Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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The Smaller The Farm, The Better The Food
http://organictobe.org/index.php/2008/05/30/the-smaller-the-farm-the-better-the-food-with-organic-radish-salsa-recipe/
>From Jeff Cox Posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008

It’s vitally important to know your growers and suppliers. Here are several 
correlates if you want truly great-tasting, fresh food. Like all 
generalizations, there are exceptions, but for the most part these rules hold 
true:

The Smaller the Farm, the Better the Food
Chances are that at small family farms, more care will be taken with the 
produce, the meat and milk animals, and the farm itself. At very large 
factory farms, produce and animals are commodities. There’s a machine 
designed expressly to machine-harvest every crop. Things are done by a 
schedule, including the application of agrichemicals. Small farmers, on the 
other hand, are much less regimented. They get “up close and personal” with 
their crops and animals. Their chickens are more likely to live in a pen by a 
henhouse, eat vegetable scraps and insects they find by scratching in the 
soil, and enjoy their lives than to live crammed together into cages under 
round-the-clock lights like agribusiness chickens. Which eggs do you think 
make the best omelets?

The Closer the Farm to Your Table, the Better the Food
The more local the food, the better, for a number of reasons. First of all, 
it’s going to be fresh and in season; it’s going to exhibit all the flavor 
it’s capable of. Because it doesn’t have to sit in trucks and railcars and on 
supermarket shelves for weeks, it can be one of those delicious but fragile 
varieties that doesn’t ship well. It can be picked ripe, instead of harvested 
hard and green and then gassed into obtaining color (but not flavor) on the 
long journey to the supermarket.

Also, the shorter the distance from the farm to your table, or at least to 
the market, the greater the chance you’ll meet the person who actually grew 
the food. You’ll be able to ask him or her questions about how the food is 
grown.

The Smaller and Closer the Farm, the Better the Effect on the Environment
There are environmental benefits to shortening those supply lines: Less fuel 
is used in transporting and storing the food. And local small farmers tend to 
be organic because they’re farming their own land, and they don’t want to 
expose themselves and their families to noxious chemicals. They also tend to 
be your neighbors and can be held accountable for their practices by their 
fellow citizens. If your neighborhood dairy is polluting the local creek by 
spreading raw manure on frozen soil (which allows it to run off into the 
local watersheds), you can do something about it. If your milk comes from 
cows penned on a thousand acres a thousand miles away, you won’t even know 
about its environmental problems.

Small farmers who own their own land also have a deep relationship with that 
land and a regard for it. They know where the pheasants nest and may decide 
not to plow there during those times of year when the birds are raising their 
young. They can see the effects of their husbandry on the ecology of the 
natural world and the farm world as these worlds intertwine and affect one 
another. Factory farms tend to plow every inch that can be plowed, from 
fencerow to fencerow, without regard for the niceties of nature. Small 
farmers can be held accountable if there’s something wrong with their 
produce. If there’s something wrong with the crops from factory farms, and 
you try to talk to the person responsible, you’ll be passed up the ladder of 
command until you reach someone who’s either unavailable or surrounded by 
platoons of PR people to smooth-talk you or lawyers to sue you if you get too 
close.

The Shorter the Time from Harvest to Eating, the Better the Food
Although you may want to age your beef, cheese, and wine, and hang your game, 
most foods taste best and have the most nutrients when they’re just picked or 
freshly killed. They taste better and have the most nutrients when it is 
allowed to develop fully on the plant it grows on. If you could graph the 
flavor development of a tree-ripened peach on a bell curve, the very highest 
point of the curve would be the moment it’s picked dead-ripe from the tree. 
If that moment closely coincides with the moment you bite into it, well, it 
doesn’t get any better than that. This doesn’t hold true for every food. But 
we all know from experience that vine-ripened tomatoes taste better than 
supermarket tomatoes, and people who plant tomatoes in their gardens know 
that a tomato picked ripe and eaten on the spot tastes even better than a 
vine-ripened tomato from the store. Consumers put a premium on freshly picked 
corn because the moment an ear is snapped off the stalk, it begins to lose 
sweetness and flavor.

Enzymes are the catalytic agents in fruits and vegetables responsible for 
these swift changes in flavor after picking. But enzymes are evanescent 
molecules without a great deal of persistence, especially after their work is 
done. One of the reasons fresh food tastes so bright and complex compared to 
food that’s been trucked around for many days is the presence of enzymes, 
phenolis, and other plant substances that will wither away with every passing 
hour.

One of the best ways to shorten the distance and time from the farm to your 
table is to visit local pick-your-own operations. In Connecticut, a typical 
northeastern state, about 30 percent of the state’s fruit and vegetable 
growers have pick-your-own plots. The crops from these plots are usually sold 
at reduced prices because the farmer doesn’t have the expense of picking the 
crop. Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a gradual move by small 
farmers away from sales to wholesalers, who offer low prices for their crops, 
to direct-to-consumer marketing, where the growers get a fairer price 
(although higher for you, the consumer). A recent survey by the Connecticut 
Department of Agriculture identified about 560 state growers who market their 
produce through farm showrooms and roadside stands.