You’ve heard of pub crawls, but farm crawls?  Well, five farms in South Central Iowa banded together and sponsored an afternoon of farm tours on October 7th.  You can read more about it at www.farmcrawl.com.  My family had a great time and managed to visit four of the five farms.  Check back soon for photos and more information on the food and fun.

I love fall — especially when it comes to food.  I love the hearty, filling nature of apples, potatoes, winter squash, carrots, parsnips…  It’s also nice to have some cool days when heating up the kitchen with cooking doesn’t seem counter productive to the task of trying to keep cool. 

I also love the colors of fall.  I visited the second-to-last Valley Junction Farmer’s Market to stock up on some items, and one stand really stood out: Circle M Produce from Martensdale Iowa.  I visited with Circle M’s proprieter Mike Misjak.  Mike is at a farmer’s market about every day of the week, except Sunday when he’s busy picking.  He helped start the Norwalk farmer’s market on Fridays.   On the day I visited, he had an abundance of winter squash, pumpkins, peppers, some summer squash, green beans, and watermelons.

You might be surprised to find an orchard in Urbandale (9875 Meredith Drive) and I was at first, until I considered just how fast the suburbs surrounding Des Moines have been growing.  I witnessed it first hand from my Grandparent’s house near Railroad and Grand, which 25 years ago bordered corn fields and now is likely near the population center of West Des Moines.

At the Iowa Orchard we met Bryan Etchen.  Bryan’s family purchased the orchard in 1974 and he took it over in 1991.  In addition to their Meredith Drive location, they have other orchards in the area.  This year’s late frost (freeze?) caused them to have about 90% fewer apples than normal.  Fortunately, Bryan has relationships with other orchards and had an ample supply of apples.  Some of the varieties available when we were there in September: Cortland, Johnathan, Ozark Beauty, Lura Red, Wealthy, and my favorite for fresh eating, Honey Crisp.  Varieties you’ve never heard of?  Don’t worry — Bryan and his staff are quick to hand out samples and provide recommendations.  We purchased a peck each of Honey Crisp and Wealthy.  As I write this a couple of weeks later, the Honey Crisps are nearly gone.  I’ve sampled a few of the Wealthy apples from the back of the fridge, and keep begging my wife to make this wonderful "Good Neighbor" apple cake recipe she has.  If I succeed, I’ll try to get the recipe and photos online to share.

Back to Iowa Orchard… this summer I purchased peaches on various occasions, hoping to find the perfect one — with little success.  Seeing that Bryan had Colorado peaches, I decided to give them a try.  Unfortunately, they were on par with the others.  Perhaps it was a poor year everywhere for peaches?

In addition to the fresh fruits, they offer apple butter, pies, fruit jams, marinades, and other fruits.  We purchased one of their cherry pies and it was wonderful (this coming from someone who typically isn’t fond of cherry pies). Fresh cherries, a hint of almond flavoring, flaky crust… it didn’t last long.

You can swing by their store seven days a week, or find them at many of the farmer’s markets.

• Taste. Local food is fresher and tastes better than typical supermarket food that travels 1,500 miles to get to you.  Varieties that taste wonderful but don’t travel very well can be grown in your backyard or purchased from local farmers.
• Environmentally Friendly. In season, local food is better for the environment, especially if it is also organic.  Less energy is used to transport it, less packaging is needed.
• Healthy.  Incorporating a larger amount of fresh fruits and vegetables in your family’s diet is an excellent way to improve your family’s health.  Research is also showing the benefits of grass feed and naturally produced meats.
• More Diversity.  Local farmer’s are likely growing a wider variety of cultivars than the standard ones larger commercial operations are growing.  More diversity in an ecological system reduces the risk that a whole segment of the biological community will be wiped out by insects, poor weather or a disease.
• Food Security.  If terrorists blew up a major oil installation or some other event (look up peak oil) caused a dramatic cut to oil supplies (and a dramatic increase in oil prices), wouldn’t you like to have a lot of your food available closer to home?
• Local Economy.  Spending your food dollars close to home will help your local neighbors and those dollars will be closer to flowing back to your pocket.
• Exciting. Trying new varieties and new foods is fun and exciting.

I’d bet that if you said “farmers market” to someone in the Des Moines area they would immediately think of the Downtown Farmers Market in downtown Des Moines on Saturday mornings.  Well a close rival to the Downtown market is the Valley Junction Farmers Market on Thursday evenings.  It’s at Fifth and Railroad in West Des Moines and runs from 4:00 to 8:00PM until September 27th.

