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.
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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.
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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."
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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
