NEWS FROM MARIQUITA: A CSA Journal Hats off to the
many sombreros of a farmer By Andy Griffin |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
 |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
April 20, 2004: The crowded courtroom was steaming hot and smelled like a locker room. To make matters worse, the court sounded like a video arcade, what with all the defendants’ cell phones chirping out tiny bytes of pre-programmed pop tunes for ring tones. The judge demanded that we turn off our phones. The court-appointed interpreter repeated her commands in Spanish. One by one phones were clicked off. Then, in the relative calm of the sweaty hall of justice, one phone rang out loudly with a beeping rendition of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Her Honor was not amused. The bailiff moved to confiscate the offending phone with all the dread purpose a Valkerie herself might summon up to remove a slain hero off the battlefield to Valhalla. Now the courtroom was crowded, stinking, hot,....and quiet... Sigh... Another day on the farm. Some of our farm’s customers entertain the romantic notion that I, being an organic farmer, spend my days in contemplative harmony with nature. Fat chance. Like any small business owner I end up doing what I cannot afford to pay someone else to do. I wear a lot of hats during a week. I was in court because my driver's fix-it ticket for a burned out brake light had morphed into a $1300 fine for failure to appear and failure to pay. Jail time was pending. In his defense, his wife had passed away in Mexico and he had returned home to deal with life’s issues. So I played country lawyer, got the charges and fines reduced to zero and got my driver, Don Gerardo, legitimate again. Of course, various bureaucractic hassles prevented Don Gerardo from having his license renewed immediately. So, in the meantime, I was the driver hauling product from the field to the cooler and from the cooler to our restaurant accounts in the city. When I finally got a moment to “be” a farmer, I discovered the heat wave had pushed my fall planting of Royal Chantenay and Scarlet Wonder carrots to bolt to flower. Yikes! Only our Kütigger white carrots had tolerated the heat and were worth harvesting. Quick! Time to leave farming to my foreman and focus on promoting the sales of white carrots before they bolted too. White carrots don’t sell themselves. Yes, they are more bolt-resistant and hardier than orange carrots but many (most?) people confuse them with parsnips. A lot of consumers simply refuse to believe that a carrot can be any color but orange. So Julia and I wrote articles for our farm newsletter promoting Kütigger carrots, the heirloom white carrot of Kütiggen, Switzerland. I doffed my chef’s toque and researched recipes for white carrots that paired the unusual root with other crops we are harvesting now, like chervil. We printed recipes on slips of paper and put them next to our carrot display in the farmers market so as to encourage the intrepid shopper to try something new. We asked the restaurants we deliver to if they would provide recipes for the products we sell them to get a little cross marketing action going. So there you go; quack lawyer, truck driver, fake chef, and borderline
carnival barker is all in this farmer’s job description. Oh,
and once in a while I get to contemplate nature. Hats off to farming!
|
||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||
