Side-by-side comparisons of organic and conventional strawberry farms and their fruit found the organic farms produced more flavorful and nutritious berries while leaving the soil healthier and more genetically diverse.

The paper, titled Fruit and Soil Quality of Organic and Conventional Strawberry Agroecosystems, is published in the peer-reviewed online journal, PLoS ONE.

All the farms in the current study were in California, where conventional farms use the ozone-depleting methyl bromide (which is slated to be replaced by the highly toxic methyl iodide).

In addition to finding organic strawberries are tastier and better for your health, researchers found the organic soils excelled in a variety of key chemical and biological properties, including carbon sequestration, nitrogen, microbial biomass, enzyme activities, and micronutrients.

The Science Daily article quotes lead author John Reganold, Washington State University Regents professor of soil science:

Our findings have global implications and advance what we know about the sustainability benefits of organic farming systems. We also show you can have high quality, healthy produce without resorting to an arsenal of pesticides.

The authors offer a summation of the study’s methodology, findings, conclusions and significance:

At multiple sampling times for two years, we evaluated three varieties of strawberries for mineral elements, shelf life, phytochemical composition, and organoleptic properties. We also analyzed traditional soil properties and soil DNA using microarray technology. We found that the organic farms had strawberries with longer shelf life, greater dry matter, and higher antioxidant activity and concentrations of ascorbic acid and phenolic compounds, but lower concentrations of phosphorus and potassium. In one variety, sensory panels judged organic strawberries to be sweeter and have better flavor, overall acceptance, and appearance than their conventional counterparts. We also found the organically farmed soils to have more total carbon and nitrogen, greater microbial biomass and activity, and higher concentrations of micronutrients. Organically farmed soils also exhibited greater numbers of endemic genes and greater functional gene abundance and diversity for several biogeochemical processes, such as nitrogen fixation and pesticide degradation.

Our findings show that the organic strawberry farms produced higher quality fruit and that their higher quality soils may have greater microbial functional capability and resilience to stress. These findings justify additional investigations aimed at detecting and quantifying such effects and their interactions.

We transplanted the starts out of the greenhouse and into the garden in March and April – first lettuces, peas and tomatoes under cold frames; then onion, leek & garlic starts, cauliflower and cabbages. Due to the cold, soggy spring, the winter & summer squash and cucumbers didn’t go out until late May. Bean seeds then went directly into the ground, along with red, white, and yellow potatoes.

We’ve been eating fresh lettuces since May, and are now steadily replanting every couple of weeks, growing them under a shade cloth (which seems to help retard bolting). The asparagus we let go around the first of July, to gain strength for next year. We’ve been digging potatoes and picking raspberries since early July. Mid-July, we harvested the garlic – the braids are now hanging in the wine/root cellar. We also pulled the spring crop of peas in Mid-July, at the same time planting seeds in the greenhouse for a fall crop. Luckily, green beans are now starting to come on, as are summer squash. We should have our first tomatoes by early August. If the jalapeños and cilantro cooperate, we’ll soon be swimming in pico de gallo. And the pansies, violas, and nasturtiums we started in the greenhouse from seed are now blooming like crazy, along with the sunflowers. This year we serendipitously planted the sunflowers in rows along one side of the garden – and they’ve proved to be an effective deer fence!

Last weekend we harvested the “Stonehead” cabbage and started a big batch of Sauerkraut. After watching us struggle last year trying to shred cabbage in a food processor, Cousin Doris sent us a Krauthobel from Germany – kind of a big, wooden mandolin. Here it is in operation.

Add about three tablespoons of sea salt for every five pounds of cabbage, and then from the bus tub into the crock.

40 pounds of cabbage was enough to pretty much fill a #8 crock.

The “Megaton” cabbages should be ready to harvest in a week or so. Since our one and only ceramic crock is full, we’ll have to fall back on a 20-gallon food grade plastic container that we’ve been using to store flour. Hopefully this year we’ll have enough Sauerkraut to last well into the new year, rather than running out before the holiday season.

