Photo by Marisa McClellan.

Vanilla-rhubarb jam
Makes four pints

Ingredients

10 cups of chopped rhubarb (approximately 2 1/2 pounds of stalks)
5 cups sugar
1 cup Earl Grey tea (you could just use water; I happened to have some leftover tea around and it added a nice note to the finished product)
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
1 lemon, juiced
Pinch of salt
1 packet liquid pectin

Preparation

Sterilize your jars in a large pot of boiling water. If you’re making refrigerator jam (it will keep nicely unprocessed in the fridge for two to three months), skip this step.

In a four-quart, non-reactive pot, bring the rhubarb, sugar, and tea to a boil. Add the vanilla bean, lemon, and salt to the pot and let it bubble gently for about 10 minutes (on my stove, this means I set it to medium-high). After 10 minutes have elapsed, add the pectin, stir to combine, and let cook for a few more minutes.

At this point, dip a spoon in the jam and see how it coats the back of the spoon. If you get a nice, even sheet, the jam is done. You can also taste at this point, to see if you like the balance of flavors. Add a little more lemon juice if you feel it needs additional brightening.

Pour into hot wide mouth jars, remove any spillage, and apply lids and rings. Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Remove from water and let cool.

It’s delicious on toast. If yours turns out more syrupy than jammy, serve with pancakes or waffles and tell everyone you did it on purpose.

Meg Paska with one of her chickens. (All photographs by Valery Rizzo/Nona Brooklyn.)

It’s a dreamy combination of hipster clichés: an urban farming-themed pop-up store made of salvaged materials. In Brooklyn. Maybe that’s why, when Hayseed’s Big City Farm Supply opened at the beginning of April, founder Meg Paska thought, “We’re going to get mocked.” But mockery did not ensue; instead, an enthusiastic community response showed that Paska was on to something with this small, seasonal shop catering to the needs of people growing food and raising animals in the city.

Paska, who blogs about her own backyard garden, chicken coop, and beehive at Brooklyn Homesteader, started Hayseed’s with the folks who run Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Queens. The store will be around until early July in a space Paska rented from the design studio Domestic Construction. We chatted with Paska recently about the project.

Q. How did Hayseed’s Big City Farm Supply come together?

A. My business partners and I both kind of have our own urban farm things going on. We were talking one night over beers, and we both admitted that we had thought about opening a farm store. But we were concerned about retail spaces being really expensive. We kept our ears to the ground and hoped that something would present itself, and it did. A bunch of friends of mine had posted a Kickstarter campaign for a design studio a few blocks from my house. They were going to try and save the lot next to their studio and turn it into an urban farm. I asked them how they would feel about hosting a pop-up store, and they were really into the idea. Their studio is in a big mechanic’s garage. They rented out the front space to us and then actually built out a storefront with pallets and old wood. We didn’t spend a single cent on materials; they built it all with salvaged objects.

Most of the Hayseed’s store is made out of re-purposed objects like these shipping crates.

Q. Why did you see the need for a place like Hayseed’s?

A. As someone who raises chickens for eggs, I struggled to find quality feed at a reasonable price. I am really into a small feed company in Virginia called Countryside Organics, but when you have the feed shipped it doubles the price. There are a lot of other people who raise chickens in the five boroughs here, and they were experiencing that same thing. I started posting on the Just Food City Chicken meetup group’s message board asking who would want to go in on ordering a full pallet [of feed]. The response was overwhelming.

Getting straw and hay delivered to Brooklyn is nearly impossible. It’s difficult to find places to dump bulk loads of soil and stuff, too. Most people don’t want to have a big pile of manure-based compost dumped into their [yard]. We’ve been fortunate this season that the gals at Domestic Construction allowed the use of their lot to do this. We’ve gone through about 60 cubic yards of soil in the month and a half that we’ve been open.

Q. As someone who was doing urban farming on her own, what’s it like to connect to the community through this project?

A. When you’re in the store and you have people coming in asking questions all the time, it makes you realize how much you know, and how much you don’t know. It’s given me confidence, but it’s also given me an opportunity to spot areas where I could improve my knowledge, which is ultimately what I want to do — keep learning and getting better at what I do every day. I’ve learned quite a bit from being questioned on things that I’d never really considered.

