November, 2009
by
Corrin Green
"How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" So went a popular song of 1918, as American sons and daughters began trading the agrarian lives of their ancestors for cleaner, more "sophisticated" work. Over time, giant agri-business concerns gained control of much of U.S. food production and either consumed or killed their smaller rivals. What family farms remained became slaves to government subsidies which dictated not only what they raised but how they raised it. Bigger was better, and Americans experienced "better living through chemistry."
Today, though, innovations in farming methods, and growing consumer demand for healthier food has opened a niche in the U.S. food supply chain which allows small farms to exist, if maybe not quite thrive. Increasingly, the grandsons and granddaughters of the generation which abandoned farming are returning to the land. They hope to change the way we grow as well as the way we eat.
Maya Dailey tends an acre and a half of land near 32nd Street and Southern, known as Maya's Farm. She is a powerhouse, and among a number of locals who are helping the small farm niche grow in the Valley. Her father was in the garment business in New York and her mother was an activist for human rights, but her grandparents were immigrant farmers. "Farming is in my blood," she says.
It's easy to imagine you're in another time and place as you walk into Maya's Farm, which sits inside a larger compound on the grounds of "The Farm at South Mountain." Remnants of a grove of elderly pecan trees soften the sunlight as you approach row upon row of ripening melons, sprouting carrots and assorted other vegetables and flowers. The rows are precise and the plants are well-manicured. Roughly twenty chickens peck and poke and go about their poultry lives in a shady area that allows them plenty of space to socialize. If one wanted to glimpse idyllic scenes of rural life (albeit on a small scale), one need look no farther.
None of it is for show. Maya's produce is featured at several local farmers' markets, and is also sold on-site. In addition to that, a growing number of locals actually subscribe, in a way, to be first in line for a selection of her vegetables and eggs on a weekly basis (It's called CSA. More on that, shortly.) She claims to be making a profit. She took her life in a new, old, direction and it is rewarding her.
New directions seems to be a theme among local small farmers, in fact.
Carl Seacat ran a successful software design company in Seattle for a couple of decades prior to starting Seacat Gardens, basically in his backyard. Today, he manages an acre of land in Litchfield Park, and couldn't be happier about it. "We designed a specialty piece of software that addressed a need in this one industry," he says, "and that kind of sustained us for about fifteen years." Does he miss the business world? "You joking?"
The geek side of Seacat shows as he explains the workings of his farm, but it's engaging. He's kind of a mixture of your favorite teacher, the next door neighbor who always has the barbecues, and Bob Ross, the painter guy from PBS. He's had this acre for a year now, and discovering what makes workable land healthy and productive clearly turns him on.
"We'll actually save a few of the best items of each crop for ourselves." Those would be the actual fruits or vegetables from each variety, each season, that displayed the quickest time to-harvest, and the choicest characteristics for color, shape and flavor. "We'll eat them and save the seeds, and those will be the seeds we plant when we raise that crop again next year." No microscopes and no teams of white-coated vegetable Nazis, conducting evil experiments. Just good old genetic engineering the way agrarian civilizations have been doing throughout history - ways that didn't put extra chemicals into the soil or make genetic alterations with possibly unpredictable consequences.
In addition to selling directly to the consumer at farmers' markets, Seacat supplies to a small handful of local restaurants. Although he can't compete in volume with some other growers or the traditional suppliers, he plants certain crops specifically for chefs who talk with him and, in some cases, also help him plant and tend. He gets some extra help in exchange for an assurance that, if the produce is excellent, it will be bought.
Not that he is content with this arrangement as is. Oh no. By planting more than one variation of a single item, each suited to a different temperature range by nature of its origin, Seacat hopes to extend the period during which he can provide that item to the restaurants and markets.
He takes me to a section of six rows of vines, all with broad green leaves. On closer inspection, though, it's easy to tell that the leaves in the first three rows are starting to get yellow. "These plants over here," he points to the yellowing ones, "...are starting to die out because it's already getting too cool for them at night. The ones over here, though…" the very green ones, "…they come from a slightly cooler part of the world and are just now starting to really thrive and produce. That means I can pretty much double the time I can deliver this fruit." That's not only cool in kind of an agri-Tetris sort of way, but that's a great selling point when trying to convince a restaurant or third party purveyor to start getting their produce from Seacat Gardens.
On the other side of town, in the Lehi district adjacent to downtown Mesa, another budding family farmer is following a similar route, but with some notable differences. Michael Thompson had a digital imaging business in San Francisco before chucking it all and moving to the Valley where his wife was born and raised. He bought a house and several acres of land which had never been cultivated (not in modern times, at least) and started Love Grows Farms.
