Tag: change

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Fresh Spuds

Last November we ran into two issues on the farm; rain and storage. The weather had turned bad and we were harvesting more mud than spud. J We’d also run out of room to store any more potatoes. So we left them in the ground, anticipating that the rainy and freezing last winter would kill the spuds.  Last week we “opened up” a few fields with the disc to start drying out the soil. As soon as we started down those left behind rows of potatoes, it was like we hit a brick wall. Bam! The disc sliced through some of the whitest, rock hard potatoes. I was not expecting to see that.

As a farmer, I spend a lot of time building my soil and my soil biology (microbial and fungal populations). I earnestly believe that having healthy soil and microbial activity helps my produce grow better and last longer. However, to have those spuds overwinter and be in as good of a shape as they are was not even on my radar. I called a few farming friends and shared what I discovered – radio silence. So I sent them a picture of the inside and then their responses came in as “WOW!” or “Nice!”

Of course we had to cook up a few and yes, they are good! So we geared up, got the digging equipment set up and headed out. Bummer! It turns out that the winter weather has caused our soils to pack together so tightly around the potatoes it is almost impossible to dig them. Ugh! As we ran the digger through the soil ever so carefully, we were cutting through more than we were harvesting! We have had to resort to hand digging to get the potatoes out. That is really the epitome of slow food!

Needless to say, what was going to be a pretty good harvest and a little extra profit has produced fewer high quality potatoes, which means I could only put them into a few boxes this week. That is painful for me! I love to grow food and love to get it to you.  We will keep digging, but it will be more of a slog than a jog!

I have definitely learned that digging potatoes in the spring is not going to work, but it was sure fun to find this buried treasure.

From local spuds to local speaking!

Last year, our team added a goal to have me spend more time out in the community sharing about organic farming, eating healthier and just visiting! I have spoken to Rotarians, preschoolers and at large farm conferences, and I have been to health fairs and community meetings.  So if you need some entertainment at one of your local meetings or events, just call the office and we will do our best to come and share about the importance of local farms and healthy eating. I will even bring a box of good to be raffled or auctioned off with the proceeds going to your group’s favorite charity.

The farm is waking up!

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There is a New Superfood

I can’t quite get my mind around it, but Lettuce is the new super food. It is a new variety of lettuce created by a team of researcher breeders from Rutgers University. Nutritional breeding is the newest frontier, where in a lab a single plant cell is selected and “grown out”. From these single cell lettuces cultures, the cultures with the most desirable traits are selected and re-grown and re-selected until the Nutritional Breeders get what they are looking for. From there it is grown out as a plant to produce seed for the vegetable growers. While this new lettuce variety is not GMO, it is produced in a lab.

This process has the potential to really speed up the hybridization of vegetable breeding, shaving years off the process of bringing new varieties to market. And this new lettuce called Rutgers Scarlet is supposed to have as much nutrition as blueberries, quinoa, almonds and kale. Those are some hefty claims! Lettuce was chosen as the first vegetable to work with because it is the second most popular vegetable behind potatoes that we eat. And unlike blueberries, the season for lettuce is much longer, thus adding a nutritionally potent fresh food source available for a longer season.

I am still on the bubble on this concept of nutritional breeding. In this discussion, no one is talking about the soil, sunshine and the environment it is grown in. I believe that the soil is everything. I spend a lot of time focusing on my soil health, striking a delicate balance with nature and the ecosystem on my farm. I am hypersensitive to getting the soil as nutritionally charged as possible so that the food we grow can “do its thing”. I am not sure that food grown inside a laboratory can ever compete with food grown outside.

However, if the nutritional breeders can really produce a super food through speeding up the genetic selection within a lettuce plant and I can grow it in my organic system – I can make the mental leap to accept it. As long as the plant breeders are staying with lettuce to lettuce, carrot to carrot, apple to apple etc.

However if they start to add non lettuce traits to lettuce, I am out! I would never consider any crop that has a transgender component, which is what GMO technology uses.

