Houston Chronicle Aug 2007

Photo by Johnny Hanson

Aug. 1, 2007
GROWING FIELDS
City cousins, country cousins
Small farmers and hungry Houstonians organize to share the risks and harvests

By PEGGY GRODINSKY
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Farming is a notoriously risky business. Too much rain or not enough. Hail, bugs and blight. Too cold, too hot - or maybe both in a single season, always at the wrong time.

What if the risk were spread around? What if the small, local farmer - that fellow Americans love to love, at least in theory - had a community behind him sharing the gamble?

That's the idea behind "community-supported agriculture,'' also known as subscription farming. You may know it by its acronym, CSA. A handful of such programs, if that, operate in the Houston area. Around the state there are 36, according to www.localharvest.org. Austin is CSA central - no surprise.

Like farmers markets, organics and sustainability, are CSAs an idea whose time has come?

"We've watched it grow a lot over just the five years I've been involved,'' said Brad Stufflebeam, an enthusiastic, indefatigable farmer who owns the 22-acre Home Sweet Farm in Brenham with his wife, Jenny. The couple supply four CSAs, totaling roughly 100 families, in Brenham, Cypress, Katy and Houston's Meyerland area, with a changing mix of vegetables grown without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides.

"When we first started, there were just a couple in Texas. We're seeing it grow across the whole country."

How it happens

To form a CSA, people band together to buy shares in the growing season of a nearby farm, paying the farmer a lump sum upfront. In exchange, they pick up a bag of fresh-picked, locally grown vegetables weekly at a central site. Sometimes eggs, cheese, milk or other farm products are available, too. In effect, the group has lent the farmer money, which will be repaid through the season in kale, kohlrabi, tomatoes and corn, often curious heirloom varieties that can't be found at Kroger or H-E-B.

The farmer gets cash when he needs it most — at the start of the season, in time to buy seeds and equipment — when ordinarily no other money is coming in. Since he knows in advance how many customers he has, he also knows how much to plant. After a few seasons, he knows what his customers like, too, and can customize the crop to suit — less okra, more tomatoes, and so on. It's a win-win situation, says Conroe farmer Angela Thiel of St. Fairsted Farm, which operates a CSA that supplies families in The Woodlands, Huntsville and Conroe.

As for the subscribers, they get an education in growing seasons, unscripted cooking and weird vegetables. Malabar spinach, anyone? Amaranth greens?

They also learn compassion for the farmer, their farmer, when it rains. And rains. And rains some more.

"It's a drop in the bucket, but it can only help to support that kind of farm," said Bettina Elias Siegel, a member of the Home Sweet Farm-supplied CSA, which I joined last spring. It was organized by the Jewish Community Center as part of a national program called Tuv Ha'aretz ("good for the land" or "best of the land" in Hebrew).

"There has been so much written lately about the carbon cost of your food, and I really never took that into account," Siegel said. "I (used to be) delighted to get my raspberries from Chile in January. This has focused me."

The idea isn't new

CSAs originated in Japan and Europe in the 1960s, reaching the United States about 20 years later. Today, some estimate the number in the United States at 1,700; the largest have more than 1,000 members. Individual farmers shape the model to suit themselves, deciding how many members they need to make it feasible, whether members will contribute work hours, if monthly payments are acceptable, if home delivery is an option.

The Tuv Ha'aretz CSA — open to anyone — charged $600 for a six-month vegetable season, plus a membership fee. You can buy half-shares, as I did, or one-quarter shares. Each week, vegetables that members fail to pick up are donated to Braes Interfaith Ministries, which operates a food bank.

My half-share was both too much and too little. What to do with the single black radish that arrived in April? How to handle a mere four leaves of kale in May? And what about the onslaught of hot and sweet peppers that started in July and hasn't subsided yet?

The radish, I am ashamed to say, went to waste. It fell to the bottom of my crisper and languished, out of sight, out of mind. By the time I remembered it, it was shriveled and limp, beyond eating. The kale and many other leafy spring greens inspired a barley risotto with chard, a wheat-berry salad with all manner of greens, a cornbread pudding fortified with chopped, sautéed kale.

When I joined the CSA, I expected the vegetables to become the main event on my table. Instead, I found they crept into my cooking as supporting actors.

Except for the peppers. The peppers (Italian, banana, corno del toro, Aconcagua) starred in sandwiches on peasant bread with provolone cheese. They went into tortillas. They sauced pasta one night, and the following night, too. I finally struck gold with Sweet Peppers With Chorizo, Potatoes and Chickpeas (the recipe is on Page F6). Not only was it scrumptious, it was useful — the glut of peppers gone in one clean sweep. Until the next week.

