Farm Bill Recognizes Organic Farming and Fruit & Vegetable Farmers

    Organic food and beverage sales represented approximately 4 percent of overall food and beverage sales in 2010. Leading were organic fruits and vegetables, now representing over 11 percent of all U.S. fruit and vegetable sales.
Source: Organic Trade Association’s 2011 Organic Industry Survey 
http://www.ota.com/organic/mt/business.html



    At 11% of all US fruit and vegetable sales, organics can no longer be ignored.

Farm Bill Reflects Shifting American Menu and a Senator’s Persistent Tilling

By JENNIFER STEINHAUERMARCH 8, 2014

WASHINGTON — The farm bill signed by President Obama last month was at first glance the usual boon for soybean growers, catfish farmers and their ilk. But closer examination reveals that the nation’s agriculture policy is increasingly more whole grain than white bread.

Within the bill is a significant shift in the types of farmers who are now benefiting from taxpayer dollars, reflecting a decade of changing eating habits and cultural dispositions among American consumers. Organic farmers, fruit growers and hemp producers all did well in the new bill. An emphasis on locally grown, healthful foods appeals to a broad base of their constituents, members of both major parties said.

“There is nothing hotter than farm to table,” said Representative Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican from a district of vast cherry orchards.

While traditional commodities subsidies were cut by more than 30 percent to $23 billion over 10 years, funding for fruits and vegetables and organic programs increased by more than 50 percent over the same period, to about $3 billion.

Fruit and vegetable farmers, who have been largely shut out of the crop insurance programs that grain and other farmers have enjoyed for decades, now have far greater access. Other programs for those crops were increased by 55 percent from the 2008 bill, which expired last year, and block grants for their marketing programs grew exponentially.

In addition, money to help growers make the transition from conventional to organic farming rose to $57.5 million from $22 million. Money for oversight of the nation’s organic food program nearly doubled to $75 million over five years.

Programs that help food stamp recipients pay for fruits and vegetables — to get healthy food into neighborhoods that have few grocery stores and to get schools to grow their own food — all received large bumps in the bill.

The new attention and government money devoted to healthy foods stem from the growing market power of those segments of the food business, as well as profound shifts in nutrition policy and eating habits across the country.

“This is my fourth farm bill, and it’s the most unique I have ever been involved in,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat who negotiated, prodded, cajoled and finally shepherded the bill through Congress over two and a half years. “Past farm bills pit regions against regions. I said that we were going to support all of agriculture.”

The bill also eased a 75-year-old restriction on growing and researching industrial hemp, paving the way for several states to begin pilot growing programs for this variety of the cannabis plant, which can be refined into oil, wax, rope, cloth, pulp and other products.

At the same time, hunting programs were protected in the farm bill, which attracted the rare approbation of the National Rifle Association. The bill also ties conservation requirements to crop insurance benefits, which many environmental groups praised. “I think this is the new coalition,” Ms. Stabenow said.

While still in the shadows of traditional farming, organics are the fastest-growing sector of the food business. Support for that movement has traditionally come from Democrats in Congress, but the organic farming provisions in the bill had broad support from both parties.

“We kind of overperformed with younger new members of Congress on both sides of the aisle,” said Laura Batcha, the executive director of the Organic Trade Association.

Ms. Batcha pointed to a provision sought by her organization to exempt organic producers from having to pay assessments for certain marketing programs, which received broad backing from both Republicans and Democrats. The support surprised her, she said, but showed the popularity of organic products.

“I think we should let consumers make their own decisions about what kinds of foods they purchase,” said Representative Reid Ribble, Republican of Wisconsin, who is a member of the House Agriculture Committee. “And if there’s a market for organic products, we should support it.”

Over all, healthy food has become more politically popular because of efforts to combat childhood obesity and diabetes and a growing national interest in the farm-to-table movement promoted by the first lady, Michelle Obama, and other national figures.