Q. What range of farming experience do you see among your customers?

A. We get a ton of people who think they don’t have the ability to grow anything. We give them suggestions for things they can grow easily — foolproof crops with a really high rate of success. Most of the people around here don’t know anything about fertilizing, and we have a whole array of organic fertilizers.

We do workshops every week, on [everything from] beekeeping to raising chickens. We’re doing a small livestock workshop this week, we’re doing a gardening-for-flower arrangements class, we do some on basic container gardening, and then we have a really fun workshop coming up on vegan gardening techniques — using fertilizers that are not animal-based, low-impact gardening, and finding ways to control pests without spraying a bunch of stuff.

Q. What other projects do you have going besides Hayseed’s?

A. I’m writing a book on urban beekeeping. I’m starting an educational homestead in New Jersey at a place called Seven Arrows. We’re hoping to create a place where people can come to get away from the craziness of the city, but also learn more about growing food. We’re going to put all the infrastructure in place late this summer, and then by early 2013 we’ll be in full swing. The goal is to create a hub for learning in the region.

Q. What’s the plan for the store from here?

A. We’re open for another month. We’re going to end [the store] no later than early July. The last two weeks we’ll do a lot of sales and start doing workshops on how people can prep for their fall garden come late August, and then we’ll close up shop. If the numbers reflect a sustainable operation, we’ll do it again next year. All our overhead [for this year] has been paid off, so anything that we sell from here on out is gravy.

We’re just trying to get people pumped on growing their own food, and we want to give them the confidence to get started.

Photo by Chiot’s Run.

If you’ve noticed more carrot-crunching, more orange-peeling, and an abundance of leafy green salads lately, it’s probably not a coincidence. As The Washington Post reported earlier this week, Americans eat more fresh foods than they did five years ago.

The WaPo story was based on a national phone survey conducted by the Kellogg Foundation, which found that the majority of Americans are trying to eat more fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, are shopping at farmers markets at least on occasion, and say they know “a lot or a little about where their fresh fruits and vegetables come from.” These findings are interesting — and they speak to the success of a whole array of efforts to get more of us cooking, examining what we eat, and honing in on the place where healthy and truly delicious foods intersect.

Less visible in the media landscape is the fact that the Kellogg Foundation survey also suggests that all this healthy eating has Americans looking outside themselves.

For one, they’re considering the environment — 64 percent say it’s “very important” that produce be grown in an “environmentally friendly way.” And the same number of people say it’s “very important” or “somewhat important” that produce be organic.

And nearly all — 93 percent — of those surveyed say they think it’s at least “somewhat important” to “make sure all Americans have equal access to fresh fruits and vegetables.” And three-quarters of the respondents said they support the idea of a national program that would double Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps”) benefits at farmers markets. (Of course, this is more than an idea. As we reported recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is currently expanding the number of farmers markets around the nation that are equipped to accept EBT cards.)

Beyond these basic humanitarian instincts — and despite the apparent popularity of Tea Party politics — the survey also suggests that Americans look to our public institutions to play a part in ensuring healthy food access:

• 81 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., needs to do more to increase access to locally produced fresh food in communities throughout the country.

• 86 percent strongly or partly agree that state and local officials should play a role in ensuring local fresh food is accessible to local residents.

• 89 percent strongly or partly agree that the community should play a role in ensuring local fresh food is accessible to local residents.

• 83 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., should shift its support more toward smaller, local fruit and vegetable farmers and away from large farm businesses.

• 83 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., should provide more incentives to encourage the creation of new businesses that sell, process, and distribute locally produced healthy food.

It may be too late for this data to influence the current Farm Bill process — which has taxpayers slated to support those “large farm businesses” with tens of billions in subsidies while offering a few million here and there for “smaller, local fruit and vegetable farmers.” And that’s the best-case scenario put forth by the Senate; the worst case (the House of Representatives’ version) would also involve tens of billions in cuts to SNAP — the very program that is proving crucial to fresh produce access.

Either way, it raises the question: Is this data a snapshot of a trend that has peaked and will now begin to reverse? Or are we seeing the early signs of a larger shift toward a saner, and — yes — a crunchier, leafier food system?