Thompson's intensity is conspicuous, even in a peer group of all intense people. It's easy to see why farming and the business of farming suits him - it's an all-encompassing endeavor that uses every bit of energy he can give it. He hit the internet, he hit books, he hit chickens. (Just seeing if you're awake, that should be "got" or "purchased" chickens, of course.) He also built two greenhouses where he grows luscious herbs, and did a lot of digging. He got selling to restaurants and he got in-touch with the public through some great publicity (including a piece in Martha Stewart's living) and a concept called CSA.
Now I'll tell you what CSA is, in case you haven't heard.
CSA stands for "Consumer Supported Agriculture" and is a growing trend in this growing trend. Basically, a consumer buys a periodic subscription to a farm. In the case of Love Grows Farms, that period is 10 weeks and the price is $250, up front. It's a win for the farmer, who gets some cash for a change; and it's a win for the consumer, who gets a weekly selection of the freshest, local, hand-picked, pesticide and hormone-free produce and, in many cases, eggs. For some, the rub in the CSA equation is that the consumer has little say over the exact contents of their weekly package. Whatever is ripe for picking is what goes into the mix. On the other hand, that's no different from if they actually owned the farm themselves.
For the week of October 17 2009, Love Grows Farms CSA members received tons of fresh basil, four kinds of squash, tomatoes, okra, a sweet pepper, a pomegranate, a red chile pepper, and half a dozen freshly-laid eggs.
Both Maya's Farm and Love Grows Farms feature a CSA program.
Maya's Farm, Seacat Gardens and Love Grows Farms are relatively small. One could walk around all three of them combined and still be less than halfway around McClendon Select Farms in Peoria. At 25 acres (with another parcel in a cooler area just out of town), McClendon dwarfs them all in geography as well as production, yet it is every bit a family farm.
True to form, Robert McClendon wasn't born a farmer. For twenty years he was a pharmacist and eventually the head of Surgical Pharmacy at St. Joseph's Hospital. A backyard garden put him in touch with nature and growing. The business began strictly with internet sales. "We started by selling citrus, dates, and honey over the internet and then people started coming to our farmers markets at Town and Country," says McClendon, referring to the seasonal weekly farmers market at Phoenix's Town and Country shopping center at Camelback and 20th St. "We used to sit and wait for people to come up to us and buy our stuff. We kept putting the best quality out there and finally it caught on. Now when we do Town and Country we have five cashiers and 600 customers in about five hours."
McClendon uses not only his family, including son Sean, daughter-in-law Kate, and wife Marsha; but also paid and volunteer help. He has also hosted interns from Israel who he says brought his organic farming techniques back home.
Today, internet sales are the smallest portion of McClendon Select Farms' revenue. "Our biggest business is restaurants - around 35 or 36 restaurants in the Valley and four in Flagstaff. We also supply to three restaurants in Las Vegas," he says. "We're very closely attuned to the chefs. They basically request more things all the time. We'll always try it and if it works for us, great." Direct sales at farmer's markets make up most of the rest of McClendon Select's sales.
Clearly McClendon Select Farms is a rousing success which has far outgrown Robert McClendon's ability to be out picking the potatoes (just chosen because it starts with "p" - I'm not sure he grows 'em). And yet when you call the toll-free hotline to order your gallon of Desert Blossom Honey for $38, you better believe it's Robert who answers the phone.
Among this diverse group of farmers, there are a couple of constants. One is involvement in the product. Each one can quote chapter and verse on what went into their soil on any given date and in what quantities, what pests had been spotted and repelled, what they produced for their weeks of labor. Carl Seacat won't say who, but a large entity in the state hired him as a consultant when they wanted to enter the agriculture business. It wasn't pretty, and it wasn't successful. "When I start hearing 'oh we didn't get around to that', or 'that's not so important so let's just skip it,' that's when I knew it wouldn't work. You gotta be out here every day and you gotta know what's going on with every plant." They all agree.
They also all agree on the concept of organic farming as the way to responsibly treat the earth as well as our bodies. According to McClendon, "organic was a personal part of our mission as a family. As we became educated to realize the health benefits of organic there was just no question." Both his and Seacat's operations are certified organic by third parties who base their certifications on federal guidelines. Love Grows Farms and Maya Farms aren't certified yet, but both are using methods which meet or actually exceed the standards, and say they are going through the necessary steps to achieve certification.
In many ways, a certification is more relevant in the marketing of organic produce than it is in actually describing the specifics of the growing method, which is why each of these farmers encourages consumers to learn beyond the label.
Each of these farmers shows a real passion for what they're doing. They believe in it, and they believe all our lives would be better if more people joined the cause, both as producers as well as consumers. Maya Dailey even has a patriotic angle: "We get our food right now from Argentina, from Asia. We depend on all these other countries. America's independence, its REAL independence, is in its ability to grow its own food. Food that doesn't make us sick, food that makes us smarter and healthier. Not just nationally, but locally, too. Every community. That's what makes a strong, healthy nation."
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