growing
ne ws & ide a s for lo c al fo od producers
FOR
Volume 21 / Number 6
June—July 2012
M A R K ET
Setting prices for
maximum profits
By Chris Blanchard
Essay contest...Win $1,000 / 8
Trellising tomatoes / 9
Harvesting and curing garlic / 15
Making bridal bouquets / 24
It’s easy to get caught up in the
work and excitement of production,
buying new tools, and trying new
growing techniques. But if you want
to make money farming – and even
though it’s not about the money, it is
the money that makes the wheels go
round – you’ve got to get your pricing
right. Price your product too high,
and nobody will buy it. Price it too
low, and you won’t make enough to
cover your expenses and keep farming. Set your prices right, and you’ll
maximize your income and minimize
your work.
After 10 years of farming for other
people, I finally started selling my
own produce at farmers market in
2000. That year, I had a stand next
to a couple who were also just getting
started in the adventure of farming.
The week our first carrots were ready,
I showed up with my Toyota Previa minivan packed to the gills with
green-top carrots. My neighbors had
carrots, too, and were selling them
fifty-cents-a-bunch cheaper than we
were. At about 9 o’clock, Jerry turned
to me and said, “We’re sold out of
carrots!” He was clearly proud of having sold out.
We sold carrots all day long, pulling crate after crate of carrots out of
the Previa right up until the last few
minutes of the market. Why? Because we had our price set right so
that we could keep selling carrots all
day long. And because we had carrots
at our stand until the last minutes of
the market, customers kept coming
to my stand, where they also bought
my salad mix, tomatoes, and beets.
Jerry’s additional produce languished
on his stand.
When you set your prices right,
you maximize your effectiveness at
making money. They call it “market”
farming for a reason.
Price right, make more
If you sell out of product, your
prices are too low. Ideally, you would
have a little bit of everything left over
to take home to your compost pile or
donate to your local food bank.
Let’s say you take 10 pints of Sungold cherry tomatoes to farmers market, sell them for $2 a pint, and sell
out by 9 a.m. Score! You’ve made $20.
On the other hand, the biggest draw
at your stand is now sold out, and
your Swiss chard and bok choy might
end up sitting by the wayside, wilting
in the sun.
But maybe you’re going to sell
them for $4 a pint. Lots of people
walk by and turn up their noses at
your outrageous pricing (have those
people ever actually grown anything?)
continued on page 3
LET TER FROM
Wild Onion Farm
LYNN BYCZYNSKI
Getting out and about
to see farms and markets
I try to ensure that the articles in Growing for Market
are useful to you, our readers, with sufficient details to allow you to put ideas to work immediately. This issue is
certainly packed with that kind of information. You have
here the tools you need to cure your garlic, make a bouquet
for a June wedding, stake and weave your tomatoes, and
reconsider how you’re pricing them.
As much as I love the practicality of GFM articles,
I enjoy even more the little glimpses they provide into
other farms. I love the photos of other growers’ barns and
workshops, the little details of their days, the personalities
that shine through their advice. The variations on market
farming are endlessly refreshing.
This summer, I am hoping to get out to experience
some farms and markets in person. Our young adult children (one just graduated from college, the other just completing her first year) are taking charge of the flowers and
tomatoes. And there’s no July issue of GFM, so that gives
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me the opportunity to travel in June. It’s been a few years
since I’ve had the chance to visit farms and markets during the growing season, and I miss the journalistic excitement of seeing something new and different. Because I’ve
been a grower myself for so long, I can often spot a news
story that might go unnoticed by a non-grower: a homemade piece of equipment, the layout of a packing shed,
an efficient harvesting method, an exceptional marketing
technique. These are the kinds of details that can be immensely helpful to other growers, and I hope to bring back
some great stories and photos.
I would appreciate recommendations for places to visit
this summer, especially in the Midwest, Virginia, and
Sacramento area. What farmers do you admire? What
farmers markets are dynamic? Would your own farm be
fertile ground for a GFM article? Please drop me a note:
[email protected]. Thanks!
Growing for Market is published 10 times
per year by Fairplain Publications, Inc.
ISSN 1060-9296
Volume 21
Number 6,
June—July 2012
(To Canada, add $15 postage; other countries, add
$30 postage. All orders in U.S. dollars.)
© 2012 Fairplain
Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
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or phone 800-307-8949.
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Jessica Pierson
For more information on making your farm safer, call 800-­786-­2829 or visit www.jiffyhitchsystems.com
2
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
Print edition by mail:
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Contributing Editors
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Setting prices
continued from page 1
but you sell five pints and you’ve got $20 at the end of the
day. Plus, you’ve got five pints to take home, where you
can slow roast them in the oven for a truly heavenly treat.
On the other hand, you could price them at $3 a pint,
and maybe you’ll sell eight (especially if you’ve got underpriced neighbors who sell out before the demand is exhausted), and then you’ll go home with $24 and you’ll still
get to have some slow-baked Sungolds. That sounds like
sweet success to me.
And the best part? When you’ve got a high-demand
item throughout the time the market’s open, the rest of
your produce sells better, too. When somebody’s got their
wallet out to buy your Sungolds, they’re more likely to buy
your broccoli raab as well, since they’re already making an
exchange. Plus, you can gain some loyalty on the part of
those late risers who are so often disappointed.
Grow less, make more
Scaling up is all the rage right now. If you’re in the agricultural education sector and you want funding, just say
“scaling up” and agencies start throwing money at you.
But it’s worth asking if growing more is actually the best
way to increase your farm’s economic viability. Maybe
you just need to raise your prices.
Until you increase your scale such that you can mechanize or take advantage of deep price cuts for bulk purchases, and unless you have high overhead costs, your cost of
production per unit of produce doesn’t change radically.
It just doesn’t cost that much less per bunch to grow, harvest and wash 200 bunches of cilantro than it does to grow,
harvest, and wash 100 bunches of cilantro.
If it costs you 75 cents to produce a bunch of cilantro,
and you sell that cilantro for $1, you’ve made 25 cents for
each bunch. If you sell 100 bunches, you’ve got $25 left
at the end of the day. Now, you’ve decided you want to
make more money from your farm, so you decide that you
should scale up, and double your cilantro production; now
you sell 200 bunches, and you’ve got $50 after you’ve covered your expenses.
But what if you just raised your price instead? If you
raise your price to $1.50 per bunch, your costs to produce
the cilantro won’t change at all – but now you’re making 75
cents on each bunch you sell. Classic supply-and-demand
economics tells us that our sales will go down, but now you
only need to sell 67 bunches to make that same $50 after
expenses.
continued on the next page
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GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
3
Components of cost
For the market farmer, cost has three main components: overhead, direct costs of production, and direct
costs of marketing.
Overhead costs are those costs you assume whether
you grow and sell anything or not: interest on loans, interest on tractors, the cost of owning land and buildings,
and the amount of money you spend on office supplies.
Whether you sell one bunch of carrots at farmers market,
or a thousand bunches of carrots wholesale, these costs
stay the same.
Direct costs of production include all of those things
you buy and do to actually grow a crop: seeds, transplants,
diesel fuel, labor. While these can vary somewhat with the
amount of product you grow – a million seeds costs less
per seed than a hundred – in operations with low overhead
it doesn’t cost much less per unit to grow more produce.
The direct costs of marketing are made up of the expenses you assume to sell your produce: stall fees at farmers market, fuel for the delivery truck, and brochures for
the CSA all go into marketing expenses.
