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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, nmgreens@yahoogroups.com
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] How To Keep Them Down On The Farm
  • Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2004 13:40:38 -0700


The New York Times

March 7, 2004, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 14NJ; Page 1; Column 2; New Jersey Weekly Desk

LENGTH: 2458 words

HEADLINE: How To Keep Them Down On The Farm

BYLINE: By JENNIFER GOLDBLATT

DATELINE: PARAMUS

BODY:
THE forces that have eroded New Jersey farming beckon at Susan Joy's
doorstep: The Garden State Parkway surges through the back of the 16-acre
vegetable farm her grandfather started harvesting in the 1940's, and
$700,000 homes peek through a veil of bony poplar trees on either side.
Developers are constantly circling.

But Ms. Joy is digging in for the long haul. Last year she opened her farm
to community-supported agriculture, selling shares of her crops to local
residents months before the first head of lettuce emerged from the ground,
and distributing them each week from June to October.

For Ms. Joy and about a dozen other landowners around the state who together
own at least an estimated 950 acres of land, this arrangement secures a
market for crops in the pre-season, when money is needed for seed and for
repairing equipment. The people who buy into these farms get weekly
infusions of fresh vegetables and flowers all season long: lettuce, snow
peas, arugula in June, tomatoes, basil and peppers in August and pumpkins in
October -- all harvested just hours before it is on their plates.

"Being able to get it freshly picked, it was just wonderful," said Sharon
Zukowski, a novelist from Hackensack who bought shares in Ms. Joy's farm.
"It just makes a huge difference in taste."

What's more, the swelling popularity of organic food has provided a lot of
potential members for these farms, known as CSA, for community-supported
agriculture. Sales of organic foods have been growing by about 20 percent
each year since 1991, and consumers bought $13 billion of organic food at
supermarkets last year, according to the Organic Consumers Association in
Little Marais, Minn.

These farms serve to forge close financial and emotional bonds between the
farmers and their communities, which many hope could help make farming
financially viable in the long term.

"People feel like they are in this with you, and they are," said Michael
Baki, head gardener of the community-supported gardens at Genesis Farms in
Warren County. "Even just by the fact that they've taken the step to join,
that's a big big thing."

So is this a bargain for consumers? Well, for people who find themselves
drawn to places like Whole Foods several times a week, the answer is yes,
particularly since organic foods tend to be more expensive than
conventionally grown produce. In a survey conducted by Watershed Farm in
Pennington in August 2002 -- a particularly dry season -- those who had paid
$19 a week for a family share received produce that would have cost $80 at a
natural food store.

Last season, an individual share in the Watershed farm cost $295, which
worked out to about $11.80 a week for the 25-week season. Most farmers say
that if there are any complaints from their members, it is that they get too
much food, not too little.

At first, the concept of community-supported farming was difficult to grasp
for Ms. Joy's 71-year-old father, Joseph, who had worked the fields in and
around Paramus -- now an intensively developed shopping mecca -- for decades
with his family, selling what they grew at a roadside stand and to small
retail shops. Initially he scoffed at the idea that his daughter would be
taking people's money up front.

"When I came to my father with this idea I probably aged him five years,"
said Ms. Joy, 41. "I think he sweated all the way into July."

But to his surprise, 22 people bought shares last year for $599 apiece,
showing up each week to pick up their crops, and the farm broke even on the
season's harvest. For the first time in recent years, Joy Farms was not
caught between bigger stores that only dealt with big wholesalers and
smaller shops that did not need everything the farm had.

"This turned out to be the perfect mix," Ms. Joy said.

Scattered around the country there are an estimated 1,200 farms that
practice community-supported agriculture and feed about 90,000 households.
The Northeast has been a fertile environment for such arrangements because
it has so many dense urban areas brimming with people who crave fresh food,
and, perhaps, contact with a more primitive form of food shopping.

"Ironically that density of the population - the thing that conflicts with
farming that creates the fertile environment," said Duane Perry, executive
director of the Food Trust, a Philadelphia-based group that develops
farmers' markets. "The consumer is pretty much next door to the farmer."

Virtually all of these farms grow crops organically, without synthetic
pesticides, fertilizers or other artificial additives. But outside of that,
the farms are a diverse breed. They are as small as Ms. Joy's suburban
startup and as expansive as Watershed Organic Farm, a sprawling 90-acre
operation on a land reserve in Pennington, a borough of yawning hills just
west of Princeton. Watershed is one of the largest in the country, with
2,600 members last season and a waiting list with 121 names.

