Roots Music Redux and Some Farm Notes

Posted on September 11, 2011 by geek 1

Yes, the Slow Food Roots Music Festival was, in my very humble opinion, a raving success. You can find all the pictures and videos on their Facebook site. The musicians were just outstanding and the food was…well…not just yummy, but so good for you. I went back for thirds and then did it again the next day. Mmmm…

Things are finally ready for harvesting on the farm. The garlic came in almost a month late, but the peaches are ripening right on time and the apples are ready early. The long cool, rainy spring really threw things for a loop once again this year. All the farmers had to adjust to crops coming in late or not at all (think tomatoes). Still, the bounty is something to behold.

Music, Food, and Chefs! Oh my!

Posted on August 25, 2011 by geek 1

(Top left) Jimmie Dale Gilmore, (top right) Moondoggies, (bottom left) Stilly River Band, and (bottom right) Clinton Fearon.

I’m just so excited! This weekend is the Slow Food Roots Music Festival. It’s a music festival unlike any you’ve ever attended. In addition to a veritable smorgasbord of tuneful delights, there will be chefs, art, a farmers market, wine & beer, and, oh yes, food! The concessions are all locally grown, farm-fresh, good-for-you eats. Take a peek:

Fifteen Hour Smoked Brisket & Pulled Pork – served on Bread Farm ciabatta with carrot cumin slaw & choice of bbq sauce
Del Fox Burgers & Sausages – served with choice of cheese, carmelized walla wallas, rhubarb ketchup, habanero relish, guinness roasted garlic or herb mustard
Grilled Corn on the Cob – basted with choice of brown sugar & coconut milk, cilantro & garlic butter, lime & chile butter, or herb butter & parmesan cheese
Raw Bar – Taylor Shellfish’ oysters and clams. Served with choice of jalapeno mignonette, lemon oil mignonette, or lime and chile sorbet
Bacon Wrapped Enoki Mushrooms – served with ginger scallion sauce
A Taste for Plato – Mediterranean plate with hummus & baba ganoush served with pita and chick pea wraps
Dessert – Sweet chilled rice with a generous dollop of lemongrass yogurt and crushed berries

If you’re in the area (northern Snohomish County, Washington State) come join us for a fun, tasty, musical time. This shendig is a fund raiser for Slow Food Port Susan and many other local programs benefiting the lower Stillaguamish Valley.

Oh, and I’ll be pouring at the Slow Food Beer & Wine garden between 2 and 6pm. Stop on in!

Business is Business but Farming is Personal

Posted on August 24, 2011 by geek 1

Farming is not an occupation, it’s a calling. The farmers that I know are passionate about growing really good food. Additionally, they want to educate their customers and keep them informed, which, in turn, creates loyal customers.

Selling directly to customers creates some unique issues for farmers. Standard marketing methods don’t usually work that well for a couple of reasons: it’s too expensive and casts too wide a net. Farmers who sell directly to consumers need advertising methods that work on a personal basis. They also need to reach customers locally, which can be a challenge on the world wide web.

There are a number of online tools farmers can use to solve some of these issues and yet maintain steady relationships with customers. Blogs and social media are free, immediately accessible, and usually easier to understand and use than a website. What they take, however, is time and a certain amount of dedication to the relationships these tools create. Time is in short supply when weeds need pulling and there are goats to milk and cucumbers to harvest.

I believe the trick is to find and use the tools that best fit your business model and your personality. Let me give you an example: a blog is a great way to keep your CSA customers in touch with what is happening on the farm. If you hate to write, however, a blog is going to be agony to use. A better choice would be Twitter, which limits the size of your postings. You can announce, “Beets are here!” without having to spend lots of time putting together an entry. You can even Tweet from your phone.

Last fall, I explored a few ways you can use social media to improve your marketing ability. In truth, social media and blogs are so new, that there isn’t really a wrong way to use them. (Well, unless you use them illegally.) Any way that you can enhance your customer base using Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, or Blogspot is valid. In fact, folks are quite encouraged to use social media in new and interesting ways.

I’m reserving a later posting to explore methods for reaching customers through social media, blogs, and other online tools. Stay tuned.

Farm to Fork

Posted on July 30, 2011 by geek 1

: Farm to Fork Dinner at Whispering Winds Farm

For the first time ever, I attended a Farm to Fork dinner. (I know, I know, why did it take me so long…) It was at Whispering Winds Farm, home of Freshly Doug Vegetables, a local CSA and farmstand farm. It was held inside their heritage barn which has quite a nice view of the valley. We were serenaded by the band Cabin Fever and Pacek Winery kept the mood jovial with some delightful white, red, and dessert wines.

: Char and Doug, Freshly Doug Vegetables

Considering that this was their first ever dinner, our hosts, Char and Doug, were quite well organized. There were a few hitches, such as some of the vegetables not being harvestable in time due to the cool weather, but they persevered. Menus were slightly changed. Last second details were modified. Everything came together in the end.

We had a nice time hanging out on the farm, talking to the goats, walking the fields, sipping wine, and chatting up the other guests. I was able to talk to the chef, Devra Gartenstein, who created the recipes we enjoyed. She has several cookbooks published and some were given away in a gift raffle. (No, I didn’t win one, but The Neighbor, who went with me, did win a Freshly Doug Vegetables hat. I’m almost jealous.) Devra’s blog is quirkygourmet.com, where she writes extensively about good food.

If you find a Farm to Fork event in your area, go! It’s a great way to spend an evening.

