Lucknow Farms

West Virginia: Unexpected Geothermal Resources Found

New geological surveys indicate that West Virginia has unexpected geothermal resources, especially in the eastern section of the state. Geothermal energy, at temperatures of 150dc - 200dc at 5 kilometer, is useful for generating electricity and for heating surface buildings.

With natural gas already a recently discovered important natural resource for the state, geothermal energy provides the opportunity for the state to shift from coal to cleaner energy sources.

I foresee a blossoming of huge hot houses growing tropical fruits in Winter for sale to the eastern seaboard.

Our farm sits on land within both the natural gas and geothermal zones. We've already had offers for the natural gas rights on our farmland. Perhaps requests for our geothermal rights are next. 

Eli Kintisch, "West Virginia Is a Geothermal Hot Spot," ScienceNOW AAAS October 4, 2010.

Community Supported Agriculture in Southern California

CSA is, in most of the US, a small farm business strategy. Subscribers prepay for (usually) produce, eggs, and sometimes, meats, which the farmer delivers during the growing season. Small farms traditionally have not been major players in Southern California. Agriculture was dominated by the citrus industry. Despite the division of citrus into five-acre producers, the management of farms and marketing of produce was in the hands of large cooperatives, such as Sunkist. There were small vegetable and egg producers, scattered throughout the region before World War II often Asian, but they did not dominate farming. And big consumers of free produce and meats, such as large restaurants, often had their own farms.  As a result, community supported agriculture has not been widely adopted in the region.

Riverside County, the heart of the historic citrus industry, which long ago moved to the Central Valley, has recently seen a few CSA farms become successful. The Press-Enterprise today profiles a CSA foundation located in Riverside City, which distributes food produced in northern San Diego County, which borders Riverside County to the south (Naomi Kresge, "Fresh and Local: Food with Thought: Community-Supported Agriculture; Taste, environmentalism nurture interest in practice", The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Tuesday, July 3, 2007, A1; on-line, titled, "Community-suported agriculture delivers fresh, local food").

The article does not explain why the CSA cooperative is organized as a "foundation"; perhaps, it is a registered as a non-profit organization. It is also not clear whether the farmer who produces the food distributed by the foundation is also a member of the foundation.

The Tierra Miguel Foundation farm has 85 acres, planted to "squash, cucumbers, melons, beans, summer carrots, eggplant, peppers and tomatoes next to lettuce being allow to go to seed for next year. Members pay $133 a month for 15 to 20 poinds of produce delivered weekly or $66.50 a month for biweekly delivery." According to the on-line version of the story, the Foundation apparently owns its farm and has 48 subscribers in the inland counties.

The Inland Orange Conservancy, another CSA organization, is the "largest inland community-supported agriculture organization." It has 1,200 members, who  "paid dues of $65 for a 14-week season of oranges, grapefruit an cother citrus, eating 167 tons and donating 84 tons to charity."

The Temecula area in south Riverside County has several CSA farms. One farmer, Jill Mann, whose farm is named Rancho Papagilo, sells eggs. (She is pictured with goats, but what she does with the goats is not mentioned.) Although the print article mentions her operation only briefly, the on-line video of her is several minutes long and includes her discussion about vegetarianism, humane raising of farm animals (her chickens and goats), and whether farm animals should be treated with antibiotics when sick.

Another Temecula farmer, Lynne van Dyke has a list of 25 subscribers, who pay $20 a week for produce. A third CSA farm near Temecula has traditionally supplied coastal communities, but now as 48 subscribers in the inland counties.

Much of the appeal of CSA products, according to the farmers, is that it is fresh and clean.

A second article on a Temcula farm discusses a farmer, David Barnes, who sells to restaurants, but not on a subscriber or CSA basis (Sean Nealon,"Home-Grown Collaboration: Wine Country farmer and others cultivate an effort to sell produce directly to eateries", The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Tuesday, July 3, 2007, on-line under title,"Wine country farmer enjoys fruits of collaborating with others"). He has a partnership with another farmer.

Barnes has been farming for 16 years. "He can make up to $5,000 during one 14-hour day delivering to 20 San Diego-restaurants."  Barnes delivers twice a week. In addition to other cropos, Barnes grows "three types of potatoes and three types of onions [and] four varieties of apples."

Barnes is partner with another Temecula area farmer, Phil Noble, sells exclusively to restaurants. He raises 30 kinds of fruits and vegetables, including 15 varieties of tomatoes.

The Press-Enterprise articles on-line are accompanied by podcasts and videos. The videos are well worth viewing.

Video: Harvesting at Crows Pass Farm

Video: Visit Tierra Miguel and Rancho Papagallo

{Note. Viewing videos requires signing in. Membership is free.}

Community Supported Agriculture

From the Rodale Institute's bookshop and reading list, I picked several recent titles on organic farming. Scott Chaskey, This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm (Penguin, 2005) and Nicola Smith, Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic Farm (photographs by Geoff Hansen, Lyons Press, 2004) traverse a year on small community supported farms. Chaskey is the hired farmer and manager for the Peconic Land Trust at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett (Long Island), New York. Jennifer Megyesi and her husband, Kyle Jones, own and operate Fat Rooster Farm in Vermont. Their story was recorded by Nicola Smith.