Turn your back this time of the year, and the grape vines want to take over the universe. I’ve been getting up at six o’clock in the morning now for the last few weeks, spending a couple of hours before heading to the office trying to get things back under control. At least the vines are now growing faster than the deer can eat them. I’m dreaming of mid-August, when I’ll again be able to sleep in a bit.

The big culinary hit this year has been a variation on the Alsatian/German Flammkuchen, a kind of “pizza” traditionally made with crème fraîche, Speck, and onions, seasoned with a little fresh nutmeg. I first tasted Flammkuchen at a little jazz club called the Musikantenbuckel, literally underground in an ancient stone building in the tiny village of Oberotterbach, Germany. We’ve ever since attempted to replicate that, substituting well trimmed, uncured pork belly for the unobtainable Speck – not really the same, but American bacon is way too smoky. We tried first boiling bacon to remove some of the smokiness, but have since settled on using uncured pork belly, well-trimmed to remove most of the fat. When vegetarian friends were visiting we made a version using fresh, locally gathered or grown mushrooms (golden oyster, white elm, and morels) and fresh leeks. It was so fabulous it has now become a permanent part of our repertoire.

A mobile slaughterhouse, with a team composed of a butcher and a federal meat inspector, travels from farm to farm.

USDA’s efforts to help small farmers are focused within its “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program, which seeks to help make the link between local production and local consumption.

USDA has published a Mobile Slaughter Unit Compliance Guide to help those who want to establish a mobile slaughter unit under Federal inspection and operate in accordance with Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) regulations.

• A more humane livestock system
• Healthier and tastier meat and dairy products
• Less E. coli food poisoning
• Elimination of feedlots
• Better manure management
• Increased groundwater recharge
• More fertile soil and more nutritious forages
• More diverse and healthier ecosystems
• Enormous savings in energy
• Reduced use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides
• Reduced flooding and soil erosion

And, to top it off:

• A dramatic reduction in global warming gases.

Richard Manning in an article in Mother Earth News titled The Amazing Benefits of Grass-fed Meat argues that we can have all this. And not just for niche markets – we can scale it up. We can convert half of the 150 million acres used to grow corn and soy ?to permanent pasture and not lose one ounce of meat production.

Tastier, more humane meat – and less global warming. Industrial farming relies on huge amounts of chemical fertilizers that produce emissions contributing to global warming. Nitrogen fertilizer reacts with oxygen to form nitrous oxide (N₂O), which has become the third most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane.  N₂O has a global warming potential 296 times larger than an equal mass of carbon dioxide and also contributes to stratospheric ozone depletion.  In corn and soy production, tilling adds oxygen which promotes oxidation. Tillage also releases carbon dioxide, along with methane and nitrous oxide. While a growing corn field sucks up a lot of carbon dioxide, the carbon is soon released as the disced down stalks and leaves decay. All tillage systems have been found to be net contributors to global warming, with the worst offenders being the annual crops corn, soybeans and wheat farmed with conventional methods. Conversely, fields of perennial crops pull both methane and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soil. Manning points to evidence that perennial grasslands can, under certain conditions, be even better at sequestering carbon than forests.

Manning calculates that if we converted half the U.S. corn and soy acres to pasture, we might cut carbon emissions by roughly 144 trillion pounds. That’s not even counting the reduced use of fossil fuels that would also result.

An additional benefit from the reduction of industrial corn and soybean farming not mentioned by Manning would be a reduction of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the use of chemical fertilizers upstream in the Mississippi basin.

So what’s stopping us? Redesigning our food system would require shifting, slashing, or eliminating massive federal subsidies for corn and soybean production – subsidies that end up in the pockets of the agribusiness conglomerates or the wealthy. The “health care” debate, which resulted in further entrenching the parasitic insurance industry, shows how likely that is to happen. Brian Riedl, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, calls farm subsidies “America’s largest corporate welfare program.”

Congress justifies agribusiness subsidies as keeping America’s food supply cheap and abundant. No matter that the food’s killing us while bankrupting the health care system and destroying global ecosystems.