“The average member of Congress, whether they are urban or suburban, knows that is what their constituents want,” said Ferd Hoefner, the policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “Even the most ag-centric member of the Agriculture Committee knows that is what helps sell the bill when it gets to the floor.”

For farmers of fruits and vegetables, oddly referred to in ag-speak as specialty crops, the ability to participate in crop insurance programs, which were expanded as direct payments to farmers were ended, is a major victory.

John King, a co-owner of King Orchards, which specializes in Montmorency cherries in Central Lake, Mich., was previously able to get insurance only for his apples. His cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots and raspberries went uncovered.

In 2012, the combination of a bitterly cold winter and a March heat wave resulted in Mr. King’s greatest losses in the farm’s 34-year history, wiping out all of his stone fruit and a third of his apple crop. “Crop insurance did not even cover half my labor bill for the year,” said Mr. King, who has already signed up for the maximum insurance for 2014.

“Over the years the big-program crops have been able to get what they want while for specialty crops it has been, ‘Tough luck as you freeze,’ ” Mr. King said. “Well, we grow the stuff people eat and want to eat, and we do need some financial cover from this increasingly precarious weather situation.”

On the farm bill, Ms. Stabenow was able to come to an agreement with her Republican counterparts in the Senate as well as the House, where the most conservative members sought large cuts to the food and nutrition program that makes up about 80 percent of the bill.

Ms. Stabenow had to fend off the most conservative House members, who at one point wanted drug testing for food stamp recipients. (Ms. Stabenow told them that she would agree only if every recipient of farm bill dollars was also tested.) But she also had to deal with some liberals who pushed back against any cuts to the food stamp program, including a provision that had allowed some states to inflate residents’ food assistance by counting the costs of utility bills that residents did not actually have.

“I appreciate passionate advocates,” Ms. Stabenow said. “But I believe it helps to be the first one to call out situations where there is not accountability.”

Ms. Stabenow was so persistent, her colleagues, supporters and Senate aides said, that some senators began to fear her approach as she moved purposefully between the Republican and Democratic cloakrooms just off the Senate floor. The clerks there would bet over drinks whether she could get her bill passed.

In general, the bill reflects the diverse agricultural landscape of Ms. Stabenow’s home state, which plays a leading role in movements like community gardens in schools and offers a program that gives food stamp recipients double credit for food and vegetable purchases — a model for the federal farm bill.

“I give her a lot of credit,” Mr. Hoefner said. “She made it clear from the get-go that these items needed to be in the bill.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 9, 2014, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Farm Bill Reflects Shifting American Menu and a Senator’s Persistent Tilling.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/us/politics/farm-bill-reflects-shifting-american-menu-and-a-senators-persistent-tilling.html

Farm bill: Why don’t taxpayers subsidize the foods that are better for us?

