"farm" news and stories

Farmers Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell. Photo: Michael Hnatov.

Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, gorgeous photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season. Here's how they got their start!

One evening last winter we sat down to dinner in a little pied-a-terre on the Upper East Side of Manhattan: Beef roast braised with rosemary and onions; pureed celery root and parsnips; crackling-fresh sautéed green beans. For dessert it was goat milk cheesecake with elderberry coulis. We washed the whole thing down with bottles of hard apple cider.

Had we ordered in -- stereotypical Manhattanites -- from the overpriced local gourmet grocery? Nope. Everything we consumed we had raised, herded, grown, plucked, cultivated, canned and cooked all by ourselves.

Could any other of the millions of inhabitants of New York City make that same claim that night? How about anyone else in the United States? OK, probably a couple, but for us, this was a meal just about 40 years in the making.

A photo of the farm and the rest of the introduction, after the jump.

Foodies are familiar with the term "farmstead," which implies grown and made by the same hand. Farmstead goat cheese, for example, is made by the same person or people who raise and milk the goats. Now importer Anthony Nicalo is bringing the farmstead concept to the wine world with his Farmstead Wines, working with European grape growers and winemakers to source the best handcrafted wines for distribution in Canada and soon the U.S.

In French wine terms, a rough equivalent for "farmstead" would be vigneron, which refers to the farmer and winemaker as one and the same. That's not always the case over there or over here: often farmers farm, and winemakers winemake, sourcing their grapes from elsewhere. Going back to the cheese example, that would be the same as a cheesemaker getting milk from another source and then using it to make his own cheese brand.

Not that there's anything wrong with that method. It also has been used for generations, and when you're a budding winemaker without the resources to score ever-more-expensive vineyard land, it's sometimes the only option to realize a dream. But Nicalo believes that the farmstead concept, whether in food or wine (he's a trained chef), creates a better end product because the one person, the creator and grower of the food or wine, has control over the process from the very beginning. He calls his winemakers artisans.

Continue reading "Farmstead Wine - Wine of the Week" after the jump.

We've all heard about CSAs - Community-Supported Agriculture - and many of us have participated in CSA programs in our towns. Essentially, you fork over some cash (usually from $500 to $800), and each month, you get a bounty of whatever fruits and veggies are in season, courtesy of a locally-owned farm.

For some people, the boxes of produce are as close to they get to the farm, though they can feel secure in knowing that they're supporting their local farmers and not supporting grocery store-sold produce. Other CSA participants go a step further and purchase a small piece of the actual farm, which they visit and keep up themselves.

My question: why is the New York Times just now learning about this? A recent article on CSAs calls it "a loose but growing network," making it sound as if they just stumbled upon the movement yesterday. Really? I have friends who have been participating in these programs for years. Perhaps it's just new in more rural areas?

In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy locally-grown veggies, and go back to my love/hate relationship with the Times.

Lately, there have been some raised eyebrows in BK's direction, mainly because they won't agree to pay their tomato pickers an extra penny per pound of tomatoes.

The tomato pickers have to pick 125 buckets worth of the fruit in order to get $50-60 per day, and work 10-12 hours in the hot Florida sun. The new measure would only cost BK an additional $300,000 per year, out of their $11 billion yearly revenue.

Other fast food joints have already agreed to pay their workers more, but BK continues to stall. Some people are afraid that tomato growers would wind up with the money, instead of the pickers, and others are worried the new agreement will violate antitrust rules.

But the shadiness doesn't stop there. BK execs admitted that they have a relationship with Diplomatic Tactical Services, a security firm with a creepy, amorphous name, which helps BK spy on its clients.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, recently wrote an op-ed for the Times on the subject, shedding light on BK's Big Brother tactics.

I always knew there was something hiding behind that awful molded plastic King in the commercials...

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Another round-up of food posts from our favorite environmental sister site, Green Daily:

• Tired of eating right? Check out organic dietary supplements
• Help save the environment at work during lunchtime
• Going on a picnic? Here are the most eco-friendly options for portable utensils
• Our own Suburban Farmer gives us the lowdown on egg hunting and broodiness
• Startling facts about organic food
• A Brooklyn man blogs about his experiences tracking the chain of his consumption
• No more salmon fishing on the West Coast, please
  
• No surprise here: report claims industrial animal farming is hazardous to our health and our earth
• Taco Bell is...moving toward sustainability? No, it can't be...
• Starbucks needs to teach its employees the meaning behind reusing and recycling

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