By Tim Carman
Tuesday, January 4, 2011; 2:45 PM
At 6:45 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 11, when Heinz Thomet should have been harvesting product for the Dupont Circle FreshFarm Market the next day, the farmer noticed flames poking through a boiler-room wall on his Next Step Produce farm. He grabbed a fire extinguisher, but the gusher of flame-suppressing foam never materialized. Two other extinguishers were duds, too. Thomet finally read the fine print on his red canisters.
"If those things are sitting for two years, all the material inside can just settle on the bottom, and it really doesn't do anything anymore. So ideally, they say on the small print to shake that thing every other week," says the owner of the 86-acre farm in Newburg, in Charles County. "You have no idea how helpless I felt then."
Sixteen minutes after he spotted the blaze, Thomet called 911. Rather than wait for the trucks, the farmer decided to crank up his irrigation system and serve as his own volunteer firefighter. The real brigade, however, rolled into Next Step before he could get the water flowing. It was 7:13 a.m.; his boiler room and adjacent woodshed were engulfed in flames.
To Thomet, the crisis required radical thinking: At that point, he figured he would be better off letting the fire have its way, consuming the entire boiler-room structure and all 17 cords of firewood stored in the shed. That way, he would have to spend less time demolishing and removing whatever useless charred pieces remained of the wooden building, which housed the furnace that heated his home and his two greenhouses.
The Newburg Volunteer Fire Department viewed the situation from the opposite perspective: There was a fire, and it needed to be extinguished. The supervisor at the scene was not interested in Thomet's proposal to let the blaze die on its own.
A supervisor "basically says to me that I called 911, they're here to put it out, and I should step aside. And [because] I didn't jump, then he calls the police," Thomet recalls. "What I learned, in retrospect, is when you call 911, you have no more rights."
Clifton Butler, assistant fire chief with the Newburg crew, has a different recollection of events. Sure, Thomet asked the supervisor to let the building burn, he says, but the farmer's approach was, let's say, not so diplomatic. He was "yelling and screaming," Butler remembers. "He called us idiots and everything else. . . . Told us we're stupid. Everything he could think of, he called us." (Thomet, for his part, denies he treated the firefighters with such disrespect.)
Whatever the case, Thomet's request stood no chance against the hardware amassed on his property. Trucks and pumpers from Newburg, La Plata, Cobb Island, Bel Alton, King George County, St. Mary's County and even the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren, Va., all carefully maneuvered down Next Step's narrow, winding, uneven dirt-and-gravel driveway, more than a half-mile long, and converged on the scene. Together, the trucks had about 6,000 gallons of water. It still wasn't enough to extinguish the fire, Butler says.
"We can let this thing burn once we get it to a controllable stage, but right now [the fire was] too far gone for us not to calm it down, because then we'll have everything on fire. The woods and everything will be on fire," Butler recalls. "I mean, those flames were standing probably 25 to 40 feet in the air."
Several weeks after those flames finally were extinguished, tempers have settled, too. At least for now. Because even though Thomet might not still be spitting bullets over the fire departments' performance, he's still swimming against the current. The contrariness he apparently displayed on Dec. 11 is part of the same take-no-prisoners personality that fuels his continuing resistance to traditional farming practices in Southern Maryland.
Thomet, 51, and his wife, Gabrielle Lajoie, 33, run a certified organic farm amid a sea of conventional ones. They are outsiders here, in farming practice and in personal history. Thomet hails from Switzerland and Lajoie from Canada. He grew up on a farm that was "by default organic," says his wife of five years. "That's just the way things used to be." Lajoie, by contrast, studied natural science in college in Quebec but discovered she preferred the warm soil to cold calculations. She moved south in 2000 and went straight into farming in Maryland. Both developed their attitudes about farming outside the influence of American industrial agriculture.
Which apparently is obvious to the locals. As one resident told me with classic rural understatement, the people in the area describe Thomet and clan as "out of the ordinary."
The thing is, the locals probably don't know the half of it. They're aware of Thomet's unkempt appearance: the wild hair and the ragged, graying, Greek-godlike beard. They've probably even heard him rail about big ag (a favorite subject), and they've, of course, taken notice of Thomet's protests any time neighboring farmers want to spread sludge on their fields. But the locals might not know that the couple and their three young daughters are all vegans. Thomet, in fact, essentially hasn't touched meat since 1984, not long after he moved to America almost on a lark. "It's the only New Year's resolution I ever kept," he quips.
Their lifestyle flows right into their farming practices and products. Unlike many of the growers around them, Thomet and Lajoie show little interest in conventional Southern Maryland crops, whether soybeans, corn, wheat or that old standby, tobacco. Instead, they've researched and experimented with fruits and vegetables, trying to learn which will thrive on this unusual patch of land, where the weather and the tributaries of the Chesapeake combine to keep the soil warmer in winter. Over the years, the couple have found that their farm can grow ginger, persimmons, callaloo, Jerusalem artichokes, figs and even an occasional surprise such as cardoons.
Along the way, they've developed a loyal fan base among chefs, including Dean Gold of Dino and Nora Pouillon of Nora, and among customers who shop at Next Step's one and only farmers market outlet, at Dupont Circle on Sundays. Next Step's popularity, says FreshFarm co-director Bernadine Prince, lies in its broad mix of products and its practice of biodynamic agriculture, in which Thomet and Lajoie consider everything they do and how it affects the soil and environment. "It's a very holistic approach to farming," Prince says.
Gold e-mails that "My favorite product from him is his fresh young ginger. This is ginger before it develops the brown skin that allows ginger to be cured. No one else is crazy enough to grow it here, and it tastes better than the stuff I used to get in the Japanese supermarkets in LA."
Since the fire, FreshFarm has been collecting money for Next Step via a donation button on its home page at www.freshfarmmarket.org , and a number of Dupont regulars already have earmarked contributions to the Help Heinz Fund. As of last week, four donors had given $1,000 to the fund, which will defray the rebuilding costs not covered by Next Step's insurance. Thomet says his carrier will cover about half of the $40,000 needed to replace the old wooden boiler-room structure with a metal free-span, or pillar-free, building. He also needs to replace about $1,600 in seeds lost to the fire.
As he squats next to his rainbow chard in the larger of his two greenhouses, Thomet catalogues the injuries to this sensitive plant, which prefers a warmer environment than the one this boiler-less room can now provide. He yanks up a leaf and pulls the stalk apart to reveal cell damage: The chard has become rubbery and shriveled. This is not Dupont-worthy produce. Just as troubling, the bitterly cold temperatures in December damaged or slowed the growth of Thomet's winter greens in his unheated high tunnels. For the first time they can remember, Thomet and Lajoie will have little kale, collards, Swiss chard or spinach at market in January. They will have to sell off their stockpiles of sweet potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes and butternut squash instead.
What's more, Thomet will not be able to start growing his transplant onions in the greenhouse until the boiler room is rebuilt. He probably won't even be able to seed his transplant tomatoes in mid-January if the structure is not in place by then. All of that could have consequences to his income, although Thomet says he has not fully considered the impact. In fact, he doesn't seem worried about it, as if this were another way he stands apart from his peers. He doesn't fret the bottom line.
"Yes, it is a financial loss," he muses, as if for the first time. "But will I have no bread on the table? No."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/03/AR2011010305513.html
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