Category Archives: Sustainable Agriculture

CSA Fair in Fort Collins This Weekend

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Grant Family Farms ‘orphans’ & others learn about other local farmers’ and ranchers’ CSAs

This logo is frp, The Calhoun School in Manhattan.

This logo is frp, The Calhoun School in Manhattan.

Be Local Northern Colorado hosts what its anticipates to be the first annual CSA Fair on Saturday, March 2 to give local residents a chance to meet and connect with farms and ranches in northern Colorado that operate Community Supported Agriculture programs. The event takes place at the Opera Galleria in downtown Fort Collins from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Grant Family Farms “orphans” take note. CSA members left high and dry with the farm’s unfortunate lapse into bankruptcy last year can shop around for a new one to join from the 20-plus in northern Colorado.

It seems unlikely that any foodie would be unaware of the CSA concept. But just in case, know that the initials stand for Community Supported Agriculture, a mutually beneficial commitment between a farmer and a community member to produce and purchase locally grown and raised foods. The most common model is vegetable “shares” in which people purchases “memberships” to a farm, which then supplies a “share” of the harvest throughout the vegetable growing season. Hereabouts, that is  roughly from May to October. A membership also engages people in the reality of farming in a difficult climate.

Be Local Northern Colorado, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, also operates the Winter Farmers’ Market at the Opera Galleria from November to April. If you are in north Colorado and haven’t been there yet, so go. The Opera Galleria is at 123 N. College Ave., Fort Collins.

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A Focus on Front Range CSAs

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Community Support Agriculture brings farm-fresh to your table

This logo happens to be from The Calhoun School in Manhattan, but it looks generic enough to use here.

This logo happens to be from The Calhoun School in Manhattan, but it looks generic enough to use here.

Let’s thank the Boulder Daily Camera for an informative list of more than two dozen area farms and other purveyors with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs. The majority offer pay-in-advance full, half and (sometimes) working shares for seasonal produce direct from individual growers. Share-holders get what it is freshest each week or two (depending on the schedule customers select). CSA boxes are delivered to local farmers’ markets or other central pick-up locations on a regular schedule during a season that generally runs from May or June until October.

In addition to the traditional veggies, fruits and flowers, some include eggs, soaps, honey, locally roasted coffee or flowers. Several offer meat (beef, lamb, pork, chicken, duck and even rabbit), and one offers wine. I knew you’d want to know. Settembre Cellars’ wines made from Colorado grapes are available at the 63rd Street Farm, which also offers pizza pick-up.

Another option is to have the shares come to you. Door to Door Organics, which partners with area farmers, brings fresh, organic produce and natural groceries right to your door. Weekly orders are customizable, there is no commitment so you can cancel at any time — and the farmers still are included in the process. For convenience and flexibility, this can’t be beat. Azure Standard, an Oregon-based family-owned company new to the Denver area, delivers organic products weekly to drop points along established routes. They source from a wider geographic area, which can be considered a benefit (more variety) or a drawback (larger carbon footprint). Azure Standard accepts orders of all sizes that are also customizable, but without the to-your-door convenience.

For the record, I’d love to buy a CSA share, but there are more vegetables that my husband won’t eat than those he will, and we are empty-nesters, so it’s a tad pointless. Besides, I like to buy in season at the Boulder County Farmers’ Market.

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Denver Bacon Lauded at Iowa BaconFest

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Slogan: “A Colorado Creation. Made Here. Enjoyed Here.”

BlueRibbonBaconFestival-logoThe Denver Bacon Company’s artisan maple slab bacon has recently  been making its way onto Colorado restaurant menus and into specialty store meat counters. It was one of just eleven bacon companies in the country chosen to participate in the 6th Annual Iowa Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival on February 9. Some 450 pounds of DBC bacon were sampled and reportedly received raves from nearly 8,000 attendees who showed up at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines to taste some of the nation’s best bacon brands.

In the same spirit as the annual Presidential pardon given to a designated turkey on the day before Thanksgiving, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad pardoned one lucky pig the day before the festival, but other pigs, in bacon form, ended up on tasting tables. “Festival attendees lined up to try DBC’s artisan maple slab bacon,” said Brooks Reynolds, chairman of the bacon board for the Iowa Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival. “If we had a ‘People’s Choice Award’, it would have gone to DBC.”

DenverBaconCo.-logoThe product has two pairs of progenitors. The humans are Justin Brunson, executive chef of Masterpiece Deli and Old Major Restaurant (opening later this month), and Eric Clayman, a founding partner of Udi’s Granola and Gluten Free Foods. As for the porcine progenitors, the dams (females). are a Large White and Landrace cross and the sires (males) are Durocs. I know nothing about hog breeds, so I’m just passing on this information from a DBC press release, which also says that the dam gives the animal muscle structure, while the sire provides marbling. After slaughter, the meat is not pumped full of water and is dry-aged, ultimately allowing for more yield per pound and very little shrinkage when cooked. Brunson devised the DBC bacon recipe. The meat is cured with a blend of such spices as coriander, yellow mustard, juniper, thyme, bay leaf and black pepper, and then sweetened with maple sugar. It is then smoked with Colorado peachwood, sourced from Fruita, Colorado.

