Among Stories and Soil and Strawberries
Carolyn Snell

Falling in love with plants at age four nudged me to try to convince everyone else to love plants too: Imagine a pre-school-aged headful of red curls explaining to customers of a garden center which plants prefer sun and which shade. I was an enthusiastic fixture at my family's farm and greenhouse, every hour sneaking garden-way-cart loads of plants across the street to my shady garden. I began casual experiments, trying plants that were listed for sun, to see just how much they needed to survive.

As I became old enough to stay all day with Mom as she sold plants, vegetables, apples, and maple syrup to the people of Portland, I learned to answer customers' questions about plants. When vegetable season began, I filled quart boxes with potatoes and later apple bags with Macs, Cortlands, Macouns, and Red and Golden Delicious. But I had not even begun to understand the intricacies of being a farmer.

As I have continued and increased my involvement with the farm - especially in serving our customers - I've lately realized that human ecology provides a framework for farmers to consider the ethical implications of growing crops for human consumption. This realization finally gelled as I listened to college president-elect, David Hales respond to a student question about everyone's ethical obligations. With a sympathetic half smile, he said "sometimes the right thing to do isn't the right thing to do." Even though he was responding to how we can best help people suffering in a geographically distant natural disaster, I couldn't help but think about my family's farm and the complex decisions we make every day to do the right thing in regards to our environment, our customers, and ourselves. We must explore complex questions - questions with many interrelated factors and variables, none of which hold the same value.

I see these interlocking and contradictory factors evident in the decisions we and other farmers make in their daily practices. What is the right way to be a farmer? With so many combinations of methods and techniques for growing food for human consumption, this is a daunting question. The relationships farmers build with people and animals as well as their land and the greater environment as a whole create the many important layers of complexity inherent to a farming lifestyle. Good farmers offer local people the best produce they can grow in the most sustainable way they can grow it: I believe this is their gravest responsibility. I have witnessed my parents as they have diversified Snell Family Farm, while striving to serve the family, the community, and the environment.

Everything farmers do affects the earth. To determine the nature of their relationship with their fields, good farmers know the soil. Not only do they know the different soils of each field by the way the soil looks as they plow, plant, and cultivate - they know it by the way it feels in their hands as they pull numerous weeds, transplant lettuce seedlings, pull carrots, and wash the clinging soil away from bunches of beets. Mom and Dad know the way the soil smells and the implications of the differences between the light andloamy reddish soil of our back "Prairie" and the nearly blue, heavier clay of some of the lower fields. In knowing the soils, farmers must recognize that the needs of the soil are always in flux and depend on what crop will grow on which field during which year. Soil science is a kind friend to the farmer through annual soil tests which report the levels of pH, minerals, and organic matter while recommending particular soil amendments. The relationship the farmer builds with the soil is imperative in terms of both appreciating the power within that growing medium and considering the nutritional needs of the plants to yield a good crop.

Even if the farmers grow good food well, they are not serving their community if they are not reaching out to the local people. Because Snell Family Farm sells primarily at Farmers' Markets and at our home farmstand, we have built up many important relationships within the greater community, and with every decision we must consider those relationships. We employ local workers and sell our products locally, building trust. That trust has allowed us to finance much of the annual costs through our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program as well as the federally funded, state-run Senior Farmshare program. CSA investors pay in advance for farm products, mailing us checks in March and April for their summers' worth of plants, vegetables, apples and syrup. The Farmshare program pays $100 for low income seniors to receive a summer's worth of fruit and vegetables. The farmer receives the payment in May when it's needed, and the senior receives valuable nutrition from a local source, with the dignity of a farm account rather than the degradation associated with food stamps or other such coupon-style food programs. These important connections with local people not only develop loyalty, but ensure that we receive direct feedback on our products without the filter and cost of dealing with a broker.

Knowing our customers, of course, means more than the revenue that the relationship generates. We develop a real emotional connection with them as we become part of each other's routines. Our weekly rendezvous allows for more than the transfer of food; we learn people's stories and they learn ours. Many people in the greater Portland area have watched this passionate redhead grow from a four-year-old plant consultant to a serious salesperson who cares deeply about flowers and vegetables and the people who love them. The best part of these interactions is the insight they allow into the human condition. I know that a CSA shareholder of ours, Pat, began as a market customer when her husband was on dialysis, and she needed to kill time while he was at the clinic. She continued to shop with us even after he died and she later remarried. I know that since her first husband died Pat has not been able to keep track of her own spending, nor has she been able to properly train her golden retriever puppy. What's difficult, though, about this aspect of our relationship with customers, is not taking advantage of the stories we learn through weekly glimpses. The right thing for us to do here is to be friendly, considerate, and kind. We cannot be too casual or pushy. Our connection is as it should be: a collection of glimpses.