Readers of Jim’s blog are fully aware that we’ve been planning to build an outdoor brick bread and pizza oven because we simply couldn’t get any home-made bread to come out the way we like it: chewy, stretchy on the inside and very crusty on the outside.

And of course, it wasn’t available in any store here, in our area. The closest we ever came was the La Brea sourdough baguette which we used to buy by the dozen, frozen, from our Lebanon Roth’s grocery store and bake as needed. When Roth’s closed its Lebanon store, there went that source.

I experimented with any and all recipes I could find, collected from friends, the Internet and my old recipe files. I sprayed the oven to create steam, I worked quickly, I kneaded diligently – and it seemed that I worked with a new recipe every week, either with or without my sourdough starter. Not a single one was satisfactory. The breads were good, but they didn’t have the texture I wanted to achieve.

My last resort was an outdoor brick bread oven, fired with wood, to be used once a week for pizza, bread, and chicken (in that order = the order of available heat).

Then one evening we were at our friends Linda and Robert’s house in Scio for dinner. Linda fixed coq au vin. We brought bread and our own wine to contribute, Robert shared his wine. The conversation centered around food and focused on bread. When I was done lamenting my unsatisfactory loaves, Linda asked, “Why not try no-knead bread? It’s easy, and results in a bread that sounds just what you’re looking for.” Now why I hadn’t heard about no-knead bread before? The very next day I dove in – and ended up baking myself right out of a bread oven.

It is an amazing, and amazingly simple recipe. It doesn’t require any fancy equipment, elaborate preparations or muscle power. All you do is mix in a bowl3 cups flour with ¼ tsp instant yeast, 2 tsp salt and 1 5/8 cup lukewarm water, using a wooden spoon or rubber spatula.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit in a warm place (warm room temperature, out of any draft) somewhere between 14-20 hours. I place mine on a shelf above our woodstove.

The dough then looks pretty spongy and wet.

Coat your fingers with flour, lift the dough on a floured surface and fold over twice. Cover with plastic, let sit for 15 minutes, and then shape the dough into a ball, using enough flour on your hands to handle the still very sticky dough. Put the ball on the kitchen counter or a cutting board, seam down; sprinkle with more flour, cover loosely with plastic and then with a towel, and let sit on the kitchen counter for up to 2 hours.

During the last 30 minutes start the oven by preheating it to 450 degrees Fahrenheit and put a Dutch oven or any baking dish with a lid inside the oven, so the dish can get hot also. When the oven and the dish are heated, take your dough and place it inside the dish.

Put the lid on and bake for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove the lid.and bake your bread for another 20-30 minutes. Take the bread out of the oven and take or turn it out of the pan to cool a bit (if you can wait!).

THAT’S IT!

Try not to eat the whole loaf all at once (I put on a whole pound after the first 2 loaves). It is very crusty outside, perfectly chewy inside and has those big holes that we all identify with “hearth, artisan” bread.

If you can get bread like this out of an ordinary kitchen oven that can be fired up every day with the turn of a knob, why go through the expense and effort of building a specialized bread oven that, because of the cost and effort of heating with a wood fire, you’d probably only use a couple times a week at most?

If your dish is round, your loaf will be (somewhat) roundish (free style); using an oblong dish will obviously change the shape. I’ve been searching for more shapes with lids, since the lid is the secret to the dish creating its own steam oven.  I have found one great website – www.breadtopia.com, headquartered in Iowa. They carry a round and an oblong clay baker, called La Cloche, a version of the German popular Römertopf. I ordered the oblong clay baker as the round one is on back order right now.

In my e-mail I had asked about the lead-time for that and Eric, the owner of Breadtopia, called me on the phone within minutes of my query and answered my questions personally.  And I got email confirmation that my order had shipped, the very same day. I’m so impressed with this outstanding customer service that I want to spread the word.

Meanwhile, I’ve been experimenting with different types and various ratios of flour:

1. All 3 cups bread flour (King Arthur is the best, I think).
2. 1 ½ cups bread flour – 1 ½ cup hard white winter wheat ground myself with my flour mill, from a friends’ farm just outside Albany.
3. 2 cups of my own milled flour and 1 cup bread flour.
4. And even all 3 cups of my own milled flour.

