Cali - FORN - I - A (part un)

A four month respite from writing. Gads!

An incredible trip to the North California Coast is worthy of picking up the keys again and sharing some beautiful photos.

In the summer of 2007 I had the good fortune to attend the Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture Conference (thanks Dr. J) and enjoyed my first visit to Ithaca, NY and the finger lakes region. I also got to catch up with an old Peace Corps buddy, Noelia Springston, and visit she and her husband's brand spanking new farm. As luck would have it I also got bumped on my US Airways flight up there and yippee for me, got a free ticket voucher out of the deal!

Well the last year's been a bit busy trying to get my Thesis finished, and I kept hoping I could really use that ticket as a reward for a thesis well defended. Well, the voucher was due to expire during the summer of '08 and I had to go ahead and use it or lose it so I guessed I might be done schooling and all by October and booked a ticket to San Francisco for October 10th.

Ha ha. My thesis ain't defended, but, it's job seeking time so that seems like a good excuse to go ahead and head on out there, right?

With a lot of help from my #1 farm buddy (a blonde canadian type) I got in touch with some farms to visit, scheduled a visit to the Center for Agroecology at Santa Cruz, shipped my bicycle UPS and away I went for 11 days of adventure.

So my first comment is that San Francisco just moved right up there to the top of my list of favorite American cities. Though I was quite disgruntled at the time, it was possibly to my good fortune that my bicycle on its ride out west was in a Train wreck and delayed for a few days, leaving me with some extra time to explore the city.

People often rave about the food in San Francisco and for good reason. I didn't have a bad meal the whole time. Here's a quick summary:

• the Market Bar @ the Ferry Building----Poached Eggs on Polenta with stewed tomatoes and swiss chard
• Cafe Divine @ Northbeach----- Porcini Ravioli, Homemade Gingerbread with caramel, and port for dessert
• Chez Panisse @ Berkley----- Baby lettuces with pomegrante, persimmon and fig, Roasted delicata squash, Roasted Fennel, and damn forgot the name of the chicken.
• Helmand Palace @ Van Ness---- Aushak - Afghan ravioli filled with leeks and scallions with mint/cilantro yogurt and beef sauce, Mourgh Challow - chicken and split pea curry, Rice Pudding.
  
• Mi Lindo Yucatan @ Noe Valley ---- shrimp/mango ceviche tostado, empanda, flauta, taco de Cochinita

Hmmmm! Yeah pretty good. Fell in love with a little bar in North Beach called the Columbus Cafe that had Speakeasy beer on tap for $1.50 a pint as part of their Recession Days special. Yeah, how could you not fall in love with San Francisco. Oh yeah, and I got to go white water Kayaking on the south fork of the American River just where we discovered gold for the first time in California...good ole Coloma.

So anyway eventually the bike came, I cheered right up and started heading south the 80 miles to Santa Cruz. I rode along the bay early one morning on my way out of town and this is what I saw.



and then the great GGB!



and then down the road a piece the California coast.



I broke myself in pretty good that day travelling 50+ miles. Went past the beautiful town of Pacifica and up and back down the Devils Slide (where these little photos were taken), then on to Pigeon Point Hostel which is one of two lighthouse hostels along this stretch of coast.



Hung out with some good folks here then early next morning had to hot foot it down to Santa Cruz to meet up with some folks at the Agroecology Center at UC Santa Cruz.

But I passed some groovy little places on the way. One of my favorites was Swanton Berry Farm which is one of the first organic strawberry farms in California. The place got my attention right off the bat with this great farm stand sign.



This place had the coolest farm stand I've ever seen. There were samples of strawberry jam on animal crackers, hot strawberry cider (yum), chocolate covered strawberries, strawberry shortcake, strawberry cheesecake, strawberry truffles (sooo good), pumpkin pie, then also cauliflower / leek soup....all organic. Then they had a sofa with a bookshelf filled with books about labor unions and cycling. I fell in love with this one book called the Noblest Invention - an Illustrated History of the Bicycle. I spent some quality time in this place both coming and going. Here's a quick shot of the simple building with a certified kitchen in back and some picnic tables out front.