While not a cash expense, depreciation is a
true cost to your farming business. Machiner y
and buildings slowly wear out as you use them,
and will need to be replaced at some point in
the future to keep the farm operating at its
current capacit y.
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Don’t forget to account for your own labor when you
are calculating expenses. Your labor doesn’t come for free:
you’ve always got an opportunity cost, whether it’s playing
ball with your kids or working for wages. If nothing else,
value your hourly wage at the same rate you pay (or would
have to pay) somebody else to do the equivalent work.
The difference between your cost to grow and sell your
produce and the price you receive for it is your profit – the
money you make in return for your management expertise, risk, and investment.
Marketing expenses and margins
When a company buys your product to sell it to somebody else, they charge more to their customers than they
pay you. That’s how they cover their own expenses, and
it’s how they make money in return for their management
expertise, risk, and investment.
The additional amount they charge can be expressed
in one of two ways: as a markup, or as a margin. Markup
describes the additional percentage a reseller makes on the
product; margin describes the percentage of the selling
price that a reseller makes above the price they paid for it.
Margins are useful because they not only provide a
basis for a reseller to price their product, they can also
describe the “gross profit margin” that a reseller actually
gets. For example, one of my local natural food stores uses
a 42% margin as their basis for calculating produce prices,
but expects to realize a 35% margin on their produce sales
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4
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
overall. Why? Because they experience a certain amount
of “shrink” in their inventory – losses due to spoilages,
trimming, blemishes, customer handling, samples, and
theft.
The
remaining
margin has to cover all
of that store’s direct expenses related to selling produce – all of the
labor, bags, and display
items – as well as the
overhead cost of running the store – electricity, bookkeeping,
rent, cash registers,
and everything else.
Different
outlets
have different cost
structures, so they
use different standard
margins. A wholesale distributor I work with locally uses
a standard margin of 18% (although they charge more for
special orders and highly perishable items). They have
lower expenses per unit sold than the retail store does, so
they don’t need to charge, or to realize, a higher margin.
If a marketer can spread their costs over a larger volume, or operate more efficiently, or reduce their costs, they
can afford to achieve a lower margin; this explains part of
why the local Wal-Mart Superstore can sell frozen organic
burritos for half the price that the local natural food store
can.
At the same time, the fact that Wal-Mart buys frozen
organic burritos by the semi-load means that the frozen
organic burrito company can afford to sell them to WalMart for a lower per-unit price, because they receive one
order, write one invoice, manage one receivable, and manage one delivery. The frozen organic burrito company’s
sales cost per unit is lower when they can sell by the semi
instead of by the pallet or by the case.
continued on the next page
Conventional wisdom says that selling produc ts
direc tly to the customer is the best way to make
a living farming. In the winter of 2008-2009,
when my farming par tnership broke up, I took a
hard look at the margins in each segment of my
sales strateg y – CSA , farmers market, and sales
to retailers. Even though we could get the highest prices at the farmer market – we charged
the largest margin over the cost of produc tion
– once I f igured the costs of transpor tation,
stall fees, and labor, my ac tual farmers markets
prof its were much lower than selling through
the CSA or direc t to retail stores. When I calculated in the oppor tunit y costs as a single father
of having to commit ever y Saturday to being
at a farmers market, it became clear that Rock
Spring Farm – and Chris Blanchard ! – would be
bet ter of f moving that same produc t through
other outlets.
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5
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more
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Setting prices
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beyond that, you’ll need to start to get
at your cost of production. You can make this as easy or
6
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
as complicated as you want; the more detail you track, the
more precise your understanding of the cost structure for
growing and selling your vegetables will be, but you have
to balance the amount of effort you put into this with the
results you need or want to get out of it. Since I’m writing
an article on pricing, I’m obligated to say that everybody
should know their exact cost of production and marketing
on every crop and every sales outlet, but I know that few
people are going to jump into that degree of detail.
To get an idea of your actual costs, you’ll need to do a
more extensive analysis. Although most of the crops that
you grow on the farm will have the same basic crop structure for growing the crop – everything requires tillage and
seeding and weed control – some crops have additional expenses that shouldn’t be allocated across all of your crops:
tomatoes might get trellised, carrots might take extracareful hand weeding, garlic gets mulched, and so on. You
might want to separate out the more universal expenses
from those that apply to specific crops. Seed costs can
also vary widely by crop, and some crops are grown from
transplants while others are grown from seed.
Once you figure out your production costs, you would
also want to calculate the costs associated with your different marketing channels. The price of a CSA share should
bear the burden of the expenses that go into packing CSA
boxes, producing sales brochures, and delivering boxes;
the cost of your farmers market stall and the fuel to get
there should be borne by the price of your produce there.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Jim
Munsch have put together a tool called the Veggie Compass (www.veggiecompass.com) that can go a long way towards figuring out your actual costs per crop and margins
per marketing channel, providing a very comprehensive
overview of all of this.
In any case, when you work on figuring out your cost
of production, know that getting close numbers is more
important than getting precise numbers: profits on the
market farm aren’t usually made on pennies. Find a place
between tracking every seed and not keeping track of anything, and use that information; once you start to see the
value in the numbers and find a system for tracking them,
I’m willing to bet that you’ll be willing to put more effort
into the process.
It’s not just your costs
If you want to sell your produce, you have to take into
account more than just your cost of production. You have
to know what the market – whether it’s a store, a restaurant, or a farmers market customer – is willing to pay.
At farmers market, it’s worth taking a walk around to
see what other people are charging. I had a rule for my
stand at farmers market that if anybody had an equivalent
price at the market, I would see their price and raise them
a quarter. If you know your costs, how long it took you
to harvest your crop, or your target per-acre yields, then
you’ve got the ability to know how low you can go and still
meet your goals.
If you are selling to a reseller, you have a couple of tools
available to you. First and foremost, just ask. If you’ve
got a good relationship with a buyer, they’ll tell you what
they’re paying elsewhere. Often, I don’t know where a national price is sitting, or what I might be able to expect
for a local-produce bonus on a particular crop – and a
straightforward ask gives everybody an opportunity to be
open and honest. I just did this with my wholesale asparagus crop, and now I’m making 15% over my price for the
last three years because of a labor shortage in Michigan.
In more roundabout ways, or to double-check that you
are getting a fair price, you could apply the margin tools
above to get an idea of the wholesale price range by checking current prices with the retailer and their competitor.
Rodale Institute also maintains the very useful Organic
Price Report (www.rodaleinstitute.org/Organic-PriceReport), where you can search by market and crop to get
an idea about pricing on the national market.
The water-under-the-bridge problem
Even though it’s ideal to make a plan about where and
for how much you are going to sell your produce, most
growers live in a world where that plan can easily fall apart
once the season gets underway: another farmer shows up
with dirt cheap carrots at farmers market, or a buyer goes
back on their pricing agreements for wholesale lettuce,
and now you’ve got a problem: you’ve spent the money and
resources to grow the product, but now that it’s time to sell
it, you can’t sell it for enough money to make a profit.
But what if you can still sell the lettuce for more than
it costs to harvest it? Or what if you’ve already picked and
washed the carrots and driven them to market and paid
your stall fees, and now you realize that you can’t sell your
carrots for what it even cost you to harvest them?