I also know that Joanie's daughter is going through a divorce, so when I ask Joanie how her family is, I keep that in mind. Joanie is an excellent source of pickle recipes and knitting patterns, and she genuinely cares how I'm doing at school and what's going on in my life. At the same time, I need only answer her questions about my life briefly and sincerely, because I cannot risk monopolizing our time together. I believe that the intimacy involved in growing and selling food and the trust that we are able to build are our greatest strengths as a family farm. While we are approaching the right way to farm in these ways, we still have room for improvement.

Snell Family Farm works toward being as sustainable as possible with our land and within our market; however, we are not certified organic. Instead our farm uses integrated pest management which includes much scouting for insects, rotating crops, using beneficial predatory insects, and occasionally applying pesticides only when threshold amounts indicate that the impending damage will cause significant economic problems. Farming is a risky business - financially and emotionally. Since so much depends on exterior factors, we must keep our options open. My mother employs the metaphor of antibiotics to explain her philosophy for pesticides: It is not wise to administer antibiotics as a daily supplement. However, if your child is very sick, the right thing to do is consider all your options. Sometimes a wet year requires fungicide applications or there will be no green bean crop. Sometimes a dry year requires that we rely heavily on our three irrigation ponds. We try to spread out the risk with many different crops, so a crop failure will not claim our livelihood. Droughts, flooding, hailstorms, insects, and disease can take their toll: with local mouths to feed, we must be prepared.

After I graduate from college, my first personal agricultural enterprise will take shape: a few rows of strawberries to be sold at farmers' markets July of 2007. As I research different approaches to strawberry production, I further puzzle about the right thing to do. Having listened to many growers share their experiences at conferences, I don't yet know the answer. Organic growers struggle most with weeds and tarnish plant bugs. I hate the idea of spraying herbicide, and naively hope my husband and I can keep up with cultivating and hoeing, but what if we can't? Tarnish plant bugs attack the flower and the fruit, deforming the strawberry and ruining the flavor. In combating those bugs timing is important, but mild insecticide during the flowering could do a world of good for the berries.

As a farmer, I need to learn more about my relationship with insects in the strawberry patch. While many bugs damage the plants, roots, flowers, and fruit, many beneficial insects act as predators for clippers, tarnish plant bugs, vine weevils, and Japanese beetles. Last year several large strawberry growers in Cape Elizabeth, Maine lost 75% of their crops because of root weevils; that's not something I'd like to experience. Perhaps beneficial nematodes combined with good crop rotation will help me avoid that kind of loss. Even though strawberries do not require bees for pollination, I do not want insecticide to damage any bees that have strayed from their work pollinating cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, and tomatoes.

Weeds, on the other hand, are a force to be reckoned with. Some growers have experimented with later plantings, decreasing the weed pressure in the first growing year. In Florida and the Carolinas plastic mulch controls many of the weeds, but methyl bromide controls fungi and root diseases. Although I don't feel that fumigants are the right way to go, plastic mulch might be a good option. What if the labor involved with hand weeding and picking and scouting and selling requires a price of $7.00 a quart? Keeping strawberries out of the hands of local people by making them too expensive certainly isn't the right thing to do. Weighing all of these possible threats with my needs for the crop and which threats and remedies need most attention - combined with price and the customer's expectations - makes choosing which crops and how to grow them a complicated matter.

Doing the right thing requires both an optimism that people can be stewards to the environment and each other and a willingness to ask everyone involved what they need and are interested in and why. In order to be constructive, the "why" question must be more than a rhetorical "Why?!?" To learn enough to actually do the right thing, we cannot merely tell people what to do or what not to do without learning about the issue as a whole in as many contexts as possible. Why do some farmers choose to sell produce through brokers when they might get a higher price by selling directly to consumers? Perhaps geography is a factor for them, or perhaps they don't have enough staff, marketing experience, or interpersonal skills to manage sales. Perhaps the volume they grow needs to reach a wider market than they can reach themselves. Why do some growers rely so heavily on herbicides? Surely it is more than mere laziness: Is it more a matter of scale reaching beyond what is sustainable? Or is it that price has required more volume at less cost to be viable?

I'd love to believe that for me the right thing to do is to raise strawberries organically, and I hope to move in that general direction. But I must first learn more about what's actually sustainable within the spheres of the strawberries, the farm, and the farmer. I believe that I have enough creative options to adapt a strawberry crop to the farm's rotation for many years to come while continuing in my family's path developing strong relationships with local people. But I may learn that with a small crew and a low chemical regimen, strawberries are not the right crop for me. We'll see.