The results were all good, but the No. 2 version of equal amounts of bread flour and my own milled flour were the best – chewy inside, hard crusty outside, a bit heavier (because of the whole wheat) but not too dense. Next I will experiment with using my sourdough starter as a portion of the dough. Lessen the amount of water to achieve the same texture should theoretically work. Stay tuned!

For all species, including humans, nothing is more critical than food. Jason Bradford in a post at The Oil Drum argues that reliability of food production in the face of change requires resilience rather than efficiency. A food production system capable of surviving disruptions and failures and of responding quickly to changing circumstances is essential.

Our existing food system is not resilient. As a result of government policies, financial pressures, cheap fossil fuels, and market trends over the past several decades, our food system has become dominated by a relatively few large players. As a result, our food system has become rigid and brittle.

The key to resilience in social-ecological systems is diversity. Biodiversity plays a crucial role by providing functional redundancy. Social and economic systems are no different.

Bradford sketches out what a resilient farm might look like:

A resilient farm has diversified operations to buffer against volatility. The benefits of diversity accrue in many ways.

Organic and especially agroecological farms are less dependent upon outside inputs that can change in price rapidly and unpredictably. Crop rotation plans include many species of plants and animals that are complementary in functions, such as legumes fixing nitrogen, grasses building soil carbon, and animal manures making nutrients more readily available to plants. Instead of buying mechanized services or fertility inputs, the farm integrates the functional diversity of life to create synergies.

Inherent diversity means no single crop failure will ruin the farm, and soil imbalances are prevented. The focus is on soil health, with all fields going through periods of planting in perennial and deeply rooted species to build soil organic matter and mobilize minerals such as phosphorus from deep layers. Fungi associating with roots locate source rock and solubilize minerals that are trans-located to leaves. Topsoil fertility is therefore built from below.

Landscape structure is created to provide habitat for native and naturalized species that participate positively in the farm food web, such as pollinators and predators. No need to buy pesticides when raptors have homes in the trees, predatory wasps have nectar sources, frogs can breed in clean water, and ground beetles have zones of refuge from tillage, for example.

While the emphasis is on letting the biology do the work, renewable energy infrastructure also creates resilience. Farms are often ideal places for wind and solar technologies, and on-farm biofuels are likely to have positive energy returns.

A resilient food system requires in the farm economy as well. Creating healthy and resilient rural economies requires transforming the entirety of our food system.

What might healthy and resilient rural economies look like? Again, Bradford sketches an outline:

It will be organized akin to an ecosystem, or food web. Farms and renewable energy infrastructure occupy the level of primary producers, with businesses acting as conduits for feeding omnivorous humans. In contrast to our current food system, which is linear in structure, the future food system will cycle nutrients back to the farm. This structural constraint will mean that much more food is grown for local populations.

Farms might be more self-sufficient, producing a wide variety of products, for trade, barter, and gifting as well as cash sales. This is a strategy many of our friends are already pursuing, seeking to diversify their income sources and means of support as a way to increase their personal financial resilience.

There structure impediments to our markets which inhibit building resilience. For example, the best and often the only use for much of Oregon’s farm land – even in the Willamette Valley, especially where irrigation is not available – is  as pasture. Grass-fed livestock avoids the health and environmental problems associated with grain-fed livestock and feedlots, while recycling nutrients back into the soil. But the lack of inspected slaughterhouses and butchering facilities means that marketing is a challenge, especially for small-scale producers, as access to retail customers is restricted to the big players.

Similarly, the dominance of giant chain supermarkets makes it difficult for local producers to find outlets for their goods. Buyers for the chains can’t be bothered with small producers. You have to go to independent locally-owned markets like the First Alternative Co-op in Corvallis or to an online marketplace like Eugene Local Foods to find locally grown produce, local cheeses, or locally raised meats and poultry.