As I mentioned earlier this week, we do still have some choice in the matter.

Photo by Ben Williams.

Filmmaker Hailey Wist’s documentary The Garden Summer is the true story of five strangers picked to live on a farm, work together, and have their lives taped. Wist recruited four other good-looking 20-something suburbanites to spend the summer on an Arkansas farm, getting all their food (except booze, coffee, and cooking oil) either from their own garden or from within a 100-mile radius.

So what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real on a farm? Well, like the original MTV reprobates, they drink, get in arguments, and have romantic entanglements, sometimes with the same people. But they also learn about where their food comes from, and about wasting less and living simpler.

The cast — I’m calling them The Filmmaking One, The Wholesome One, The Ethereal One, The Sardonic One, and The Mustache, based solely on their pictures — makes the original Real World look like a Benetton ad. I’m pretty sure every season had The Token Minority One, sometimes even The Token Minority Several, but this cast is whiter than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And every single one of them is in a creative field — filmmaking, writing, illustration, photography. Now, I’m not saying that necessarily means they’re all incredibly privileged; I’m just coughing really loudly and it happens to sound like that’s what I said.

So OK, maybe this is less the Real World of farms, and more the Girls of Real Worlds of farms. But it looks like they’ll touch on a lot of questions that many of us have — could I be completely self-reliant for my food? Could I learn to waste less? Could I get by eating entirely local? It sounds fun to watch other people doing the experiment, so you can learn from their experience before you try anything yourself. Because you know your version would be way less picturesque and have no soundtrack.

Lynne Curry has always considered herself a locavore, but her food choices changed drastically when she moved from the Washington coast to a grassland ranching community called Wallowa in Eastern Oregon. Near the coast, she had eaten mostly vegetarian, with some fresh fish now and then. But in Wallowa she found that eating responsibly and supporting her local community meant buying and eating grassland beef (in large “shares”). Drawing on prior culinary experience from stints working in several high-end Pacific Northwest restaurants such as The Herb Farm and Willows Inn, Curry created recipes for every cut of meat on the cow.

With her first cookbook, Pure Beef: An Essential Guide to Artisan Meat with Recipes for Every Cut, Curry shares those recipes. She also suggests reaching into the freezer and grabbing whatever cut comes to hand, then paging through her book for a recipe. We caught up with Curry recently to hear about her decision to write the book and the lessons she’s learned along the way.

Q. When did you realize you wanted to write this particular cookbook?

A. I always knew I wanted to do a book, but when I saw an article in TIME magazine about cow-pooling, I knew it was this one. It was the first thing I had seen outside of my community that reflected the relevance of this topic back to me.

But many articles about grass-fed beef only go so far, and then leave you hanging. To make this a viable choice, people need to know how to apply cooking methods.

Q. The book is so comprehensive, covering everything from how grass becomes beef to the basics of butchery. Can you talk about your research process?

A. One of the main things I wanted to do was make sure I could understand and interpret scientific research for consumers without adding to the contention about food choices.

I had an amazing cohort of primary sources, such as Bob Dickson, a leading meat scientist in Oregon; I talked extensively to Cory Carman of Carman Ranch about her ranching practices; on the nutrition front, I consulted with Dr. Lauren Gwin at the American Grassfed Association. I also talked to people at the Niche Meat Processors Assistance Network.

One of the best resources for me was from Union of Concerned Scientists. They did a report about grass-fed beef called Greener Pastures. It helped me put the pieces together. Anyone making choices about what kind of beef to eat should read it.

Q. I liked the moment in the book when you describe being vegetarian and eating beef that was offered to you in Guatemala. You say you weren’t consciously thinking about right versus wrong, but it plays into your overall food choices. Do you think that sense of pleasure spurred you to look for a humane way to eat meat?

A. In that moment, I was completely pulled out of my own context. This 80-year-old woman unexpectedly handed me some beef, and it was an amazing gesture. Everything else faded and the flavor of this meat was in Technicolor. My true confession is that I stopped eating red meat because I didn’t like it, but I loved that beef! It wasn’t until later that I realized what I had in Guatemala was grass-fed.