It’s easy to say that you should till in that lettuce to support fair pricing, or just take your carrots home. It’s a lot
harder to do that when you’ve got rent to pay and shoes
to buy for your children. But if you don’t do that – if you
allow your prices to be set by the low-ball producer, or
the one who doesn’t know or doesn’t account for the cost
of production, or the one who doesn’t value their labor –
you’ll always undersell yourself. There’s always somebody
ready and willing to sell their produce more cheaply just to
get in the market, or to feel good about selling out.
Know your costs, know the margins you need to achieve
to make money, and know that you deserve it.
Chris Blanchard owns and operates Rock Spring Farm,
with 15 acres of vegetables, herbs, and greenhouse production north of Decorah, Iowa, selling a wide variety of vegetables and herbs through a 200-member CSA, food stores,
and a farmers market since 1999. Under the banner of
Flying Rutabaga Works (www.flyingrutabagaworks.com),
Chris’ workshops about farm business concepts, food safety,
organic vegetable production, and scaling up to farmers
throughout the country have gained a reputation for fresh
approaches, down-to-earth information, and honesty.
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
7
Farmers Market Inspiration Award
to honor the stories behind the stalls
This summer, the Farmers Market Coalition (FMC) is launching the
Farmers Market Inspiration Award,
designed to reward and showcase the
variety of ways farmers markets benefit communities across the United
States.
In a partnership with Growing for
Market magazine, FMC seeks essay
submissions from farm producers
who sell at farmers markets, telling
stories that depict concrete examples
of farmers market impacts on a farm
and the people with whom it connects. One grand prize award of
$1,000 will be awarded for the winning entry, which will be published in
Growing for Market in October 2012.
The Inspiration Award entry period will coincide with the entry period
for the American Farmland Trust’s
America’s Favorite Farmers Market
Contest, the winners of which will be
announced at the end of August.
“Behind every one of the more
than 50,000 farm stands at America’s farmers markets, there exists
at least one inspiring story about a
life changed, a business launched,
a lesson learned, and a relationship formed,” says Stacy Miller of
the Farmers Market Coalition. “It’s
about time we let these stories come
out, and share them with the general
public.”
Essays are encouraged from a wide
diversity of agricultural producers,
and should focus on a story that reflects some specific outcomes/benefits from selling at farmers markets.
What challenges, major or minor, are
involved in selling at farmers markets? What priceless relationship have
you formed at market? How has your
business changed since you began
selling at farmers markets? What’s
the most important thing you’ve
learned from a customer? How have
you built your product mix around
the unique assets of the land you use?
What humorous or humbling lessons
have you learned? What’s your favorite part of the market day?
8
What: An essay contest with a $1,000 Grand Prize.
Why: To gather information about how farmers markets
benef it farms, families, and communities.
Who may enter: Agricultural producers who sell at farmers
markets.
How to enter: Submit an essay, photo, and market manager
contac t info to w w w.farmersmarketcoalition.org.
Deadline : August 11, 2012
In addition to telling a specific story no longer than 1,200 words, essays
should include at least three pieces of
measurable data that strengthen the
story, for example:
r Number of acres in production
r Number of crops/varieties
r Income earned at farmers
markets
r Number of employees and/or
family members supported by
farmers market sales
r Number of regular customers
r Number of pounds donated
annually to social service
agencies in your market’s
community.
Along with each entry, farmerwriters are asked to submit a photograph of themselves or a farm member at their market stand and the
contact information for your farmers
market manager.
Timeframe for Entry: June 15th
through August 11th, 2012
Submissions will be judged by a
team including staff and volunteers
from the Farmers Market Coalition,
Growing for Market, and American
Farmland Trust.
Up to five honorable mention essayists will receive a complimentary
one year membership in the Farmers Market Coalition and a one-year
print subscription to Growing for
Market. All essays, both winning and
non-winning, may also be published
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
in Farmers Market Coalition print
and electronic publications, and may,
with the contestant’s permission, also
be published in partnering organization blogs, print publications, or
FMC partner web sites.
Learn more about essay requirements and submit your entry at www.
farmersmarketcoalition.org.
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Caring for the tomato crop
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Finally! A company that understands the insurance
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By Pam Dawling
The National Farmers Market Insurance Program offers
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Most growers use trellises,
at least for indeterminates
for vendors.
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it on planting day, it’s usually easier to put stakes in soon
$2,000,000 aggregate
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by putting an extra stake at an angle tied to the end stakes
as a brace. Most of our tomatoes are large determinates,
and although our indeterminates grow tall, we don’t much
like the extra effort it takes to use 7’ T-posts, so we live
with “rolled over” tomato plants later in the season.
Some growers like to use staked cages made from 5’ tall
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A member of the Twin Oaks garden team trellises tomatoes
using the string-weaving system. A simple wooden tool ac ts
as an ex tension of the worker ’s arm, to get the t wine over
tall stakes, and also prevents “ t wine burns” to the hands.
Photo by Kathr yn Simmons.
spacing may be justified by the high yields produced.
For small determinate plants, it is possible to make
a fairly quick support system by curving stock panels
lengthwise into low tunnels, and putting these over the
rows of tomato plants. The plants then grow up through
the panels and need no tying. To protect early plantings
from spring frosts, while the plants are small, the tunnel
can be covered with row cover.
We like the “Florida stake-and-weave” or “stringweaving” system for indeterminate varieties, large determinates (Roma) and even small determinates, and peas
too. According to ATTRA in Organic Tomato Production, stake-and-weave is not the best support method
on any one criterion, but is equal-best or second-best on
most: earliness, fruit size, yield, quality, protection from
sunburn and pest control. It is worst as far as labor cost. If
earliness, large fruit size and good pest control are important factors for you, choose a high wire with one string per
plant attached, and prune out suckers. For high yield and
protection from sunscald and cracking, use cages.
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
9
Tomatoes
continued from page 9
For the stake-and-weave method,
set one T-post after every two plants
along the row. We use a stringing
tool made from a 2’ length of broken canoe paddle, with a hole drilled
through close to each end. Any comfortable length of wood will do, or a
piece of pipe (pipe doesn’t need holes
drilled through, as the twine can be
threaded down through the pipe).
With the wood handles, the twine is
threaded through one hole and back
out the other. The twine is not tied to
the tool, but moves through the tool
the whole time. The tool functions
as an extension of the worker’s arm,
to get the twine over tall stakes, and
it can be given a quarter turn to pull
the string tight. (Pulling twine tight
against your hand for several hours
can cut through the skin.) For maximum efficiency, keep hold of the tool
in one hand all the time.
Start when the plants are 12-15”
tall. Tie the twine onto one end stake,
about 8-10” above the ground.
Sweep the twine past the two
plants in front of you, then cross in
front of the next stake and loop the
twine round the back of the stake and
pull it tight, perhaps twisting the tool
to help the tightening.
Then use the thumb or forefinger
of the other (non-tool-holding) hand
to keep the tension you have created, and loop the twine around the
stake again, going a tiny bit lower so
that the second loop crosses over the
first and locks it in position. At this
point if you were to let go of the tool
you should not lose the tension on the
twine.
Proceed along the row, then flip
the twine over the end post. Weave
back down the other side of the same
row, putting another row of twine at
the same level as the row on the first
side. You are creating two “walls” of
twine with the plants in the middle.
Step 1 : Tying the t wine onto one end
stake. Do as we say, not as we do, and
star t when the plants are 12-15” tall.
All photos by Kathr yn Simmons.
Step 2 : Sweep the t wine under and past
the t wo plants, then when you’ve gone
round the stake, pull the t wine tight to
lif t the plants up of f the ground.