Developers push “destination resorts” as a boost to rural economies. But destination resorts don’t do anything for the people already living there – rather, they are pretty much self-contained units, alien invaders that remain distinct and disconnected from the local rural economy. For an idea of a model of tourism that is immersed in the local rural economy looks like, look to France and gîtes ruraux – accommodations at a private farm that can be rented for a week, a weekend, or a short stay.  Gîtes foster a real relationship between the owner of the property, the visitor, and the surrounding countryside. The additional income goes straight to farmers and other residents of the rural area, adding resilience to the local rural economy. In France, gîtes are vigoroulsy promoted by the government.

So here’s an impromptu agenda for beginning to build healthy and resilient rural economies: allow and encourage local processing of poultry and livestock; encourage independent, local markets; and authorize and promote direct rural tourism.

More ideas, anyone?

Caveat: note that the biggest difference is that states no longer have “no data”, so any data at all looks like a huge jump.

As Charles Hugh Smith points out, the explosion of obesity and related diseases has all occurred in the past 23 years since 1985. Eat junk, get sick.

We can’t successfully address “health care” without addressing the underlying cause. The “insurance reform” currently before congress will do nothing to address the crisis in health care or the financial crisis in paying for it.

After a fabulous meal of “duck three ways” prepared for us at the farm by friends visiting from Portland, we’ve decided that this coming year we’re going to raise ducks. Ducks and duck eggs are too expensive to buy for our own consumption. Conversely, they yield a lot of profit for the effort – much more so than chickens, even free-range, organic chickens.

We’ve raised chickens before in the past, giving up on most recent attempt because a fox was making away with one every night. That was painful to wake up to each morning. So we gave the remnants of our flock away to someone with more secure facilities, before the chickens all disappeared.

So one key is a predator-proof shelter where the poultry can be safely locked away each night.

The design we settled on is based on Gene Logsdon’s design for a chicken coop, posted at The Energy Bulletin.

Okay, so ducks don’t roost or use nest boxes (at least that’s what we’re told) – but we want a flexible design to accommodate whatever poultry we might want to raise in the future.  The roosts and nesting boxes can always be added if necessary.

We had a run-down shed that at one time served as our lambing shed (we’ve since build much better lambing facilities inside the barn itself). We figured we could move the shed to its new home and then rebuild it for its new purpose.

First, the shed had to be reinforced a bit and all the rotten parts replaced. Then moving it proved to be more of a challenge than I thought. I had moved it once before, dragging it with the tractor from its old home to a spot within the area fenced for the sheep – but that was years ago in the summer, when the ground was dry and hard. Now that the rains have commenced, the ground is soft and slippery and the tractor couldn’t get any traction. The key proved to be jacking it up on fence posts laid down as rollers and rolling it to its new location, running the rollers from the back to the front as we went.

So here it is, in its new location and partially reconstructed.

Alright, so it doesn’t look like much – it’s a work in progress.

Just wait ’till we’re through, and ’til its flocking with ducks!

You heard that right. More than the emissions from all the world’s passenger cars, trucks, trains and planes, or the emissions from all electricity generation or manufacturing. Of the three most important man-made greenhouse gasses — carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation, methane emissions from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide emissions from heavily fertilized fields  — account for 30% of the total.

Jonathan Foley points out at Yale Environment 360 that since the last ice age, nothing has been more disruptive to the planet’s ecosystems than agriculture. Continued population growth is pushing global agricultural systems to their very limits. He asks:

Already, we have cleared or converted more than 35 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface for agriculture, whether for croplands, pastures or rangelands. . . What will happen to our remaining ecosystems, including tropical rainforests, if we need to double or triple world agricultural production, while simultaneously coping with climate change?

We’re already exploiting Earth’s water resources in an unsustainable manner, drawing on fossil aquifers and draining rivers before they reach the sea. The use of industrial fertilizers and other chemicals has more than doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds in the environment and fundamentally upset the chemistry of the entire planet. How can Earth cope with future demands from increasing population and agricultural consumption?

Unfortunately, Foley’s answer is pretty feeble. First, acknowledge we have a problem. Then, “find ways to simultaneously increase production of our agricultural systems while greatly reducing their environmental impacts” – what he calls a “greener agricultural revolution.”

