Sunday, May 18, 2008

Hundredfold Farm event and Broad Valley Orchards CSA

A friend and I went to the Earth Day event at Hundredfold Farm over the weekend. I write about this a bit in my other blog, but I wanted to focus here on one of the talks I sat in on, Food Security. One of the owners of Broad Valley Orchard, Thom Marti, spoke on this.

He was covering food security in a more specific way than they have talked about on the news. This was not the very general let’s be sure our food supply is safe from terrorists kind of discussion. This was more ‘do you know where your food comes from’ kind of discussion. Specifically, he said at one point: “Pick up a head of lettuce at my stand and ask me how it was grown and I can tell you. Pick up a head of lettuce in a SuperGiant and ask the produce guy how it was grown and he has no idea probably which country it came from, much less how it was grown.”

He also said that the latest trend he’s heard about in the organic food business is ‘organic’ produce coming over to the west coast in jumbo jets….from China. China? Producing safe, organic food? You have got to be kidding.

He spoke about CSA, which he didn’t decipher so of course being from Gettysburg I immediately thought of Confederate States of America. But no, that’s not it. It stands for Community Supported Agriculture (I’ve also seen it Consumer Supported Agriculture).

I made it a point to go talk to him afterward, as what he is doing (on 3 acres, 1.5 farmed) is basically what Matt and I would like to do (on 1 acre, or if his parents still want to do this it would be 4 acres). A CSA would be ideal, and it turns out that after scouting around there are no CSAs in the Waynesboro-Blue Ridge Summit-Fairfield areas, but there is interest. Hmmmm. Sounds promising. Thom said to give a call and we could come up and see their operations. I can’t wait. I looked them up a couple different places and found their CSA offers 36 shares @ $295/share/year. That works out to more than $10,000/year. And they have a waiting list. And that price/year is on the low end.

And the interesting thing is we already have 2 potential members. Stay tuned.

1 comment:

Me voici ∞ Here I am said...

You know, I have thought for a long time that a "good" way to cripple America would be to attack the mid-west bread-basket... ::insert Patriot Act "Red Flag", "RED FLAG!"::... hypothetically. It would certainly change a lot of things, but then I realized, in attacking us there, you cripple the world too, so....

Sounds like you had fun!

I'm surprised China has called in all our debt and taken over frankly.