And check this out. A little sumthin' for the cyclists! Yeah.



I'd run into another red and white sign early that morning as I was riding through literally miles of conventional Brussels Sprouts farms. They grow so many sprouts along this section of coast they actually have a Brussel Sprouts festival according to my Krebs cycling map. There were also sprouts all over the road, presumably swept out the back of hauling trucks. The sprout fields were quite beautiful and you could smell that sweet pungency of a Sprout.



But this red and white sign contrasts sharply with my friendly cycling sign in an eery but funny sort of way.


The Peligro Sprouts!

Well that's about all I got time for today. I'll see if I can't put some more stories up here in the next few days. And get back in the habit of writing.

a taste of local grass

When summertime comes, there’s just something that makes us want to fire up the grill and throw a bunch of hand patted beef burgers onto the sizzling flames. The crackling sound of searing meat and the wafting smells of the cook out cause most of us to salivate with anticipation. Just one whiff often makes one think, “I wonder if I can get an invitation to that cookout?” Our long-time friends the cows, the often uncelebrated guests of honor at the summer cookout, must feel exactly the same way when they stand at the fence staring upon a fresh pasture of tall, succulent grasses and think “How, oh how can I get an invitation to that good looking pasture?” When the fence is finally let loose they scramble into the forage, put they’re heads down and happily begin smacking and crunching. Tall, fresh grass is the cow’s equivalence of a summer cookout. And to a grass fed beef rancher the one sound that’s even better than burgers hitting the grill is happy cows crunching on fresh grass. “That’s my favorite sound,” explains Etwenda Wade, the rancher behind Tink’s Beef, a grass fed beef ranch located just east of Athens in Wilkes County.

With the interest in buying local and sustainable foods in full thrust, grass-fed beef is just beginning to come into its own. Not yet a part of our everyday parlance, grass-fed beef is a simple enough concept, but a full appreciation requires at least a basic understanding of the universe of the cow. Cows are herbivores; which simply means that their bodies are physiologically designed to ingest and digest green plants. Cows began to evolve, with the help of human domestication, from wild aurochs of Europe, Asia and North Africa around 6000 BC. This ancestry has predisposed cattle to be wide ranging foragers constantly on the search for tall fresh grass. Cattle also possess a strong herding instinct as a leftover defense mechanism from the once constant threat of predation. This lingering instinct basically says “eat and move, eat and move, and stay with the group.” By constantly moving they never overgraze the grass, and by staying together they eat faster, competing with each other for the choicest bites and gaining weight fast in the process.

Grass-fed beef takes full advantage of this ancestral ecology between cattle, grasses and don’t forget good old fashioned sunshine by mimicking the efficiencies of nature developed over a millennia. Rather than let cows lolly gag around the pasture, eating grasses down to the roots, damaging the soil, and exposing themselves to their own pathogens, ranchers keep the cows in smaller sections of pasture called paddocks with the use of electric wire fence. The closer quarters make the cows eat faster, then in a few days they’re moved to a fresh section of pasture with tall yummy grass. For the cows it’s just like having a cookout at least once a week. And by managing the relationship between cow and grass in ways more consistent with ancestral patterns, the health and vigor of both are improved.

With the age of cheap corn and cheap transportation coming to a close this new system of raising cows offers a long laundry list of benefits. To date, only a handful of Georgia farmers have made the leap. Etwenda Wade, who is a fourth generation rancher with cattle raising in her blood, found the grass-fed beef approach offered her an opportunity to regain a heritage of rewarding farm work while also restoring her own health. Her great grandparents were one of the original pioneer families of central Florida, eventually amassing a staggering 20,000 acres of land where they ran their cattle as they do in westerns, traveling with the herd like cowboys. Being that far south with that much land, they never had to feed hay or grain, so Tink learned about grassfed cows right from the beginning. Growing up with her cousins as neighbors, she picked up the nickname Tinkleberrry from a young cousin that couldn’t quite muster Etwenda. Luckily Tinkleberry, got shortend to Tinky, and finally to Tink.

