My niece, a practical 21-year-old, is home for a few days before returning to graduate school. Her degree will be in forensic accounting. She says to me, "Hey, have you heard of Penn and Teller?"
"Yes," I respond. This can't be good, I think.
"Well, they say that if the entire world were to eat only organic food, over 2 million would starve."
Rather than respond in kind, I wanted to prove the superiority of locally grown, healthy food simply by offering her a nice plate of organically grown heirloom tomatoes from my CSA. Alas, they can't be had for love nor money.
It's the blight, you know. The Valley's and a large swath of the Northeast's tomatoes have fallen to the same plant fungus that caused the Irish potato famine. With an airborne striking range of 30 miles, these spores thrive in the kind of summer weather we've been having: lack of sun and lack of heat and lots of rain. At an emergency meeting of farmers at UMass several weeks ago, complaints and solutions flew through the room about like blight itself. One of the fallback remedies is to diversify by planting lots of other crops to avoid complete decimation, but for some tragedy has hit and it is too late.
One woman, a third-generation farmer in South Hadley, typically cans all of her produce at the end of the season, putting up enough tomatoes for 10 different tomato sauce-based dishes. "I don't know what I will eat this winter," she confided to a friend.
A farmer in upstate New York isn't faring much better. In response to blight conditions in Saratoga County, he offers this: "We burned all 250 heirloom tomato plants last Monday. I picked some unblemished green fruit and am keeping them on an uninsulated porch and most of them are rotting or showing signs of infection before fully ripe. It is just about a 100 percent loss here. I estimate about $10,000 worth of tomatoes, maybe more, since it was such a bumper crop. I caught it way too late to do anything with copper or Serenade. I did remove infected plants and spray, but then it rained the next nine days afterwards. Rather than risk it, I am no longer giving out any fruit at all to any customers. Whatever we ripen will be for our own consumption, or to friends who already have blight, as it is transmitted on fruit as well as in the air. I am pretty ready to give up farming at this point."
Fortunately for larger farms in our region, other crops such as eggplant, peppers, greens, corn and other produce have fared very well and there is enough food to go around—but not without repercussions. "Easily, the value of the tomatoes that we should have picked from those fields would equal at least $100,000," says Ryan Voillard of Red Fire Farm. "It is possible that our financial loss from losing so much of our tomato crop may be cushioned somewhat by the CSA, as these folks will not be refunded the value of all the tomatoes that we had planned to give out this summer."
A cursory survey of other farms tells an entirely different story. Tomatoes are on the rickety tables and in the backs of old wooden wagons all over the Valley. Sophie, an 87-year-old retired farmer from Hadley, was selling the biggest, reddest, cheapest tomatoes I came across. She stood less than a tenth of a mile away from The Food Bank Farm, as the crow flies. Food Bank lost its entire crop of tomatoes and other produce.
"No blight?" I ask her.
"Well, no, dear," she says.
"Why not?" I ask.
"My son-in-law knows what he's doing," she says.
By "knows what he is doing," she probably means that he is using non-organic methods of farming. I learned this after speaking to some of the folks at UMass who held the blight meeting where proactive and reactive methods were discussed. Reactive methods include some use of soil nutrients, but to prevent infestation of other crops, people were urged to immediately pull up plants that are diseased and burn or bury them in the ground or under a tarp.
The proactive method is the use of organically approved copper-based anti-fungal spray. Other recommended methods of prevention include planting seeds that may be blight-resistant, starting seeds in a green house and planting the seeds farther apart for air circulation. A manager at one of the larger CSAs said he did all of these things and still lost his entire crop of tomatoes.
And what about the survivors? There seem to be plenty of tomatoes in isolated patches and on more traditional farms. According to a soil expert I spoke with, those farmers may be using a deadly non-organic spray at the beginning of the season. "That kind of fungicide is highly toxic and will ultimately kill the nutrients and the tomatoes and ultimately you," he said.
At a farm stand in South Hadley a friend of mine, a third generation farmer, presides over tomatoes, beans, plums, peppers, cucumbers and corn. When I visited her stand last week, her tomatoes looked as healthy as they did last year, and I asked how she avoided the blight. Olga pushed back the lock of white hair above those beady blues and said, "Oh we spray," and shrugs. "You don't want to starve," she said and laughed. She cut me a piece of one of the tomatoes. It was delicious. Just like last year.
Recipe
This recipe for peach preserves is indicative of both the past and the present. Since most people just eat peaches right off the vine, off the shelf, or out of the fridge, the idea of canning is pretty old fashioned for sure. But when summer is just a memory, having fresh peaches out of a jar in winter proves that food is indeed love. Why else spend a day over hot canning baths in August? Recipes can carry wisdom of the ages, no matter what the era. This one, a bit of an antique with no author attached, has a cautionary note at the end.
Old Fashioned Peach Preserves
2 qts. sliced peaches
6 cups sugar
Combine fruit and sugar and allow to stand for 12-18 hours in the refrigerator. Slowly bring to a boil and cook gently until the fruit becomes clear and the syrup thickens—about 40 minutes. Stir frequently to prevent sticking. Skim if necessary. Pour, boiling hot, into hot canning jars. Adjust caps and process in boiling water for 15 minutes. Yield: About 7 ? pints. A husband who is as busy as a bee may wake up to find his honey missing.
Events
Red Fire Farm's "Tomato Light" Tomato Festival
Saturday, Aug. 22
Red Fire Farm
7 Carver St., Granby
Since only some of Red Fire's tomatoes have survived Late Blight, the festivalwill feature other crops, including melons, cucumbers, peppers spicy and sweet, kale, aromatic basil, sweet corn, crunchy carrots, crispy beans, blood red beets, fragrant garlic, magnificent onions, cilantro, eggplant and raspberries. Events include cooking demonstrations. Christina Pirello, author and host of the PBS show Christina Cooks, will demonstrate healthy, healing cooking with whole foods; Janet Fletcher, a writer currently working on a book about CSAs that will feature Red Fire Farm, will demonstrate seasonal recipes. Chef Brian Aussant of Springfield's Bottega Cucina will introduce the world of raw foods, and fermentation specialist Seth Travins will demonstrate how to make pickles and sauerkraut.The 5K Tomato Trot through the farm will begin, for runners and walkers, at 10:30 a.m. Musical acts will be Rusty Belle of Amherst, The Can Kickers of Connecticut and Drew Hickum and the Colonels. For more information, contact www.redfirefarm.com.