I have other concerns about being so gene selective: vegetables are very complex and selecting certain traits will limit our genetic diversity of our seeds going forward. I understand the debate and the need that they are trying to meet, but maintaining a genetically diverse seed stock is also important for future generations to meet their nutritional needs.

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This has been fun!

A February like this is…just grand! Mowing my lawn in February – who would in their wildest dreams (or nightmares) have expected that?! Sure, it is only February, and the other coast is buried in snow, but not us! We might as well enjoy it while it lasts. As a farmer, I always have my eye on what I think the weather is doing and might do.

Okay, I am not quite doing cartwheels (Maleah is though), because it is February and we usually don’t start working the dirt until mid to late March. More often than not I hold off starting early, because the ground isn’t dry enough to really start. Also, more often than not I have to redo work when I’ve gone and jumped the gun. Now I know Diesel is amazingly cheap right now, but starting early in the fields can really harm the land and cause problems later.

That was a roundabout way to say that I am tempted to fire up the tractor and work the ground…but probably won’t.

President Abraham Lincoln said, “[Good] Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”

Amen, President Lincoln! The art of knowing when to wait and when to hustle is a fine line. When I was younger, I would have been considered an early adopter, an opportunist always hustling. As I have become more “seasoned” through the years, I have learned when to wait and when to hustle. Right now, waiting to start the tractors is the prudent choice. As a caveat, if the weather is still this nice in early March, then I will need to get after it and start hustling.

 

But right now? I will take my time “warming up” to the weather and enjoy it (maybe even go canoeing!).

 

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When it comes to less plastic, we have it “in the bag”

Last week I wrote about the journey that brought us to using recyclable cardboard boxes in our delivery business. This week I want to share how we came to the place of using plastic bag liners for these boxes. We currently line our boxes with a FDA approved biodegradable plastic bag. Each bag has perforated holes to help with ventilation and transpiration. Ironically enough, we are using plastic to save on plastic.

Before we started doing home delivery as our primary source of distribution, I worked in retail produce and had my own produce store as well. During that time I watched many customers load up on healthy organic produce and leave with a plastic bag of Fuji apples, navel oranges, lemons, onions, potatoes, garlic, lettuce, radishes, and a paper bag for mushrooms. This was just how it was done in the 90s and before. It was just more convenient, since every item had to be weighed separately. So when we switched to home delivery from retail produce, we did what we had always done, we used lots of plastic bags to deliver the produce.

As we matured as a company and moved from paper bags to recyclable cardboard boxes, we were able to cut out 90% of our plastic bag use by using one plastic liner inside the box and packing everything inside it. We still used the small plastic bags to pack the “extras,” like bananas, lettuce or apples, which customers ordered in addition to their “box of good,” but we were still using too many plastic bags in our service.

About five years ago we noticed a trend: customers were not only buying a standard box of good, they were also ordering many additional produce and grocery items as well. Some customers had also started ordering “a la carte” and not even getting a regular box. That was different. We were suddenly using more plastic bags again. Customers were shopping with us like a grocery store, and we found ourselves packing produce orders like a grocery store – using separate plastic bags for each item.

We were happy to fulfill these “a la carte” orders, to make healthy eating as easy as possible for our customers, but we did not want to be using that much plastic. We decided to start packing these “a la carte” orders like our regular boxes, which again drastically cut our plastic use. We now call these orders “custom boxes” and are packing 170 custom boxes a week, easily eliminating over 1,200 bags a week, which makes 60,000 less plastic bags a year! Add in our regular boxes and we are using 10,000 less plastic bags each week, which makes 520,000 less plastic bags a year!

Imagine, just by purchasing your organically grown fruits and vegetables through us, you are helping eliminate the use of over half a million plastic bags a year – plastic bags that are not being manufactured and thus not going to our landfills. WOW!

We are focused on bringing your family the freshest fruits and vegetables in the safest and most sanitary way possible, and doing it with less plastic is a bonus.