Tink wasn’t given the option of taking over the family land and to her dismay most of it was sold for housing. Several years after moving to Georgia her dream of returning to farming became a constant obsession. Based on a friend’s recommendation she and her husband visited Wilkes County for the Mule Day celebration held each fall and she fell in love with the town of Washington. “To me it’s the prettiest town in the state of Georgia.”

Twelve years ago they purchased a beautiful and historic 230 acre homestead and Tink started raising cattle. But as is often the case, it took some hardships before everything fell into place. Chief among these was Tink’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. Conventional treatments for MS commonly produce some adverse side effects causing patients to seek alternative remedies. For several years Tink followed the conventional treatments, but after little success she reached a turning point that caused her to seek healthier ways of living, including a total change in diet. Now she doesn’t eat processed foods of any kind, and hasn’t touched fast food in the last seven years. The more she took possession of her treatment the more she realized that changes in lifestyle, rewarding work, and a healthy environment were crucial to her physical and mental well-being. Today she’s off of all medications and considers her grass-fed beef operation to be her most effective treatment.

Tink’s other breakthrough that inspired her to produce grass-fed beef came from her experience raising hogs in confinement for seven years. When they first purchased the farm it came complete with three swine houses and a contract to raise 750 hogs every three months. Tink has always loved animals and she hoped it would be a good way to make payments on the farm. But her discomfort with confinement really hit home one day when they were loading up hogs to send to the processor and one of them got out and into the pasture where he was able to walk on grass for the first time in his life. Pigs are easy to stress out, and as he walked around he kept “putting his little hoof down and picking it back up” as if to say, “something’s not right, this doesn’t feel like concrete.” All of a sudden the confused pig just had a heart attack and rolled over dead. The shock of the big wide world was just too much for him. That moment is one she’ll never forget and she got out of the confinement business for good.

Just like a good gardener who has to understand the physiology of the plant and the properties of the soil in order to grow a strong healthy crop, good cattle ranchers must spend a great deal of time trying to think like a cow. In fact, it’s not a half bad idea to try and think like a blade of grass too. Tink’s close attention to what her cows eat, and how her fields respond even inspire her to take an occasional nibble now and again just to see what’s going on. “I’ve tasted all the grass out here,” she states. “Clover is very sweet. If I was a cow, clover would be my diet.”

In our rather consumer-centric economy we tend to focus a lot of our attention on the benefits that sustainable foods have on us, the eaters. Things like health benefits tend to get our attention first, with environmental benefits coming in as a close runner up. On the rise is an awareness that sustainable foods also contribute to a better quality of life for those who produce our food. This includes not just the farmers but also our friends the cows. Stories about healthier lifestyles, family-owned businesses, and deeper community relationships tend to inspire, and such inspiration can have a big impact on society’s capacity to change.

“I’m on a mission,” explains Tink. “It started out as just a little thing but now every time I bring beef home and I taste it, and it tastes good, do you know how rewarding that is?”

As one of the only options for eating locally produced grass-fed beef in the Athens area

Tink is on the innovative front-lines of the burgeoning interest in locally produced foods. These kind of benefits extend far beyond the plate.

Organics in Georgia - the warm up to Vidalia Onions

Several months ago I was doing some research on organic agriculture in Georgia and came across some USDA data from 2005 on certified organic acres in each of the 50 states. I wasn't really surprised to find that Georgia is listed in the bottom ten states for the total number of certified organic acres. In fact 8 of the 10 states at the bottom of this list are in the southeast. However, when I looked at just organic vegetable acreage (you know vegetables are the most profitable and intensive crop type per acre) GA suddenly leaps into the top sixteen states.

Why is that I wondered? Here's a few theories, organic grains (row crops) and livestock take up a lot more acres than vegetables, and these two areas of the organic market just haven't caught on yet in this region. There's a good reason for this. Organic row crops are more difficult to grow in the south due to our poor soils (less organic matter) and high weed, insect and disease pressure.