While most of these farmers serve their members from June to November, their
schedules vary according to where they are and when their crops flourish.

Most community-supported farms plant a wide variety of fruits and
vegetables. The Watershed Organic Farm offers 60 types of crops and 350
varieties, ranging from basil and broccoli to crimson and white,
candy-striped Dolce Di Chioggia beets.

Many farms allow members to pick some part of their shares directly from the
fields. Some examples are strawberries, raspberries, snap peas and cherry
tomatoes. And some deliver shares to remote pickup sites at farmers markets
and health food stores for the convenience of members who can not make it
out to the farms.

Share costs vary widely among the farms, from $275 for an individual share
to $599 for a family-size allotment. The sizes of shares also vary each
week, according to what crops are in season and how the farm has divided
them up.

These arrangements create ties between farmers and customers that are deeply
felt. In the good years, the farmers are happy to share their bounty; during
lean harvests they are glad to have loyal supporters. Yes, there is stress
making sure that the customers feel that they are getting a fair share of
high-quality food, but farmers like the intimate connection with the
families they're feeding.

"Delivering a box of vegetables to the back of the store isn't especially
thrilling, nor is talking to produce managers who have no loyalty to you,"
said Elizabeth Henderson, co-author of "Sharing the Harvest," (Chelsea Green
Publishing, 1999) a book on community-supported agriculture. With this
system, Ms. Henderson said: "I know my members' children. I know their
parents. It's very rich."

To be sure, this kind of agriculture has thrust farmers into roles they have
not historically held, that of being retailers. It requires them to add
customer service and face time to their production duties -- not always an
easy transition.

"It can be difficult to devote yourself to the farm members but also to your
crops and your soil," said Jim Kinsel, farm manager of Watershed Organic
Farms. "If I were to spend a minute with everybody, that would be 2,600
hours."

Watershed and other community-supported farms have tried to stay close to
their members in other ways, with newsletters that alert members to what is
happening in the fields and recipes to advise them how to cook some of the
more obscure crops, like kohlrabi, a type of turnip cabbage originally
harvested in northern Europe. Some have hotlines so members can find out
what crops will be available in a given week. Many organize cooking classes
and lectures. Each October, Genesis Farm invites members to help harvest the
vegetables that will be stored for the winter, and puts on hayrides, pumpkin
decorating and a potluck dinner.

Members relish the excuse to escape to a rural setting, far from the clutter
of their urban lives.

"There's just something about going out to where you can see where the food
is growing and see people picking it," said Amy Wagner, 36, of Ringoes, a
member of Watershed farm. "It's a real community-type of feel and a nice
atmosphere. And I just feel like when it's organic and locally grown, as far
as the vitamins, the quality of the produce is going to be as high as
possible."

Farmers also have to spend a lot of time educating their members about what
it means to eat seasonally. For many people who are accustomed to the
convenience of supermarket shopping, where virtually any produce is
available at any time of year and you can get salad washed, cut and in a
bag, the learning curve is steep.

"A lot of people have unrealistic expectations," said Luanne Lohr, associate
professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of
Georgia. "They thought potatoes grow all year. They wanted their children
and families to eat well, but a lot of times they didn't know what they were
getting. Some things sounded exotic but then they got too much of it, and
they didn't want to learn how to prepare it."

Susan Keymer and Juan George, who operate a 12-acre farm in Monmouth County,
extensively interview potential members, making sure that they understand
what comes out of the ground at what time of year.

"Some people were in love with the idea of being on a farm, but the reality
of farming is beyond them," Mr. George said. "It's not just a supermarket.
They would come to me on the first day of May and ask where tomatoes and
eggs are."

The farmers also go to great lengths to explain the risks of buying into
farms, the realities of floods, droughts, groundhogs and rabbits that can
delay and diminish crops.

"We're as up front as we can be about the variability and the whimsy of
nature and how that impacts the availability of any given crop at any give
time," said Leonard Pollara, who runs Upper Meadows Farms in Sussex County.
"I try to paint as stark a picture as I can."

Community-supported agriculture has grown steadily over the last two
decades; its rise has been intertwined with mounting public appetite for
organic food and growers' move toward direct marketing.

This form of farming first emerged in the United States in 1986, organized
by farmers who were concerned about pollution in the food supply, and
helping small farms remain competitive. They had seen similar arrangements
in Europe and were influenced by the principles of biodynamic agriculture
asserted by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher. Mr. Steiner emphasized
the use of local land to feed the community and pairing the farmer with the
consumer. He shunned the use of chemicals, and advocated running a farm with
respect to its interaction with natural forces like light, fertility and
planetary movements.

