The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - The Case for Slower

Episode Date: July 10, 2022

This ep: we introduce a new segment called Farm Sounds. This time: when the tradeoff that comes with a gain in efficiency on the farm doesn't feel worth it. Plus another installment of The Farmer Questionnaire.

This is The Ruminant, a podcast about food politics and food security and the cultural and practical aspects of farming. You can find out more at theruminant.ca, email me, editor at theruminant.ca, and you can find me on Twitter, at Ruminant Blog, or search for The Ruminant on Facebook. All right, let's do a show. Hey everyone, it's Jordan. So I've got a short episode for you today, although it wasn't short to produce. The episode features a new segment we're trying out. More on that in a minute. But first, I want to mention that I've got some good interviews cooking on the stove, I promise. But booking and conducting interviews in general is taking

a lot longer in 2022 than when I started doing this show in 2012 or whenever it was. Back then there were way fewer podcasts. Plus we just went through a pandemic where it seemed like audio and video interview production exploded. And in general, it seems like a lot of people are just overwhelmed with communications in their lives. So it's hard to get through to some of the people I contact with interview requests. And that's one reason why we're trying out a new segment on the show today. We're calling it Farm Sounds, and here's how it works. From time to time, I'd like to share a sound or two from the farm with you, and use that sound as a starting point to share some thoughts, some ruminations, if you will, about farming, which is good for me because I like to write and don't do

enough of it. Plus, this segment doesn't rely on me booking and conducting interviews, which is just so time consuming. So here you go, the inaugural edition of Farm Sounds on the Ruminant Podcast. After that, we'll do a farmer questionnaire. This is the sound of me harvesting salad greens at around 5.30 on a Tuesday morning in late June. Baby greens have always represented the largest source of revenues in my mixed veggie operation in BC's Okanagan Valley. A healthy majority of those greens are grown for restaurants, although I also send bagged greens to a couple of retail outlets in the region, and plenty used to go direct to households before I wrapped up my CSA.

On my farm I seed two plantings of greens per week for around 24 weeks. For the peak 16 weeks my salad mix features around 15 cultivars. Most of them are members of the brassica family but not entirely. I grow three different jam lettuces whose smaller inner leaves I cut and add to the mix as well as a couple different chicories and usually there's some baby chard or spinach to add as well. I'll tolerate some weeds in the mix as well, as long as they're edible, very young, and in small quantities. During July and August, I'll harvest up to 200 pounds of various baby greens per week, and I do it all myself, by hand, with a pair of scissors. That's what you're hearing in the sound layered under these words. Me, kneeling in a block of salad greens with a harvest bin and a pair of nine and a quarter inch tailor shears that turned out to be the holy grail in a long ago exhaustive search for the perfect

pair of harvesting scissors that can be got from Lee Valley in case anyone's interested. Though you should know that I'm a big son of a bitch and some of my smaller body staff have eschewed them for their heaviness. As a bonus they're Italian made which it took to be permission from the universe to irritate my employees by regularly turning my shears into a pair of lips that says it's a me you scissors. That joke will come off as less xenophobic to listeners who've played a little Nintendo in their time. Anyway I'm to briefly play another sound for you. That's a quick cut greens harvester, which I mainly wanted to play in order to prove that I

own one, so that the rest of this essay carries more legitimacy as I explain why I don't use it in favor of cutting 200 pounds of salad greens per week with Italian shears. On technical terms, the farm on which I chose to learn how to grow veggies was a bad choice, though owing to my lack of experience I was ill-equipped to recognize that. It was a beautiful farm on beautiful Vancouver Island, and the people were friendly and the food they served was delicious. But the farm, though commercial, wasn't very commercialized. There are lots of examples, but the best is probably that their approach to irrigation was the constant rotation of a couple of those lawn sprinklers that fan back and forth and are much less associated with watering a commercial broccoli