Regarding organic livestock, most of the nation's organic livestock operations are located out west closer to where the organic grains are grown. Unfortunately organic livestock doesn't mean much more than the animals are fed organic feed, and they aren't given hormones or anitbiotics. Now these can be good things but there are no animal density requirements (in other words 100,000 chickens in a house is o.k.), and no pasture requirements. So rotational grazing livestock operations are now considered the more sustainable choice to organic grain fed livestock. Most of our grass fed beef and other grazing operations don't bother to get organic certification because unfortunately the organic standard for animals has mostly been conventionalized.

So that brings us to vegetables, the mack daddy of the organic movement. 42% of all sales in the certified organic market are fruits and vegetables. And Georgia is somehow nestled up at #16. Who is in front of us? Well, they are some large producers. Here's a countdown of the organic vegetable acres in each of the top 16 states (data from 2005):

Georgia	606
Texas	625
North Carolina	640
New Mexico	643
Minnesota	750
Pennsylvania	869
Wisconsin	928
Vermont	963
Colorado	1,957
Florida	2,140
New York	2,952
Arizona	3,639
Oregon	3,737
Virginia	4,859
Washington	10,331
California	58,327

In '05 there were 98,500 organic vegetable acres total in the nation. Now look at California. They possess more than half the total number of organic vegetable acres in the entire country.

Things are changing quick here in Georgia. Take a look at the six year growth rate in organic acreage. This is just those folks who are certified. There is no information on the number of growers who are growing organically but don't seek certification.

6-YEAR GROWTH	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008
Certified Organic Acres	273	413	665	1,076	1,565	1,799

Now that's some growth. Over 6-fold in five years! So what's being grown on all this acreage. I put in a call last week to Vernon Mullins, the Organic Program Manager for the Georgia Department of Agriculture to ask. Vernon is a wonderfully pleasant fellow, and I could tell he was disappointed that they hadn't tried to figure out the answer to this question before. In fact, he was uncertain if they even could figure it out. He said that when people send in their certification registration, they often just list Assorted Vegetables. Hmmmmm. (but on the paperwork for organic registration, farmers are actually required to submit info on Product Grown, Amount Grown (Quantity), Annual Gross Sales, and Acres in Organic Production - so there is an answer to this question somewhere) He did mention that the only certified animal operation is a 28,000 head layer operation somewhere down in south Georgia. That's a bunch of eggs. I wonder where those are being sold.

One thing is certain, one of the fastest growing segments of organics in Georgia is in Vidalia Onions.

But for that story you have to stay tuned, we're just getting warmed-up.....to the Vidalia Onion!

Maymester Begins

Dr. Carl Jordan's agroecology lab at the University of Georgia offers one of the only intensive courses in both the principles and the practice of organic agriculture offered in the state. This summer is the 5th year the course has been taught as a Maymester session. The course is entitled Organic Agriculture and the Ethics of Sustainability. It's an intensive course, with only 16 total meeting days. 16 students (both undergrads and grads) are participating.

Today was the first day. I'll be sitting in on as much of this course as possible and sharing some highlights here and there as time provides.

Today's guest lecturer was Paul Sutter, an associate professor of History at UGA. Paul is an Environmental Historian and gave the class a good foundation in the history of American agriculture, with specific insights into some of the regional differences in agricultural settlement.



Paul described the settlement of America as a search for arable land. He described the notion of extensive vs. intensive agriculture in which land was seen as a resource whose main value was short-lived fertility. Once this fertility declined it was abandoned for un-spent land. Agriculture in the west was of a migratory nature. He contrasted this with the type of agriculture that developed in the northeast, where continuous mobility was no longer an option. Here farmers had to develop methods to sustain fertility the best they could. One of the ways in which they could do this was using animals to concentrate fertility.

