| What's Growing This Week: | |
Tomatoes (All)
Sweet Peppers (All)
Garlic (All)
Asian Pears(All)
Melon (All)
Cukes (S,L)
Carrots (S,L)
Valencia Oranges (M)
Shishito Peppers (M,L)
Zucchini (M,L)
Basil (M,L)
Watermelon (M,L)
Figs (L)
Green Beans (L)
Items may be substituted without notice.
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Contact Us:
| terrafirmafarm.com
csa@terrafirmafarm.com
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| CSA Rates 2012 | 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
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Bulk Items
Still available, 10 lb. boxes of ripe tomatoes ready for saucing, jarring or canning. $15 each delivered to your drop site. You can buy boxes one at a time, or subscribe and a get a box every week. Go to your account page to sign up.
Do you love the Shishito frying peppers that we've been putting in your boxes and can't get enough? Now you can buy them in on the Web Store, 5 lbs. for $25. |
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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
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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
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News From Terra Firma Farm
Community Supported Agriculture |
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Greetings!
Fall is just around the corner, and during this traditional harvest "crunch time", birds have historically become pests in farm fields around the world -- taking advantage of the concentrated abundance to help fatten up for their long migrations. With so much work to do, farmers are not able to post sentries at every field to scare off the marauding flocks of crows, bluejays, and starlings. So was born the Scarecrow -- a pile of old clothes stuffed with hay or straw and propped on a wooden stake in the field.
A scarecrow is a flimsy defense, hastily erected, but can be quite effective at frightening or confusing some birds -- known for their nervousness and group behavior. The rhetorical version of a scarecrow is a Straw Man, defined by Wikipedia as "an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponents position". And with the election of 2012 just a few months away, this fall is chock full of straw men. The recent party conventions were virtual straw man massacres.
Last week another straw man was erected, by Stanford University: an academically generated attack on organic agriculture whose central premise was the following argument:
"Organically grown food claims to be more nutritious than conventionally grown food".
The report proceeded to thrash that straw man with a statistical stick. The media quickly joined the bash-a-thon, accepting at face value the straw man premise and reporting the results as if they were devastating for organic food and its supporters.
Setting aside that there appear to be serious questions about the data and methodology of this academic report, the fundamental problem remains: the organic movement makes no official claims about the nutritional value of our products.
Organic Agriculture has a very specific definition set by the United States Department of Agriculture and certified organic producers must follow the rules established. Nowhere in the law that established the National Organic Program or the regulations that govern it will you find any references to nutrition.
Certified Organic foods are defined by a series of rules governing how they are grown and processed, most specifically excluding the use of synthetic pesticides, fertilizers, preservatives and food ingredients. Organic livestock is produced without antibiotics or growth hormones. Organic crops can be used to make nutritionally deficient ingredients such as corn syrup, for example. But the corn syrup cannot be processed using the same chemicals that are used to make conventional corn syrup. To put it another way, organic soda is not more nutritious than conventional soda, but it has fewer chemicals in it. I don't buy organic soda -- I don't drink soda at all -- but I have no problem with giving people a choice to buy organic soda if they want it.
One might wonder why a study that claims to be neutral on organic agriculture might have created a dishonest premise as its starting point. But then one might also wonder why no American university or government agency has done a study on the long-term effects of cumulative lifetime consumption of multiple pesticides on human health. After all, the EPA rules for pesticide residues on conventional produce are based on single products and short-term exposures in rats.
I could go on and on about this topic for pages. But in my experience, it comes down to a simple idea: People, eaters, "consumers" have two options. If they don't care how their food was grown, they can buy conventional and have faith that existing government regulation is adequate. But if they -- you -- believe that how your food was grown is important, and you want to know the details, your only option is organic. Organic farmers have voluntarily agreed to complete transparency in how they produce their products -- our farms and facilities are inspected every year by a third-party agency that is audited continuously by the USDA. There is no such transparency for conventional farmers.
In the week following the release of the Stanford "study" there has been lots of media coverage -- most of it shockingly ill-informed about organic agriculture and food. (One exception is this editorial from the Los Angeles Times). The most accurate and informed rebuttals that I have seen have been from consumers, in the comments sections of websites and news outlets. This doesn't surprise me in the least, because I know that people who buy organic are smart enough to know a straw man when they see one.
Thanks for subscribing!
Pablito
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Farm Day Date
We've gone ahead and set the day for our annual Open Farm Day: Saturday, October 20. And because it often rains on the day we pick, we are also claiming the following Saturday as the Rain Date.
We will have tickets for the event up on our Web Store by September 20th.
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In your boxes
We're still more than a week away from the start of Fall, but our Peach season is officially over. Nothing can really take the place of peaches, but we are well into harvest of our Asian Pear orchard and Apples are not far behind. So we're sending you the first asian pears of the season.
Asian pears are often called "apple pears" both because they are round and because they are crisp when ripe, unlike their European pear cousins such as Bartlett and Anjou. But their texture is all pear, grainy and very juicy. We have several different varieties and over the course of the season, you will probably get to try them all.
The oranges in your boxes today are Valencias -- juicing oranges. The peels might be partially green, but guaranteed they are sweet and orange inside.
As I mentioned last week, our Pepper field has really kicked into high gear and we are sending an extra portion out today. If you are interested in getting a 10 lb. box of peppers for roasting, freezing or whatever, they are available for a limited time at our web store.
We're having a short lull in our Table Grape harvest, but the season is not over yet. They will be back next week and then for at least another week after that.
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Recipe: Spanish Style-Marinated Carrots and Peppers
Another Spanish recipe this week, via my friends Shep and Laura and based on a recipe from a cookbook that I didn't catch the name of. I normally don't like cooked carrots, but these are quite addictive.
Peel and trim 1 lb. of carrots. Boil in a large pot of salted water until crisp-tender, 8-10 minutes. Drain and rinse, then cut into 1/4 inch thick slices 2 inches long.
Remove the core and seeds of 1 sweet pepper. Slice very thinly into 2 inch pieces.
Peel 3-4 cloves of garlic and place in a mortar with 1-2 t. cumin seeds. 2 t. dried oregano, a pinch of hot pepper flakes, a pinch of salt, 1 T. minced fresh parsley, and 1 t. olive oil. Use a pestle to mash the ingredients into a paste. Whisk in 1/2 C. lemon juice.
Place the carrots and peppers in a glass bowl and pour the garlic paste over them. Add 1 1/2 T. red wine vinegar and 1/2 C. olive oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let marinate for at least 6 hours or overnight. They will keep for at least a week in the fridge.
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