By PIA CATTON
Of all the places where self- congratulatory behavior flourishes, it blooms most vividly in urban farmers markets. Here the smug shopper reigns supreme: a little too friendly at 8 a.m. (the only acceptable arrival time for those who wish to be taken seriously), a little too quick with advice on, say, bitter greens, a little too eager to refer to the farmer by his first name while asking after his partner, children and livestock.
Some city foodies surely dream of the day that they, too, can leave civilization behind and, like their favorite heirloom-tomato supplier or the guy whose ramps you simply must try, live the arcadian life. But if the faces on the other side of the folding table look a little weary, former chef and restaurateur Kurt Timmermeister explains why in his memoir, "Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land." Farming is just as complicated, market-driven and cruelly disappointing as any office job. With good humor and plain speaking, Mr. Timmermeister introduces readers to the ironies of small-scale farming in modern America.
Today, Mr. Timmermeister's dairy farm just outside Seattle has 12 Jersey cows, as well as hogs and chickens. But his evolution as a farmer—with many trial-and-error detours along the way—included extended adventures with bees and sheep. In 1990, he bought four acres on Vashon Island and soon after added a neighboring parcel, bringing "Kurtwood Farms" to about 12 acres. While still running a restaurant in the city, he set himself up as a vegetable grower because he had heard it was "a good place to begin—cheap, quick and unregulated by the county, the state or the federal government."
As it turned out, that career only lasted for one season, during which Mr. Timmermeister sold vegetables through two outlets: a farmers market and a Community Supported Agriculture group whose members pre-bought a portion of his harvest. Selling at the market, he soon discovered, "is all about being first." Farmers do what it takes to beat the competition. "If you sell ordinary green beans at the middle of the season when every other farmers market stall is selling green beans, you will make no money," he writes. "If you have beautiful, unusual tomatoes weeks before everyone else, you will clean up." But producing those early tomatoes can require the use of landfill-clogging materials such as plastic sheeting and PVC pipes fashioned into temporary greenhouses.
The author's sales for the first year came to $17,500. The expenses for the farm at that point, he says, were an estimated $20,000. So Mr. Timmermeister shifted his focus to livestock and became a dairy farmer specializing in raw milk: a fashionable, controversial product that goes from cow to glass without pasteurization. While he was able to meet the Seattle area's steady demand, the regulations and fear of liability took their toll.
As he explains in a chapter devoted to raw milk, the government's pasteurization requirements for milk are a classic case of crafting rules to address the lowest common denominator. They are rooted in the 19th century, when dairies moved into urban areas to be near the whiskey factories that sold cheap, left-over grain mash as feed for cows. The poor-quality feed made for poor-quality—and sometimes diseased—milk. Governments looked to Louis Pasteur's method of heating liquid (originally intended for wine) to make milk safe. Meanwhile, dairies outside the cities set their own standards to differentiate themselves from their dodgy urban rivals.
Despite such standards and self-certification, a belief took hold that all milk should meet a uniform standard. By the 1930s, pasteurization was required for all dairies. "The original supporters of pasteurization had no intention of requiring pasteurization of all the milk," Mr. Timmermeister contends, "only the dangerous, poor-quality milk produced at swill dairies."
Today, raw milk is allowed in 28 states, including Washington. Mr. Timmermeister initially sold it unlawfully, then with proper permission. The state regulators were cooperative, and it took him about six months to be a licensed raw milk producer. After nearly five years, though, he quit. A change in the law, requiring additional testing of his cows, drove him to shout expletives at a state worker, and to wonder if the bureaucrats were conspiring against him.
"It wore me out," he writes. "Not the actual work of milking cows, bottling the milk and selling it, but rather the attention I gave to both the state and to my customers." His raw-milk aficionados, it turns out, place an emotional burden on their suppliers, through their blind belief that the product is a magic cure-all elixir. "When customers informed me that they fed the milk to their weeks-old infants, I would shudder," he writes.
Mr. Timmermeister learned more lessons in farming reality by selling meat and eggs, which were all regulated at the county, state and federal levels. "The result is a little profitability from the selling of these high-ticket but highly regulated products."
For years, Mr. Timmermeister balanced his city work with his agricultural sideline, but by 2003 he was a full-time farmer. His central product is a Camembert-style cheese, which he sells at nearby stores, from Whole Foods to Thriftway, a local grocery chain. But what keeps the farm afloat is a skill he had developed long before he set up as farmer: cooking. On Sunday evenings paying guests come to his home for dinners made almost exclusively from products grown on the premises. The guests themselves are often the kind of people who make a sport of "locavore" and low-carbon-footprint one-upmanship. Yet Mr. Timmermeister has little patience for overly precious foodies.
At the Sunday dinners, guests are often shocked to learn that Mr. Timmermeister's kitchen has no olive oil. His land can't sustain olive groves, he explains, but does yield other delicious fats: "We have an abundance of beautiful butter from the Jersey cows and excellent, flavorful lard from the pigs." The American love of olive oil, he theorizes, boils down to culture envy. Olive oil fuels the "tyranny of the Mediterranean." In "warmer Italian climates . . . the sun shines often, food is an important part of daily life and life moves at a slower pace."
Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land
By Kurt Timmermeister
Norton, 335 pages, $24.95
Likewise, when local-food advocates tried to persuade the author to make his own salt, he "let them know that if they want to row out into the bay and dredge up five-gallon buckets of seawater, bring them back to shore and boil them down to capture a bit of questionable-quality sea salt, that they are most welcome to. I am quite content with my bright red box of kosher salt, thank you."
At times, Mr. Timmermeister can go into too much detail—we may not all need to know how to cure bloat in a cow's digestive tract—but the earnest simplicity of "Growing a Farmer" is charming. Though opinionated, Mr. Timmermeister is not an evangelist. He narrates his personal journey with an open, straightforward spirit and declines to pass judgment on those who can't or won't live as he does.
"I enjoy a life and diet that few can enjoy," he writes. "I don't have a recommendation for a way of growing food that would be accessible to everyone. I can only say that living off the land, and grandly, is possible." Grandly, yes. Profitably? Maybe someday.
—Ms. Catton, a Journal reporter, is the co-author of "Be Thrifty: How to Live Better With Less" (2010).http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703555804576102211222517814.html?KEYWORDS=the+dismaying+facts+of+a+farmer's+market