My commitment is to eat local, and to eat the best quality food available. My choice to eat meat only came from being in a foodshed where this is an available food source. Once I moved here and saw how the animals were raised and saw the whole lifecycle, I felt okay about making this choice.

Q. Pure Beef is obviously a cookbook all about beef, but do you think Americans should be eating more beef?

A. Exactly the opposite. I think we need to be eating less. With this book, I wanted to model a way for people to integrate meat in a holistic way.

In the book, I decided to do whole meals, rather than single recipes. I wanted to show alternatives to each person eating a whole steak. The portion sizes in my book are smaller, and the meat is integrated into a whole meal with a lot of produce.

Q. How do you feel that small-scale ranching addresses some of the problems of food waste?

A. There is attention to usability built into the ranching system. It comes from a rural tradition of taking advantage of available resources and putting things back into the cycle.

Q.There are so many voices out there talking about the best way to feed the planet. How do you square meat-eating with those questions?

A. This is such a hard topic for us right now. I don’t believe we can have a healthy, well-rounded ecosystem completely without meat, but the decision to eat meat is intimate and complex. I wanted to make a book free of judgment for people who already made their choices, and give them the tools for those choices to be fulfilling and pleasurable.

Q. Any recipes that gave you a challenge?

A. I found short ribs to be a challenge. They are always different — some are really fatty, some have a smaller proportion of meat. I finally landed on a ginger-glazed short rib that I’m proud to share. As I talked about earlier, I tested all these recipes with grass-fed beef, so these recipes really are tailored to this kind of meat.

Q. Do you have a favorite recipe in the book?

A. That’s like asking a mother which of her children is her favorite! I love steak and a salad, so the T-bone with fennel-radicchio relish and olive oil flatbread fits my style nicely.

A sweet potato from Saura Pride Purple Sweet Potato, a fledgling business that was once a tobacco farm. (All photos by RAFI.)

Alan Flippin comes from a long line of North Carolina tobacco growers. But, a few years back, the crop just stopped making sense. His family’s operation stopped making much of a profit as the cost of fertilizer and other inputs rose. And, Flippin says, “I don’t really enjoy growing tobacco; I don’t use it. I was looking to get into something else.”

He wanted to transition to growing produce instead — something he could feel good about cultivating, eating, and selling. But shifting to a completely different crop is a hugely risky proposition. “With tobacco, you pretty much know how to grow it; you’ve got a market, and you get insurance for your crops,” Flippin says. “Whereas for produce, it’s very scary because there’s so much you don’t know.”

Flippin’s fledgling produce operation got off the ground with the help of a grant from something called the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund. The grant enabled him to build a greenhouse and experiment with several varieties of organic vegetables to sell to wholesalers, farmers markets, and at a local co-op.

The fund was created in the wake of the Tobacco Master Settlement to help North Carolina’s agricultural communities transition to new sources of income. According to the terms of the settlement, announced in 1997, the country’s four largest tobacco companies would make perpetual payments to 46 states to compensate them for smoking-related health-care costs and, in tobacco-growing states, economic losses (four other states already had individual agreements with tobacco companies).

A percentage of North Carolina’s settlement money goes to the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund, which is a program of the nonprofit Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI).

Jefferson Herr, owner of Herr Flower Farm, is a recipient of funding from the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund.

“The idea,” says Joseph Schroeder, the fund’s director, was to “fund farmers to take that first step in discovering new, innovative ways of making money off farms. In turn we would make them share their lessons and business plans with their community.” Tobacco comes with many of the same issues as other commodity crops (those grown at a large scale and sold to the commodities market, such as corn, wheat, and cotton): It’s a monocrop that requires large amounts of pesticides, depletes soil, and is susceptible to disease. And tobacco locks farmers into a dependent relationship with the corporations who buy their crops and provide them with seeds and pesticides.

The transition from commodity crops to more diverse, locally focused operations can be jarring, and hard for farmers to make on their own. As Flippin noted, small and mid-scale farmers rarely have the security of crop insurance, which makes it much easier to get loans. “Getting that capital infusion [from the Fund] was a big boost to us,” Flippin says. “It really got the ball rolling.”