I loved both books, was enthralled by the descriptions of seasons on the farms, planting and care of the crops, and the travails, particular, of Megyesi and Jones to make a go of their farm. Several issues interested me, but appeared only as minor themes in the stories of these farms. One theme is the problem of labor for farm work. A second theme is finding markets for local farming produce. Another theme is the role of community supported agriculture in the economic viability of the farms. The last theme is the important, if not absolutely critical, role of the restaurant market, for vegetable produce particularly.

The scarcity of farm labor is a constant theme in American agriculture from the beginning of the twentieth century. Most people avoid farm labor as an employment. It is hard work that does not pay well. I worked on a farm for several summers in my teen years and understand the disinclination. I had to bicycle five miles to the farm to start work at seven AM, and I worked until five PM or later, then biked home. As I was underage, I had to obtain a federal work permit for the job. Most of the time, I worked in a small gang of teen boy laborers, weeding truck crops with hoes. As the farm was located in northern New England, I cannot say that I worked under a broiling sun; but the physical labor was physically strenuous and dirty. At lunch break, I remember vividly how good it felt to lie down and relieve my back.

Harvest labor is a different problem from the year-round lack of farm labor. At harvest, large gangs are needed for table crops, where machine harvesters often cannot be used. Migratory labor has met this need for centuries. In California, Mexican migratory labor is used. In the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, Chinese and Japanese agricultural laborers met most of California's labor needs on farms. White, often women, labor was used in packing and canning sheds. During World War One labor shortages, the first guest worker (bracero) program brought Mexican labor to California's valleys, especially for the fruit harvest. They stayed on to provide most of the state's farm labor, entering the packing sheds and canning factories in World War Two. The censuses regularly reveal, however, a wide diversity of ethnic  immigrant groups working in harvest gang labor. In New England, French-Canadian labor provided labor for both factories and fields after the 1880s. Elsewhere in the East, for decades, brokers bussed black laborers from the South to farms up and down the coastal and piedmont farming districts. My wife has vivid memories of the seasonal appearance of black laborers at her parents' farm in upstate New York. Now, Mexican laborers are widely utilized in the East and Midwest as well.

Small farms still have a difficult labor problem. They do not need enough labor to keep families of laborers working and often don't have the capital to pay wages for migratory labor gangs that larger commercial farms use. Community supported agriculture is supposed to help with this problem.

Another problem is finding a market for small farm produce. Since the railroads spread across the US in the nineteenth century, small local farms have been beaten by large commercial farms able to distribute their crops and meat quickly around the country. The domination of the nation's fruit production by California growers is a paradigm example of this phenomenon. With economies of scale, with contract labor, and with extensive mechanization, large commercial farms can undersell local farmers. This is another problem that community supported agriculture is designed to solve.

Community supported agriculture (CSA) originated in Europe and Japan in response to food safety issues in the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, several CSA farms began in New England and California, according to the Wikipedia article on CSA and a history by an agricultural specialist involved with sustainable agriculture. The first person CSA food was Robyn Van En of Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts. Today, there are perhaps 1,500 CSA farms.

In CSA farming, the consumers share with the farmer some of the risk of the farming. They can do this by a variety of arrangements, such buying a share in the produce (that is, by contributing capital) or contributing labor. Because of the connection between farmer and consumer, CSA farms must be located close to the consumers. They have also mostly been family farms. Fat Rooster Farm is family owned, but Quail Hill is owned by a preservation trust. (See the USDA page on CSA.)

For Quail Hill, the attraction of the CSA arrangement to consumers is having fresh, safe produce (the farm does not raise animals and obtained manure from local horse stables). For the farmer, the CSA arrangement means a guaranteed market for at least a portion of its production. Fat Rooster Farm appears to have relied less on its CSA contracts, but CSA purchases of fresh chicken eggs and turkeys were important sources of income. In neither case, however, did CSA contracts provide all of the income. Since budgets were not included in either books, we can't know exactly how much the farmers benefitted from the CSA arrangement. Quail Hill Farm clearly required restaurant sales to survive at one point. Fat Rooster Farm relied upon local farmers' markets. The farmers' markets were especially important in alerting the farmers to shifts in consumer demand.

In neither farm, judging from the scattered comments in these books, was CSA labor a significant source of labor. The farmers testify to the unreliability of CSA labor. For Fat Rooster Farm, apprentice or intern labor was very important. Young students, perhaps students at an agricultural college or students otherwise intending to operate their own farms, interned at Fat Rooster (for wages) to learn farming. This arrangement was clearly very important for Fat Rooster. Fat Rooster Farm operated debt-free, without a mortgage, and made enough money to keep going year to year; still, both the owners of Fat Rooster had to hold part time jobs to supplement their income.

The Wilson College CSA database lists only two CSA farms in West Virginia. LocalFarms.org lists 32 local (not necessarily CSA) farms in West Virginia.

• LocalHarvest.org data base, local farms.
• Wilson College Biodynamics CSA farm database,  CSA and biodynamic farming.