Letter from a Farmer

The leaf peeping season has come to a close this week. The rain on Saturday removed the last of the brilliant colors of the woods. When the colors appear, the tree is telling us it is preparing for winter. As if the tree follows the calendar, it stops producing food by halting photosynthesis and starts pulling the remaining sugars out of its leaves. Actually the tree already prepared for this in the spring as at the base of the leaf a special layer of cells (the abscission layer) is formed that allows the leaf to later separate and fall off. And it is a good thing they do; how many of you remember the October storm of 1987? We lost many trees due to an early snow storm. The wet snow stuck to the leaves breaking off many branches. We remember it well as we were out of power for more than a week as the broken branches fell on the power-lines.

Chlorophyll gives leaves their bright green color and is very dominant. Once the green fades, the other colors in the leaf become visible to us. With oak trees all we get is a plain brown, while the sugar maples can turn a magnificent red which is due from the sugars that get trapped behind the abscission layer. The glucose turns red from the presence of anthocyanin, an anti-oxidant that we find in all red and purple fruits and vegetables like berries, tomatoes, beets, apples and grapes. The orange in the leaves comes from carotenes and the yellow from xanthophyll, which we find plentiful in carrots, squash, and sweet potatoes. Apparently the cool nights and abundant sunshine we experienced during October of this year made for a better than average fall color show.

Fall is a time of transformation and a very similar process takes place with our annual, biannual, or perennial crops. The annuals include salad greens, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, and also the many garden weeds. Annuals survive the winter by completing the cycle of reproduction in one year with the production of an abundant seed supply. Pigweed, a common garden-weed, produces hundreds of thousands of seeds per plant. Every weed left in the field represents another generation of future weeds. Seeds can be tough and many survive the stomachs of our farm animals, wet soil conditions, and freezing temperatures. We use many annuals in the garden and their flexibility and vigor is an important trait as each year we can improve their qualities as new varieties become available.

The biennials have a different way to survive the winter. Some of the biennials are frost hardy greens like kale and collards. They have their own way to survive the cold temperatures. Due to the frost, their leaves turn sweet and lose some of their bitterness and the increased
glucose acts like antifreeze. Whenever someone tells me they don’t like Brussels sprouts I wonder if it is because they have never tasted a good one. Most of the cole crops available in the store come from the balmy West Coast. Cole crops and other greens harvested in October or November in the Northeast not only have superior taste and flavor, they are an important source of vitamin K, anti-oxidants, folate, magnesium, and even omega 3 fatty acids. So, eat those vegetables if you plan to be around for a while as these are compounds that keep us young!

With other biennials the leaves die back, allowing the underground parts and/or thick stems to remain alive. Carrots, sweet potatoes, parsnips, potatoes, beets, rutabaga, onions, and even cabbage and broccoli are all biennials that create an abundance of food to survive the winter and store it in their tubers, roots or stems. Instead of leaving them in the field we bring them inside our barn, and store them under optimum conditions.

There is another way we store the summer into the winter; the grasses and clovers of the pasture became beef and lamb. Even the butcher hogs and turkeys consumed high amounts of green plants and other culled vegetables from the packing barn. Animals raised on green plants, ripe fruits, and other colored vegetables are superior in health to animals raised on a grain only diet. If vegetables are good for us, we shouldn’t deprive the animals from it. What would your health be like if you would live on a diet of rice and beans only? Studies have shown that meat from pastured animals contains more anti-oxidants than meat from grain fed animals and a diet of grass prevents lipid oxidation (a major cause of deterioration of meat affecting flavor, color, texture, and nutritive value). But, besides that, to us it is simply intuitive that there is something fundamentally wrong with putting an animal in a barn deprived of sunlight, green plants, and colorful fruits. So we don’t keep as many animals over the winter as in the summer which is the reason we only provide you with meat in the fall.

So while it is getting colder, summer is not really over. Summer lives on in the crops that have been brought in to the barn like potatoes, winter-squash, sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onions, and beets. The summer lives on in the many hay bales stored in the barn that will slowly be fed to the animals. Summer lives on in the field in the frost-hardy greens and lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and in the root crops like the celeriac and rutabaga that will soon be harvested. And summer lives on in the meat from our animals.

With the exception of cool weather loving crops like spinach, cauliflower and broccoli, most crops have stopped growing. These days the fields are like a giant walk in cooler. In the morning we put on an extra layer, wear neoprene gloves to keep our hands from freezing and harvest what is left. Let the warmth of the summer’s sun, preserved in our food, shine in our bellies.

~ Jean-Paul

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower”. ~Albert Camus