Beyond the struggle to access capital, Schroeder says, “the thing about commodity production — and tobacco is one of the best examples of this — is you don’t learn how to do everything you need to do to be an entrepreneur. All you learn how to do is grow the product.”

In addition to money, the grant gave Flippin access to guidance from a regional expert and support from a network of grantees around the state. And, true to the other end of the deal, Flippin’s business now serves as a model for how a farm can transition from tobacco to produce. “We’re one of the farms everybody’s looking towards to see if we actually make money or not,” he says.

Though the fund was originally intended for tobacco growers, it’s now open to anyone who earns the majority of their income through farming. In addition to grants for individual farmers, the fund awards community grants for collaborative efforts, and the range of projects they’ve have supported — over 500 in the last 15 years — is an inspiring testament to the potential of farmers’ innovation.

Meredith McKissick, who grows flowers, got a community grant to buy shared-use equipment for a farmers’ co-operative she belongs to near Asheville, N.C., and later served on the review board that selects grantees.

Kay Doby of Hot Shot Goat Farm (once a debt-inducing conventional poultry business).

“It was a super amazing experience for me to see all the different farmers trying to be innovative,” she says of the review process. “There was one fellow who had been [raising chickens] and had been asked to make upgrades he simply couldn’t afford, so he was forced out of his contract. His family banded together and decided they would turn one of the chicken houses into a creamery for dairy goats. Despite his age, he was starting over from scratch. That made me feel like there was hope for some of these growers getting squeezed out.”

Schroeder explains that while other states often funnel settlement funds toward a few specific crops and farming practices, in North Carolina, they “trust the farmer to be the expert.”

That strategy has paid off: Schroeder says RAFI’s surveys report that over 80 percent of the projects it’s funded are successful after three years. And because of the requirement that proposals be replicable — ideas that other farmers could learn from and adapt — the success of any one project has a resounding impact. A University of North Carolina study [PDF] found that each dollar awarded to a farmer through the reinvestment fund generates a whopping $205 of local economic activity, and that each grant creates an average of 11 new jobs in one year.

The fund is based on some pretty simple principles: Support farmers with new and creative ways to make a living off the land; encourage them to share their ideas and inspire others; and in the process, revitalize rural economies once dependent on commodity crops. It’s exciting to imagine how this model could be applied to other industries — corn, industrial livestock, even coal and oil.

Sadly, the fund has taken a bit of a financial hit. It’s fully funded by the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission, which was nearly eliminated in the state’s recent budget crisis; instead, it went from distributing $35 million to just $2 million. That means this year, the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund was only able to give out 34 grants compared to last year’s 181 grants. But the ripple effects of the fund will hopefully continue to widen, especially as recently funded projects grow.

Flippin, for his part, feels that his years of produce-growing trial and error are about to pay off. “The broccoli’s looking great, the zucchinis are looking great, and the tomatoes are looking great,” he says. “It’s finally all coming together this year.”

Photo courtesy of the USDA.

When it comes to giving more people access to fresh, healthy food, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has turned a great deal of its focus in recent years toward farmers markets. And, more specifically, opening farmers markets up to Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) or  “food stamp” users.

In fact, the agency reports, spending at farmers markets under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has already jumped by 400 percent since 2008 — and that’s with less than a quarter of the country’s 7,000 markets participating in the program.

“That’s a huge transformation in the farmers market world, in terms of people being able to feel like they’re invited to the party,” USDA deputy secretary Kathleen Merrigan said in a phone interview.

Expanding SNAP at farmers markets is part of the agency’s broader approach to increasing healthy food access for low-income communities that lack adequate grocery stores and public transportation — areas known (if sometimes controversially so) as food deserts. So when this year’s budget talks came around, the USDA requested $4 million to expand the effort. (Cost is a major reason why more farmers markets don’t already participate: SNAP benefits are redeemed through the EBT system, which relies on wireless technology, and that doesn’t come free.)

Today, the USDA announced it will begin to allocate funds to states with the greatest numbers of EBT-less farmers markets. The states will then decide how best to spend the money for each market: Some may purchase just the wireless equipment, others may buy the equipment and hire someone to manage it, or make other investments that will help manage the program effectively.