By Tamar Haspel, Published: February 18

Read the farm bill, and a big problem jumps right out at you: Taxpayers heavily subsidize corn and soy, two crops that facilitate the meat and processed food we’re supposed to eat less of, and do almost nothing for the fruits and vegetables we’re supposed to eat more of. If there’s any obligation to spend the public’s money in a way that’s consistent with that same public’s health, shouldn’t it be the other way around?
The problem dates back to the bill’s inception in the 1930s, when farms raised livestock and grew a mix of crops, including staple crops (corn, wheat, oats, barley) and what the bill calls “specialty crops” but what the rest of us know as fruits and vegetables.
From the 1930s to 1980, subsidies alone weren’t substantial enough to significantly change the mix of crops on farms, according to Vincent Smith, professor of economics at Montana State University and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “In 1980, we introduced crop insurance subsidies of substance that began to change the ways in which farmers manage risk, and to discourage diversification,” he says. And then we increased them until they became very substantial, and farmers, at least to some extent, farmed to the bill the way teachers teach to a test.
What’s important about how we subsidize farms isn’t necessarily the overall dollar amount — it comes to 5 percent to 10 percent of the market price of most of the subsidized crops — it’s that it takes some of the risk out of farming grains and oil seeds, but not fruits and vegetables.
Farming is inherently risky. Weather, insects and disease, over which you have limited control or none at all, can wipe you out. One of the ways farmers manage risk is to plant variety. Okay, powdery mildew got your strawberries, but the broccoli’s going gangbusters. For farmers, crops that are given guaranteed protection from both losses and price drops are lower-risk propositions.
Farmers, like the rest of us, have bills to pay and children to feed. (Full disclosure: My husband and I farm oysters and have benefited from the farm bill’s conservation program.) A guaranteed source of income is attractive. That’s one of the reasons that, of the 300-million-plus acres planted with food (other than grass, hay and forage for animals) in this country, half are corn and soy. Another 50 million are wheat. Only 14 million are devoted to fruits and vegetables, from peas (1.2 million acres) to mangosteens (1 acre, which I’d dearly love to visit).
The 2014 iteration of the farm bill, signed into law this month, changes the way farmers are subsidized, and if you’ve read one thing about it, it’s probably been that direct payments — annual checks based on production history — have been discontinued. But calling the two programs that replace them “crop insurance” isn’t quite accurate, says Smith, because there are no premiums and no policies. Farmers choose between Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) and receive payments when price (for PLC) or revenue (for ARC) drops below a benchmark.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that PLC and ARC will cost about two-thirds of what direct payments cost, but the accuracy of that estimate depends on assumptions about the future price of commodities, something any commodity trader will tell you is notoriously hard to predict. Any analyst who could do it accurately would make his fortune in commodity futures, quit his analyst job and buy a lovely home somewhere sunny, where they grow less corn and more mango­steens.
PLC and ARC, together with a few other commodity programs, are slated to cost $44.4 billion over 10 years. Traditional crop insurance will continue, with government paying 65 percent of the premiums, and that’s another $89.8 billion, for a total of $134 billion for commodities over a decade.
And how does the bill help specialty crop growers? Robert Guenther, senior vice president of the United Fresh Produce Association, counts the ways. There’s help with research, provisions to include produce in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and school lunches, export enhancements, grants and a few other things. Total expenditure: $4 billion over 10 years. There is almost no insurance, and there are no subsidies, but many fruit and vegetable growers wouldn’t have it any other way.
“We’ve taken a different approach from the commodity growers,” says Guenther. He explains that specialty crop farming, because of its variety, doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of regulation. And he says many farmers prefer the flexibility that comes with independence to the conformity required by regulation, even if the regulation comes with cash. Asking the Agriculture Department to compare Washington apples with Florida oranges, and regulate appropriately, would be asking a lot. (There are also contractual agreements, outside the scope of the farm bill, that reduce risk for many specialty growers.)
It’s worth noting that, although producing more vegetables at lower prices looks good from a public health perspective, it’s not in the interest of the farmers already growing vegetables.  Specialty growers supported the rules that, until now, prevented commodity growers from devoting some acreage to fruits and vegetables; this year’s farm bill allows commodity farmers to use up to 15 percent of their acreage for specialty crops without losing benefits. Because growing interest in local produce gives them a market, some will undoubtedly do that, and one study, published last year in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, concluded that “the removal of the planting restriction may have a non-trivial impact on U.S. fruit and vegetable production.”
I asked Guenther what he thought about the competition. “As long as these growers are willing to play by the same rules that current producers play by, they’re welcome to join the club,” he replied.
The extent to which the farm bill has shaped agriculture is hard to quantify, and the degree to which changing it can reshape it is hard to predict. According to Patrick Westhoff, director of the Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute, “If you subsidize something, you get more of it.” Neither Westhoff nor Vincent Smith, however, is convinced that if you stop subsidizing it, you get much less.  But a 1 percent decrease in the 160 million acres of corn and soy translates to an 11 percent increase in the 14 million acres of fruits and vegetables. (Whether that would translate to increased consumption is, of course, another question.)
There might be a way to promote production of fruits and vegetables while also protecting the interests of the farmers already growing those crops. Although specialty growers haven’t pushed for commodity-like plans, Guenther says they would like to see more focus on insurance. Smith points out that most of the risk to specialty crop growers comes from weather, and many private weather insurance products are available now that can cover a wide variety of crops. Many farmers don’t buy them because they’re not subsidized. If we were to change that, says Smith, “it would probably increase production, and there would be some price effect.” How much? “Anybody’s guess.”
Changes to the farm bill can have consequences both here and abroad, and we have to proceed cautiously. We can’t pull the rug out from under farmers whose choices have been influenced by the bill, and we have to consider the price and supply of the grains and oilseeds that feed the developing world. But we also need to move away from a system that requires taxpayers to spend billions underwriting a system detrimental to public health.