crop than they are with children prancing through them on a hot Saturday. I didn't come away from that experience with a lot of knowledge about agri-tech, but the owner, Josie, taught me a lot about quality control. She sold to high-end restaurants in Victoria and had a reputation for beautiful produce. Josie's main crop? Baby salad grains, which we harvested by hand. And in this case, I mean by hand. The lettuces for the mix were standard varieties like oak leaf and lola rosa which we transplanted out six inches apart. Once they had around six leaves we'd come through on a harvest day and hand peel the two or three largest leaves still baby-sized off of each plant. Now this was before advances like salanova became available, but still it was bonkers. I think Josie's point was that densely planted lettuce

mixes produce limp leaves, and they do, and scissor blades caused oxidation on the bottom of the leaf, and that by peeling we were allowing the inner leaves to size up for the next harvest. So bigger yields! It wasn't just the lettuce. We did use scissors for some of the greens but I distinctly remember peeling individual leaves of baby peacock kale off their stalks and to be clear these weren't small harvests. We had one hotel restaurant ordering 60 pounds at a pot and some weeks the total salad harvest was well over 100 pounds. Good thing Josie's helpers came cheap. As an apprentice I made room, a converted animal

stall, plus board, plus $50 a week. Though granted I'm a big son of a bitch, so feeding the tubby guy sleeping in the pig stall couldn't have been cheap. Anyway, from that farm I took away a strong emphasis on quality as a path to farming success and the intention to make baby salad greens a focus when I started my own farm business. Which brings us back to the present and my choice to use a $40 pair of Italian shears instead of a $900 greens harvester. It didn't take me long to abandon the idea of peeling individual lettuce leaves, which did result in superior quality, but was just too slow. The emergence of new cultivars like the Salanova collection and its imitators helped a ton since they allowed you to produce a full head of baby-sized leaves, although I ended up switching to jam lettuces for reasons I won't explain here.

I'll skip past the first quick-cut harvester I bought, which featured a double-blade design that had a few ongoing problems. I soon replaced it by a far superior single-blade model. That's the one you heard in operation a minute ago. I bought the harvester for the same reason everyone else did. The promise of greatly increasing my harvest efficiency was super appealing to me. And the marketing for it was slick. For a while, I used it regularly. And what I can say in its favor is that when conditions are perfect, that tool pushes tin. Which will not mean anything to you if you haven't seen the movie

Pushing Tin, starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton, which was made back when studios would release mainstream movies about two air traffic controllers who get into fights at barbecues. I say the guy's a loose cannon. Takes one to know one, Nicky. He brings it in steep and tight. He pushes tin. He pushes tin.

Anyway, the tool works well in perfect conditions, meaning it works great when the bed you're cutting is relatively dry and weed-free, and the crop is standing straight up and of a uniform height. In those conditions, one can dramatically increase their harvest efficiency while maintaining control over the quality of the cut. But conditions on the farm are seldom perfect. Where I live, we experience really hot, really dry summers that require frequent, sometimes daily irrigation. really hot, really dry summers that require frequent, sometimes daily irrigation. For conservation purposes, I water overnight and almost always wake up to wet greens on harvest day. To wait for dry conditions would line up with temperatures too hot to harvest greens in.

Those greens are covered by insect netting since I don't use any pesticides and the flea beetles here mean business. Insect netting that, when I pull it off wet beds of greens, tends to knock the greens over, which makes it way harder for the quick cut harvester to deliver an even cut. Add to this the realities of weed pressure and beds of mustard or mizuna or arugula that don't always grow uniformly, and the ultra fast scorched earth approach of the quick cut harvester translates to a drop in quality. Weeds end up in the mix that are too mature for inclusion, or greens get in there with either too much stem or half their leaf missing. My abandoning of the quick cut happened gradually. I would lug it out for each harvest and start out with it, knowing how much faster it would make the salad harvest, but almost without fail I'd end up

abandoning it after a few minutes because I couldn't stomach the compromise in quality I was trading for speed. Suddenly it would be three hours later, the harvest would be done, and I'd end up abandoning it after a few minutes because I couldn't stomach the compromise and quality I was trading for speed. Suddenly it would be three hours later, the harvest would be done, and I'd have to get up on my deck to look out over the farm to see where I'd left the quick cut. And also, well, listen to the quick cut and then the context of a busy community farm. On most days by 9am there are two tractors running full-time and 20-40 volunteers bustling around the farm.

