Meet this week’s vegetables:
We ran into some friends at the local office supply store yesterday; they were buying back to school supplies for their kids. We realized school began soon, but it was still a surprising reminder to see a basket filled with notebooks and pens! This weekend is Labor Day—the last ‘real’ weekend of summer for those of you living on the academic calendar (which seems to affect us all these days).
And yet, here at Oakhill Organics, we are only just past the halfway mark for the main season CSA (and not even halfway through the entire season). Remembering this was a good reminder of how much is still coming, even though we might feel like things are winding down and going back to ‘normal’ after summer.
This week we’ve been continuing to plant and harvest, plant and harvest, plant and harvest. We’ve planted more chicories, lettuce, turnips, swiss chard, carrots, basil, mustard greens. Along with more onions, yesterday we began harvesting our winter squash. This feels early to us, since we normally harvest it right before or after the first frost, but it was ready. Because of our experience farming ‘up north’ (Bellingham, WA), we planted our squash probably earlier than anyone else in this valley. And with the extra heat this summer, it started looking mature weeks ago. It was hard to believe that it could be ready so early, but the plants have already started dying off (as they do towards the end of the season) and we began to worry that the sun would scald the fruit in the field. So, finally today we began bringing the squashes in. They’re beautiful.
We really don’t mean to tease you with all these previews of upcoming offerings. Fall harvests have simply been filling our days and our minds (and someday soon, our bellies too).
But we do think about things besides fall and ‘next year’ too. We had a rousing conversation with a workday crew last week about one of our most frequent topics of discussion: organic certification and its significance. At Oakhill Organics, we talk about the ins and outs of this process frequently, since it is a rigorous and sometimes frustrating experience.
Most often, however, we talk about the current trend of many new small farms not being certified even though they grow more or less in accordance with the national organic standards. Instead they choose to market themselves using terms like ‘sustainable’ or ‘natural.’ This is a choice we considered at first as well. Since we direct market 99% of our vegetables, we thought that perhaps we could communicate our growing methods straight to the eater and that this would suffice.
When we voiced this possibility to some of our mentor farmers, they encouraged us to get certified. And, in the end, being certified has become incredibly important to us as new growers.
Being certified has its drawbacks. It is most certainly a painful process: with the exception of our actual inspection, dealing with the paperwork and the certification body was a lesson in bureaucracy and perseverance. Much of being certified is simply about establishing an ‘audit trail’ that provides evidence of growing methods (which of course must be in accordance with the federal organic standards). While most of the record keeping will be useful to us in subsequent years, there were moments when it just felt overwhelming, daunting, and very inaccessible to a new small grower.
So we understand why other farmers have chosen to opt out. It can be disheartening to see the organic label on so many foods that seem far from sustainable (which many farmers want organics to mean, even though that is not currently how it is defined). But at the same time, we worry about the drop out of small farms from the organic conversation. We worry that their voices will have less weight if they’re not forcing themselves through the door and into the ‘organic’ club. We also worry that the certifying bodies will more and more discount the small growers as worthwhile players (this is an experience many small farms have had with certifying bodies already). It is certainly sad to see the same demographic that founded the organic movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s (small market gardens) now choose more and more to leave its ranks.
As you can see, it is not a simple conversation that we had while weeding carrots last Saturday. And here at Oakhill Organics, we continually wrestle with our own role in the organic movement and what it means for us to be organic. For us, it is of course much more than just being synthetic chemical free (which is more or less the national standard in a nutshell). That is part of it, but we also have other goals and priorities as well. I think that the words ‘health’ and ‘sustainable’ probably best summarize our own aims. We want to foster a healthy farm, where soil health supports plant health, which in turn fosters people health. We also want to be a part of a healthy local agricultural economy, where diverse populations of people can afford to buy our healthy food and where we can afford to make our living providing that good. And we want all of this to be ‘sustainable’ so that the farm can continue season after season (and so can we). And so on.
For now we are glad to be an ‘official’ part of whatever ‘organic’ means right now. We feel like being certified makes us ‘voting members’ in an important debate.
And we also love the contract it creates between you—the eater—and us—your growers. We could say that we haven’t sprayed our fall garden crops, and you could believe us, and that could work just fine. And we do enjoy talking through these issues with you (and love that we are in a position to discuss how we grow with the people who eat our food), but being certified gives us a solid place to start.
So, hopefully we’ll continue this conversation through the rest of this season and into the future. We are always interested in hearing what you think about issues surrounding food politics and safety too. What are your priorities when choosing the food you eat? Hopefully someday we’ll hear about them.
Until then, enjoy this week’s certified organic vegetables!!!! We hope that they fit in well with your Labor Day weekend plans. Remember that summer squash, onions, and eggplant are all yummy grilled!
Your farmers,
Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics
