmer and eater that doesn't exist in the industrial system. For the farmer it also reinforces the pride that they take in producing food in the manner that they do. Fortunately, it also usually provides the farmer with a little better profit than if they sold their crops and products to a large wholesaler or processor.

A visit to Riverbend: Growing Certified Organic vegetables

Riverbend is a forty acre certified organic vegetable farm located a short distance west of Minneapolis, Minnesota, near the town of Delano. Greg Reynolds owns the farm. To help him with his work, Greg hires part-time labor.

Riverbend keeps only about half of the forty acres in production each season. The other half is allowed to rest, or lay fallow. Part of the fallow period also includes planting crops that are not harvested but actually plowed back into the soil. These crops, called green manure, protect the soil while it's resting and actually add new organic matter to the soil when they are plowed in. The green manure crops are part of a four year rotation of crops to build the soil and protect the crops from insects and disease.

When Greg and his wife Mary purchased the farm in the early 1990s, the soil had suffered for years under a continuous corn and chemical regime. Greg set out to improve the soil by only growing things on it every four years. His current crop rotation involves a season of green fallow, followed by a green manure crop of soybeans, then winter wheat, mixed vegetables, and finally field peas, beans, and small grains.

Here are some of Greg's thoughts on his rotation and soil building program.

"There was a lot of quack grass and thistle on our farm. The fallow started out as a black fallow that we tilled every week. That did a good job controlling the weeds but it was hard on the ground. Now we just mow the green fallow to keep it from setting seed. You can do a pretty good job on quack grass if you keep cutting it before it goes to seed. Keeping after it like that and then, in late July, going through with a field cultivator and tearing it up, really weakens it."

Greg would never consider using an herbicide to kill the weeds. Besides, he enjoys watching the soil improve.

"With the mowed fallow we're improving the soil quality and environment because the roots are still underground and trying to grow. I can walk out in the field and see little chunks of plant matter that aren't broken down. When we got here there was almost none of that. That plant matter represents slow release nutrients. Green manure builds up soil and is the cheapest fertilizer by far."

Greg won't use insecticides either. That's not just because being certified organic won't allow it. He's simply opposed to putting poisons on food, in the soil, and in his lungs. He controls insects by attracting predatory insects with something he calls an insectiary.

"There's an insectiary strip between our beds of vegetables," he says. "Our beds are twelve rows wide and then there's a six feet row of the remainder of the winter wheat green manure. That attracts predatory insects. I'd like to find something I can seed in the spring that will come on when the winter wheat is dying out. I tried hairy vetch last year but it didn't do anything until the Fall. This year I'll try buckwheat in there."

Sometimes the insectiary doesn't work.

"We had these false chinch bugs that wiped out close to $4,000 in greens and radishes," he says. "Bill Hutchison, at the University, said if you don't get on top of these they'll breed, lay eggs, and die off and it'll look like you're done but next year they'll be back. They swarmed just thick. So, that's one case you've got to do something. You can't wait for a natural predator to come along and eat them."

So Greg turned to a tool that has fairly wide success in controlling weeds in corn without herbicides.

"My response to that was to flame everything that they were on mercilessly, day after day, to try and eradicate them." Greg flamed the false chinch bugs with a hand held flame weeder mounted on a bicycle frame. The bicycle frame carries the propane tank and the wand and Greg pushes the rig. Time will tell if the chinch bugs survived immolation.

Consumer education is also an important part of the solution to insects at Riverbend. Greg sells a wide variety of vegetables - radishes, greens, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, cucumbers, potatoes, squash, peas, beans, corn, and garlic - to restaurants, stores, and a weekly subscription of vegetables to individuals in a system called "community supported agriculture." Educating those consumers is an important part of an organic farmer's job.

"We have all this expectation for this perfect designer food in the grocery store," he says. "When I first started selling arugula to the Wedge (a food cooperative) they didn't want it. It had holes in it from flea beetles and so I launched into this thing about rotenone. I told them I can use rotenone but it's really toxic to fish and to people and it's implicated in Parkinson's Disease. I told them it lasts for three days and then I told them I could use something like that or you could explain to your customers that I'm not using it because of those reasons."

Nowadays nobody complains about the early season holes in Greg's arugula. Greg and his staff don't have to spray rotenone on their farm along the Crow River and customers eating fresh arugala aren't exposed to rotenone residue. Besides, Greg says, the little holes in the leaves don't taste like anything.

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