Because of that variation, it’s not clear how many more markets will now start redeeming SNAP benefits, but Merrigan estimates that the machines could reach an additional 4,000 farmers markets.

She hopes those markets will help break some of the stereotypes that have developed around eating and cooking with fresh, local fruits and vegetables.

“Twenty years ago or more, people thought this was something for the elite. Clearly that’s not the case, and the expansion of farmers markets with EBT has really proven that,” Merrigan added. And she’s optimistic that more time spent at these markets can lead to other healthy lifestyle shifts as well. “Hopefully some of those people are going to farmers markets on their bikes and walking,” she said.

That said, use of SNAP at farmers markets isn’t going to be the solution that solves all the country’s food problems, and Merrigan recognizes that.

“There’s no silver bullet,” she added.

And because someone will be able to buy local kale or fiddlehead ferns using EBT doesn’t mean they’re going to have the time or experience to cook them. For that reason, Merrigan emphasizes SNAP as a piece of a broader, multi-pronged approach, which includes: “getting access to the food, figuring out what to do with it, and then understanding why it’s important.”

But while this effort by the USDA won’t produce miracles, it will likely give more SNAP users — many of whom do cook at home — quicker, easier access to fresh produce. And that’s no small part of the battle. As Merrigan said, “Getting people to those markets is inviting them into really healthy eating.”

All photos by Almanac Beer Co.

Wendell Berry has said that eating is an agricultural act, but what about drinking beer? A thirst for fermented beverages may have inspired the world’s first farmers to plant crops some 13,000 years ago, yet today beer is rarely part of the larger conversation about where our food comes from.

In California, a handful of local craft brewers are starting to tap into that primitive connection. Taking up the motto “Beer is agriculture,” Almanac Beer Co. works directly with farmers in the greater Bay Area to source specialty ingredients for their seasonal brews. “For most people, beer is what shows up in the bottle or can,” says Almanac brewer Damian Fagan. “We’re trying to create a foundation that beer is rooted deeply in agriculture.”

Fagan founded Almanac with Beer & Nosh blogger Jesse Friedman last year, after they met in a home-brewing club, where they traded brewing experiments. (“I’d show up with a fig beer or a puréed turnip beer. Not always great ideas,” Fagan admits.) The two instantly bonded over their interest in San Francisco’s farm-to-table food culture. “We saw a real opening to think and talk about the brewing process using that same vocabulary and ideology,” says Friedman.

From the farm to the barrel

While the term terroir is usually reserved for fine wines, Almanac has found creative ways to “infuse a sense of time and place in each brew,” as Friedman says, by integrating fresh produce into the mash.

Since last summer, Almanac has collaborated with Sebastopol Berry Farm, Twin Girls Farm, Hamada Farms, Marshall’s Farm Natural Honey, and most recently, Heirloom Organic Gardens. For each of their beers, made in small batches and released seasonally, Friedman and Fagan meet with the farmer, tour their farm, and feature it prominently on the bottle’s label and Almanac’s website.

Almanac’s Jessie Friedman adds late fall plums to a batch of beer.

Like the Farmer’s Almanac, each brew serves as a record of the season. The Autumn Farmhouse Pale Ale celebrated the last of the area’s fall plums, while the Winter Wit preserved the end of December with a mix of Cara cara, navel, and new blood oranges. “If we’d brewed two weeks earlier or later, the mix of oranges would have been different,” Friedman notes.

Their most recent release, Bière de Mars (March beer), is a French-style farmhouse ale highlighting baby fennel. While fennel might sound like an unexpected choice for beer, Heirloom Organic Gardens farmer Grant Brians thought it made a lot of sense when Almanac approached him. “The flavors in fennel are carried in an oil and slightly alkaline base,” he explains. “It’s perfect to mix into the brewing process.”

The goal with each brew is to provide a distinct but subtle accent that does not dominate the flavor profile, but adds depth and pairs well with seasonal dishes. “We want the ingredient to be an integrated part of the beer,” Friedman insists. “It should not be a fennel cocktail.”

How’s the finished result? “It’s good!” says Brians. “I’m generally a wine drinker, but I enjoy full-bodied and well-balanced flavors in beers. And it was nice to taste the end result of our collaboration.”