And since the 1970's, community-supported farms have been part of a larger
shift toward marketing directly to consumers. The hope is that by
cultivating community-supported farms, farmers' markets, catalogs and even
"agritourism," farmers won't have to split their incomes with distributors,
processors and retailers, and can reap larger returns on the food they grow.

On average, farmers get about 19 cents on every dollar consumers spend on
their produce at retail stores, according to the United States Department of
Agriculture's Economic Research Service. That is nearly half of what it was
two decades ago.

For Mr. Pollara, selling shares in his farm was a last resort after years of
struggling to sell organic buckwheat, tomatoes, oats and other commodities
to restaurants and distributors. With so many other farmers growing and
marketing the same crops, it was tough to get a premium on his products.

"Before I threw in my towel for farming, I wanted to see if this would
work," he said.

So far, he said, it has. In fact, Mr. Pollara is expecting to sign up 75 to
100 members to his three-year-old community-supported farm, and is
optimistic that he can recoup the $48,000 it takes to run the farm for a
year.

Many farmers say that they break even for the season, or make a small
profit. The larger operations enjoy economies of scale, getting discounts by
buying larger quantities of everything from seeds to compost.

And many operate roadside stands or sell to restaurants, alongside their
members' shares. To make ends meet, some of those who run these farms have
part-time jobs elsewhere. For instance, Ms. Joy works at a florist during
the winter, and Ms. Keymer and Mr. George drive school buses in the
off-season.

Many people hope that this form of agriculture will ultimately sustain small
farms in the long term. But that is still an open question. The answer
depends largely on whether consumers continue gravitating toward organic and
locally grown foods, or whether they are ultimately pulled back to fast food
and salad-in-a-bag culture.

"I don't think that it's a silver bullet," said Kathy Ruhf, project director
at the Small Farm Institute, a nonprofit group in Belchertown, Mass. "I
think this is a market opportunity and has great promise for how producers
and consumers of food products can relate. But it remains to be seen in
terms of the bottom line whether CSA is more viable for small scale family
farms than other creative ways that people are engaging in survival."

A Growing Phenomenon


More information about community-supported agriculture in New Jersey is
available from the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Jersey at
www.nofanj.org. Following are some community-supported farms:

Joy Family Farm
725 Pascack Road, Paramus 07652. (609)412-3189.
Daisy7354@msn.com.

Asbury's Natural Village Farm
Charles Napravnik
10 Asbury-Bloomsbury Road, Asbury 08802. (908) 537-2846
www.asburyfarm.org

Cherry Grove Organic Farm
Matthew Conver
11 Carter Road, Princeton 08540.
(609) 203-5139

The Kitchen Garden & Rock Farm
Jean Boggio
76 Haytown Road, Lebanon 08833.
(908) 236-9551
kitchengarden@juno.com

Merrick Farm
Susan Keymer
98 Merrick Road, Farmingdale 07727. (732) 938-2491
merrickfarm@aol.com

Mill Creek Organic Farm CSA
Ken and Nancy Muckenfuss
105A Eayerstown Road, Medford 08055. (609) 953-0372
nlmuck@hotmail.com

Muth Family Farm
Bob Muth
1639 Pitman-Downer Road, Williamstown 08094.
(856) 582-0363

Cook College Student CSA
Ralph Coolman
69 Lipman Drive, Rutgers University
New Brunswick 08903.
(732) 932-8406
coolman@aesop.rutgers.edu

Genesis Farm
Mike Baki
41 B Silver Lake Road, Blairstown 07825.
(908) 362-7486

Watershed Organic Farm
Jim Kinsel
260 Wargo Road, Pennington 08534.
(609) 737-8899
www.watershedfarm.com

Upper Meadows Farm
Leonard Pollara
16 Pollara Lane, Montague 07827.
(973) 293-9869
lenpollara@compuserve.com


http://www.nytimes.com

GRAPHIC: Photos: Susan Joy and about a dozen others are operating about 950
acres of consumer-supported farmland. (Photo by Laura Pedrick for The New
York Times)(pg. 1); To the surprise of Susan Joy, above, and her father, 22
people bought shares last year for $599 apiece, and the farm broke even on
the season's harvest. An individual share in the Watershed farm, left, cost
$295, or about $11.80 a week for the 25-week season. (Photographs by Laura
Pedrick for The New York Times)(pg. 8)

LOAD-DATE: March 7, 2004





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