read about in this blog.


For a few years, our family has tended to a small slice of heaven in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. The rolling hills give the land beauty, and our animals and crops help contribute to its life. Garlic is our primary crop and will be a frequent topic of this blog.



Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Selling stewardship from the start

I am currently reading “Just Food” by James McWilliams, who argues about flaws in the locavore movement. The environmental underbelly of the process, he says, is that agricultural pollution isn’t primarily caused by the final transportation of the product but rather is compounded during the planting, harvesting, and processing of the crops. His early points suggest that larger, commercial farms are much more efficient than local (often, smaller) farms during many of the production stages and that their impact on the environment is considerably less than your farmer down the road.

There is a lot to be said for this approach to understanding the locavore movement, and I do take to heart some of the things that McWilliams is presenting. However, there are many questions to be asked, and I am still too early in the book to see whether I will receive answers to them. Here and now, the biggest question, as a small farmer myself, is: Why indict “the locavore movement” when some of us might be doing things right?

At Cherry Lane Farm, we have begun to harvest this year’s garlic. Over the past couple of years, we have planted more and more of our crop, meaning that the effort on both ends of the production process has become more time consuming and more difficult. What hasn’t changed with that expansion, though, is the structure of how we do things.

While I understand and accept that there is little chance sustainable farming will become the norm -- especially as global population growth fuels the need for commercial agriculture -- my wife and I at Cherry Lane Farm promote agriculture that has little-to-no impact on the environment and is healthful for the consumer. We are stewards of the land and of society. Machinery is kept to a minimum; muscle is maximized.

This week, as I began to dig up our garlic bulbs one-by-one with a shovel, I also thought back to when they were planted in October and November of last year. I took a spade and other hand tools and painstakingly dug the trenches. The only machinery used over the past eight months was a shallow hand tiller, which created trace amounts of erosion. Even looking a couple of weeks back, the garlic scapes were cut from the hardneck varieties with hand clippers -- patience being the most important part of the harvest.

Pulling the garlic from the ground, brushing the dirt away, and carefully setting it to dry is an intimate process. You become more in tune with what you’ve created and you don’t relinquish that connection to the cold metal of a machine.

Since I’m employed full-time elsewhere, my livelihood doesn’t depend on what I grow. The riches are spiritual instead of financial. And the method in which I harvest becomes impossible once a certain scale of production is reached. But as a grower and seller locally, I feed the locavore ideology. Environmentally, there are drawbacks to elements of the movement. But economically (and often nutritionally), the perks abound.

And when garlic or other produce is harvested with the simplicity of sweat and a spade, environmental stewardship becomes sound as well.

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