Bottlenecks for local brewers

While Almanac has sourced some local grains for their brews, including wheat from Massa Organics, brewing a truly local beer is fraught with challenges when it comes to hops and barley malt. “Unfortunately, the beer world is defined by the big American brewers,” says Friedman.

California was once home to a thriving hops industry, but by the 1950s, the mechanization of hops harvesting, outbreaks of downy mildew, and changing beer tastes wiped hops growers out. Today, the majority of U.S. hops are grown in Washington and Oregon.

Sourcing specialty malt poses another obstacle, since there are no malt houses in California, and out-of-state industrial malting facilities prefer to work with large brewers. “You can grow high-quality barley here, but the issue is malting,” says Ron Silberstein of Thirsty Bear Brewing Company. “Part of the problem is that local growers are competing with commodity growers who can grow and malt their barley very inexpensively.” Organic malt from locally grown barley is even rarer.

San Francisco’s first and only brewery to carry a seal from organic certifier California Certified Organic Farmers, Thirsty Bear experimented with brewing a 100 percent local and organic beer in 2010, collaborating with nearby Eatwell Farm and Hops-Meister, a hops farm. Since there are no local malt houses, Eatwell had to ship its barley to Colorado Malt Company, which hand-malts in small batches.

In launching the Locavore Ale, Silberstein had hoped to enlist more local craft brewers to commit to purchasing organic malting barley from Eatwell Farm, but the buy-in wasn’t there, and the farm has since abandoned the project.

“You have to get enough brewers who want to tell a story, who want to have an heirloom varietal of the barley, and who are willing to pay a premium for that,” Silberstein says. He is hoping to build momentum to start a small artisan malting facility, which would make local, small-batch malting more feasible.

While the process of reconnecting local brewers and beer drinkers with local farms still has a long way to go, Silberstein and Friedman are optimistic that the farm-to-bottle movement is growing. “We need to build larger systems to support local brewing, and that’s a challenge we’re excited to tackle,” says Friedman. “In the meantime, we’ve contented ourselves with highlighting specialty ingredients from local farms.”

This beautiful interactive chart from U.K. organization Eat Seasonably may not apply precisely to your climate, and it’s pretty British in other ways too — “courgettes” are zucchini, FYI. But I love the concept — a handy calendar showing you what fruits and veg are in season at what times — and I love the idea of having a star vegetable or three for every month.

For parts of the U.S. this will already be a decent approximation (and if you live in one of those, you can download a poster-sized, though non-interactive, version). For the rest of us, maybe we need some localized versions for other parts of the globe?

Update: Oooh, they have some of these already, though not interactive and not free. You can buy “food wheels” showing what’s local and in season for the New York area, the Bay area, and the Upper Midwest.

Photo by Mswine.

I was recently struck by a promotion I saw on the site Local Harvest, which lists organic and locally grown food around the country. The site reads, “Many farms offer subscriptions for weekly baskets of produce, flowers and other farm products. Try a CSA this year!”

“A subscription to local farm products?” I thought. “Is that all community-supported agriculture has become?”

As the local food movement has gone from a trickle to a sweeping current, and sales of local farm products have grown, it seems that many community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscribers may have lost touch with the original intention behind the term. As a farmer, and one who’s researched and written about the history of CSAs in the U.S. and abroad, I find this trend deeply troubling. It seems many urban residents now see the CSA as just another form of “retail farming” rather than a model for civic agriculture, a site-specific form of solidarity, or associative economics that can transform relationships.

In 1986, when the farmers behind Indian Line Farm and Temple-Wilton Community Farm started the first CSAs in this country, they were seeking solutions to the farm crisis that was driving people off the land. The number of family-scale farms was dropping every year. The work of food production — not to mention all of the risk — fell on the farmers, while prices rarely covered the costs of production, let alone provided a living wage. The CSA model invited local consumers to share the harvest and the risks by paying in advance for a whole season. They would feel a sense of ownership in the farm, and they took whatever the farm could produce in return.

The farmers at Indian Line Farm literally divided up the harvest of each week’s crop equally among the shareholders. Everyone participated — harvesting, weeding, or helping with distribution, promotion, or administration. Temple-Wilton separated the food from the price-per-pound mentality by summoning all members to an annual meeting where they made bids for payments to cover the farm budget. Once the season began, members took the amount of food they needed regardless of how much they had paid.

