To Market, To Market!

First thing Tuesday morning everyone got to work a little earlier than usual in order to harvest all the veggies needed for our trip to the Cannon Beach Farmers' Market that afternoon.  We collected garlic scapes, shallot buds, pea shoots, lettuce mix, a variety of fresh herbs, green garlic and fava beans.  We also brought along a good deal of plant starts: tomatoes, kale, herbs, cukes and chokes.

On the long car ride to the beach I got to thinking about my motivations for working on a farm, which mostly boil down to a desire for self-sufficiency.  This aspiration coupled with what I've been reading about homesteading led to me wonder: what's the difference between a small farm and a large garden?

The best answer I could come up with is that a farm is a commercial enterprise that seeks to profit from its surplus, whereas a garden could be the same size (in theory) but is for personal use exclusively.  Before working on a farm I couldn't visualize how the business aspect of growing vegetables worked.  Slowly I am beginning to understand how the farm makes money.  One of, if not the most important part of the business is selling our starts and produce at the farmers market...

Here we are manning the Gales Meadow Farm booth at the Cannon Beach market.  Eating fruits and vegetables that were picked that day and grown in local soil guarantees a degree of "freshness" (I wish I could think of a less over-used word) that you will never find in a grocery store, even if that store is New Seasons.  It takes about one day working on a farm to understand the importance of farm-to-table food buying.  In the words of one of our customers "the food is still alive".  

Similarly, working at the farmers' market gives one a renewed appreciation for specialization.  Businesses these days are all about selling everything possible.  The first thing that jumps to mind are the recent Target ads around Portland advertising their produce--gimme a break!  As if Target's produce isn't imported straight from Mexico and covered in chemicals.  Moreover, the varieties of vegetables they grow are chosen for the their long shelf life rather than taste, texture or color.  Target is good for shower curtains and boxer briefs, not brussel sprouts.  At the market you have your cheese maker, your baker, your vegetable farmer, and on down the list.  This way each vendor can focus on doing what they do really really well, and (lucky for us) after we've sold everything we can, we trade with each other so we can all have it all!

This is the world I imagine I would like to live in, one where every woman or man or family or business enterprise could focus on doing something really well and then exchange their goods for what others do well.  (Granted, I would like to be able to grow and bake and cook and slaughter everything I'd ever need.)  At the same time, I learned from a young age that specialization is bad, bad, bad and leads workers to dissatisfaction and depression.  Take your everyday postal employee or toll-booth worker who perform the same mundane task day in and day out.  Would she not be happier working a job wherein she can participate in a wide variety of activities and processes that lead to the end goal?

For me, I try to apply these theories to my working life.  While I've been working on the farm, I have taken the advice of Carol Deppe to heart and made a point to never do one activity for too long.  I'll spend an hour weeding, an hour planting, drink some water, back to weeding, now some digging, etc.  This change of activity helps my brain stay alert and interested in what I'm doing and keeps my body from over-using one muscle group.

In other news, going to the Cannon Beach market was also a fun excuse to get out of town for the day, and as I mentioned earlier, I had never been to the Oregon coast.  It reminded me a lot of Sea Ranch and the beaches in northern California, with its coastal pines and fog, two very familiar staples of my childhood.  I had a chance to walk around the little town and go down to the beach.  I took this self-portrait in the public restroom because I so enjoyed the light shining from overhead.  Going down to the shore with a cup of watery but super-hot coffee was very enjoyable.  It was so wet and misty that by the time I returned to the market, it looked at though I had taken a dip.

 

After the market we made a visit to the "community meeting" which regarded the Liquified Natural Gas pipeline that was proposed to go through Gales Meadow Farm and hundreds of other peoples' property, thereby clear-cutting 150 feet of the land in order to export LNG from Canada to Asia.  In short, pure evil.  We showed up to give the bad boys (shown here on the left, Peter Hansen, head douchebag) a taste of their own medicine.  Luckily there has been a strong resistance to the LNG pipeline and the people trying to organize it don't have their shit together, so right now it's nothing but a bunch of schematics on a computer screen.  Either way, it was fun to be part of the resistance.