Pr ofe ss io na l D ri p I r r i gat io n S u pp l ie s
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Step 3 : The second wrap of t wine crosses the f irst one and locks it in place.
Step 4 : Coming back down the other side
of the row, fasten the t wine at the same
level as the f irst side.
Once a week add a round of twine
every 8” up the stakes as the plants
grow, until you reach the top of the
stakes a couple of months later.
The first year we did this, we used
heavy spools of baler twine, and the
instruction to carry the twine with
you along the row was rather daunting. We got a little trolley, but then
discovered a better method. Park the
twine in a bucket at one end of the
row, with a pair of scissors. Stringweave the first side, letting a length
of unused twine play out behind you
(get yourself inside the loop when you
start, to avoid tangles). At the end of
the row, flip the twine over to the far
side of the row and work back, using
up the free length of twine from the
ground. This technique does require
flipping the twine over each stake
(and the plants) before wrapping it,
but this is a great trade-off for not
needing to haul a big spool of string.
Laughing Stalk Farm in Missouri has
posted a video of this method on YouTube.
Disease reduction
Step 5 : Af ter weaving the second side,
you end up where you star ted. Tie a knot
and cut the t wine.
Because nightshades have a lot of
fungal, bacterial and viral diseases,
it pays to take action to minimize
the chance of diseases attacking your
plants. Here are some strategies:
Choose disease resistant varieties.
Consult seed catalogs for details. Save
your own seed and select for disease
resistance – you can get noticeable results in just a few years.
Practice good crop rotation. It’s
best to rotate away from nightshade
Sales
crops for at least three years. We don’t
manage this ideal one year in four. In
our 10-year rotation, three of our ten
years are nightshades (one paste tomatoes and peppers, two plantings of
potatoes).
Add compost and cover crops
to help increase the diversity of soil
micro-organisms and build naturally
disease-suppressing soil, as well as
building fertile soil to support strong
plant growth.
Use foliar sprays of seaweed extract, compost tea or other microbial
inoculants to boost general disease
resistance.
Practice good sanitation. Avoid
smoking, especially near tomatoes,
and have smokers wash hands with
soap or milk before working with tomatoes. Tobacco can spread Tobacco
Mosaic Virus (TMV) to nightshade
plants. Avoid handling tomato plants
while the leaves are wet. Avoid touching the diseased parts of plants except
to remove them. Remove and destroy
diseased plants and rotten fruit especially for Late Blight, TMV and Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus (TSWV).
Clean tools in between use in one field
and another. After tomato harvest is
finished, till the plants into the soil to
speed decomposition, or remove and
compost or burn them. Scrub posts
if they will be used for tomatoes next
year.
Remove nightshade weeds (e.g.
horsenettle, jimsonweed and black
nightshade), which can be alternate
hosts for pests and diseases.
continued on the next page
Company
Step 6 : Add a round of t wine ever y week
or ever y 8”. You can measure using your
hand. Shor ten the distance as you near
the top of the stake, leaving room for a
f inal round, in case the previous week ’s
t wine has stretched. The plants will
have grown more and will benef it from
another round of string-weaving.
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GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
11
Tomatoes
continued from page 11
Improve soil tilth, drainage and
aeration. Chisel plow to break hardpan, or grow deep-rooting cover
crops ahead of your tomatoes. Grow
tomatoes in raised beds and hill soil
around stems so that excess water
drains away from plants.
Maximize air circulation around
plants. Choose a bright, breezy location (avoid frost pockets as they also
collect dew), orient the rows parallel to prevailing winds, and give the
plants plenty of space. Remove any
leaves touching the ground. Prune the
suckers below the first flower cluster.
Provide vertical support for plants,
rather than sprawling them on the
ground.
Prevent soil splash-back onto
leaves, to reduce outbreaks of soilborne diseases. Use mulch. Use drip
irrigation rather than overhead sprinklers.
Plant a succession to reduce the
impact of disease, by providing fresh,
healthy plants, allowing you to remove diseased earlier plantings.
Use weather monitoring to minimize sprayings of copper compounds
to the occasions when fungal diseases
are most likely. Copper fungicides
cannot cure an existing disease, but
can slow down most fungal and bacterial diseases. They must be applied
before symptoms are observed and
they must cover all plant surfaces, including the undersides of leaves. This
strategy will involve spraying every
7-10 days (8-12 times per season),
so new foliage is protected as plants
grow. Because of the toxicity, if this
can be avoided by use of other strategies, so much the better. Chitosan is a
spray additive that can be used with
copper products to stimulate plant
defenses and reduce the amount of
copper needed. Copper compounds
are toxic to earthworms, blue-green
algae and some other soil microbes.
(Even though some organic certifiers
still permit some copper compounds,
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GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
we don’t use them.)
Try biofungicides for use against
some tomato diseases. F-Stop™,
T-22G Biological Plant Protectant
Granules™ or other forms of Trichoderma can control damping off (Pythium), Rhizoctonia, Fusarium and
Sclerotonia. SoilGard™ (Gliocladium
virens) can work against Pythium and
Rhizoctonia. Bacillus subtilis works
against Pythium, Rhizoctonia, Fusarium and Sclerotonia. Mycostop™
(streptomyces griseoviridis) can be
used against Phytophthora, Aalternaria, Pythium and Fusarium. 35%
hydrogen peroxide diluted to a 0.5-1%
foliar spray solution may help control
early blight. 1% solution = 3.7 oz in
124.3 oz water to make one gallon (1
ml : 33 ml). There are commercial
products such as Oxidate™ which are
based on hydrogen peroxide. This is
corrosive and challenging to handle.
Use bio-rational controls if needed, including AQ10™, baking soda
or milk against powdery mildew. 4
teaspoons of baking soda and 4 teaspoons of soap per gallon (4 liters) of
water. Or 1 milk : 9 water, sprayed
twice a week for a cure; 1 milk : 19
water for mild cases.
Disinfect seeds against diseases
that are seed-borne. Dip them (in a
cloth bag), into hot water at 122°F for
25 minutes, or into a 1:10 bleach : water solution for 90 seconds. Follow by
four rinses. These seed treatments are
best done immediately before planting, else you need to dry the seeds
well enough to prevent germination.
Consider getting a high tunnel for
tomato production. It can keep leaves
dry and greatly reduce the introduction and spread of diseases.
Consider saving your own seeds
for an important variety, and select
for resistance. Use a fermentation
process when saving seed, as it kills
some diseases. Tolerance to some diseases (Fusarium, Verticillium, Septoria) can be bred into seed in 5-6 years.
Consider grafting disease-prone
tomatoes onto disease-resistant rootstock.
Physiological disorders
These are caused by stress, not by pathogens, and can
make tomato fruit unmarketable.
Blossom end rot (dry black flat spot at blossom end):
caused by a calcium deficiency in the fruit. This can happen in cool weather, or during a shortage of water, even
when the soil calcium level is sufficient. It usually clears
up as the season progresses, provided irrigation is adequate. Water-logging, root damage, or excess soil nitrogen or salinity may contribute.
Catfacing (pinched-in scars at the blossom end): aggravated by temperatures lower than 60-65°F by day and
50-60°F at night for a week or more or by very hot dry
weather.
Puffiness and Zippering (contracted linear scars): can
be caused by incomplete pollination due to low temperatures, or very high temperatures.
Cracking: increased by heavy rain or excess irrigation
after dry spell.
Sunscald (bleaching and decay of fruit): caused by exposure to hot sun, usually after defoliation.