The value of commitment

Today, while many models like this still exist, there are also some CSAs that have abandoned entirely the notion of sharing the risk. In crowded markets like the San Francisco Bay Area, farms like Full Belly Farm and Capay Organic allow members to join for as little as one month. Farm Fresh to You, Capay Organic’s produce box service, and one of the largest in the country, advertises: “Customer Friendly, Flexible, Convenient — Cancel anytime — No commitment.”

All members of Genesee Valley Organic CSA play some role in the workings of the farm (these folks are washing vegetables).

The popularity of the CSA concept has also spawned imitators with no farm base at all, who use the local farm connection to lure customers to their convenient box delivery schemes. One local food service claims to run “very much like a community-supported agriculture, or CSA program.” But the entrepreneur-owner does not pay the farmers in advance or share the risk with them in any way. As the Wisconsin-based FairShare CSA website puts it, “These ‘box schemes’ source products from all over the country or world, just as most grocery stores do … You don’t build a relationship with any of the farmers involved and it may be difficult to even find out where something really came from.”

Dave Runsten of Community Alliance with Family Farmers in California tells me that the Department of Food and Agriculture in that state is working on an official definition of CSA. Runsten says the state plans to define single-farm CSAs and multi-farm CSAs, and they’re considering banning the use of the term by anyone buying from wholesalers or not requiring advance payment. That’s a start, but what about sharing the risk?

The United States Department of Agriculture defines CSA this way: “CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.”

Meanwhile, Angelic Organics, a biodynamic farm in the Chicago area that supplies over 1,000 shares to members, describes the relationship in more colorful language:

When you sign up, you dedicate yourself to being our customer for the year, thus providing us a secure market — a welcome measure of certainty in the fickle world of farming! We, in turn, dedicate ourselves to being your farmers, providing you with a varied, nutritious vegetable diet. We do our very best to bring you a beautiful and bountiful box each week, but since our boss, Nature, provides no guarantees — we can’t offer any either. One of the premises of a Community Supported Agriculture program is that the shareholder shares, through the veggies, the farmers’ experience of nature’s mischief (and blessings).

Beyond convenience

In the 25 years since the first CSAs appeared, thousands of farms have adopted the model. Farms ranging in size from half an acre to hundreds of acres have benefited from the support of steady season-long sharers. The CSA model has also inspired and enabled an astonishing variety of farm-based projects with social service missions like the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, Calif., which employs homeless people, and Red Wiggler Community Farm in Pennsylvania, which gives meaningful work to adults with developmental disabilities.

Member involvement also varies tremendously. New York’s Genesee Valley Organic CSA and Missouri’s Fair Share Farm stand out as rare farmer-customer co-operatives — all members contribute, either by taking a core group job or helping with farm work and distribution. Vermont Valley Community Farm in Wisconsin recruits 50 of its 1,250 members to work as harvest crew, exchanging labor for vegetables. Still other CSAs make farm work voluntary or offer discounts to members who provide drop-off points.

Committed CSA members have also been known to make additional investments and loans to farms in need. This is a phenomenon I know firsthand. When my own farm, Peacework Organic Farm, needed financial support to secure land a few years back, our CSA members pitched in so that a local land trust could buy the farm and lease it back to us.

This isn’t the kind of community that we should take for granted.

And while some commercialization may be inevitable when a product of counterculture enters the mainstream the way the CSA model has, the conversations I hear about how “inconvenient” it is for consumers are missing the point.

As I see it, reducing CSA to a mere food box subscription scheme would castrate the CSA model, taking away its power to create lasting relationships between the people who grow and eat food. As Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini would say, CSAs allow citizens to become “co-producers” with their farmers, rather than passive consumers.

At their best, authentic CSAs are a win-win-win. Farmers get living wages and freedom from worry about profits and losses. Everyone weathers the tough times and benefits from the good times. Nothing goes to waste, and community investments help pay for land and equipment. Most of all, eaters get healthy food, good company, and the deep — if not always “convenient” — satisfaction that comes from playing an immediate role in transforming the food system.