Hunters' Greens x 2

Jim at Hunters' Greens has a lot going on (both in the field and in his head) this time of year. And I for one am always glad to be a recipient of his mullings and musings. Here's a message from Jim regarding our local CSAs, CSA customers, and some thoughts on what you can do to directly support your CSA farmer or farmerette.

Dear Shareholders,

CSA shareholders of Clark County, your farmers may require your assistance. I address this message not just to my own CSA shareholders, but to the larger community of "supporters of
agriculture."

By way of a caveat, I have to admit that I have been neglecting my relationships with my fellow CSA farmers for the last year or two, so check with your farmers to check the relevancy of my remarks to their particular situation.

Here's the deal. The word on the wire is that CSA farmers are having trouble filling out their complement of shares this year. Various theories are circulating to explain this problem, such as: "It's the economy stupid!", and "We're just getting too many CSAs in the county." While these two factors may make the job of finding shareholders a little more difficult, I think it would be sad if our farmers despair on the basis of these theories.

But you can help! Shareholders helping out was an integral part of the original North American CSA model as it developed on the East Coast, but somehow we rugged western individualists have seemed to leave that piece out of the puzzle. As the pioneer CSA farmer in the county I stand guilty as charged as a poor role model. But even I from time to time accept a little help and even rarely, ask for it.

So the kind of help I'm asking you to offer your farmer here is in the area of marketing. For we introverted, "I'd rather be out in the field talking to my plants" farmers, marketing can be tough. And its getting to that time of year that our fields are exactly where we should be. If every CSA shareholder copied off three brochures and handed them out to likely friends or co-workers, that just might be enough to get the job done. Our latest shareholder was signed up through such an effort (Thank you Eric and Eileen, and Clay).

Are there sympathetic businesses you patronize that might lay out some brochures?

But there is another level at which CSA members might want to help. The traditional image of the help shareholders give farmers is spending an afternoon weeding or harvesting crops. But might it not make even more sense if shareholders offered help that came from their own area of expertise or labor of love. Natural born marketers might offer to help design and implement a marketing campaign, avid speakers might offer testimonials at social, trade or religious gatherings, writers could write articles for newsletters (this techno- illiterate can't even conceive of the new electronic media possibilities).

A few shining examples of this kind of help come to mind. Our own CSA member Heather Lehman (of atrocityarts.com), first offered, and then insisted on building and maintaining our web site. Heather claims we are allowing her to use us as a guinea pig, but the quality of her work and her known dedication to the local food movement bely any selfish motivation. Heather's offering has been incredible. Occasionally we show our gratitude by "allowing" her to come pick some surplus, or past prime produce that we are too exhausted to pick and market ourselves.

On a more community wide level, the work of Glenn Grossman and Sunrise O'Mahoney come to mind. Glenn's "Clark County Food and Farm" website offers a comprehensive view, with commentary, on the farm and food scene in the county. Whatever role Sunrise plays whether it is struggling to grow a food co-op, or coordinate plans for the 78th Street Farm, Sunrise always keeps an eye out for the welfare of local small farmers.

These folks have made giant contributions and no one expects that kind of "agricultural support", but maybe you have a skill that you could "guinea pig" on "your" farmer. Call her and find out.


And here's an update from the farm from Hunters' Greens:

Farm Update

The intrepid Clark County Farmerette Brenda Millar of Rosemattel's CSA looks like she may yet make good on her promise to have radishes and salad greens for the opening of her Battle Ground Farmer's Market this Saturday at the Gardner Center. The greens may qualify as micro-greens, but the radishes look like they just might size up in the next few days. To round out her tables she will also be harvesting some over-wintered collard greens, leeks, chives, pea shoots, herbs, green garlic and our undiscovered delicacy the "sweet collette." Visit her stand if you're craving the "first fruits" from this property in 2010.

Meanwhile, down in the Hunters' Greens fields, tiny baby bok choy, mustard and arugula seedlings are sprouting up between rows of tiny walla walla onion starts. The carrots were actually able to break through the rain packed soil, the next question is whether it will be soft enough for their roots to swell. Meanwhile around the green house a sea of plants in seed blocks is growing to cover Brenda's tidy plant benches. Most of these are Jim's, Brenda's remain in the green house and in little shelters she builds with various plant protection fabrics. Spinach and lettuce plants are sprouting true leaves, signaling they only await well tilled soil to drop them into so they can begin the race to June. But ah, there's the rub, unlike Brenda who scratches what she can into the cold earth, Jim insists on waiting for the precisely correct soil conditions to do his final tilling, soil amending and transplanting. Those conditions may have arrived during a brief window this week-end, but we'll never know because Jim was curled quietly in his bed sweating out the mother of all crud bugs; swine, seasonal or other, it was brutal. In his early farming days he might have crawled out to the fields, but fifteen years of experience have convinced him that it WILL work out in the end.

Observing this sense of calm juxtaposed against Brenda's frantic efforts reminds of us of the great gift of owning land with a home, free and clear. In the days of the family farm, such a gift was passed on from generation to generation, but today's new small farmers don't benefit from that tradition. It is painful to watch the Brendas and David Knauses struggle to achieve their dream in the face of daunting odds. Watch for a longer essay on this subject in our blog, Notes From the Margin.