Green Shoulders: more common in some heirloom varieties than in hybrids, and worse in hot weather.
Nutrient deficiency symptoms can sometimes look
like a microbial disease. Yellowing of older leaves (nitrogen deficiency), purple-red leaves (phosphorus deficiency,
worse in cold weather), bronze spots between leaf veins
(potassium deficiency), and small, twisted leaves (boron
deficiency) are all examples of this.
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Pests and diseases
There is not space here to go into the various
problems tomatoes can have. See the resources listed below, which I recommend.
Resources
USDA ARS Sustainable Production of Fresh-Market
Tomatoes and Other Vegetables with Cover Crop Mulches: www.ars.usda.gov/is/np/SustainableTomatoes2007/
SustainableTomatoes2007Intro.htm
Virginia Tech, Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus: pubs.ext.
vt.edu/2906/2906-1326/2906-1326.html
Septoria Leaf Spot: ext.vt.edu/pubs/plantdiseasesefs/450-711/450-711.html
Early Blight: ext.vt.edu/450/450-708/450-708.html
Cornell University Organic Insect and Disease Control for Solanaceous Crops in their Organic Resource
Guide: web.pppmb.cals.cornell.edu/resourceguide/cmp/
solanaceous.php
Alabama Extension, Blossom Drop in Tomatoes:
www.aces.edu/department/com_veg/blossom_drop.pdf
ATTRA Organic Tomato Production: https://attra.
ncat.org/attra-pub/summaries/summary.php?pub=33
Pam Dawling is the garden manager at Twin Oaks
Community in Louisa County, Virginia. Her book, Sustainable Market Farming: Intensive Vegetable Production
on a Few Acres, will be published in February 2013. www.
newsociety.com/Books/S/Sustainable-Market-Farming
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GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
It’s time to harvest garlic!
Harvesting
By Josh Volk
Over the years garlic has been a small but stalwart crop
on the CSA farms that I’ve worked on, and on my own
farm. Compared to many other crops, it grows easily and
reliably, is adaptable to a variety of techniques, provides
harvestable parts all through the spring and, when cured
and stored properly, can be sold all through the summer,
fall and winter. On a small, hand scale it is easily grown
intensively in a small space with minimal tools, and on
a larger scale many farms take advantage of a variety of
tools, hand and power, to streamline the growing, harvesting and curing. The cultivation of garlic is also very
wide ranging, and the tools and techniques vary a bit from
place to place, climate to climate. With harvest and curing
season upon us, I talked to a few garlic growers around the
country, trying to understand some of the tools and techniques that are being used. This month, I’ll tell you about
harvest, curing, and storage. In the August issue, I’ll write
about planting. Here are the growers I interviewed: Chet
Byler at Straw Hat Farm in Montrose, Colorado; Avram
Drucker of Garlicana in Southern Oregon; Fred Forsburg
of Honeyhill Farm in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate
New York; and Ed Fraser of Fraser’s Garlic Farm near
Rochester, New York.
Garlic can be harvested at any stage. In spring, green
garlic — eaten like green onions — can be pulled as a way
of thinning the plot. The scapes that form on hardneck
varieties can be cut and sold; cutting scapes also helps the
plants put more energy into the bulbs. It can be sold as
fresh garlic, when bulbs have differentiated cloves but tops
are still green. Finally, fully mature garlic can be cured
and stored for a long season of sales.
Mature garlic is ready to be harvested when it has five
to seven wrappers. The number of wrappers decrease the
longer the garlic is in the ground. Years ago, Jim Leap,
who used to run the farm at UC Santa Cruz, gave me a few
harvest tips. The first was to sample bulbs by slicing into
them and then carefully counting the number of wrappers
around the clove. Since then I’ve been using five to seven wrappers as my harvest point, which lets me lose two
wrappers during the curing and cleaning stages, and still
have at least three to five left in storage. The number of
wrappers is also indicated by the number of living leaves,
generally about three, but the count is more accurate when
you actually cut into the head.
Most small growers just use spading or potato forks to
loosen the ground and then pull the plants by hand. I pile
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GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
15
Garlic
continued from page 15
the plants on carts for transporting
back to the barn.
On a larger scale, Fred and Ed in
New York State both use undercutter bars on the back of their tractors for loosening the garlic quickly.
Fred got his bar from Market Farm
Implement. Ed had his custom fabricated and puts up to 700 lbs on it
and drives very slowly to keep enough
down pressure to make sure that it
stays at least 3” below the heads in the
ground.
In the East, where it rains in the
summer, there is usually sufficient
moisture to allow undercutters to dig
into the soil. Here on the West Coast
it’s dry in the summer, and most
farms I know usually dry their garlic
fields down around harvest time, cutting off irrigation a couple of weeks
before harvest. In dry areas, you
should chisel the paths for the shanks
on your undercutter bar before the
soil completely dries out, usually
about two weeks before harvest. This
helps reduce the stress on the tool and
also allows it to dig in better.
Curing
After harvest, garlic must be
cured, or dried thoroughly, to prevent
mold in storage. Chet Byler at Straw
Hat Farm in Colorado uses a curing
method similar to the method many
farms I’ve worked on use. He ties the
garlic into bundles of five and then
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Fred Forsburg uses an undercut ter on his trac tor, weighted to provide enough down
pressure to get below the garlic in the dr y soil common in July.
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GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
hangs them to cure for 3-4 weeks in an open barn. I cure
my garlic the same way, only I use long loops of poly
twine which I then hitch two bunches of 6 heads to on
either end of the loop. This allows me to hang the bundles over a barn rafter without any tying, and to reuse the
same loops every year.
To improve air flow, the loops are long enough that
I can offset the bunches, hanging one close to the rafter
and the other below the first bunch. Creating the hitches
takes most folks
I’ve worked with
a few tries to figure out, but once
you learn, it’s very
fast.
Avram Drucker also hangs his
garlic to dry. He
has 2 x 2 posts
that run from the
floor of his small
barn to the rafters and then he ties multiple horizontal
lines of poly twine from one end of the barn to the other.
His drying rack is shown above right.
He also ties extra vertical twine between each post to
keep the lines from sagging. Lines are spaced so that the
garlic can hang between them, and five to six bundles of
12 garlic are hung on each line, between each 2 x 2 creating long alleys of hanging garlic. The bundles are either
tied with twine, or zip ties, which are faster and easier on
the fingers, but are not easily reusable. Air flow is key so he
cracks windows and doors and runs a ceiling fan.
When I was at Sauvie Island Organics I designed a
stackable 4’ x 4’ rack for harvesting and curing which I
wrote up in the September 2009 GFM. Fred Forsburg in
New York also uses racks, although his are 4‘ x 12’, have
chicken wire bottoms and are stacked using cinder blocks
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17
Garlic
continued from page 17
to separate the layers and allow good air flow. I’ve always
cured garlic with the tops on, but according to Fred there’s
research that shows cutting off the leaves and leaving long
stems is just as effective. He trims the tops before laying
out the garlic on racks using Craftsman Handi-cut utility cutters and leaving about 3” of stem. Ed Fraser uses
similar racks but he keeps the tops on. Some of his curing
is done in a shady barn, but he also uses a hoophouse with
shade cloth, noting that it’s important that the hoophouse
not have any vegetation or moisture that reduces airflow
and increases humidity, which can lead to molding. He
also uses fans to increase air flow. If the weather allows,
he likes to leave the pulled garlic in the field for a day or
two before bringing it in. Conditions have to be dry for
this to be possible. He lays the garlic out with bulbs in one
directions and leaves the other direction to make it easier
to pick up later.
