News from Terra Firma Farm

Boxes are charged on Monday for the week's deliveries at:

$14 Small
$24 Medium
$32 Large

For a payment of $300, get a 3% bonus. Your account balance will be $309.

For a payment of$850, get a 5% bonus. Your account will be posted as $892.00

For a payment of $1,400, get a 7% bonus. Your payment will be posted as $1,498.

Vacations are charged weekly when notice is given as a fee, no charges occur during the vacation week.

$4 Small
$8 Medium
$11 Large

Bulk Strawberries now available!

Beginning next week, you can get half flats (6 baskets) of ripe strawberries for $12 delivered along with your CSA box. Simply go into your account and choose either a weekly subscription or a single purchase.

Ruby Red Grapefruit is also available this way: 10 lb. boxes available for $12.

Pledge of Authenticity

Terra Firma is a real farm. We grow 99% of the produce that goes into our boxes on our 220 acres of certified organic land in Winters. If we do buy produce from other farms, it's almost always from a neighboring farm and we give them full credit in the box list.
The owners of Terra Firma are involved in every aspect of making your boxes a reality: walking the fields, planting the crops, selecting and checking what goes in the boxes and finally delivering them to you. We eat the crops from our fields every day, just like you do. Thanks for supporting our efforts and enjoying the food we grow.
Paul, Pablito, & Hector

Payments, Billing, and Changes

Schedule vacations, change box sizes, make payments or sign up for autopay by logging in to your subscriber account at terrafirmafarm.com

News From Terra Firma Farm

Community Supported Agriculture

Greetings!

Folks who live in the Bay Area, New York metro area, and other urban metropolises may be under the impression that "local food" is the biggest force affecting agriculture right now. That's because when media outlets in urban areas cover agriculture -- if they do at all -- this is the subject they tend to focus on. An example is an recent article in Business Week highlighting a handful of multi-generational farms who have shifted to direct marketing all their crops. As the article points out, direct sales to consumers and retailers is now a billion dollar market.
A billion dollars is a lot of money. But it represents just a tiny percentage of the total revenue produced by agriculture in the U.S. And while SF Gate and the New York Times are lovingly covering the explosion in farmers' markets, CSAs and other locally grown foods, a much different story is told in the magazines that farmers read. The picture is also a rosy one, but it's all about commodities.
The market for most commodities -- which are traded globally -- has exploded in the last three years with most of the new demand coming from China, India, and other countries where the middle class is growing quickly. Crops like corn and soybeans are in high demand because they are fed to pigs, cows, and chickens -- meat consumption is way up as people seek to emulate the American diet. And sales of "luxury" foods like almonds, walnuts, and pistachios (as well as wine) have skyrocketed. The latter category has dramatically impacted agriculture in California.
Our state produces more of the first two nuts than any country in the world, and is on a pace to best Iran on the third. Nut crops are extremely appealing to farmers for two primary reasons: they are highly mechanized and not very perishable. In this way they are not unlike the dried corn grown by most farmers in the midwest. (Unlike corn, though, nut orchards take 5-8 years before they start producing income.) Throughout the Central Valley of California, farmers who can afford to do so have been planting thousands of acres of nuts annually since the early 2000s. Every time an acre is converted from another crop to nuts, jobs are lost. A 20 acre modern nut orchard, with a fully automated irrigation system, will provide a job for one full time employee at most.

A farm like Terra Firma that is providing locally grown food requires about five times that many people per acre. (We have a total of 20 acres of nut orchards, about 10% of our total acreage). This is the primary reason why our neighbors all around us in Winters are ignoring the booming market for locally grown food in the Bay Area -- just 60 miles away -- and have mostly shifted their land over to nut crops and other commodities.

The federal government gives lip service to promoting "locally grown". Yet where it really counts -- on issues such as immigration and food safety -- the federal government is pushing farmers to produce commodities instead. Here in California, the legislature has decided that CalOSHA's (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) new rules on heat safety for farmworkers and other outdoor workers aren't strong enough. They are now getting ready to pass a draconian bill that will be almost impossible for small farms like ours to comply with. Among other things, it will require shade to be available to workers 365 days of the year, irregardless of temperature. This calls to mind a scene where TFF's field crew is out harvesting carrots on a rainy day in January, trying to stay warm in rain gear and rubber boots, and yet has to set up a shade tent. The shade must be within 400 feet of where employees are working or the employer could face criminal charges and civil penalties.
A neighbor of mine who has grown both commodity walnuts and dried fruit for local markets for 35 years shut down his fruit dryer last month, laid off several dozen employees, and is currently ripping out his apricot and peach orchards. I asked him why. He just looked at me and said "It sure seems like that's what they want us to do". For him, the last straw was the new food safety rules from the FDA.
If you have occasion to communicate with your assemblymember any time soon, you might mention to them that small farmers don't need any more obstacles to success. If they really want to support farmers who grow food to sell locally, they need to stop passing laws that push us instead towards growing commodities to sell to China.
Thanks,

Pablito

In Your Boxes

Peaches on the tree just before we harvested them yesterday

Stone Fruit season is off to an early start this week. We started harvesting Cherries on Saturday, but we weren't going to get enough this week for all the boxes (they are in the Small and Large boxes today). So we were happy to see a passel of ripe Peaches on the trees Monday morning that we are sending along to Medium subscribers. There will be more cherries next week, but it may be another two weeks before we have more peaches.

Small and Large boxes will get cherries this week; Medium boxes will get them next week. The fruit in your boxes today are the earliest varieties around, which means they spend less time on the tree and have less time to develop sugar and flavor. In other words, they won't be the best cherries/peaches you've ever eaten. But we hope they will the best ones you have eaten in mid-May.

As I mentioned last week, Tokyo Turnips are in your boxes this week (M&L). Tokyo turnips look a lot like radishes, but they have a slightly different texture and flavor. They can also be cooked, which takes their peppery edge away. The greens are tasty when cooked as well, although a single bunch will shrink down to just a few tablespoons when stir fried or sauteed.

This normally would have been a week for us to put Garlic in some or all of the boxes. But the garlic is in an in-between stage between "Green Garlic" and "fresh Garlic". Over the next week or ten days, the heads will start to form cloves and by early June will become dry bulbs. At some point during this process, we will send you a few partially dried heads.

Recipe -- Zucchini Ribbons
Every once in a while, I find a new way to prepare a vegetable I've been cooking and eating for years. I've always sliced or chopped summer squash and considered it a chunky vegetable, or grated it to put in salads. Last year I was shown how to make spaghetti out of it. This year, I am using a vegetable peeler to make wide, thin ribbons -- sort of like lasagne noodles. When cooked, these squash ribbons quickly absorb other flavors while retaining a slightly crunchy texture.

Trim the ends off 4 summer squash. Slice zucchini types in half lengthwise; pattypan types in half from top to bottom.

Place the cut side of the squash down and use a vegetable peeler to slice each one from top to bottom. The slices should be as thick as the peeler will let you make -- you don't want them paper-thin like shredded carrots. Right-angle peelers like the one below work best, but either way be careful and use two hands.

Squash Ribbons

If you want the ribbons narrower, you can slice them in half lengthwise after cutting.

Prepared this way, you can substitute the squash for noodles completely, or go 50/50 -- for example, in lasagna.

Alternately, you can make your favorite zucchini recipe but cut the squash this way instead of the way you used to. It will be just as good, just different.

Or, don't cook the ribbons at all. Marinate them with salt, and lemon juice or vinegar, and spices of your choice and use them as the basis for a salad, or as a substitute for (or addition to) sliced turkey or other sandwich filling.