At 5 in the morning, though, it's just me and the birds out there. What sound would you rather hear? Maybe that sounds quaint, or maybe if you're a fellow commercial farmer, you're rolling your eyes right now. But for me, when I consider making investments to gain efficiency, and listen, I am always making investments to gain efficiency, and listen, I am always considering investments to gain efficiency, I think one has to weigh the trade-offs involved, because there are always trade-offs. If you don't believe that, I've got an uber-efficient,

uber-destructive industrial farm model I'd like to show you. In the case of the quick cut, I had to weigh a gain in harvest efficiency of two to four times against the drop in quality of my mix I'd have to accept and the decrease in enjoyment of harvest compared to hand cutting. In that case, I decided it wasn't worth it. So the harvester now hangs pretty much full time from the wall of my tool trailer, except for once a year when I pull it down to cut the tops off of my fava beans, which it's really really good at. Oh, and one more thing I want to say. I am very, very fast at hand cutting greens with my Italian shears. I've cut thousands of pounds of greens with them, and I don't fool around. So I guess

there's also a pride that I take in harvesting that way. Before I say goodbye, let me bring up the sound of the harvest again so I can better explain what you're hearing. I harvest on my knees, bin to my left, scissors in my right hand. I make between six and eight cuts between each drop of greens into my bin, gathering each cut into my left palm with my middle finger as I go. You can hear that in this recording, the series of scissor cuts as I gather a large handful, and then the sound of me dropping it into the bin. In good conditions, I can harvest 75 pounds an hour this way. I don't always have good conditions, but it doesn't matter.

If we place efficiency as a goal above all else, all the time, most of us will end up with a farm that looks and operates very little like the one we had in our mind's eye when we were first inspired to do this work. And for me, there's a sadness to that prospect. So I'm going to keep hand cutting and listening to the bird song. And now for some salt to put in your soup. It's the Farmer Questionnaire. Who are you and where do you farm?

Yeah, so my name is Catherine Kirshner and I farm in Big Timber, Montana, which is southeast, kind of by Yellowstone. And so it's beautiful here. Snows like a lot and it gets really cold, but it's really dry. The name of the grass-fed business is Uncommon Beef, and so it's a grass-fed and grass-finished beef label, and we lease our property. We've kind of moved different properties a couple times, but all in this general area. And the animals are always on pasture,

and we do rotational grazing to try to keep them healthy and to contribute to the land instead of take from it. And yeah, I think it's pretty good, tasty beef. And we market through social media, our farm newsletter, our email list. And then through we get our name and brand out there by farmers markets mainly. we get our like name and brand out there by farmers markets mainly. There's three ones that we attend pretty consistently that are all, you know, within an hour of us. And that's, yeah, I mean, initially when we got into, we bought our herd, but we didn't have, you know, beef yet.

We did bone broth and that kind of started getting some traction and people started knowing us for that and we were sourcing the bones from a local organic farm ranch and then we started having our own beef product in inventory and so now we pretty much just do that. At this point we're running like 10 head. We grow seasonally and then reduce through the winter because we are in a drought that's newer. So in 2020, hay prices were like $120 a ton. And then the following year, they were like $300 a ton. And so a lot of the head of the herds in Montana, they left because no one could feed them over winter. And so we did the same.