 
Haspel, a freelance writer, farms oysters on Cape Cod and blogs at www.starvingofftheland.com


http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/farm-bill-why-dont-taxpayers-subsidize-the-foods-that-are-better-for-us/2014/02/14/d7642a3c-9434-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html

Pathogens Everywhere

D.C. farmers markets highlight an array of food safety issues

By Esther French, Mattea Kramer and Maggie Clark, Published: July 22

Outside the Department of Agriculture headquarters on Independence Avenue SW, government workers and tourists shop for fresh produce, poultry, popcorn, baked goods and hot lunches.

Like farmers markets across the country, this one sponsored by the USDA is thriving, propelled by a national craving for fresh food and the perception that locally grown food is healthier than food mass-produced by big agriculture and sold in grocery stores.

But commercial tests found pathogens on raw chickens sold by a Virginia farmer at the USDA market; the pathogens could be harmful if the poultry is not properly cooked, according to an investigation by News21, a national university reporting project at the University of Maryland. The same was true of poultry sold by a Pennsylvania farmer at a Vermont Avenue NW market.

Both farmers were exempt from USDA inspections because they process fewer than 20,000 chickens a year, although farmers operating under the exemption are not permitted by USDA regulations to sell their products across state lines, officials said.

A USDA spokesman said the department has suspended poultry sales by the vendor at its market as it conducts an investigation.

The director of FreshFarm Markets, the nonprofit organization that operates the market on Vermont Avenue, said FreshFarm requires USDA inspection of all meat for sale at the market. Ann Yonkers, the director, said she was unaware that the farmer’s chickens were exempt from inspection and asked him to stop selling them.

The findings from both markets highlight seams in the federal government’s efforts to keep the country’s food supply safe through a maze of federal, state and local laws that can be confusing even for the people charged with enforcing them. They also illustrate the danger for consumers who think they can find refuge in markets selling food grown locally.

Despite the interest in food from local growers, scientists say small does not mean safe. “From a food-safety point of view, there’s no inherent reason why large production is, on balance, more dangerous than a small family farm,” said Bill Keene, a senior epidemiologist at the Oregon Public Health Division.

Benjamin Chapman, a food-safety specialist at North Carolina State University, said that in some cases small farms may be less safe. “We’re finding that there’s less pressure on a vendor at a [farmers] market to implement risk reduction because the perception is that the product is safe already,” he said. “At a grocery store, growers have all these specifications they have to hit, but that’s absent in the farmers market.”

Tests conducted for News21 by the Baltimore division of Microbac, a federally certified laboratory with locations nationwide, found salmonella in three samples of chicken being sold at the USDA market by J&L Green, a farm in Edinburg, Va.

“Our process as a whole is sanitary when operated correctly,” said Jordan Green, one of the farm’s owners. “Mistakes do happen.”

Green said he had recently noticed his plastic bags of fresh chicken leaking at the farmers market. He said it was hard to keep bags from tearing and, as a result, he was moving away from fresh and toward frozen poultry.

