Letter from a Farmer We are often asked if our produce is healthier than the produce you buy elsewhere. A loaded question that invites an answer filled with hubris. The question comes with the expectation to lay claim to a measureable outcome. As a result I avoid answering it altogether; which is unfortunate. I know, having gladly read the emails from many of our members, that indeed our produce creates a great sense of well being. I wonder if health, aside from a sense of well being, can truly be quantified. The word "health" comes from the Old English Germanic word for "whole" and "holy". The last one a bit loaded indeed, and the first one becoming widely used to advertise all-natural foods and services. The word "whole" implies that all the parts are properly connected. To discern truth we fracture the whole into measurable parts to quantify measurable facts. Once you break the whole into separate parts it is really hard to put the parts back together again. Ever tried to put a frog back together after you dissected it? Modern science is based on finding truth by fracturing the whole into smaller and smaller parts. We have come to understand the world by naming all the building blocks. We have also been extremely clever by rearranging them in a way that works better for us. We have taken the smallest parts and turned them into something new; something nature did not create itself. Call it sub-nature, as there is a huge dif-ference between living organisms and an assembled product. A product is still complete (and whole) but it is never connected to all the other living systems on this planet. This is exactly the problem when we in-sert a foreign gene into a plant or animal. There are many examples where our ability to disassemble the whole into parts has resulted in products that increased our quality of life. Think here of the incredible arsenal of medicines produced and manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry. The understanding of the individual parts brought much progress which relieved much suffering in the world. The dilemma with many of these products is that while they helped save lives, their by-products end up in our drinking water and oceans, and only God knows what the long term effects are of this. And I can continue with page after page of examples where we have cleverly reassembled building blocks into new products that are very useful, but once discarded can pose a problem to the natural cycling of the living systems on our planet. With all our cleverness we forgot that we are part of this planet. One of the applications in the isolation of parts (that I believe had some of the greatest conse-quences for the human species) happened back in 1909. This is when nitrogen was first fixed (con’t p. 2)

ROXBURY FARMROXBURY FARMROXBURY FARM

info@roxburyfarm.com www.roxburyfarm.com august 11, 2014 - pickup week #10

The new digger lifting carrots for today’s harvest.

The crew making the carrot bunches.

(letter con’t) out of the air by Fritz Haber (with the help of fellow British scientist Robert Le Rossignol). Their inven-tion was commercially applied by Carl Bosch (hence the Haber-Bosch method). Many believe that if it wasn't for their ability to isolate nitrogen we would never have been able to feed the number of people on this planet. A cer-tainly commendable achievement if it wasn't initially de-veloped to replace Chilean nitrate as an important compo-nent of ammunition and bombs. (Source: "Enriching the Earth" by Vaclav Smil). Certainly, with the discovery that nitrogen is the greatest limiting factor of plant yield by Liebig, the isola-tion of it by Haber and Rossignol, and the commercial ap-plication by Bosch, we have been able to feed a lot of hun-gry mouths, but at what cost? Nitrogen fertilization has resulted in the dead zones in the Gulf, the pollution of drinking water in most of the Midwest and the degradation of food in general. In the soil, urea and other nitrogen fer-tilizers work like salt, decimating soil life. Just sprinkle a little bit of salt on a snail, and yes it dies, but that is exact-ly what artificial fertilizer does to the tiny delicate animals in the soil. As a biodynamic farmer I don't purchase nitrogen fertilizer and we rely on nature to provide us with our needs to sustain the crops. Let's look at how we bring in nitrogen at our farm. Aside from the integration with rumi-nants that sustain themselves on a healthy diet of grass and legumes on the pastures, we grow green manure crops to sustain the fertility of the cropland. Their sole purpose is to fix nitrogen and carbon out of the air and to feed this to the microorganisms in the soil. As the grass and leg-umes feed the cows, the manure feeds the microorganism; the green manures feed the underground animals directly. Legumes live in symbiosis with nitrogen fixing bacteria (if present in the soil). To supply broccoli and cauliflower with sufficient nitrogen we plant a crop of sorghum, crot-alaria, cow peas, and sunflower the previous year. We allow these crops to grow up to 9 feet tall. After the first frost they are winterkilled and we mow them down with a rotary mower. The mowed plant parts create a thick mulch protecting the soil over the winter and providing the earth-worms and many other microorganism with nourishment. In return, they not only break down the large amount of organic matter, they create new soil in the process. Vandana Shiva points out, “that soil where earth-worms work, they create channels that aerate the soil therefore can hold more water, necessary for plants to get through a dry period. And the earthworm casts can weigh up to 40 tons per acre, contain more nutritive material than artificially fertilized soil. The castings of earth-worms add 5 times more nitrogen, 7 times more phospho-rous, 3 times more magnesium to soil, compared to soil without those castings, and 11 times more potassium and