Cleaning
Cleaning happens after curing and there is a bit of variation in methods and tools used from farm to farm. Some
farms leave roots on, some trim them, some put extra effort into cleaning up loose skins and soil, some don’t.
Pruners and hands are the most common tools for
trimming tops and roots and for cleaning loose skin and
soil. Avram employs old tooth brushes to help with the
cleaning process, using the hard plastic edges as much
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GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
as the bristles to help scrape away soil and loose skin. He
does trim roots, and if there is excessive soil attached to
the roots he will spray them off with water before hanging
them to cure. This prevents the pruners from having to
cut through soil,which dulls the blades quickly.
Both Fred and Ed use old vegetable brush washers to
clean their garlic. These are the type that are used for apples or potatoes and have a series of roller brushes with stiff
bristles that gently tumble and convey the garlic through,
rubbing soil and loose skin off in the process. Typically a
washer like this is set up with spray heads, but they use
them without any water, keeping the cured garlic dry to
ensure good storage quality. Because Fred cures his garlic
by trimming the tops first, keeping a good length of stem
intact, he doesn’t trim further in the cleaning process, preferring to sell them with long stems.
Storage
There seem to be two schools of thought around storing
garlic, both based on the same piece of information, which
is that garlic is encouraged to sprout when it drops below
45°F. To avoid sprouting, both Chet and Avram try to
keep the garlic in the 50-60°F range at about 50-60% humidity. Chet stores his in a basement with a dehumidifier
which ensures the proper humidity. He is typically storing
hardnecks into November and softnecks into January, but
for personal use the garlic lasts much longer. Avram, using
a similar approach, sells garlic into the following spring,
with no sprouting problems.
continued on page 20
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Garlic postharvest at Honeyhill Farm
Photos courtesy of Fred Forsburg
At Honeyhill Farm in upstate New York, Fred Forsburg
grows 2 acres of garlic for both seed and table. They
plant about 40,000 cloves each fall, and har vest a similar number of heads each July. They grow only hardneck
varieties, mostly German White.
The garlic is lif ted with an undercut ter on the trac tor
(page 16) . To avoid heat damage the crew quickly places
bundles of garlic on a hay wagon and transpor ts it to
the barn. The bulbs are immediately cut, leaving about
3” of stem, and placed on the dr ying racks.
The trimmed garlic is spread on chicken-wire racks to
cure. Fans keep the air circulating around the bulbs.
Af ter curing and cleaning , a grading board is used
to size the garlic. The baskets in front of the grading board show examples of each size ; from lef t, 2.25
inches ; 2.0 inches ; and 1.75 inches. Honeyhill Farm sells
the 2.0 inch grade as seed. The smaller bulbs are sold
as table garlic. The jumbo garlic is sold for roasting and
hostess gif ts in a decorative mesh sleeve with recipes
and information about the farm.
Inspec ting each bulb at the grading stage allows for
excellent qualit y control.
Af ter curing , the garlic is cleaned in an old but functional vegetable dr y brusher. Bulbs go in dir t y on the
lef t and come out clean on the right. For operator comfor t, the fan blows dust out the door.
Af ter it ’s been graded, the garlic is packed into mesh
bags for storage. An old school desk has been modif ied
with a new top to make packing easier. The garlic is
stored in bags until it is sold.
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
19
Garlic grade standards
USDA grade standards don’t have much to say
about the size of garlic — only that it should be more
than 1.5 inches diameter for fresh market sales. That
applies primarily to softneck varieties. Hardneck, or
porcelain, garlic can be much larger. So growers who
grade their garlic do it to satisfy their own standards,
not USDA’s.
Ed Fraser grades his German White hardneck garlic into four categories. Less than 1 inch diameter gets
sent off to a dehydrator or sold in mesh bags at market.
Between 1 and 2 inch diameter also is sold at market.
2 inch bulbs are saved for planting stock. Larger bulbs
are sold individually as roasting garlic at market, bringing $2.50 to $3 each.
Ed says he plants the 2 inch bulbs because that is
the size where you get the greatest number of cloves
per pound, and therefore the largest crop the following
year. Bulbs that are 2 inches in diameter will have 4045 cloves per pound. Those that are 2.5 inches will have
35 cloves per pound. The 3 inch heads have 20 cloves
per pound.
Ed uses the opposite approach and gets the temperature down to close to freezing, at which point there is general consensus that garlic will store almost indefinitely as
long as the humidity is in the 65% range. When the garlic
comes out of cold storage it then is prone to sprouting so
he lets his customers know that they should store it in the
crisper in the refrigerator in a paper bag. With this method some of his customers report that they still have garlic
into the following summer.
There is also general consensus among the growers
that variety has a lot to do with the storability of garlic and
everyone tries to sell their varieties that store poorly early
in the season. Essentially, the tighter the wrapper on the
cloves the longer the garlic will store in good conditions.
Avram also points out that the ancestral growing grounds
for different varieties points towards the optimal storage
conditions, with some varieties coming from very dry regions, and some from wetter. For example, varieties that
are from very dry regions are less prone to desiccation at
low humidity.
Climate differences
Garlic growers in my experience are particularly passionate about their crop and love to talk about it. It is important to keep in mind regional climate variations and
even variations from farm to farm in micro climates when
talking about garlic methods. What works in the desert
Southwest where the sun is intense and the humidity is
extremely low is very different than what works in the
Northeast where humidity can be very high. This is especially true about curing and storage. Ed mentioned to me
that curing methods that work perfectly well for him don’t
20
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
work for Fred because of the way water moves in relation
to Fred’s hoophouse and barn. Even though they are both
in upstate New York, they have to look at site-specific
methods to cure their garlic.
Resources
The Garlic Seed Foundation, and David Stern in particular, was recommended highly by many growers as the
best resource for garlic growers; www.garlicseedfoundation.info.
I have found Growing Great Garlic by Ron Engeland
an excellent resource over the years and very readable. It is
available from Growing for Market for $17. Subscribers receive the 20% discount, which makes the price $13.60 plus
$5 shipping. To order online, go to www.growingformarket.com and log in under the Member Login box using
the words print and member in the two fields. Once you
see the page that says You’re Logged In, click on the Online store in the left column. You’ll see books listed with
the regular price crossed out and the member discounted
price above it. You also can order by phone at 800-3078949 or by mail to GFM, PO Box 3747, Lawrence KS
66046.
Josh Volk writes regularly about tools and equipment in
Growing for Market. He farms on the edge of Portland, Oregon, and consults with growers around the country. Contact him at www.joshvolk.com.
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Food hubs open new markets for farms
By Andrew Mefferd
We grow a lot of tomatoes on my
farm. We go from waiting impatiently for the first ripe one to oversupplied
in a very short while. By the time the
boxes start to build up, my thoughts
turn to the people in schools, hospitals, restaurants and other local institutions, who are all eating tomatoes. Tomatoes on burgers. Tomatoes
in salads. Bruschetta. Because I’m
not big enough to hook into the industrial-scale food distribution network
many institutions get their food from,
I can’t sell to these institutions. And
people in local institutions are deprived of my delicious, locally grown,
organic tomatoes.