We liquidated our breeding stock. And so now we're bringing on yearlings during the growing season and if um you know the hope is to finish them out and direct market them um that way we can not have to have so many hay input costs during the winter what's one of your favorite breeds or cultivars oh yeah so the breed i'm super passionate about is the galloway um beast cattle breed it's sort of a heritage breed I mean I didn't really think of it as that way but technically it is um it's this awesome like shaggy animal so it kind of looks like the highland a highlander breed but it doesn't have the horns they're naturally pulled and they're great for our climate they do really well on grass

um and because of their thick hide, which is second only to the thickness of buffalo hide, it keeps them warm and they require less groceries to maintain their performance through winter. They're super docile, which is important to us because it's a small family operation and we have small kids. I do't work the or I guess rather I do work my cattle on foot like I don't do horse or four-wheeler so much and so they have to be decile we won't keep anything that's not. Describe a common misconception about food

production or what you do as a farmer or anything commonly believed about farming gardening that you think is a myth? Yeah, so I mean, the common one that we deal with a lot in terms of marketing our product is that people think that grass-fed beef should be cheaper than grain-finished beef, which can be frustrating, but understandable. Most people don't understand the greater landscape

of our food supply and how corn and soy is so subsidized. And so our meat costs are artificially kept cheap. And then they're like, you know, healthy, biodiverse, like beautiful pastures, then where are we going to be? There's no growing grass. I mean, it's not free. It basically is the short of it, right? And so we have a lot of input costs in terms of water development for our cattle so we

can move them like we want to. And also, you know, pasture seed, diverse, we put diverse perennial grass seeds out and hay, you know, and so it takes longer to finish an animal properly on grass instead of feeding them grain and getting there faster. So yeah, that's a common misconception we deal with. What's one skill set or knowledge set that you lack in your farming that you wish you had or that has vexed or befuddled you? Really, when I think of this question, the first thing that comes to mind is irrigation. Water is magical, and the things you can do with it and how important it is.

And when you can't get it where you need it, it's just like the number one limiting factor to management, like intensive grazing, the way we do. How do you maintain balance in your life? Not very well. You can hear the small children in the background. But, I mean, we try. So my husband is wonderful. And so the grass finished beef business is mine. He is a teacher and that's his passion is education. And so I have his support with the kids and work life balance. And he really supported me in my decision

to pursue agriculture in the first place because it's not my background growing up. And I was in education for 10 years, too, before I decided to follow a calling into ag. And so balancing the kids is like full time. We have a two year old, five year old and eight year old. And so they're still pretty young and not super handy for, you know, safety sake yet. But, I mean, it's great. Last night the cows got out and we leased pasture, so I threw all the kids in the car before bedtime. We drove out and I put the cows back in and we came home and went to bed. So, you know, it's fun. It's a good way to grow up, I think.

How would you think your farm will look different in 10 years? Hopefully. Our goal is to increase, like, the biodiversity and the biomass as we, you know, manage the land well. And we invest in seed as we feel is appropriate i mean i do believe in like a latent seed bank that is just present on the land and that we can actually wake it up with biology but i also think that maybe we can get there faster if we put out um native species that were there before so we've intentionally focused on soil health and we're working fully on developing more water points so we can protect the stream that runs through the property.

And what's the other big important thing? Oh, so we also plan to stack enterprises. So, next year we're planning on bringing on Katahdin and hair sheep. And the following year we want to bring on pasture poultry. on katahdin and hair sheep and the following year we want to bring on pasture poultry and kind of managing them all in this like ecosystem where they're all giving back to the land and producing really healthy meat for our family and our community that's all everybody i will talk to you next time. We're no closer, we never have laundry We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves Live life like it was meant to be, aw don't fret honey

I've got a plan to make our final escape All we'll need is each other a hundred dollars and maybe a roll of duct tape and we'll run right outside of the city's reaches we'll live off chestnuts spring water and peaches we'll owe nothing to this world of thieves and live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry. We could be happy with life in the country. With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing

a lot of thinking some real soul searching and here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong

so we'll run right out into the wilds and graces we'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba you