MOFGA FOOTHILL FARM ALLIANCE
BY STOWELL WATTERS JULY 2017
Published in MOFGA's 2017 Common Ground Fair Newspaper
As of this writing a dozen organic brown eggs costs about five dollars at the grocer down the road, the tomatoes are green going pink, the pigs are on forage, and the rain is fine to heavy. By the time this is published the farm report will be wholly different, with new crops to tend and price, new faces to meet and hands to shake, and new weather patterns to admonish or gripe over. This is the hubbub of the farm community: the language of a world so obfuscated by our modern consumer culture that it seems a relic of a simpler, older time.
But tractors and chickens and farmers with pockets full of seed still exist and farms still grow food. In this modern world many farms strive to reestablish the lost union between people and their food with the farm share or CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model, which requires that customers pay farmers directly at the beginning of the growing season and take part in the flow of food throughout the year, often spending time on the farm as well. For decades this model has connected people with their local food and farm community all summer long and more recently a few such programs have popped up that go beyond the warm season to provide a harvest long into winter.
One such Winter CSA has sprouted roots along the border between Maine and New Hampshire in the small town of Center Conway. A unique collaboration of five farms, The Foothill Farm Alliance takes off when most CSAs are tapering off, providing vegetables to customers all winter long. But beyond the snowy deliveries, the kale under cover, the squash in storage, and the complicated logistics of a five farm collaborative CSA, the Foothill Farm Alliance is focused on reconnecting people and farms.
“It offers the opportunity to collaborate with other farmers in building a winter market. It also appeals to me, from a social perspective, as an opportunity to build community in the growers network as well as with our friends and neighbors,” said Tom Earle.
Tom runs Earle Family Farm with his partner Ruth in Center Conway, New Hampshire where they raise organic vegetables, chickens, sheep, pigs, and cattle. Their farm functions as the headquarters for the group: it is the place where all of the farmers bring their food to distribute and divide into shares. The shares are either set out at the Earle farm stand to be picked up by Conway locals or driven to one of the four other farms which have their own contributing customers and pickup times. In the five years the CSA has existed its membership has grown to where it now feeds about 80 households between New Hampshire and Maine and runs from October to January.
In the winter the customers get a full box of vegetables and a chance to meet their farmers, shake their hands, and ask them questions: How do you keep salad greens alive in subzero temperatures? How do you make the white part of the leek grow longer? What planet does kohlrabi come from? And then in the summer the farms each host educational tours where interns and farmers alike come together to learn about the multitude of ways to operate a farm. These connections and interactions serve as the lifeblood of the Foothill Farm Alliance.
“Have we grown the community's relationship to local foods and local farms? Are friends and neighbors interested, engaged, active in our farm, as farm members, farm-stand customers, farm volunteers, or farm advocates? Looking back over these years I can say that the level of interest has grown,” said Tom Earle.
Interns learn how farmers Geof and Gina Hancock employ expert tractor work, fertility management, and soil care to grow mountains of vegetables at their Hancock Family Farm in Casco, Maine. Tom Earle served as Geof’s mentor in 2008 through MOFGA’s journeyperon program and the two have been friends ever since, in fact, every farmer is connected to one another through Tom, as his farm has served as a place of mentorship for them all.
“We are not five farms pooling resources for money, we are one greater whole, with a vested interest in the health of the group” said Geof.
This collaborative spirit is manifest in the planning meeting of the Winter CSA, which usually takes place in early spring before the seeds are ordered, the farmers huddling together over hot coffee and Ruth Earle’s homemade muffins to plan out the growing season. Instead of each farm jockeying for financial superiority and the right to grow all of the potatoes or all of the onions the group asks questions: What can your farm grow well this year? What would you like to try to grow?
This past year the newest farm to join the alliance ventured that they could grow great big leeks and potatoes for the CSA; and that they did. Natalie Beittel and Kyle Peckham run Hosac Farm, in Cornish, Maine at the foot of Hosac Mountain, the highest point in York County. Natalie and Kyle employ unique cover cropping methods on their small farm, using clover for paths with constant care that their soil is covered with something growing, whether its lettuce or oats. Their farm is still small but growing, carved out on the edge of a quiet pond, and serves as an opportunity for farm interns to see a young farm still in its early stages.
Down the road from Hosac in Limington is the Old Wells Farm, where Dylan Watters and his family run a small organic operation. They raise pigs and goats and grow vegetables using a seaweed sheet-mulch. They do not till soil regularly and shape their beds to the contour of the slightly sloping land.
“Everybody farms their own way, I think that’s the coolest part about the [Foothill Farm Alliance]… there is no one way to do it, and for the interns and the customers to see that, I think is special” said Dylan Watters.
Storage is one of the biggest challenges for the winter CSA growers. If a crop has no place to be stored the farmer might as well not grow it. For two years in a row the Hosac Farm has stored all of the beets and daikon radish for the Old Wells Farm and the Hancocks have become masterful in their ability to store winter squash, which is notorious for looking perfect right up until the time it needs to be shipped out.
But not every crop makes it. The cold of winter presents innumerable challenges to keeping vegetables healthy and fresh. Last winter Dylan and his brother (me) woke up at 5:00am on delivery day to a frozen Volvo and chanced the hour long drive from Limington to Conway in a pickup truck instead. The perfect green cabbages were packed, double bagged, and then boxed in the back of the truck, but the wind-chill was just too much.
“Yeah those cabbages,” Dylan said, “turned to a bunch of mush.” Luckily the other farms were able to pitch in with emergency produce at the last minute and effectively save the day.
Storing vegetables is one thing, but keeping them growing when the snow is four feet deep is a whole different beast. Luckily, the Foothill Farm Alliance has one final member, experts at winter growing.
Paul Swegel and Katie Doyle Smith grow pristine salad greens, kale, pac choi, chard, and spinach in every season at their Pork Hill Farm in Ossipee, New Hampshire where the mountains meet the lakes. All five of the farms grow something through the winter, but it is the Pork Hill Farm that specializes in greens in high tunnels, tucked under layers of row cover all winter long.
Katie also worked a mentorship on Tom Earle’s farm, long before she was at Pork Hill. When asked how the winter CSA was started, Katie said it was pretty simple:
“Tom's army of farmers linked up to extend their growing season and get into the winter.”
Pretty straightforward.
Purchasing and consuming locally grown food is a healthy and rebellious act. Healthy because as the seasons change so do the offerings from our land and larder. Spring salads wake us up out of hibernation, summer fruit keeps us hydrated in the heat, and the storage crops of fall and the hardy greens help us keep full and warm through winter.
Eating locally is rebellious because it flies in the face of the central narrative of the fantasy world that is our modern grocery store which is “everything all of the time” – access to cheap tomatoes shipped with cheap fossil fuels from California, apples and grapes from China, and raspberries from Russia. The cost of this fantasy is not passed on to consumers but laid at the feet of poorly paid and housed workers and our rapidly deteriorating environment and climate.
It is also healthy and rebellious to take part in a CSA, whether it’s a summer share at your local farm or part of a collaboration like the winter CSA offered by the Foothill Farm Alliance, because it connects food to people and place. What they have established with the alliance is not just a unique way to buy and consume food, but an open invitation to an older world: a world where the act of growing, cooking, and eating food is not marginalized or chore-like, but where meals represent vital and rare chances to connect as friends, as family, and as people sharing a tumultuous planet. A world where farmers are not hidden but stand in the sunlight.
BY STOWELL WATTERS JULY 2017
Published in MOFGA's 2017 Common Ground Fair Newspaper
As of this writing a dozen organic brown eggs costs about five dollars at the grocer down the road, the tomatoes are green going pink, the pigs are on forage, and the rain is fine to heavy. By the time this is published the farm report will be wholly different, with new crops to tend and price, new faces to meet and hands to shake, and new weather patterns to admonish or gripe over. This is the hubbub of the farm community: the language of a world so obfuscated by our modern consumer culture that it seems a relic of a simpler, older time.
But tractors and chickens and farmers with pockets full of seed still exist and farms still grow food. In this modern world many farms strive to reestablish the lost union between people and their food with the farm share or CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model, which requires that customers pay farmers directly at the beginning of the growing season and take part in the flow of food throughout the year, often spending time on the farm as well. For decades this model has connected people with their local food and farm community all summer long and more recently a few such programs have popped up that go beyond the warm season to provide a harvest long into winter.
One such Winter CSA has sprouted roots along the border between Maine and New Hampshire in the small town of Center Conway. A unique collaboration of five farms, The Foothill Farm Alliance takes off when most CSAs are tapering off, providing vegetables to customers all winter long. But beyond the snowy deliveries, the kale under cover, the squash in storage, and the complicated logistics of a five farm collaborative CSA, the Foothill Farm Alliance is focused on reconnecting people and farms.
“It offers the opportunity to collaborate with other farmers in building a winter market. It also appeals to me, from a social perspective, as an opportunity to build community in the growers network as well as with our friends and neighbors,” said Tom Earle.
Tom runs Earle Family Farm with his partner Ruth in Center Conway, New Hampshire where they raise organic vegetables, chickens, sheep, pigs, and cattle. Their farm functions as the headquarters for the group: it is the place where all of the farmers bring their food to distribute and divide into shares. The shares are either set out at the Earle farm stand to be picked up by Conway locals or driven to one of the four other farms which have their own contributing customers and pickup times. In the five years the CSA has existed its membership has grown to where it now feeds about 80 households between New Hampshire and Maine and runs from October to January.
In the winter the customers get a full box of vegetables and a chance to meet their farmers, shake their hands, and ask them questions: How do you keep salad greens alive in subzero temperatures? How do you make the white part of the leek grow longer? What planet does kohlrabi come from? And then in the summer the farms each host educational tours where interns and farmers alike come together to learn about the multitude of ways to operate a farm. These connections and interactions serve as the lifeblood of the Foothill Farm Alliance.