Leaky poultry juices present a cross-contamination hazard at a farmers market, where shoppers may also be buying peaches or lettuce and placing their purchases in the same canvas bag. Because produce is often eaten uncooked, pathogens would not be killed.

At the market on Vermont Avenue, Microbac found campylobacter on chicken sold by Garden Path Farms of Newburg, Pa. Emanuel Kauffman, the farm’s owner, said he believes his farming practices are safer than big agriculture’s.

It is not against the law to sell raw chicken with salmonella or campylobacter. Regulators instead have placed the responsibility on consumers to understand the importance of cooking thoroughly and avoiding cross-contamination of other foods. A USDA official said the department’s consumer education efforts are vigorous and ongoing.

But the government’s efforts have failed to reduce the number of salmonella infections in 15 years, even as other food-borne illnesses have dropped.

Salmonella, which doesn’t discriminate between small and large farms, is a pathogen sometimes found in the intestinal tracts of birds and other animals. On chicken farms, it can spread from bird to bird or can be introduced by wild animals. During slaughter and processing, salmonella on one chicken can contaminate many more.

Salmonella is invisible, odorless and tasteless, so even the most careful farmers might not know their chicken carries the pathogen, unless they test for it.

The same goes for campylobacter, which is even more prevalent in chickens. The pathogen is one of the leading bacterial causes of diarrhea in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Microbac also found salmonella or campylobacter in chicken parts sold by another local vendor and two grocery chains a short distance from the U.S. Capitol.

Altogether, five out of seven markets and grocery stores tested positive for campylobacter, and two of the five also tested positive for salmonella. It demonstrates how easy it is to find pathogens — no matter which market or grocery store a consumer patronizes.

In 2009, an annual Food and Drug Administration retail meat study found 21 percent of chicken breasts contaminated with salmonella and 44 percent with campylobacter.

The findings come at a time of increased federal concern over food-borne infections linked to the two pathogens, which the CDC says are two of the most commonly reported causes of food-borne illness.

A 2011 CDC study estimated that 1.8 million people are sickened, 27,000 are hospitalized and 400 die each year from both pathogens combined.

Because J&L Green, the Virginia farm selling chickens at the USDA market, operates under the exemption for small farms, no government inspector had looked at the way Jordan Green and his wife, Laura, raise and slaughter chickens, Green said. The USDA generally reviews exempt operations only if it receives a complaint.

Farmers decide whether they want to operate under an exemption from inspections. They do not, however, have to notify the USDA that they have claimed an exemption. The agency does not keep track of exemptions. However, state governments can have their own rules. Virginia, for example, requires farmers to fill out a two-page application, which Green said he did not know about but has now submitted. He also has paid for his own salmonella tests.

When the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service accepted J&L Green into its farmers market this year, officials failed to catch that he was not registered for the Virginia exemption he claimed and that he was breaking federal and state rules by transporting exempted poultry across state lines for sale.

The farmers market manager, Velma Lakins, said she was aware that J&L Green Farm labeled its chicken as exempt. She said she thought that exempted chicken could be transported across state lines, as did two regional USDA officials interviewed by News21.

Also at the USDA market, C&T Produce of Fredericksburg, another vendor, was observed selling unrefrigerated eggs, even though egg cartons bore USDA-mandated labels stating that they should be refrigerated.

Lakins said in an interview that she saw the eggs in coolers with ice packs. But Craig DeBernard, who co-owns C&T with his wife, Tracy, said he had not known the eggs had to be refrigerated and did not do so. C&T has stopped selling eggs at farmers markets during hot summer months and will sell them in an iced cooler in the fall.

Esther French, Mattea Kramer and Maggie Clark are fellows with News21, a university journalism program run in cooperation with the Carnegie Corp. and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-farmers-markets-highlight-an-array-of-food-safety-issues/2011/07/18/gIQAROXZTI_story.html

Organic farmer Heinz Thomet is fanning the flames in southern Maryland

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