(CSA Newsletter: Week 39)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
(Russell Sprout snags himself a Brussels sprout!)
- Brussels sprouts — One of our favorite fall vegetables! Before preparing, we recommend trimming and rinsing your Brussels sprouts. Check out some of the serving suggestions in this week’s newsletter.
- Broccoli
- Sweet peppers
- Celery root OR chard — Your choice between celery root (delicious in soups!) or swiss chard (also incidentally delicious in soups!).
- Beets — Make a fall roasted vegetable dish: chop beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, celery root, and onions in even sized pieces. Spread on a greased sheet pan and roast at 375° (stirring occasionally) until the roots are tender inside and crisp outside. Salt to taste.
- Carrots
- Sweet potatoes — Important: Do NOT put sweet potatoes in your fridge! Store them outside of a bag or container in a warm place (your counter, a pantry shelf, etc.) Another good sweet potato tip: in our many trials of roasting, we have found the secret to crispy exteriors — chop into smaller pieces or wedges and roast until tender inside. Then pull out the pan and let it sit on the counter without stirring the sweet potatoes. In about 5-10 minutes, the edges exposed to the air will turn delightfully crispy. Eat immediately.
- Red onions
After months and months of waiting, the gravel quarry hearing is coming up: next Wednesday, November 10, at 1 pm at the McMinnville Community Center (600 NE Evans St).
Our group of farmers and local residents has been working all summer and fall to prepare. We’ve been reaching out to county citizens to educate on the issues, preparing our own testimony, and generally trying to learn about mineral zoning laws in Oregon.
We feel that we have a very strong case that Grand Island is not an appropriate place to site another large quarry. The more time we have to ponder the issue, the more conflicts we see with agricultural practices on the island.
Plus, we’ve had a ‘sneak preview’ of gravel quarry impacts when the approved site on the north end of the island starting hauling rock this fall. It was at the same time that all the local farmers were rushing to chop and haul silage corn — they’d been waiting as long as possible to take advantage of the fall warmth for maturation and the rain was coming, so they were chopping and hauling almost 24 hours a day.
It was crazy watching the silage trucks and gravel trucks compete on our very narrow island roads. A telephone pole got knocked over by a truck veering off the road, and ruts were formed at the edges of road shoulders. It’s only a matter of time before the roads themselves start breaking off at those edges with such large and heavy trucks driving on them.
And that was just the beginning. We still don’t know how the open pits will affect floodwater movements when the Willamette rises this winter, or how the dust from the pits will settle on crops in the summer. Frankly, we’re pretty nervous about the first, already approved quarry — let alone another one.
We here at Oakhill Organics are already feeling some unexpected impacts of the proposed quarry. We are actively trying to buy 31 acres of land adjacent to our farm — it’d be an ideal place for us to expand. We could do so without adding much extra expense of travel to another piece of land, and it’s good island ground. In fact, in some ways, the soil next door is even better than our own for growing vegetables — it’s a very well drained silt loam. We are excited by the prospect of having more space to expand and play on — in addition to growing more vegetables, we hope to put in berries for U-pick and the CSA. And, we even have dreams of building a farm stand there that we would run cooperatively with another organic farmer on the island. We’ve already been verbally approved for a USDA loan. Sounds great, right?
Except that the current renting farmer is the same one who is renting ground from the pending quarry site. He stands to lose a lot of farm ground over the next 30+ years if this quarry is approved. He also farms land on the already approved quarry, so he’ll lose acreage there for sure very soon. And the current owner is starting to have second thoughts about kicking him off because of that fact. So, the first quarry has just begun operation, the second one is still just proposed, and we’re already feeling the pinch of losing farmland on the island.
Did you know that if this second quarry is approved, Grand Island will lose 25% of its farmland to mineral extraction zoning? One quarter! How are we supposed to continue farming as normal when the island’s core identity will be shifted so much to extraction and away from agriculture?
Oregon law is supposed to protect farmers in situations like this, but for better or worse, the decision-making and interpretation is left up to the local county governments. We’re not sure what to think about how our sitting county commissioners will hear our case in this situation given all the recent political drama happening (including some questionable timing of donations from other gravel companies in the county). All we can do is prepare our testimony and hope for the best.
Even though this won’t be decided by popular opinion, your opinion and views matter too. If you haven’t done so yet, please do submit written testimony on behalf of the farmers. You can send in a postcard (we’ll have some at pick-up this week) or drop a note of your own addressed to the Yamhill County Planning Department, 525 NE 4th St, McMinnville, OR 97128. You can find out more information on our website: ProtectGrandIsland.com.
Of course, we’d also love it if you could attend the hearing next week. The more bodies, the louder our voice and the more likely we are to be heard.
Keep in mind that this particular hearing is focused on one quarry on Grand Island, but the issue is much bigger than that. If you could fly over the Willamette River today and see the existing quarries plus all the ground that’s already been approved, you’d see a rapidly disappearing river valley.
There is no “needs” assessment component of approving new quarries — the process does not include a fair balancing of our state or county’s future needs for gravel versus farmland. Farming is still a core industry in Oregon and Yamhill County, and yet gravel is given a priority in these cases. I really think that if we don’t do something to stem the tide of new approved quarries, we are going to wake up in 40 years and realize that we allowed our beautiful agricultural river valley to be destroyed.
Gravel extraction leaves a permanent mark on the landscape — the holes will never be filled, and they cannot be made a thriving living part of the river system. Instead, they sit as walled-in ponds that don’t provide meaningful habitat for wildlife, income for farmers, or a tax-base for the county.
I may write more in next week’s newsletter, but I hope this is enough to get you angry. You should be — corporate interests from outside Oregon (and mostly outside the United States) are what drives new quarry developments. Most ‘local’ gravel companies have been purchased by large multi-national corporations (or will be in the near future).
In closing, I want to end with a quote from one of Oregon’s most influential governors, Tom McCall:
“The interests of Oregon for today and in the future must be protected from the grasping wastrels of the land. We must respect another truism — that unlimited and unregulated growth, leads inexorably to a lowered quality of life.”
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