Sustainable Small Engines

Posted on July 30, 2011 by geek 1

One-stroke Engines at the Silvana Fair

At the beginning of the last century, farms would use small, usually one-stroke engines to power all kinds of activities. Most connected to belts that ran tools, such as sheep shears, small wheat threshers, or other processing equipment. They ran all day on a quarter gallon of gas, but could require almost as much oil as gas to keep everything moving. The one-stroke action meant that the wheel turning the belt would slow down between strokes, causing variances in the speed of the tools. These were tough engines, though, and many lasted through decades of work, as long as they were maintained. They were the work horses of food processing and most every farm had one.

Water-cooled, one-stroke engine used for sheep shearing in Australia

By mid-century, tractors had belt drivers attached to their drive trains and the little one-stroke engines weren’t needed anymore. They were stored in the back of barns and storage sheds. Today, farmers and antiquers are discovering these old engines and restoring them. Small, organic, biodiverse farms are rediscovering their many uses, albeit slowly, as they learn more about what they are and how they work.

I know of two sources where farming gearheads can find valuable information about rebuilding older or antique farm equipment:

Smokestak.com – This site has tons of information and numerous discussion boards on all manner of older engines and equipment. I could spend hours there learning about threshers, harrows, and such.
The Small Farmers Journal – The journal reprints information and manuals on all kinds of farm equipment, horse-drawn or otherwise.

Do you know of other resources? If so, send them to me and I’ll repost them here.

Wild, Wild West – Part 2

Posted on July 13, 2011 by geek 1

Today, a link to a Missoula news story flipped across my twitter feed. It announces a new fiber cable broadband system covering 300 miles across both the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal areas. In combining this new system with existing networks, most of the state from the Rockies to Idaho will be wired. This means that by 2013, Western Montana is going to have quite an extensive broadband capability across an huge area that also provides beautiful scenary, lots of land, and a motivated workforce. Now that’s a recipe for a robust economy!

So, how does Washington State compare? Not well. We may have the fastest speed in the U.S. (Ephrata, at 27Mbps download), but very little of the state has any coverage at all. Many areas within an hour’s drive of the big Microsoft campus are shockingly underserved.

Tsk,tsk,tsk…

The Wild, Wild West

Posted on July 10, 2011 by geek 1

Sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, you find something like this: Wyoming Town Creates Broadband Bonanza. It’s a good thing, too, because the latest report shows that rural areas without broadband could be in a sorry state, economically:

“While broadband will not bring immediate economic transformation to rural America, regions that lack broadband will be crippled.” – Sharon Strover, Researcher, University of Texas

By the Sea

Posted on July 9, 2011 by geek 1

We finally reached the pristine Oregon Coast on one of the first warm days of the year. We piled into our 5th floor, ocean-facing hotel room, opened all the sliding doors and windows, sat down, and watched the water. What is it about the sea that makes me want to stop and stay?

It was here, finally, that I was able to find restaurants that served local, organic foods. What a relief! I don’t think I could handle even one more processed, food-service meal. Blech.

Portland, also, has many fabulous restaurants serving local, organic foods which you can easily find online. However, we didn’t stay there long enough to sample very much. I’ve visited Portland many times in the past and enjoyed so many good meals there. They even have a chain of local, organic burger joints which I quite like, called Burgerville. The last time I was there, they were baking organic shortcakes to go with the in-season strawbwrries they had just received from the farm that morning. Yummy!

My favorite place to go in Portland is New Seasons Market. They are so much more than just organic grocery stores. When you walk in, the first thing you see is the Solutions Counter, usually staffed by a nutritionist or chef. There, you can find what’s in season, get help with a nutrition question, or discover recipes for the produce you are buying that day. Amazing! Then you walk into the store proper, which has a bakery, a meat counter, a cheese counter, and many other fully staffed departments where they make value-added products, in-house. You can meet the baker who made the loaf of bread from the grain grown by a local farmer. You just can’t do that anywhere else. I really like the Policies page on their website. Under Special Requests Policy, for example, it simply says “Yes”.

After a couple of days lounging on the beach, drinking fair-trade coffee, watching sand castles being built and then washed away by the tide, we decided that we missed all our animals just too much and that we needed to go home. (Sigh.) It was time.

The route we took was across the mouth of the Great Columbia River, which is just an awesome sight. The Astoria-Megler Bridge, which spans the river at that point, is 4.1 miles long. The part you see to the left is tall enough for very large container ships to pass under. Truly, the Columbia is one of the wonders of the world.

As soon as I got back to the Puget Sound, I got stuck in a traffic jam. I’d completely forgotten about those. I’ve had better welcomings.

The Value-added Middle Ground

Posted on June 30, 2011 by geek 1

My next stop on this 2,167-mile journey is Portland, where I had dinner with a clothing-designer friend of mine, Nancy. She specializes in organic fabrics and just had a show at the Bonaroo Music Festival. Here are a few of her designs.

In creating these beautiful items, she found it quite difficult sourcing organic, sustainably produced cloth. At the same time, I’m talking with farmers raising heirloom animals that are trimmed every year for their fleece. These include sheep, alpacas, and goat fleeces. Yet they can’t sell them because so few mills are turning the fleece into cloth. We have supply and we have demand, but we are missing the small manufacturers crucial to filling in the puzzle.

This type of problem is endemic throughout the growing sustainable-farming community. This is why we are working on a project to create the Port Susan Food & Farming Center which will provide a way for farmers to create value-added products from the produce they grow. In other words, they can grow berries for a few weeks in early summer, process them into jam, and be able to sell that throughout the year. With the proper facilities, produce can be frozen, canned, pickled, cooked or preserved into all the fun things we like to have on-hand for year-round cooking.

So, my question to you is this: do you know of small mills where we can do the same thing for fleece? It would be great to bring producers and designers together, and what we need is the manufacturer who can do this.

Geek In The Country

living on the digital divide…