FARFA Meeting

Marissa     Food Politics     FARFA, raw milk     0

Earlier this week, I attended a small meeting at Boggy Creek Farm held by Judith McGeary of The Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance (FARFA). I have known about this organization since my family started getting interested in food politics from the producers point of view a few years ago when we bought the farm. Amazingly, I had no idea it was based in Central Texas until this week! They work as advocates on the national level as well as state level (in several states too), so I had never thought of where they were based. I was so excited to see that FARFA was “coming” to Austin for a meeting and did some more digging into the group and of course, discovered that Judith farms right here in Central Texas.

The meeting had a bunch of the “big players” in the world of East Austin urban farms – Johnson’s Backyard Garden, Green Gate Farms, Springdale Farm, and Boggy Creek Farm of course. Also in attendance were Simmons Family Farms, Munkebo Farm, Coyote Creek Farm, and Capital Kitchens (a shared use commercial kitchen in South Austin). I hope I didn’t forget anyone!

The purpose of the night was to help FARFA focus on what legislative issues are truly concerning food producers in the area. This is an interim year for Texas so it gives advocates like Judith a chance to recoop and plan for the 2013 legislative session. She has been holding these meetings all over Texas, and plans to continue to gather as much input as possible. After the “airing of grievances”, she told us that pretty much nothing she had heard that night was news to her – small farmers and food producers across the state are struggling with the same regulations. The top issues can be lumped into two categories: property taxes and food safety regulations.

(Pardon me if I get any of this wrong – I’ve done my research but these issues can be so tricky, sometimes things aren’t clear! Correct me if you see a mistake!)

Property Taxes and Agricultural Valuation

Most of the land that qualifies in Texas for agricultural appraisal does so under ‘open space valuation’ or 1-d-1 appraisal. By State law, the land must be devoted principally to agricultural use which includes “production of crops, livestock, poultry, fish or cover crops” amongst some other qualifications which are less important to small farmers. On top of this, the land must have been used in this agricultural capacity for the last 5 years…and once it stops being used in this way, you owe back taxes for the previous 5 years. There are several problems for small producers here.

First are the accepted agricultural uses. Each county determines what is the ‘normal’ usage of land in their area – this makes sense as the arid western potion of the state will have different normal use than the swampy south eastern portion. But large scale cattle ranching seems to be the norm for deciding whether or not you are a livestock operation. Therefore stocking rates – the number of animals you are required to keep per acre – can be absurd to a small farmer who is trying to maintain the health of the land. And pastured chickens don’t count either because there simply aren’t enough birds – “normal” use is big confined poultry housing with tens of thousands of birds. Additionally, “crops” means monoculture operations like cotton, corn and sorghum NOT mixed vegetable plots that most small scale farmers produce. So for many vegetable farms, agricultural valuation is simply out of the question because their land ISN’T being devoted principally to agricultural use. Yeah…try and figure that one out!

The second problem is the the length of time to get these things done. It’s essentially a 10 year penalty. You must farm for 5 years before you get any tax relief. Then when you stop farming, you must pay back taxes on the previous 5 years. So if you aren’t planning to farm for at least 10 years, you may as well not even bother as you won’t get any benefit from applying for agricultural valuation.

What does FARFA plan to do about this? They are pushing for extending the definition of ‘agricultural use’ to include language that is friendlier to small scale producers and also makes a more uniform application of the State law across each county. Additionally, they would like to see a reduction in the time it takes to obtain the valuation – a decrease from 5 to 3 years. All good things. Let’s hope they can get these through next year!

Department of Health Regulations on Food Safety

FARFA is working on a wide variety of legislation under this general topic. The most pertinent portions for me were the expansion of cottage food laws and direct, but off farm, sales of raw milk.

The Texas Cottage Foods Law covers those foods that are produced in your own kitchen (i.e. not a licensed commercial kitchen) and then sold directly from your residence (here’s a great blog post about some controversy over the existing law). This is legal for non-potentially hazardous baked goods, jams and jellies, and dried herbs (and probably a few other things that I’m forgetting). FARFA would not only like to see the list of acceptable foods expanded, but also the ability to sell these foods at farmers markets and other direct sales locations. This would greatly increase a small producers ability to make value-added products that can easily be a significant portion of income for a family farm type operation.

The second topic was especially pertinent to us as we have flipped back and forth on the issue of getting a Grade A Raw for Retail dairy license. Under the current law, we would have to require customers to come to the farm to buy the milk. While we are sure the quality of our milk warrants such a drive from Austin (where we have heard the most interest expressed for raw goat milk), it is a big step to pay the hefty licensing fees on the chance people are going to make that journey. FARFA is pushing for allowing any direct sales of raw milk. That means selling at farmers markets and through delivery services. This would be a huge benefit to producers like us that are just a bit too far off the beaten path! Learn more at Texas Real Milk.