Paul had some interesting things to say about aesthetics and environmentalism. He described how most of our large national forests out west are in areas where there was little opportunity for agriculture. Our aesthetic ideal of nature was isolated from our working agricultural lands. They were put in two separate boxes and environmentalist rarely thought about the latter.

Take a listen to a small part of Paul's talk. I guess this is my first official podcast. Outdoor recording ain't no easy feat so forgive the planes and windnoise.

Enjoy

http://www.farmlandconservation.org/assets/podcasts/Extensive_sound_bite4.mp3

Or Click here

The Wonderful Fava Bean

Tonight's meal has inspired me. There are so many foods that most of us have never known. Greens and roots and beans and lettuces and crazy things that make one excited to be alive again, with an incredible sense of discovery and wonder. And yet, the joy is deepened that much more if we can see these plants come up out of the ground, and know something about how they are cared for, and the history of the species, and how it has been used by people in ancient, sometimes distant lands. When the taste lingers with a knowledge of these things, ah, the delicious sweetness of deep roots.

So I'll show a quick peek of tonight's delicious feast and then come back to this and add how these things are grown, where the varieties come from, how long in the field, are they easy or difficult to grow, harvest, wash, transport? How long do they last? How long is their season? What foods do they complement?

This is the very first meal of my life with the fava bean. Celia Barss at Woodland Gardens encouraged me to take some last week after working on harvest day. I was able to pick them with the crew. After a few minutes of picking I found that they come lose from the plant easiest when grabbed and lifted straight up. There may be some risk of damaging the stalk of the plant however.

Like asparagus they are an early spring delicacy. I found in Alice Water's cookbook on Vegetables a recipe for Chilled Fava Bean Soup that sounded tasty. To get to the bean can take some time. First you split the pod and pop out the light green pod. Then you parboil for one minute. Douse in cold water then use your thumb nail to split the pod and squeeze the bean out of this second pod. The inner bean is beautiful dark green. Rinse again and add to a pan with well sauteed onions and garlic (I used some fresh spring garlic) in olive oil. Cover with chicken stock until beans are tender. Add to a blender then add additional chicken stock until the desired consistency. Drizzle with fresh rosemary infused olive oil.

The second dish was a Gratin of Broccoli with Sauce Mornay. Simmer on low 1.25 cups milk with a quarter onion, nutmeg and bayleaf (I substituted rosemary). Separately make a roux with butter and flour. Add the milk and stir on low until creamy. Add a fine grated cheese. I used cheddar and parmesan. Boil broccoli, drain, mix into the sauce. Line a gratin dish (darn I should have used mine, would have made the picture look better) with butter, added toasted bread crumbs to the bottom, add gratin, put untoasted breadcrumbs and butter on top and bake at 425 for 20 mintues.

And Hoila! Radiohead's In Rainbows made for excellent cooking music. Then Bob Dylan's documentary, No Direction Home made for good Friday night entertainment while I ate.




Tomorrow after I take my car in for a new timing belt, water pump and fan clutch I'll be swinging over to the Morningside Market, Georgia's only year round organic farmer's market. I'll get some good pics of the spring harvest bounty and tell a little bit about what I know of these good friends.

Goodnight.

Today's Lunch

Good farming produces good food. Perhaps an entertaining way to follow the whole loop around will be to show you the wonderful challenge I'm faced with in preparing and eating all the organic food I work, barter, and beg for.

This past week I've had the daunting responsibility of putting down
-1 bunch carrots
-1 bunch beets with greens
-3 greenhouse grown tomatoes
-1 carton sunflower sprouts
-2 ounces cilantro
-2 pints strawberries
-1 bunch asparagus
-1 bunch brocolli
-1 bag leaf lettuce
-1 gallon whole raw milk

This weekend I spent a good 4-6 hours making

1) A carrot - cilantro soup - also using 2 pints homemade chicken stock and one potato. This is still in my fridge as we speak.

2) A roasted beet dip - Roast beets under foil in half an inch water and a little olive oil. Peel beet skins. Put in a food processor with 2 tablespoons orange juice, half cup sour cream, corriander and cumin. I'll post a photo later

3) Beet greens - cooked in a pot with bacon (sorry this was store bought) and onions.