But food hubs in my area are
changing that. They provide a way
for me to sell to institutions that require more produce than I can grow
myself, and for larger customers to
find local produce in a quantity that
meets their needs. Food hubs are not a new idea. Before agriculture became centralized,
many communities had canneries,
grain elevators, mills, produce auctions, and wholesalers that functioned
as food hubs, though the term was
not yet coined. The industrialization
and de-localization of agriculture put
most of these out of business. Now
that the pendulum is swinging back
towards local ag, there is a need for
regional food handlers to replace the
infrastructure that used to exist. The USDA defines a food hub as
“A centrally located facility with a
business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage,
processing, distribution, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced
food products.” This definition covers a very broad range of organizations with various configurations but
the goal is the same: to connect producers with markets for local food
and facilitate the transaction. Types
The Barrels Communit y Market in downtown Water ville, Maine, is a non-prof it retail
store for Maine food and craf ts. It also ser ves as an aggregator of local produce for
a multi- campus health care provider, buying from numerous farmers to create suff icient volume for hospitals.
of businesses that could be food hubs
include but are not limited to retail
stores, wholesalers, buying clubs,
growers cooperatives, and multi-farm
CSAs.
The problem addressed by food
hubs is summed up in a quote from
USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen
Merrigan. “As I talk to farmers across
the country, regardless of what they
produce or where, they all share one
common challenge: how to best move
product from the farm to the marketplace. This is especially crucial for
small and midsize farmers who may
not have enough capital to own their
own trucks, their own refrigeration
units, or their own warehouse space.
They might not have the resources
to develop sophisticated distribution routes, build effective marketing
campaigns or network with regional
buyers and customers,” Merrigan
said.
One thing that food hubs must
offer is a physical location, a point
where farmers can deliver their produce and buyers can pick it up. This
could be as simple as short-term storage or include certified kitchens and
processing facilities. The other thing
that hubs need is active management,
like a sales manager, to find buyers
for produce and growers for products
that are in demand. A food hub provides the produce storage, handling,
and marketing resources that smaller
farms may not have.
In this article, I will profile two
hubs in central Maine. I hope these
examples of food hubs in my area give
you some ideas. Maybe you will look
at that old grain elevator or shuttered
factory a little differently and see a
potential food hub. Maybe you will
check the USDA list of food hubs and
find one in your area that you can sell
to. Food hubs are really changing the
way produce is bought and sold for
my farm, other local farmers, and for
local eaters too.
continued on the next page
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
21
Food hubs
continued from page 21
A community market
Barrels Community Market in
Waterville, Maine, is a nonprofit local products store that acts as a food
hub. Barrels is a branch of Waterville
Main Street, part of the National
Main Street Network. Waterville
Main Street had been trying to recruit a local products business for
some time with no luck so in June of
2009 it launched Barrels.
Barrels has a retail space in downtown Waterville which sells products
exclusively from farmers and craftspeople in Maine. The space is also
used to host educational and other
events that are in line with the Barrels
mission of supporting local producers by providing an outlet for their
products. The renovated retail space
is bright and inviting with an open
floor plan. There is a market-style
display of produce in coolers and on
wooden tables that Manager David
Gulak calls “kind of like an indoor
farmers market.” Merchandise from
Maine craftspeople is on display and
a small kitchen at one end makes eatin or takeout lunches and salads made
from the store’s wares.
“The response, support and energy that’s been generated is a real success,” Gulak said. The store now has
more than 300 vendors from all over
the state.
The first way Barrels acts as a food
hub is by providing a permanent outlet for local foods downtown, so that
if people don’t make it to the farmers
market they can still get local produce. My own farm sells eggs year
round and produce in season to Barrels, and I know it has increased our
sales, simply by giving us an outlet in
town six days a week. The appetite for
local foods definitely exists. Now that
people want it, finding new ways to
meet the demand is part of the challenge.
22
If you live close enough to a population center or vacation spot that you
can make a trip there on a weekly basis, it might be worth trying to generate some interest in a local foods store. We have found that grocery stores often want to order more than we can
supply on a regular basis, or require
a Good Agricultural Practices (GAP)
certification, which we don’t have. You don’t have to live in a heavily populated area for these food hub
models to work. Our state of Maine
has about 1.3 million people, disproportionately located in the southern
part of the state, and we live in the
center. More people live in Manhattan than our entire state. But the
brand for Maine products is strong
and local food is popular in our area.
“Have faith in peoples’ response
to local. They like local — stick with
it. We’ve gotten a lot of pressure to
carry all the things people are used
to seeing in a market. It’s hard to
meet and manage peoples’ expectations,” said Gulak. “You’re going to
make some mistakes, especially when
you’re doing something new. Like the
time we were out of chicken for two
months. That was an education for
people that chicken is seasonal.”
The other way in which Barrels
acts as a food hub is by serving as the
aggregator for produce sales to Maine
General Health, a non-profit health
care system with multiple campuses in Central Maine. When Maine
General received a grant to buy local foods from an anonymous donor,
they had to find a way to work with
the many small farms in the area. By
going through Barrels, Maine General can have one point of contact for
all its local food needs. Gulak meets with the hospital,
finds out what their needs are, and
knows which of his suppliers are likely to have produce. So even if none
has 500 pounds of tomatoes available,
he can get 100 pounds from five different suppliers and fill the hospital
order. It’s convenient for us, because
we can usually drop off produce for
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
Barrels retail when we drop off for
the hospital, making two deliveries in
one.
“We try to communicate with
farmers to build something symbiotic,” instead of trying to get down
to bedrock prices like some produce
markets, Gulak said. “Getting people
to spend more on local food is an education. Tastings, cooking demos, and
recipes are the best way to educate
what is different about local foods and
how to use them.” For someone looking into starting a local foods store, Gulak says the
number one thing is to find a partner
sponsor organization, like Waterville
Main Street, to enable non-profit
status so the business is not under
pressure to make a profit or fail in a
short time frame. He also warns that
it takes a lot of preparation work and
fundraising just to get to opening. By
the time Barrels opened, they had
been working on the project for a year
and a half and had to raise enough
money to renovate the space and start
the business.
Gulak says that dealing with a
lot of perishables is hard on the bottom line but opening the kitchen has
helped with that. They can use produce that has superficial imperfections that might not otherwise sell for
prepared foods.
“We rely heavily on volunteers,”
said Gulak. “We offer them a store
discount and a t-shirt. We usually have 20 active volunteers, and
couldn’t do it without them.”
Unity Food Hub
The Unity Food Hub is a project
of Maine Farmland Trust (MFT)
that is planned to start operating in
the town of Unity, Maine, later this
year. For information on the project,
I talked to Mike Gold, Project Coordinator for MFT’s farm viability
program. One way MFT tries to preserve farmland is through conservation easements that protect land that
is in danger of development. Another
way is by helping communities to
be farming friendly, so farmers have
good business opportunities and stay
in farming.
Unity is a good place for a food hub
because it is centrally located between
some of Maine’s largest coastal communities. There are a lot of vegetable
farms in the area, to the point where
the local direct markets have become
saturated and there is not much room
for growth.
One aspect of the Unity Hub will
be a packing shed that will be available for farmers within 5-10 miles to
use. Root or other crops that need
washing or packing can be brought
straight from the field to the shed,
where hub employees will wash
and pack them. The farmer will be
charged based on the finished packout weight of the vegetables.
“The idea here is by allowing multiple farms to use the packing shed,
it justifies the expense and makes
it possible for smaller farms to expand. It will help farmers who want
to grow more crops but can’t afford
the facilities to scale up production,”
Gold said.
