The sun is lowering in the sky and you step outside to enjoy the golden glow of a late summer evening. Tomato plants are heavy with fruit after a busy July growing. You find a bright red cherry and pop it in your mouth. That familiar snap and a small rush of juice combines with a sun warmed sweetness.
Not all tomatoes are created equally. Intuitively we know this to be true. The same bite of a supermarket cherry tomato, even raised organically, does not yield the same flavor. Accompanying that bite of a garden tomato is a rush of satisfaction and enjoyment. That tomato tasting better is your body saying “Yes! More of this!”. The factors of freshness and growing practices illustrate the difference.
Vegetables are sensitive. As soon as they are removed from the soil they begin to fade. Refrigeration slows the process of decomposition, but it can take a couple weeks for a salad or a tomato from Mexico to reach store shelves. All the while the crop’s life force is slipping away leading to nutrition used up as the plant fights to live.
Supermarket varieties are bred for shelf life during shipping at the cost of flavor. Melons full of delicious sugar bruise easier and rot faster while those less sweet tend toward durability. We have all heard the stories of tomatoes harvested green, before those vital nutrients are available and the flavor is lacking, only to be forced red during transit. While having the visual appeal of perfectly ripe produce, they arrive in your shopping cart a vegetable relic.
Local food, especially from smaller regional growers, is the exact opposite. When you purchase directly from a farmer you can ask them when the vegetables were harvested. At the farmers market the answer is usually the day before being sold. These growers can source varieties higher in sweetness, harvest at peak freshness, and shorten the transport time. Your body recognizes this value in flavor, but what is really happening is higher concentrations of iron, zinc, calcium, vitamins and minerals giving your body the nutrients it needs to heal.
Even at a local scale not all vegetables are created equally. Those grown in conventional soil have higher concentrations of nitrates. Chemical fertilizers expose soil to rapid releases in oxygen killing off of microbes and limiting the availability of naturally occurring soil nutrients. High intensity organic production can lead to soil degradation as excessive tillage destroys the soil’s flora and fauna. Without microbes, nutrients are locked away in the soil becoming inert and unavailable to plant life.
Crops grown in compost or cover crop residue have markedly higher nutrient density. The same is true for meat where diverse pasture grass fed beef is up to 80% more dense in nutrients compared to conventional grain fed beef.
The implications well sourced and vital food has for public health is immense. Given access to such crops pressure on our healthcare system would drop precipitously while wellbeing rises. The flourishing of local economies would benefit as well as farmers like me would find ways increase supply, improved soil health, and perpetuate a cycle of healing.
For so many years now big food and medicine held our choices. Companies profiting from feeding an ever sickening population a diet of food lacking nutrition and forcing people to rely on a sick care system. It is not a coincidence that the largest agricultural chemical company, Bayer, is also a huge player in the pharmaceutical industry. They’ve created a problem and a “solution” in one fell swoop.
The back doors are open on these companies and public attention is shifting towards other ways of being. There is a pull back to a time when food was locally grown and farmers relied on taking care of their soil. We all, hopefully, have the choice. Pay a little more for tastier, fresher, healthier food today or wait and pay for prescriptions and hospital beds later.
Farm News
We are looking forward to spending a few hours, 11-1, at Horse and Dragon Brewery this Saturday discussing CSAs and the repercussions they carry for human, community, and ecological well being. Also next Saturday the 25th we will be at the Fox Den Cafe with buy 2 get 1 pack your own seeds!
Spring is in the air and we have officially started the first seeds of the season. The next couple months will be a juggle of greenhouse growing, high tunnel building, and preparing soil for the first crops of 2024.
Interested in growing with us this season as a Working Folk? Follow the button below to sign-up for volunteer shifts this season. This is a great way for people to learn, grow, and get great produce in exchange for their time. Veggie shifts will be starting in May but if you’d like to come out earlier we have plenty to get into. We hope to see you on the farm!