4) One roast chicken with garlic lemon butter - I killed this chicken myself. See Day of the Chicken below for the whole story.

And last but not least.



One BST on sourdough. That's a Bacon, Sprouts and Tomato. It doesn't just look pretty.


Food courtesy of Woodland Gardens, Full Moon Farms, and assorted farmers of the Athens Locally Grown cooperative.

May all your meals be blessed,
J

Field Day at Spring Valley Eco-Farms

Today we had about 80 or more people out at Dr. Jordan's farm for an educational field day. The rains blessed the midday from about 1 until 2:30, then the skies cleared and we were able to lead the crowd with relative ease.

Personally, I realized how important it is to have places like the farm to introduce people to new farming concepts, and the little 100 acre farm on Spring Valley Road is an amazing place for just such an activity.

The day and the group was split into three sections. Dr. Jordan gave an overview of the history of the farm and an introduction to soils and soil organic matter. Krista took folks up to her research plots to talk about no-till and alleycropping research. Jason used the bulk of the day to discuss the principle concepts of the vegetable operation and the new livestock enterprises.

It was a lot to take in a day. My role was mainly to transport the groups around the farm, and I enjoyed getting into conversations with our guests about yesterdays annual Old Timey Seed Swap, and the challenges we are up against in creating valid arguments for conventional farmers to make the switch to organic agriculture.

As much as I'd like to rehash all the great discussions of the day, I'll keep it simple and focus on the things that best caught my attention.

Jason's discussion of the spader was of great interest. This tillage tool is important in organic agriculture as a way to incorporate cover crop residues throughout the soil horizon without pulverizing the soil and damaging soil texture and organic matter. It penetrates to a depth of 14 inches. Cover crop incorporation should be carried out about 30 days before you plan on planting into the bed. I am breaking this rule pretty badly in my own garden this year. I tilled my weeds under two weeks ago and I planted lettuces within one week and now have planted okra and a few tomatoes this week. Oh well, I'm learning.



They don't make Spaders in the U.S. This one is from Italy. They come in quite a few sizes, including one you can use behind a walking tractor.

We showed the group the new Freedom Rangers chickens. These birds are a beautiful reddish color and come from European breedstock. They are considered hardier for organic and sustainable production, and also possess a richer flavor with more dark meat. Unfortunately the folks that run this business just closed it down so this might be the last batch of these guys. Back to the old Cornish Cross.

It's always great to get the opportunity to hear Dr. Jordan talk about soils and organic matter and how he realized we've really got our work cut out for us in the southeast in preserving organic matter. I love it when he brings up that the GA state legislature declared Red Clay as the official soil of Georgia, which he says is like declaring Smog as the official air of Los Angeles. I noticed today how he explains that because forests are perennial and slow growing, they don't have the same nutrient demands as your agricultural crops, so the slow release of nutrients from more lignous organic matter is not limiting. He then showed a cross section of soil from the vegetable plot and discussed how compost was needed on a regular basis.



Well. That's a quick and dirty summary. I've got an audio recording of Dr. J's talk that I'll try and link to my website soon.

A New Breed of Farm

A couple of weeks ago I came home for lunch and sliced a one inch thick center slice out of a locally grown, organic bright red tomato as big around as the length of my hand, laid it between two slightly toasted pieces of loaf rye bread, slathered it with mayonnaise, sprinkled it with fresh ground pepper and took a bite. It was about 40-45 degrees outside and overcast, but all of a sudden it felt like the sun was shining in my mouth. Eating a tomato this good at this time of year makes you feel like there’s a small crack in the firmament, and a small beam of heaven’s light focused just on you. I like to call that center slice the “steak” of the tomato, and there’s just nothing on earth as good.