What Foley can’t admit is, we don’t have a “problem” that can be solved with yet another technofix. We’re in a predicament, from which there’s no solution, no easy way out. The best we can hope for is to face our predicament squarely, with as much courage and grace as we can muster.

The cauliflower – yellow, purple, and white – ripened first, and all at once. What do you do with all that cauliflower?  But the orange-yellow and beta carotene rich  Cheddar was particularly flavorful and delicious.

We discovered deer love broccoli and brussels sprouts. We were lucky to eke out enough for a couple of meals. For next year, we have an idea for a portable deer fence, made with steel T-posts and 6″ welded wire mesh (normally used to reinforce concrete). The fence would be cheap, light, and easy to move around as needed and to get out of the way when not needed. Portable fencing could keep the deer away from the peas and beans, as well.

The cabbage was a total triumph, yielding a dozen or so huge heads. We made a little slaw. But I’m not crazy about coleslaw, and how much can you eat anyway while the cabbage is still fresh? So with the last half dozen heads, we determined to try preserving the cabbage as sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut is finely shredded cabbage that has been fermented by various lactic acid bacteria, including Leuconostoc, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus. No special culture of lactic acid bacteria is needed because these bacteria already are present on raw cabbage.  Traditionally fermented sauerkraut has lots nutritional value, as it contains beneficial digestive enzymes and lactic acid bacteria and is high in vitamin C. (There may be an added bonus, as well. A study by nutritionist Lejla Kazinic Kreho at King’s College found that sauerkraut is as effective as Viagra at increasing sexual function.)

Sauerkraut has a long shelf life and a distinctive sour flavor, both of which result from the lactic acid that forms when the bacteria ferment the sugars in the cabbage. The name comes directly from the German, which literally translates to sour cabbage. Sauerkraut is traditional throughout northern and central Europe, where it provided a vital source of important nutrients during the winter before the days of refrigeration and global food transport.

We borrowed an 8-gallon ceramic crock from friends Jan and Pete, scanned the net for a look at kraut recipes (like here, here, and here), and got to work. Sterilize the crock. Shred the cabbage. Toss with kosher salt. Throw the shredded cabbage in the crock. Tamp firmly – the punch down we use for wine worked perfectly – and as the cabbage was really fresh out of the garden, it was almost instantly submerged in its own juices, safe from oxygen. Cover with a food-grade plastic lid that luckily fit snugly in the crock. Weigh down with a plastic bag filled with water that also served to seal out air. And put in the root cellar, to wait for six weeks or so.

Six weeks later it’s October, and the kraut should be about ready. Serendipitously, Irina’s cousin Doris and her Mann Bernd arrived from Germany. Who better to consult about actually cooking the stuff?

Berndt said his favorite recipe was with Polish sausage. Slice and brown the sausages. Add julienned onions. Cook with the kraut for about a half hour.

Doris told a story of Irina’s mother’s favorite, a dish that Doris would often cook for her when visiting her in Darmstadt. Cut some big – like 2″ – cubes of nice fatty speck (bacon that’s cured but not smoked). Brown a bit, then add onions and cook until soft. Add the kraut, then simmer gently for a couple of hours. Mother was in heaven.

So we tried a fusion – sauerkraut with sausages and speck. We had some speck from Michael at the Pepper Tree Sausage House, and we used his bratwurst, as we didn’t have any of his Polish sausages lying around. Bernd first did the pork belly bit, then add the browned sausages for the last half hour of simmering.

The result was a revelation. The sauerkraut was tangy, tasty, and crisp, and the meats were tender and rich. Accompanying the main dish were mashed Yukon Gold potatoes with sweet butter from the Noris dairy in Crabtree and a fresh green salad from our garden with fresh herb dressing. The potatoes, lettuces and herbs were all from our garden.  A bottle of own Pinot Noir, of course, from the fresh and fruity 2008 vintage. A simple meal with delicious, nutritious food and good friends – life doesn’t get any better than this.

Voilà – a smashingly successful demonstration. Winter doesn’t have to mean deprivation, even in the absence of refrigeration.