“Have we grown the community's relationship to local foods and local farms? Are friends and neighbors interested, engaged, active in our farm, as farm members, farm-stand customers, farm volunteers, or farm advocates? Looking back over these years I can say that the level of interest has grown,” said Tom Earle.
Interns learn how farmers Geof and Gina Hancock employ expert tractor work, fertility management, and soil care to grow mountains of vegetables at their Hancock Family Farm in Casco, Maine. Tom Earle served as Geof’s mentor in 2008 through MOFGA’s journeyperon program and the two have been friends ever since, in fact, every farmer is connected to one another through Tom, as his farm has served as a place of mentorship for them all.
“We are not five farms pooling resources for money, we are one greater whole, with a vested interest in the health of the group” said Geof.
This collaborative spirit is manifest in the planning meeting of the Winter CSA, which usually takes place in early spring before the seeds are ordered, the farmers huddling together over hot coffee and Ruth Earle’s homemade muffins to plan out the growing season. Instead of each farm jockeying for financial superiority and the right to grow all of the potatoes or all of the onions the group asks questions: What can your farm grow well this year? What would you like to try to grow?
This past year the newest farm to join the alliance ventured that they could grow great big leeks and potatoes for the CSA; and that they did. Natalie Beittel and Kyle Peckham run Hosac Farm, in Cornish, Maine at the foot of Hosac Mountain, the highest point in York County. Natalie and Kyle employ unique cover cropping methods on their small farm, using clover for paths with constant care that their soil is covered with something growing, whether its lettuce or oats. Their farm is still small but growing, carved out on the edge of a quiet pond, and serves as an opportunity for farm interns to see a young farm still in its early stages.
Down the road from Hosac in Limington is the Old Wells Farm, where Dylan Watters and his family run a small organic operation. They raise pigs and goats and grow vegetables using a seaweed sheet-mulch. They do not till soil regularly and shape their beds to the contour of the slightly sloping land.
“Everybody farms their own way, I think that’s the coolest part about the [Foothill Farm Alliance]… there is no one way to do it, and for the interns and the customers to see that, I think is special” said Dylan Watters.
Storage is one of the biggest challenges for the winter CSA growers. If a crop has no place to be stored the farmer might as well not grow it. For two years in a row the Hosac Farm has stored all of the beets and daikon radish for the Old Wells Farm and the Hancocks have become masterful in their ability to store winter squash, which is notorious for looking perfect right up until the time it needs to be shipped out.
But not every crop makes it. The cold of winter presents innumerable challenges to keeping vegetables healthy and fresh. Last winter Dylan and his brother (me) woke up at 5:00am on delivery day to a frozen Volvo and chanced the hour long drive from Limington to Conway in a pickup truck instead. The perfect green cabbages were packed, double bagged, and then boxed in the back of the truck, but the wind-chill was just too much.
“Yeah those cabbages,” Dylan said, “turned to a bunch of mush.” Luckily the other farms were able to pitch in with emergency produce at the last minute and effectively save the day.
Storing vegetables is one thing, but keeping them growing when the snow is four feet deep is a whole different beast. Luckily, the Foothill Farm Alliance has one final member, experts at winter growing.
Paul Swegel and Katie Doyle Smith grow pristine salad greens, kale, pac choi, chard, and spinach in every season at their Pork Hill Farm in Ossipee, New Hampshire where the mountains meet the lakes. All five of the farms grow something through the winter, but it is the Pork Hill Farm that specializes in greens in high tunnels, tucked under layers of row cover all winter long.
Katie also worked a mentorship on Tom Earle’s farm, long before she was at Pork Hill. When asked how the winter CSA was started, Katie said it was pretty simple:
“Tom's army of farmers linked up to extend their growing season and get into the winter.”
Pretty straightforward.
Purchasing and consuming locally grown food is a healthy and rebellious act. Healthy because as the seasons change so do the offerings from our land and larder. Spring salads wake us up out of hibernation, summer fruit keeps us hydrated in the heat, and the storage crops of fall and the hardy greens help us keep full and warm through winter.
Eating locally is rebellious because it flies in the face of the central narrative of the fantasy world that is our modern grocery store which is “everything all of the time” – access to cheap tomatoes shipped with cheap fossil fuels from California, apples and grapes from China, and raspberries from Russia. The cost of this fantasy is not passed on to consumers but laid at the feet of poorly paid and housed workers and our rapidly deteriorating environment and climate.
It is also healthy and rebellious to take part in a CSA, whether it’s a summer share at your local farm or part of a collaboration like the winter CSA offered by the Foothill Farm Alliance, because it connects food to people and place. What they have established with the alliance is not just a unique way to buy and consume food, but an open invitation to an older world: a world where the act of growing, cooking, and eating food is not marginalized or chore-like, but where meals represent vital and rare chances to connect as friends, as family, and as people sharing a tumultuous planet. A world where farmers are not hidden but stand in the sunlight.