Less than a mile away from where I live in Winterville, GA sits an unimposing small farm called Woodland Gardens. My yummy tomato was grown on this farm; only a stone’s throw from the Athens airport, and maybe six or seven miles from downtown Athens. Along the road in front of the farm is an itty bitty yellow sign that reads, “Organic Garden, please don’t spray.” Down a short dusty road stand ten tall domed greenhouses. A curious passerby might pause and say, “I wonder what they’re growing down there?” A good answer would be, “All kinds of stuff!”

My first visit to Woodland Gardens occurred one summer morning, about 4:30 a.m. It was pitch black of course, and I was hitching a ride to the Morningside Farmer’s Market in Atlanta; the only year round farmer’s market in the state that sells only organic products. Before heading off, I helped two lean, quick moving, hard working women load a refrigerated truck from top to bottom with boxes of tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, beans, squash, zucchini, okra, lettuce, potatoes, onions, leeks, herbs, bunches of fresh cut flowers, and about a dozen items I couldn’t identify. Everything had been harvested the day before. This food was fresh. So fresh, it was practically wigglin’!

Everyone at the market was magnetized towards the Woodland Garden booth. The bounty of beautiful shiny fruits with chalkboard signs describing each item and how much it cost in blue, green and pink chalk. The bright colors and the smell of fresh cut flowers, ripening tomatoes and respiring greens entranced passerby. The fresh blessings of the earth had been brought to the big city.

Woodland Gardens isn’t an ordinary farm. It’s a new breed of farm; an example of what farms may look like if society truly decides to try and eat local. Most people can’t yet imagine what eating local actually means. To most of us it probably sounds trendy, unrealistic, or downright confusing. But current and future generations are facing some challenging questions that until the last few years were inconceivable. Where will our food come from? How will people make a living in our rural landscapes? What happens if everybody sells the farm?

Celia Barss is a new breed of skilled farmer. She’s young, she’s savvy, she speaks three languages and she’s the farm manager of Woodland Gardens. Born in Canada then raised in Papau New Guinea and Baltimore, she gained her training as a farmer at the University of California in Santa Cruz. She didn’t grow up on a farm, but she always loved to have her hands in the dirt, and after finding her passion for growing food she never looked back. She knew what she wanted to do and focused on it. These days a farmer doesn’t have to be born on a farm to be born to farm; and that may be a blessing to the rest of us since less than two percent of the nation’s population still grows our food. Celia is tanned, sinewy, and confident in her craft. There’s nary an organic farm or farmer in Georgia that can compare to the level of output, efficiency and quality of produce at Woodland Gardens.

When asked to paint a picture of Woodland Gardens, Celia explains the different structures that allow them to grow year round. A total of one acre of land sits under ten passively ventilated greenhouses called high tunnels, and two heated greenhouses. Four additional acres are devoted to field production. “Each area is the best place to have the crops at different times of the year,” Celia explains, and she’s developed a system of careful rotations to maximize crop performance and efficiency.

The major advantage of greenhouses is they allow a farmer to extend the growing season, thus providing year round income, maintaining full time employees, capturing a bit of a price premium, and allowing folks like me to eat local tomatoes in the month of February. But the greenhouses also preserve nutrients and organic matter in the soil. Since a greenhouse blocks rainfall, precious nitrogen from compost isn’t leached from the soil after a heavy rain. The plants are irrigated with drip tape and nitrogen is slowly released by the decomposition activity of micro-organisms in the soil. _

Every good farm starts with a farmer who loves doing what they do. Isn’t that true of excellence in any craft, and every profession? Celia explained that in addition to this love of the craft many farmers feel responsible for providing good food, “because they’re able to do it.” Fortunately for us, some people are just born with the talents that make for good farmers. They love being in the earth, they have a mind for detail, and possess bountiful storehouses of energy. Bit by bit these individuals are finding their way back to the farm as opportunities expand and society begins to appreciate this contribution. A new breed of farmer is slowly, ever so slowly being born. As this occurs individuals like Celia and places like Woodland Gardens stand out like an experienced older sister who just graduated from college. If you’re lucky maybe she’ll take you out, show you around, and instill in you an encouraging example of future possibilities.