There were many other topics covered including egg grading, the excessive permitting from multiple districts (state, county, city), zoning, etc. It was a very informative meeting and I encourage all small farmers and food producers to attend any of these meetings held in your area.

Also, please consider joining FARFA to help fund these ventures. Membership can be as low as $10 a year. Remember they work on a national scale too – I’ve simply reported on their current work here in Texas. They have fought against NAIS,  for GMO food labeling, and other important issues. Join today and sign up for their email alerts!

0 comments

---

Online cookbook

Marissa     Eats and Drinks         1

After formulating this idea nearly a year ago, it’s finally come to fruition. I’ve posted some recipes here and there on the blog but typically I don’t follow a recipe – I start with one and then just throw stuff together. So it’s been hard to discipline myself to really try things out, tweak them, retry and finalize a recipe that I feel is worthy of sharing with our CSA customers. But we frequently get requests like “what in the world do I do with all this okra?!?” and “turnips? again?” so I realized I really need to do this.

So I’ve created the Sand Holler Farm Online Cookbook. It’s still in its infancy. The main issue was wrangling my WordPress theme into yet another post type. Or at least, that was my excuse for not doing this earlier (learning php has really not been one of my priorities…). Once I figured that out though, I knew I would actually have to start working on the recipes and taking pictures of everything! But the technicalities are finally worked out and the recipes and vegetable information just need to be filled in. For now, it’s mostly recipes that have either already been posted on the blog or ones that I had been working on when the idea hit last summer. All new recipes will have photos but some of the older ones will have to wait until I make them again!

This week I added the green bean salad recipe to the in-season vegetable section. Willa is always begging for a picnic so I figured we ought to indulge while the weather still isn’t too hot…and there was a break in the rain! The green beans are producing well at the farm and our little crop at the house is just about to burst into bloom! We have both purple and green beans and I can’t wait to experiment with new recipes. The salad was especially nice because the onions were also from the farm. I did have to cave and buy some local cherry tomatoes as ours are JUST on the verge of ripening. Soon, soon, soon! We served the salad with a cold chicken dish, grapes and hot buttermilk biscuits straight from the oven. Ah, the pleasure of having a picnic in your backyard!

Once the recipes are filled in a bit more, I will make the link more prominent. Right now, to navigate to it from the homepage, you click on CSA and then on the left-hand side bar there is a link to the cookbook. Maybe 20 recipes would be a good number before making it more public. I’m adding a few each week, so it won’t take too long!

Many of the recipes will probably be based on a series of cookbooks published in the late 1960s and early 1970s from Time Life. It was one of the first big exposures of international cuisine to the general American public and was aptly named Foods of the World. Each book comes in a set – a hardbound explanatory text that is more like a travelogue for the country or region, and a spiral bound recipe booklet. The series consisted of 27 such sets and I’m only missing one (African Cooking)!  It has been very eye-opening to read some of the comments in the text about the woeful direction agriculture was taking in the 1960s. The Cooking of Italy contains this pertinent quote:

But Italian cooking is also resistant to certain other kinds of change. One comment on a regrettable trend in modern agricultural practices was made by an Italian hotel owner who still manages to set a remarkable table. “Everything is losing its taste,” he complained. “It’s all but impossible to buy a tasty chicken anymore. That’s the result of feeding them with antibiotics and stuffing them with hormones. The same thing is happening to meat. And even to vegetables – I suppose it’s the chemical fertilizers.

I have noticed this decline in flavor myself, but more markedly in France than in Italy. In some important ways, Italy is still wedded to old-fashioned methods. Personally, I hope it will not be too quick to progress – if that is the right word.

Wow. So people knew what was happening FORTY YEARS ago? And it still happened? The power of big business. More light is shed on the trends in food production in American Cooking when the author comes face-to-face with what he perceives as ‘perfect’ beef served at a cowboy cookout – tender, fatty, juicy – and what the beef industry wants to be producing:

…the American beef industry is not entirely satisfied with its product [...] The industry feels that beef could be more uniformly tender – and, surprisingly, more uniformly lean.