 

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plastic bag saga

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The Story Behind a Box of Good

After my last article about the changes on the farm and at the business, I received a few emails encouraging us to keep up the good work. Back in the 90s (yes, we have been at home delivery for that long) we started out using paper grocery bags, lined with a plastic T-shirt bag for the “wet” produce. While that was a good solution for 50 customers, it wasn’t the best way to pack fragile items like tomatoes or peaches.

So we moved on to waxed boxes with a liner and put all the extra items purchased into plastic bags. Those waxed boxes lasted for 20 or 30 deliveries, which at that time seemed like an environmentally friendly decision, simply because we were buying less boxes. However, there was always this nagging feeling every time you had to dispose of one because it had to go to the landfill.

We were sensitive to the waxed box, plastic liner and plastic bag issues. We knew that there were companies in California in the home delivery industry who were using plastic bins to deliver their produce. The idea of using bins did eliminate the need for plastic bags, but it also supported the plastic industry quite a bit more than we were comfortable with, and we would have to make a very large investment upfront. For us there were a few apparent issues with this option: where does one store all of those plastic bins (1000s), all the damaged/unusable ones would still go to the landfill, and how much water and sanitizer would you need to use every week?

That last item was the kicker for us. Having to wash and sanitize every bin every week seemed like an incredible waste of water, soap, and bleach-type products. I would still feel like I would need to use a plastic liner because it wouldn’t feel sanitary enough for me to put your produce in a plastic bin. I still shudder when I think of this – yuck!

Mind you, we were a growing company with lots of little ones running around the farm (a.k.a., we were sleep deprived), but in one of our more lucid moments, we decided to go with a cardboard version of our box and stay with a liner and the plastic bags. This decision allowed us to recycle the boxes at the end of their usefulness, often using the older boxes one last time to send produce to the food banks.

One of our core principles is to be good stewards of the land and our natural resources. Because of this we are constantly evaluating our processes to better serve you as well as to benefit the environment. With those principles driving our discussion, we decided that using the recyclable cardboard boxes with a liner saves on landfill waste, plastic, water and chemical usage, and is a sanitary option. Is it perfect? No, but it has a minimal impact on the environment and is a sanitary way to distribute fresh produce.

Next week, I will go into our reasoning on plastic and how our company uses less than buying produce at the grocery store.

Thanks for supporting our good food network!

 

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Change

Change is afoot here at the Klesick Family Farm. The first change happened last weekend. I was blessed to walk our oldest daughter, Emily, down the aisle! Making that walk is an incredibly emotional moment in a father’s life. In the last two summers, Micah got married, Aaron got married, and now Emily is married. It is a little different, giving away a daughter than it is receiving a new daughter into our family. After all, this is my little girl, who I’d always known would find the love of her life and decide to get married, but it happened way faster than I ever imagined! Joelle and I are very excited for Keiran to join our family and to hand over to him one of our greatest treasures, so that they can begin their journey together.

For those of us who are parents, our children are our most precious crop. We pour our lives into them, teaching them, giving to them, and believing in them. A wedding is a culmination of all of these AND you get a new family member. Emily’s wedding was pretty special.

Another much smaller change that we have made at the Klesick family house and on the farm is to cut out plastic wrap. It has taken a little adjusting, but we are making it work. It is just so easy and efficient to use plastic wrap. But here we are, three weeks into the New Year, and voila, the trash is less full and we have discovered there is life after plastic wrap. Who would’ve have known!

We have located all of our bowls that “had” lids and purchased a set of silicone lids and a few sets of the clear plastic bowl covers. We have mostly used the clear plastic bowl covers because most of the larger main meals like soup or roasts already have lids for the pans we cook in. The silicone lids are excellent for covering salad type bowls. One thing I have noticed is that we rarely cover anything on a plate anymore, whereas before we would routinely use plastic wrap for covering a plate of leftovers.