Hunters' Greens Farm Update - 4.5.2010

When last we wrote, it was sunny and warm. We farmers must be optimists, because we were sure that weather would last all spring. So here it is in the mid-thirties, blowing and pouring, certainly this can't last forever.

One of the reasons Jim has nearly given up on season extending row covers is that they are always blowing away. He still uses burlap to cover the carrot seed, but it blew off days after it was installed and weighed down with pebbles. I guess we'll just have to take what nature brings.

Meanwhile, Brenda has been sprouting salad greens and radishes under her row covers, hoping to have them ready for the opening of the Battle Ground Farmer's Market on April 24. Good luck with that Brenda!

Both of us continue to seed things in the green house and in any warm corner we can find, Brenda on top of her refrigerator and Jim in his home made germination chamber (three shelves with six flourescents for light and two incandescents to add heat all wrapped in an insulation blanket).

Brenda and Jim have teamed up to promote CSAs through local neighborhood association newsletters and meetings. We have an article and presentation coming up here in Brush Prairie in May.


Diane & Jim Hunter
Hunters' Greens CSA
Brush Prairie, WA.
(360) 256-3788
Email
http://huntersgreens.com

Finally! Another Notes from the Margin Installment from Jim & Diane Hunter of Hunters' Greens

What's so Different about Hunters' Greens

Written by Jim and Diane Hunter

Thursday, 14 May 2009 14:08

Now that there are dozens of CSAs in Clark County, Jim and Diane are feeling a little deflated. When we were the only CSA, or one of a handful, we felt pretty special. But now, Well.... not so much. We can still say we are the oldest CSA, and at another level, we should be bursting with pride that the model we introduced to the county is going gang busters, and changing the face of agriculture in our community. But as you might imagine, Jim and Diane have never been content to be one of the crowd, so we find our selves itching to distinguish ourselves. Recently we have begun to understand and feel in our bones a set of values by which we can distinguish ourselves in a new way. This set of values combines good old depression era frugality with a more contemporary sense of conservation. In essence it turns one of the classic premises of economics on its head. Rather than striving to see how much we can make, we find ourselves striving to see how little we can live on. Now, intellectually this idea is not new to us. Jim was reading about it in the seventies. At that time, visionary economists like E.F. Schumacher and Herman Daly were beginning to question the assumptions of classical economic theory. They questioned the value of growth for growth's sake, and whether the size of a country's gross national product and it's rate of growth were meaningful measures of the country's economic, social and environmental health. They made the connection between ever expanding economies and environmental degradation and depletion of finite resources. They asked whether there might be other principals for guiding an economy that would result in healthier outcomes. One notion that Daly focussed on was that rather than simply measuring how much we produce, we should first ask ourselves towards what end or goal are we producing things, and how much of what do we want to produce to achieve our goals. Then we should go about figuring out how to achieve our goals using the least amount of finite resources and creating the least amount of pollution. For our first several years at Hunters' Greens we were at least partially stuck in the old model. We have been chasing a particular amount of gross farm income. We had read that CSA farmers Bob and Bonnie Gregson had achieved this amount, which years ago was the average family income in their region. Later, we chased a similar amount because the U.S.D.A.'s Census of Agriculture found that the top quarter of farms in the country make this amount or more. We felt that surely if we belonged to this group, we would be deemed significant. This magical level of income has always remained just out of reach, but we increasingly find we are managing on less. But our need to feel our work was meaningful and not be written off as a "hobby farm" or "hippy dropouts" continued to drive us to achieve that "magical" income bracket. This drive was fed by remarks by local government officials that farms less than ten acres were not "really" farms, and could not support a family. In terms of land use policy, their judgement matters, and a study they commissioned argued that a farm that did not produce a $40,000 family wage job did not deserve protection as an agricultural resource. But the logic of Daly leads to different conclusions. If we can demonstrate that we can meet our goal of providing an income to support a frugal and sustainable lifestyle using less land, fewer finite resources, and causing less pollution, then the land in Clark County should by extension be able to support more farm families while depleting fewer resources and causing less pollution. In turn, by employing more of our population in an industry that utilizes local resources, we would be able to reduce commuter traffic, and the considerable resources and pollution that represents. We would would need less land for roads. More of the family and business revenue would be spent locally, creating a stronger economic multiplier effect and generating more tax revenue. And if these farms have the infrastructure and markets in place to be successful (by the measure of their own goals and aspirations), then this will reduce the desire for farmers to sell out to developers, and thereby conserve more open space, maintaining a better quality of life in the community. As E.F. Schumacher put it in a nutshell, "Small IS Beautiful!" So if we follow Daly's model of defining success as achieving a set of meaningful goals with the minimum use of resources, the experiment we are living at Hunters' Greens becomes a model crying to be replicated across our community, not only in agriculture, but potentially in a wide variety of local resource based industries, and in every household. DO WE MATTER? YES WE DO!