The beef industry and the government are both at work on a solution to the problem. A scientifically controlled diet, administrated to cattle after they have been taken from their grass diet on the range to be fattened in a feed lot, has shown that good meat can be developed without excessive fat. [...] And the government has begun work on a 35,000-acre breeding station in Nebraska on the site of a former ammunition dump, where by 1970 more than 200 veterinarians, agricultural  engineers and market specialists will be going about the task of producing new, streamlined cattle. Their goal is to achieve a standardized animal, cutting the unwanted fat from 20 per cent to 5 per cent without damage to the flavor or character of the beef. This saving will be passed along to the consumer in lower prices, and yet I cannot help but wonder how the housewife will react to what will then be more uniform beef – perhaps even providing cuts more or less of the same size. Not the least of our national differences is reflected in the weight of the beef cattle preferred by consumers in the various regions.

So big business pushed for uniform beef and forced it on the general population and now that’s almost all we know. I still can’t get over the fact that people worried about this FORTY years ago and it still happened. Wow.

Folks, eat real food. Food raised the way it was supposed to be. Food that tastes the way it was supposed to taste.

1 comments

---

Die, cutworm, die!

Marissa     Gardening     nickles     4

I’m dealing with some serious cutworm issues in the new garden at our house. The okra was badly hit. Many of the new seedlings were being mowed down during the night by the little soil-dwelling caterpillars. But I actually thought I had passed through the critical stage as the cutworms were nibbling on stems but not completely biting through them. A few were still managing to get all the way through. But those were BIG cutworms too. Each morning, I scratched through the dirt around a victimized plant and usually found the culprit (who would then be promptly squished with green guts going everywhere…green from my poor plants of course!).

I thought I was winning the battle with this simple technique. But then one morning…that all changed. Mission: Cutworm Genocide began that day.

I waltzed out to the garden a little over a week ago to check on things, thinking the destruction would be minimal. Sure enough, the okra all seemed to have survived the night! But wait, what was that? What the…WHAT HAPPENED?!?

My beautiful Black Hungarian Pepper, grown from seed by Mom, had been hacked off about 8 inches high. Not just one stem, but all of them that stuck above that height. The worm just crawled to the top where the stems were more delicate and CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP. Sure enough, I found the assailant and turn him into a smooth paste on a nearby rock…I knew my rocky soil would come in handy one day. Surveying the garden, an Emerald Bell Pepper, about 30 feet away, was similarly topped. Fortunately, both plants will survive and those were the only two. But I knew something more serious had to be done about this.

——————————

Defensive measures (i.e. put collars around plants to prevent access.):

The usual recommendation is toilet paper tubes. I don’t have enough of those to sprinkle all around the garden on every seedling, so I started by using them on plants adjacent to cutworm damage. Pretty soon, all the okra was up and I was able to cover the ones that were closest to the hot spots of activity.

I lost one seedling in a toilet paper tube, but I had likely trapped the little caterpillar in there with it! D’oh! Don’t worry. He was squished too.

For bigger plants, which probably shouldn’t even be bothered by the cutworms, I couldn’t slip a toilet tube around them. I tried something else that I had read – aluminum foil. I wasn’t really sure how to make a cutworm-proof collar out of it, so I just wrapped the stems. No idea if it really helped, but I haven’t had any damage on the peppers in the week they’ve been up.

Offensive measures (i.e. kill the buggers!):

Use Bacillus Thuingiensis (Bt) on the soil around plants. Bt is actually considered an organic pesticide. It disrupts a caterpillars digestion – I like to say it makes their stomachs explode. The graphics at the top of this post (if you are looking at the default blog page, you’ll have to click on the post title to go to the single post page to see what I mean), courtesy of the University of Florida, are just priceless. Look at the poor wittle caterpillar with its wittle dead feet in the air. It just needs ‘x’s over the eyes. So I bought some Bt and couldn’t wait to sprinkle it and have cartoon dead cutworms all over the garden.  But Bt is no good after a rain (not sure if it makes it inactive or just washes it away) and you aren’t supposed to bother applying if its going to rain within 24 hours. Guess what? All that lovely evening rain we’ve been having for the past week has meant that it would be pointless to put out the Bt…but during the wee hours of the morning when the rain finally does stop…the cutworms emerge! Phooey. FINALLY, I got it sprinkled on the seedlings and soil on Saturday night.

Introduce parasitic nematodes that will hunt down and slaughter cutworms in the soil. I love this idea. I’ve yet to find the right stuff though and it’s more of a long term solution than an immediate fix. I will certainly be doing this in the future to improve the general health of the garden.

Squish, squish, squish. Every morning check around the base of nibbled plants for the culprits. Be ruthless! The cutworms are now in the corn (yes, I planted about 2 weeks late…). These are smaller ones. I don’t know if this is a new hatching or what. But they’ve taken out about a quarter of the corn and I’m out of toilet paper tubes!