2 COMING NEXT WEEK (OUR BEST GUESS): salad mix, head lettuce, sweet corn, green beans, small tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, Carmen sweet peppers, bell peppers, garlic, onions, eggplant, cantaloupe, and cilantro. FRUIT: peaches or plums

BEEF SHARE: The beef shares will be delivered this week to your CSA pickup site at your regular day and time. If you can’t pick up your beef share please contact the farm ASAP at in-fo@roxburyfarm.com or 518-758-8558 and we will hold your share. IF YOU DO NOT CONTACT THE FARM OR YOU DO NOT PICK UP YOUR SHARE IT WILL BE DE-LIVERED TO THE FOOD PANTRY WITH THE SURPLUS VEGETABLES.

1.5 times more calcium than chemically fertilized soil. (Source: Vandana Shiva, Dec 19th, 2010, De-wathang, Bhutan). When we find the soil in the spring rich with activity we still have 3 months before we plant the fall harvested broccoli and cauliflower. We use a no-till drill to plant oats and peas right through the mulch of the sorghum crotalaria mix. Plowing is one of those other inventions that has a strong connection to warfare. While turning swords onto plowshares sounds noble, it just means that we apply the same principle to the soil. Soil that gets inverted and aerated degrades rapidly, and our virgin prairie lands have lost most of their orig-inal topsoil due to plowing. We do use tillage tools at Roxbury Farm (as we still haven't figured out how to avoid it when we grow vegetables), but in this case we can plant a crop of oats and peas without having to invert the soil. (con’t p. 3)

AUGUST INSTALLMENT DUE: If you have not paid your August payment for the installment plan this is a reminder that the payment is due. Thank you to all who have sent in their payments.

CHICKEN SHARE DELIVERY DATES: The 2nd Chicken share will be delivered the week of August 19 – August 22. Please let the farm know if you can’t pick up your share and we will deliver it another time.

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(letter con’t) The oats and peas are mowed down at the beginning of June and worked in the soil. It took a few years to figure out how to work under such large amounts of biomass without creating a problem. One of those problems is the large amount of crop debris on the sur-face of the soil, potentially clogging up our planting and weed cultivation tools. But yes, we have figured it out, even built some of our own custom designed equipment. Dr. Laurie Drinkwater of Cornell University wondered how much nitrogen is actually being fixed in the soil with such a system so she had her grad students come out to Roxbury Farm and collect all the biomass and measure its nitrogen content. She found that we were putting upwards of 200 lbs of nitrogen in the soil with this meth-od. Cornell Cooperative Extension recommends NY farmers apply about 120 lbs of N for sufficient yield on broccoli and cauliflower. Fortunately our nitrogen is not soluble so every extra pound we fix in the soil remains available for the next vegetable crop. Does any of this make our vegetables healthier? I still feel I can't make that statement as health is related to the whole, and this does not stop at the borders of our farm. But within these borders we never look at a prob-lem as being isolated from the whole farm or its wider environment. To me health through analysis is simply an oxymoron. I recognize that every living organism is con-nected to every stone, to every other organism, to the moon, to the cosmos, to the core of this earth, simply said everything else. Okay ridicule me for my "touchy, feely new age" perspective, but I challenge you to go a second without the sun or imagine there is no cosmos, or simpler, go a day without water, a week without food, or just a minute without air to breathe. You see, we just take the connection to our world for granted but even realizing that we indeed depend on sunshine, or air and water, we need to acknowledge that we are actually far less human than we think we are. For every human cell in our body we are host to another 10 bacterial ones (Source: American Society of Microbiology 2008). That's right, even when we think we can comfortably call some-thing our own, we are still outnumbered by the world around us. If we want healthy soils, plants, animals, and people, our farm system as a whole has to work. There-fore our Farm is whole when the crew feels that their work has meaning, when they are valued not just as a worker but as a human being. Our Farm is whole when the animals can become the creatures they were destined to be, to live the life they were designed for. Our farm is whole when the land is cared for whereby its natural di-versity is honored with places for more than just cultivat-ed plants and animals but also for its wild counterparts. Our farm is whole when we do not serve an anonymous marketplace that changes its demand and price structure