We are also switching to a re-useable pallet wrap for our business. This move alone will save one garbage can of plastic going to the landfill a week. Another environmentally friendly move we are considering is switching to emailed invoices.

Let us know how your family or business re-uses every day items to benefit the environment.  You can email us or share your ideas on FB, twitter or Instagram!

Thanks for supporting our good food network!
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What We Eat Matters

Before I begin, I would like to share an excerpt from “Citizenship in a Republic,” by Theodore RooseveIt, April 23, 1910.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. 

As I think about the market place that Klesick Family Farm serves, I feel much like this famous portion of Theodore Roosevelt’s speech. As a small farmer and small business owner, it can feel daunting to engage in this battle for good food. Good food that nourishes our bodies and is grown in a way that can heal our land and environment or build upon good stewardship.

Our nation at the turn of the 1900s was having a heated debate about Conservation and Stewardship. Those two concepts are used interchangeably today, but they are distinctly different. Conservationists were advocating for no use, to let nature function alone. An example of this would be our National Park System, and John Muir would be a proponent of this thinking. Stewardship advocates would want to see working landscapes that are actively managed for the benefit of the public. An example of this would be salmon fisheries, federal grazing permits on national lands or timber harvest in the national forests.

But when I survey the horizon today, I see less conservation and stewardship to benefit the public. I see well-oiled and well- connected multinational and national food, chemical, and large farms (food factories) protecting  their private interests. And at every turn these groups are blocking my access, our access, to change. We need to change the food system for the good of all, for the health of all.

So we find ourselves in the arena with you, battling for the health of our nation and for common sense to prevail in Congress. We are turning the tide. Every organic purchase sends a clear and definitive reminder that we are engaging in another food system that is a benefit to the environment, the nation’s health and family health.

Thanks for supporting our good food network.

 

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Change is 80% Behavior and 20% Mental

If you believe in something that is realistically attainable and have the right attitude (mindset) coupled with realistic goals, you more often than not will be successful at reaching the prize. The challenge comes when our head knowledge (knowing the right thing to do) hasn’t become heart knowledge.

For instance, EVERYONE knows that eating more fruits and vegetables is the right thing to do. Nobody argues this fact. Yet this fact has a hard time travelling the 12 inches from our brain to our heart. Sadly, it usually takes a few rounds in a boxing match with a health issue like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or obesity to provide enough motivation to travel the 12 inches. Those 12 inches are the hardest to travel in every area of our lives, whether it is food, finances, exercise, reading, or not texting while driving.

Or take the world of finance. EVERYONE knows that it is better to start your retirement planning earlier than later.  For example, if you start investing $167/mo ($2k/yr) in mutual funds (avg. rate of return 12%) at age 19, and do that till you are 26 and then stop (investing a total of 16k), at 65 you will have $2.3 million—Wow, 16k becomes $2.3 million! Ahhh, the miracle of time and compound interest! But if you are a late bloomer and start saving $167/mo at age 27 until the age of 65, at 65 you will have $1.5 million. Even though the second person invested 78k, they never caught up! (Adapted from DaveRamsey.com)

It is the same with eating fruits and vegetables. Starting earlier here, however, pays immediate health dividends (unlike finances), with a large payout in our retirement years (like finances). Time is definitely on the side of our children and the 20- and 30-somethings. If they embrace eating well, they will reap a more vibrant and healthy life for years to come. But for the over 40 crowd, we better get after the goal of eating better NOW!

Most of us reading this newsletter have already travelled that first 12 inches because we are getting a box of good, but each of us probably has room to improve our health! How about a goal to do one more thing this week that will improve your health now and in 20 and 30 and 40 years! It could be something as simple as one more glass of water or one less glass of soda. It could be eating a salad a day or going for a brisk walk (even when it is raining!)

Right now, you have already thought of one or two things. Do them and travel those 12 inches for yourself and your family. It will be worth the effort. The sooner you get started, the healthier you will be.

 

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