——————————

So the battle continues. I’m usually not this blood thirsty…but this is war! Anyone have any good cutworm advice?

4 comments

---

Blackberry jam

Marissa     Eats and Drinks     blackberries, preserving     2

I’m striving to add some more ‘how to’ sort of posts here instead of just the usual gabbing about what’s going on at the farm. I figure some folks are reading this to live vicariously through those that farm, and others are trying to do these same things themselves! So let’s share the knowledge..or the mistakes, trials and tribulations!

The loads of blackberries we are harvesting seemed like the perfect excuse for me to do something about preserving. Too bad I picked a recipe I’ve never tried and did it on a workday morning when I didn’t have time to fiddle with things! Ah well, it turned out ok in the end. But this is not “the voice of the expert” here. This is “learning together”!

The farm workers took pounds and pounds of blackberries to Loackhart’s Main Street Market on Saturday. Unfortunately, something was screwy with the tent so they had to set up away from the main area where there was some shade from the buildings. Alas, the beautiful berries were simply out of sight and therefore didn’t sell all that well. So come Wednesday morning, we had an overload of softening berries. First lesson in making jam: don’t use overripe berries. Pectin, the substance that causes the jam to ‘gel’, breaks down as the fruit becomes more and more ripe. But I figured, what the heck? I love breaking rules…

So in the morning, with little time since I had to be at work by that afternoon, I set about making some blackberry jam. It was a wonderful 65 degrees outside, but I was cooped up in the hot cheese kitchen, a separate building from the farmhouse. The cheese kitchen is a great place to work if you don’t want to heat up the house during the summer, but the ventilation in there isn’t the best and I had no cross breeze (hey Pa, can we cut a window in that back wall? Pretty please!!!). Preserving can get things pretty warm.

Anyway, I gathered up my supplies and the ingredients. To make jam, you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment. The minimum I recommend is a water bath canner, jar lifter and wide mouth funnel. The water bath canner is just a huge pot with a nifty rack that keeps the jars off the very bottom and allows you to lift them in and out of the hot water. The jar lifter is essential for moving blazing hot glass around. And the funnel just makes things so much easier. I forgot to add it to the picture though!

After dusting off the supplies (it’s been since last year we did any canning), I filled the canner with water and set it on the stove. It can take a long time to heat up that much water to boiling and you need to sterilize the jars (boil for 10 minutes) before you fill them. And be sure to cover the canner. Lots of heat is lost through that open top! With the water on and the jars loaded, I processed the ingredients called for in a recipe from The Joy of Jams, Jellies and Other Sweet Preserves:

4.5 pounds of blackberries
6.75 cups of sugar
2 tablespoons of lemon juice

Hmmm…no wonder jam is good. Look at that mountain of sugar!

I then put the berries in a 2 gallon stainless steel stock pot and mashed them. Somehow the farm is missing a potato masher but a pastry cutter did the job just fine!

I added the sugar and the lemon juice and heated the mixture on medium until the sugar was all dissolved, maybe about 10 minutes. Turning up the heat to medium-high, I waited for the mixture to boil, stirring frequently. It seemed to take forever, but the water in the canner wasn’t boiling yet so I didn’t fret. Most books on preserves have a hefty section in the front giving all the general instructions for things like acid content, testing for gelling, how to fill the jars, etc. This book is no exception. I have read that entire section in the past, but it was good to refresh my memory from this particular book. I found a spot where it said that you don’t want to boil too fast or the sucrose doesn’t turn to fructose or some such. I don’t recall what the process was that needs to take place, but it made me feel good about the long time I waited for boiling. I also found a warning not to boil the jam for longer than 15 minutes or the natural pectin would start to breakdown. Huh, in the past, I’ve usually cooked and cooked and cooked. Maybe that’s been my problem with gelling! I’ve had fairly hit or miss success with it.

Finally, the water in the canner began to boil. I had already loaded the jars and the funnel so I just needed to watch the time to make sure they stayed in for 10 minutes. Right at that same time, the berry mixture began to bubble as well. I was a bit smug in my perfect timing of things!

Just to help myself become more familiar with testing for gelling, I used the technique in the book every 5 minutes, expecting to be done around 15 minutes in. It’s a common technique. You put a saucer in the freezer to chill it. Then drop some of the jam on the plate and wait for it to cool. If the drop runs, it’s not ready. If the drop mounds, you’ve got everything right and it’s time to fill jars. I was excited to finally be doing this step. In the past, I’ve just glossed over this and gone by the time a recipe said. This was so much more scientific! Woe is me, I never got a mound. The time ticked on. After 25 minutes, I began to wonder if it was the overripe berries or just me. I dug through the cabinets and found a box of powdered pectin and contemplated using it. The instructions were inscrutable though so I gave up and just took the thin syrup off the heat. Sigh. Google may have saved the day though. I found a few recipes online that were nearly identical and they all swore that the thin liquid would firm up after a week in the jar, and especially after being chilled in the fridge. So I pressed on and filled the jars.