The Iron Chef challenge

Each Thursday, we Tuv Ha'aretz members face an Iron Chef challenge of sorts, stretching our kitchen skills and nudging us out of culinary ruts.

Never heard of long beans? Chinese vegetables resembling very long green beans, they showed up in our bags in June. Plug the name into an Internet recipe search engine and away you go. Tuv Ha'aretz, like most CSAs, also offers weekly recipes, vegetable biographies and farm updates in an online newsletter.

"I get stuff I never would buy, so it's a challenge," member Mary Starrett said. "When life gives you jalapeños, what do you do with them?"

Or, say, potatoes, kale, heirloom romaine lettuce and a half-bulb of fennel, one week's haul. Some Home Sweet Farm CSA subscribers have solved the problem by combining the entire weekly bagful into what they've dubbed "Stufflebeam Stew."

For Siegel, the mix of vegetables led to an epiphany.

"Recently we got all those eggplants, peppers, squash and tomatoes, and I made ratatouille. I'd never made that before in my life," she said. "It dawned on me that's why there is ratatouille — all these things (ripen) at the same time."

As the adage goes, what grows together goes together.

Tour of a sodden farm

On a hot, cloudy July day, Stufflebeam showed me around Home Sweet Farm. We walked pretty, sloping fields by a creek, encountering gabby farm birds, a goat and as many weeds as vegetables. Probably more. Weeding is impossible when the ground is sodden. The rotted melons, the okra that refused to flower or set fruit, the disappointing harvest of summer squash, the dinky butternut squash that failed to reach its potential without the warmth of the sun — blame it all on the relentless rain. (In a stroke of marketing genius, Stufflebeam later turned lemons into lemonade, dubbing the cute, undersize squash "baby butternuts."

CSA members get weekly updates about conditions on the farm, via online newsletters and the farm Web site, www.homesweetfarm.com. This summer the news has been bleak. The day I write my story, I read this posting:

"Well, we walked the fields this week with our first days of no rain in what seems like a month. A lot of crops are still standing in water and mud, and we have tried to best assess the damage. Unfortunately, it will cause delays in production, and the farm needs at least a week to recover and dry out. The shares may be small until things dry out, and we really need some sun to help crops set fruit. The saddest part, our melons and tomatoes are a complete loss. We hope more summer crops recover soon. Thanks for your support and understanding!"

Dreams big and small

Stufflebeam, who happens to be president of the Texas Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association, is smart, articulate and passionate. He dreams big — that one day CSA farms in Texas will be as common as pickups, that supermarket produce will sport "freshness" labels indicating how far it traveled from field to market, that Americans will understand the true costs of growing food and be willing to pay them. He also dreams small — of a sales stand at Home Sweet Farm, of chefs teaching cooking classes using its produce, of flourishing rows of persimmons and purslane.

A homegrown lunch

After the farm tour, Jenny Stufflebeam made lunch. It shouted its Hill Country provenance: quinoa salad with fresh vegetables, cheese and butter from a neighbor's farm, hearty homemade bread, a juicy Israeli melon that somehow defied the rain, hibiscus tea. The couple's polite girls introduced me to Princess the chicken, Bianca the rabbit and Baxter the puppy. We became fast friends.

The Stufflebeams hold monthly market days and occasional potluck dinners to encourage CSA members to visit the farm. Often city folks, they form a community with the farmer and with one another, sharing recipes and farm realities.

Even so, when I pick up my weekly share at the Jewish Community Center, I am sometimes disheartened. I'd envisioned a cornucopia of ravishing vegetables marching straight from the field to my dinner plate. Instead, I find myself grousing in a notebook, "A half a bulb of fennel, and not even that large a bulb to start with."

Talking with my fellow members brings me around. An effervescent Tracy Stein e-mailed early on. "I don't even know what most of these vegetables are," she wrote. "This week we maybe had a parsnip. We had what looked like miniature beets. Someone said one of the greens was dandelion. I recognized the dill, and I know for sure I got eggs. ... This is going to be a humongous adventure."

Courtney Curtis gently reminded me of the deal I'd struck. "I come from the perspective to (take) the good with the bad. You are in it with them. I know they set out ... to have as much crop as they can handle. But we had a really rainy spring, so that's something you can't control."

Sunshine in the rain

You can lose, in other words, and surely some Tuv Ha'aretz members feel they did. But even in the rain, there were rays of sunshine: amaranth greens, a thrilling discovery; pea tendrils, which I finished in the car before I reached home; homely potatoes whose intensely earthy flavor made me question if I'd ever tasted the tuber before; a cheery bunch of orange zinnias that popped up among the cucumbers and basil.

With a CSA, when you win, you win big. Also, you may have aligned your kitchen and your dollars with your convictions. On reflection, that's a gamble I'm happy to make.

peggy.grodinsky@chron.com

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