Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [103]
The Appalachian Harvest packing house lies in a mountain valley near the Virginia-Tennessee border that’s every bit as gorgeous as the storybook farm on the product label. In its first year, the resourceful group used a converted wing of an old tobacco barn for its headquarters, using a donated walk-in cooler to hold produce until it could be graded and trucked out to stores. Now the packing plant occupies the whole barn space, complete with truck bays, commercial coolers, and conveyor belts to help wash and grade the produce. Tomatoes are the cash cow of this enterprise, but they are also its prima donnas, losing their flavor in standard refrigeration, but quick to spoil in the sultry heat, so the newest major addition at the packing house is a 100-by-14-foot tomato room where the temperature is held at 56 degrees.
Participating farmers bring vegetables here by the truckload, in special boxes that have never been used for conventional produce. Likewise, the packing facility’s equipment is used for organic produce only. Most of the growers have just an acre or two of organic vegetables, among other crops grown conventionally. Those who stick with the program may expand their acreage of organic vegetables, but rarely to more than five, since they’re extremely labor-intensive. After planting, weeding, and keeping the crop pest-free all season without chemicals, the final step of picking often begins before dawn. Some farmers have to travel an hour or more to the packing house. In high season they may make three or more trips a week. The largest grower of the group, with fifteen acres in production, last year delivered 200 boxes of peppers and 400 of tomatoes in a single day. Twenty-three crops are now sold under the Appalachian Harvest label, including melons, cucumbers, eggplants, squash, peas, lettuces, and many varieties of tomatoes and peppers.
The packing house manager labels each box as it arrives so the grower’s identity will follow the vegetables through washing, grading, and packaging, all the way to their point of wholesale purchase. Farmers are paid after the supermarket issues its check; Appalachian Harvest takes a 25 percent commission, revenue that helps pay for organic training, packing expenses, and organic certification. Cooperating farmers can sell their produce under the umbrella of a group certification, saving them hundreds of dollars in fees and complex bookkeeping, but they still would need individual certification to sell anywhere other than through the Appalachian Harvest label (e.g., a farmers’ market). The project’s sales have increased dramatically, gaining a few more committed growers each year, even though farmers are notoriously cautious. Many are still on the fence at this point, watching their neighbors to see whether this enormous commitment to new methods will be salvation or disaster. The term “high-value crop” is relative to a dirt-cheap commodity grain like corn; in season, even high quality organic tomatoes will bring the farmer only about 50 to 75 cents per pound. (The lower end, for conventional, is 18 cents.) But that can translate into a cautious living. Participants find the project compelling for many reasons. After learning to grow vegetables organically, many families have been motivated to make their entire farms organic, including hay fields.
The Appalachian Harvest collective pays a full-time marketer named Robin who spends much of her life on the