My family and I visited the market yesterday evening.  We arrived rather late, which is a mistake this time of year as local farmer’s crops are not quite up to full production and a lot of items were sold out before we arrived. 

We met Amy Boyer, who with her husband Jason, own The Harvest Barn in Osceola.  The Boyers had vegetables and fudge to sell but Amy was quick to point out that their main focus was on their Limosine/Angus natural beef and natural pork products.  She was very excited when I mentioned that I was looking at ways to create a local food distribution business.  She mentioned that they had been debating about how to sell to metro customers once the farmer’s markets close for the season… this reinforced my feeling that their is a need to provide local food distribution options especially in the winter months. 

You can find out more about the Boyers at their website: www.theharvestbarn.com

Well, my permaculture class at Mark Shepard’s farm in Viola, Wisconsin was excellent.  We covered everything from the philosophy of permaculture to the challenges that real people were facing as they started farms/businesses with permaculture approaches.

Our first tour was of Mark’s own farm.  He has approximately 100 acres of ground that he has swaled (small water retaining terraces) and planted in hazelnuts, chestnuts, cider apples, berries, annuals and more.  He is testing various intercropping approaches and trialing numerous varieties.  He has created a non-profit foundation and developed a hazelnut cracking machine.  He will soon have hard cider available for sale.

Another of our tour stops was at The Trout Palace Fish Farm.  We saw how Jim Pierce is making the best use of his site conditions with trout aquaculture and how he used a discarded whey tank as the basis of his root cellar inserted into his hillside.  While many aquaculturists attempt to maximize their profits by adding electrically powered aerators, Jim is limiting his production levels to what his natural spring water flow can support.

Dave and Erin Varney started One-Sun Farm and Bakery five years ago.  They are intercropping garlic, raspberries, annuals, and hazelnuts.  We heard first hand the struggles that a small farmer can go through… the Varneys had their income slashed this February when the State Department of Inspections notified them that they can’t wholesale the meat pizzas that they have been producing in their licensed food processing kitchen without a meat processing license.  They are struggling to make up that income with their veggie pizzas, bakery items, berries and other crops. 

I have many more photos to share, I’ll soon be putting them on my Flickr page at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bburnett71

If you are reading my blog about local food then you have probably already heard about Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s year of eating food solely produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver 1 bedroom apartment.  They have a web site at: www.100milediet.org

They were featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning (you can listen online): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10219029

You might be interested in their book: Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally (if you buy it through this link you’ll be supporting this site).

One thing I’ve discovered with Mesclun mixes is that some of the varieties frequently outcompete the other varieties; I’ve run into this with some Botanical Interest Sassy Salad Mesclun (2005 seed) that I started in my coldframe early this spring… the mustard greens got themselves established before the other seeds.  It is also probably a case of the other seeds not storing as well.  Another issue I’ve run into with mixes is trying to identify what is a seedling and what is a weed…  Botanical Interest’s lovely illustration of full sized specimens on the seed packet helps, but it’s still challenging.  I may start to limit myself to planting varieties seperately and mixing them as they are cut.

I also lucked out and one of my neighbors shared some morels she had found.  I wasn’t in the mood to dig out the breadcrumbs, flour, eggs, milk, so when I went looking for something to pair up with the morels, those abundant mustard greens came to mind.  

This was a simple experimental dish: melt some butter, add the morels (sliced in half, submerged in water, rinsed well and drained) and saute them for 3-4 minutes.  As the morels neared completion, I added about a quarter cup of chopped mustard greens and then a little sherry cooking wine and sea salt.  I ended up with morels in a light sauce with a nice touch of spicy greens. Yum. 

Hey and wouldn’t that make a nice picture — that’s how the current web site header photograph came to be.

This web site is an attempt to bring together a variety of my passions: lessening my impact on our Earth, gardening, cooking, photography, web development, teaching, learning, sharing, and entrepreneurism.

I hope this will be a resource where you can:

• Find out about Iowa farmers and purchase from them
• Discover restaurants that serve seasonal, locally produced food
• Find seasonal recipes
• Learn from my successes and failures growing food as locally as it can get (our backyard)

Check back soon for posts on these subjects: 

• Why Think Global Eat Local? What does it mean?
• Why start with a blog?
• Big plans, future phases

Contact me at brandon@thinkglobaleatlocal.com to be added to our email list to be notified of changes.  Subscribe to our our RSS feed which will be coming soon.

Thanks for visiting!