I had ladelled a few spoonfuls of hot water into a measuring cup (heat resistant glass container) and then put the canning lids in there. This is to sterilize as well as soften the rubber gasket. After all the jars were filled, I wiped the rims carefully and placed the lids on. The bands should be screwed down securely, but not overly tight. Once they were all done, I had a “little” left in the pot and figured I would put that in a container straight in the fridge to try this stuff out. So I loaded the rack, now perched on the edge of the canner, and lowered the jars into the hot water.

Once the water began to boil again, I processed for 10 minutes. During that time, I realized that I had TWO PINTS extra in the pot. The recipe was only supposed to make 4 pints total – I filled 8 half pint jars – and still had 2 more pints. So, what was with all that extra liquid? Should I have been boiling it down? Maybe the little factoid in the introductory section did not pertain to the blackberry jam recipe I choose. There was no time listed in the recipe, just something along the lines of ‘cook until it’s ready’, so my guess at using the 15 minute rule stated in the introduction may not have been right. With so much jam left in the pot, I went ahead and repeated the canning process so ended up with 6 pints total.

By the way, my favorite part of canning is when the processing is done and you lift the jars out of the water and get to hear the ping and pop of sealing lids!

So worst case, this was going to end up as syrup for pancakes or ice cream. Hardly a failure when you look at it in that light! Late to work, I jumped in the car and dashed to town, day dreaming of blackberry jam. I wanted to wait a week to see how much gelling would occur but I couldn’t help myself this morning. Homemade scones with cream cheese and blackberry…syrup!

Still delicious, who cares about the consistency. But I have since been given the advice to not go by the cooking time or even the chilled plate gel test. Use a thermometer – cooking is done at 220 degrees for our elevation! THAT’S scientific! So I’ll be adding a candy thermometer to my canning supplies this year. Plenty more blackberries to experiment with!

2 comments

---

Using leftovers

Marissa     Eats and Drinks     swiss chard     0

I’ve had several people comment to me that they can’t believe I cook every day, let alone usually two full blown meals (breakfast and dinner). While lunch is typically just ‘regular’ leftovers, as in just heating up whatever was left from dinner, breakfast usually has a large ‘leftover’ component to. It makes for a real meal at breakfast (we haven’t bought a box of cereal in probably 5 years), usually works in more vegetables than usual and doesn’t require tremendous amounts of prep time. I actually love to cook breakfast right now. I wake up before Chad and Willa and it’s become somewhat of a meditation time for me. My back hasn’t started to ache yet, I’m ravenous and I have enough brain cells still function to be creative. By the time dinner rolls around, my stomach has taken the punishment of 12 hours of kicking, my back is aching and my brain is fried. So breakfast is my time to put something special together.

And when you are getting a CSA basket, you are likely to have enough vegetables to include some at breakfast. This is a great way to get the day started. My toddler is hungriest too at breakfast and she is more likely to get veggies in her in the morning then during the cranky-I-missed-my-nap dinnertime we’ve been having lately.

So this week, I can show you how to make 3 meals with just cooking up the vegetables at once. Start by sauteing Swiss chard and garlic for an excellent accompaniment for eggs in the morning. Delicious. The chard that comes in the baskets is more than enough to have some at breakfast with plenty leftover. While I love cooked greens for breakfast, the husband and toddler don’t always approve of this. But never fear. After breakfast, you can hide those greens in other dishes.

In the evening, just make a simple white sauce and cook some rice. Combine with the chard, add some cheese and bake until bubbly. Scrumptious. This casserole can be made with nearly any leftover green vegetables. It’s a great way to use things up, and the creamy sauce makes this a hit with picky husbands and toddlers! We served ours with a farm salad and pan fried turnips with dill.

And finally, the next morning, add in some beaten eggs and make a frittata with the leftovers from the night before. Adding leftover veggies to eggs is an easy trick – scrambled, omelets or frittata. Again, a great way to get in some veggies for those more ‘discerning’ palates in your house. I like doing the frittata because I can finish it off in the oven while doing something else for breakfast and not have to think about it much. This week is was turnip hash browns. So good!

So three meals with only having to bother with cooking and prepping the vegetable once. One nice sized bunch of chard will provide enough for these 3 meals for 4 people too!

0 comments

---