more easily than the direction of the wind. Our complete approach to biodiversity, optimizing soil health, animal comfort, worker morale, all while standing on an economic solid foundation through innovative social finance alternatives must ultimate-ly result in greater health of our products. To begin to answer the question of health or wholeness I think of Friedrich Nietzsche who said: "Invisible threads are the strongest ties". When will we develop the intelligence that in reality nothing stands by itself? To reconnect what we have frac-tured, to re-find health asks for a completely differ-ent kind of science. It was the Little Prince who revealed its secret. It is very simple he said: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." ~Jean-Paul

Did you see the Super moon Sunday evening?

Broccoli growing where oats and peas were previously worked into the soil.

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HEALTHY RED & GREEN GREEN-BEAN SALAD BEANS 2 quarts water 2 tablespoons table salt 2 pounds fresh green beans, washed well, stem ends snapped (see TIPS) TOMATOES 1 tablespoon olive oil (butter isn't recommended, it gets a little gloppy when the salad is chilled) 1 bunch scallions, trimmed and chopped into rounds, white and green parts both (save a few green parts for gar-nish) 8 ounces grape or cherry tomatoes Pinch of dried basil Pinch of dried dill Generous salt & pepper 1/4 cup fresh chopped parsley TO SERVE Chopped green onion (the green parts only) Chopped fresh parsley BEANS Bring the water to a boil. Add the salt and stir a bit to dissolve. Add the beans, cover and let cook at a slow simmer for about 6 minutes or until fully cooked but still bright green. Drain in a colander and drop into ice water to stop the cooking and cool down. Drain well. TOMATOES In a large pot, heat the olive oil until shimmery on MEDIUM HIGH. Add the scallions and tomatoes, stir to coat with fat. Add the dried basil and dried dill. Let cook, stirring occasionally (not too often, you'll break up the tomatoes) until the tomatoes begin to pop. Stir in the 1/4 cup fresh parsley, stir a minute until just barely cooked. Stir in the cooked green beans. TO SERVE Transfer to a serving bowl, sprinkle with scallion and fresh parsley. Refrigerate until ready to serve but let warm to room temperature to serve. http://kitchen-parade-veggieventure.blogspot.com/2010/12/healthy-red-green-green-bean-salad.html

A field of sorghum, crotalaria, and sunflower that will be mowed and become a thick mulch to help build the soil for next year’s crop of broccoli and cauliflower.

5 “BEST EVER” NEW POTATOES & GREEN BEANS

Water to cover both the potatoes and beans 1 tablespoon kosher salt 1 teaspoon sugar (don't skip, it really makes the difference) 1 pound very small red or white potatoes, washed well, skins on 1 pound fresh green beans, stem ends snapped off, broken in half or thirds if long Garlic to taste, a clove or two minced very small 2 tablespoons butter Additional salt to taste START THE POTATOES Start the water, salt and sugar to a boil while prepping the potatoes. Add the potatoes as soon as they're prepped, cover and let cook at a slow simmer until nearly done, the actual time will vary based on the size and density of the potatoes but I start checking at about 15 minutes, the potatoes are usually ready after about 20 minutes. ADD THE BEANS Add the beans, return to a boil and cook for about 7 minutes or until the beans are well-cooked but still bright green. Drain the potatoes and beans, then return them to the hot pot to toss with garlic and butter. Add salt if needed. http://kitchen-parade-veggieventure.blogspot.com/2008/05/best-ever-new-potatoes-green-beans.html

A crop of green manure to sustain the fertility of the cropland.