Another function of the Unity
Hub will be a facility for the minimal processing of storage vegetables, tentatively called the Cutting
Board. While the packing shed is
more appropriately located outside of
town due to the amount of waste generated that would need to be composted, MFT hopes to restore and convert a circa 1800 grammar school in
town as the location for the rest of the
hub functions.
“Initially, the Cutting Board will
consist of a certified kitchen processing area dealing mostly with
root crops and winter squash,” said
Gold. “Peeling and chopping these
raw vegetables will put them into a
form that is more acceptable to a food
service market, expanding the range
of customers the hub can sell to.”
The goal is to meet the custom
needs of institutions, many of whose
kitchens may have transitioned away
from whole ingredient cooking to pre-
pared foods. The hub would be able
to sell 5# bags of cubed vegetables for
roasting, or chopped squash or other
prepared vegetables so institutions
don’t have to spend time processing.
“We will have synergy with shared
infrastructure of packing shed, cold
storage, and kitchen, and the ability to divert seconds to the Cutting
Board and send top quality produce
to retail. Our economy of scale will
keep the price where institutions can
consider buying from us, while still
giving farmers a decent price,” Gold
said. Another aspect of the Unity Hub
will be a multi-farm CSA with growers in the Unity area supplying vegetables, fruit, meat, maple syrup,
dairy, and baked goods. Gold thinks
this will appeal to people who want
a CSA with a more diverse product
line than one farm can supply, or who
don’t want to drive out to a farm to
pick up the share.
“In addition to all that, we want
to centrally aggregate local produce to
feed into larger, more distant markets
like Portland, Boston, and New York
City. There are only so many consumers nearby and a heck of a lot of
farmland in the Unity area,” he said.
The hub wants to work with farmers to aggregate produce in one location with cold storage, palletization,
and sales management. The idea is
not to have Unity Hub trucks delivering produce, but to gather the product
in one place where other companies
that already deliver, like the Crown
O’ Maine Organic Cooperative or
Farm Fresh Connection, can pick up
from a number of farms in one place.
Gold says that the Unity Hub
wants to offer new opportunities to
farmers while respecting other existing market opportunities, like
the farmers market and local retail. Though fundraising for this
project isn’t entirely complete, they
have raised much of the cost to get
started through grants and loans
from the USDA Community Food
Projects Competitive Grants, the
Environmental Funders Network,
Healthy Food Financing Initiative,
Community Development Financial
Institutions, Slow Money, and private
funders. These would be good places
to look for grants for similar projects
in other communities.
“A food hub not only helps a local community, but creates building
blocks for a regional food system that
supports a value chain including the
farmer in particular,” said Gold. In
contrast to the typical produce wholesale model, which tries to pay the
minimum price for a commodity and
maximize the profit, a value chain
model tries to maximize the value of
what is being sold. By de-commodifying produce, by associating it with
a place or a particular farm, much like
the appellation system with European
wine, value is built into the product.
Andrew Mefferd and his wife, Ann,
own One Drop Farm in Cornville,
Maine. They sell produce at the Skowhegan Farmers Market and to area
restaurants and whole foods markets.
Andrew is also a trial technician at
Johnny’s Selected Seeds research farm.
He can be reached at [email protected].
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GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
23
How to make a bridal bouquet
By Erin Benzakein
The first few bridal bouquets I made were real nail
biters. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing and basically
just made it up as I went. There were certainly a few
tears shed on those early bouquets but somehow I survived. Over time I have learned a few tricks from savvy
flower ladies that have helped the process immensely.
What was once terrifying and stressful is now my favorite part of doing a wedding.
While there are many styles of bouquets (trailing
cascades, stiff and modern, overblown romantic) on the
next two pages I’ll share with you a step-by-step guide
to the simplest and easiest bouquet, a spiraled garden
posy. If you’ve made mixed bouquets before, then
you’re halfway there! But the difference with a bridal
bouquet is that it needs to be a bit more delicate and refined than what would normally go to market. Flower
selection is important since you’ll want to use blooms
and foliage that have sturdy stems and can stand being
out of water for a spell without wilting. I typically order in a few goodies to supplement what’s in the garden
24
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
and give me some stiffer material to base the bouquet
around. Roses, especially garden types, are always on
the list since they weave seamlessly with farm-grown
blooms, are extremely popular and have a nice sturdy
stem to help add structure to finished bouquets. When
my own patch isn’t flowering I order them directly from
a family farm outside Portland, OR, called Peterkort
Roses. Their beautiful blooms are available year round.
As with anything, the more you do it, the more comfortable and skilled you’ll become. Once you have the
bridal bouquet technique down, the bridesmaid bouquets will be a snap and in no time you will be a pro.
My only advice is don’t be afraid to make mistakes,
take the bouquets apart if they don’t feel right, and try
again. Flower arranging is an art form, so take your
time and practice, practice, practice!
Erin Benzakein runs Floret, a small organic flower
farm in WA State. www.floretflowers.com. She also
blogs about the whole crazy adventure at www.floretflowers.blogspot.com
To begin, selec t a nice mix of f lowers and foliage in your desired color palet te. Be sure to use material that has sturdy stems and is somewhat wilt
proof. This bouquet features peonies, ranunculus, roses, and sweet peas,
with several additional varieties as f illers.
1
Completely clean each stem, removing all leaves up to the f lower head.
Just the top inch or so of the f lower
will be showing in the bouquet, so
fully loaded stems just add weight
and bulk to the f inal creation.
2
3
4
5
1. Selec t a few blooms that will become the center of
your bouquet.
2. To create the spiraled look we’re af ter, stems must
be added at a slight angle.
3 . Af ter a few blooms are positioned into place, I
t wist the entire bouquet and add more stems.
4 . I rock the bouquet up, check to see if the f lowers
look right, then tip it back down and add more f lowers.
5 . I continue to t wist, add f lowers, check it, t wist, add
f lowers, check it for quite some time.
6. At this point the bouquet is really star ting to take
shape !
continued on the next page
6
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
25
7
8
9
10
11
7. Once the bouquet is the right size and general shape, I star t to feed in
delicate items like sweet peas, leucojum, lily of the valley, fritillaria etc.
to bring in more movement and interest.
8. Af ter all of the f lowers are in place I like to add in a bit of wildness
around the edges. Here I chose sweet pea vines and lambs ear, but seeded eucalyptus, lady ’s mantle and dust y miller are all great options too.
9. Now that ever y thing is where it should be, it ’s time to secure it in
place. I like to use waterproof f loral tape which is ex tremely durable
and. unlike regular f loral tape, won’ t unravel if wet.
10. Once the stems are taped, cut them to the desired leng th with sharp
clippers.
11. A good stock of supplies is impor tant. Here I have double-sided satin
ribbon for wrapping the bouquet, silk pins and pearl headed pins for securing the ribbon and a special set of sharp scissors just for this task.
12. The key to get ting a nice ribbon wrap is star ting with the ribbon cut
at an angle. I secure the tip with a tiny silk pin.
13 . A s I wrap the ribbon, I move slowly move up the stems pulling snugly,
so there is a nice, even overlap all the way up. Once I reach the top of the
bouquet, I loop the ribbon around to the back and cut it at an angle. This
allows a nice fold-under without any bulges.
12
13
14
14 . Now that the ribbon is folded
under, I secure it in place with
t wo pearl headed pins, making
sure to angle the pins downward
so that none poke through on the
other side.
Ta- da ! The f inished bouquet.
26
GROWING FOR M ARKET / JUNE-JULY 2012
hands on. green education.
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