Chef Justin Brunson and food industry expert Eric Clayman, founders of the Denver Bacon Company.

Chef Justin Brunson. left, and food industry expert Eric Clayman, founders of the Denver Bacon Company.

DBC isn’t done with just one product, no matter how well received. The company says that is in the process of receiving USDA approval to be able to sell via larger grocery stores — but I don’t know whether that will mean natural grocers like Whole Foods or Lucky’s, or mainstream chains like King Soopers and Safeway. Coming up is a new breakfast bacon sausage that will be again available at Masterpiece Deli and other Colorado restaurants and specialty stores.The partners foresee more cured and smoked deli meats and products in the near future.

As far as I know, the sold-out Denver Beer & Bacon Festival this past December was DCB’s debut. It expects to be showcased again at the 3rd Annual Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival tour in Keystone on June 22-23.

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Cochon555 Returning to Colorado

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Vail is one of 10 stops for peripatetic pork competition and tasting event

Cochon555-logoI attended the Denver visit of the first year of the COCHON 555 tour and was blown away by the butchering, the food, the wine and the restaurant biz collegiality for many of the guests were chefs or others in the local hospitality business. (Click here for my report.) Alas, the event has never returned to the Mile High City, but Vail is the third of 10 stops in 2013 — the fifth anniversary of this event that was created to promote sustainable farming in general and heritage-breed pigs in particular.

It takes place at the Four Seasons Vail on Sunday, March 10 and features five chefs, five pigs and five winemakers. The chefs — Alex Seidel of Fruition, Hose Rosenberg of Blackbelly Catering, Jason Harrison of Flame Resturant in the Four Seasons Vail, Kelly Liken of Restaurant Kelly Liken and Lon Symensma of ChoLon — are challenged to prepare a menu from the entirety of one 200-pound family-raised heritage breed of pig, nose-to-tail.Bill Greenwood of Beano’s Cabin is doing the butchering, and Julian Smith of Bol Vail is preparing a “family meal” of barbecue. el

Twenty judges who are described as “culinary luminaries” and 400 guests help decide the winning chef by voting on the “best bite of the day.”. The winner will be crowned the Prince of Porc (or presumably Princess of Porc) and will compete at Grand Cochon event at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen on Sunday, June 16.

New additions in 2013 — some just for VIP level guests — include the launch of a cocktail competition called “Punch Kings” featuring Breckenridge Bourbon, prepared by six local bartenders, plus the new TarTare Bar round out the exclusive VIP hour. All attendees can watch butcher demonstrations, inhale sustainable oysters, taste creative pork dishes from all the chefs, pay a visit to the Manhattan Bar or new Chupito Bar featuring Mezcals, the amazing Cheese Bar, ice-cold brew from Anchor Brewing, pork-spiked desserts and cold-brewed coffee to close out the evening. Tickets are $125 to $150 plus a $10.38 to $14.75  service charge and can be ordered online. The Four Seasons Vail has lodging for those too comatose to go elsewhere!

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Grant Family Farms Filed for Bankruptcy

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Now in its 60th year, ground-breaking Grant Family Farms in great peril

Visitors have traditionally been welcome at Grant Family Farms.

Visitors have traditionally been welcome at Grant Family Farms.

“Northern Colorado’s Grant Family Farms files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy,” a headline in today’s Denver Post, hit like a dagger. “Grant Family Farms closes, files for bankruptcy,” was a headline in yesterday’s Coloradoan, the Fort Collins paper that I don’t regularly read but looked at with bated breath after I read the Post piece. Both papers reported essentially the same sad story.

 Established in 1953, Grant Family Farms was Colorado’s first to be a Certified Organic grower and with some 4,500 CSA members, is one of the country’s large Community Supported Agriculture growers. It pioneered not only CSA agriculture, in sustainable practices and in a commitment to heritage produce and farmyard animals reportedly filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on December 28. Drought, unpredictable economic circumstances and in my opinion, government policies that favor corporate agriculture over family farms. Whether or not the 2,000-acre farm near Wellington between Fort Collins and the Wyoming state line will be able emerge from bankruptcy is still and open question, but its 4,500 CSA share holders and other customers in uneasy suspense.

Beautiful kitchen gardens like this, additional acreage of organically gown produce and scores of humanely raised animals were charactistic of Grant Famly Farms.

Beautiful kitchen gardens like this, additional acreage of organically gown produce and scores of humanely raised animals were charactistic of Grant Famly Farms.

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New Year’s Resolutions: Creating a Better Food World

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Resolving to eat better and support a healthier, more sustainable food global system

‘Tis the time of the year to make make resolutions, and I am pleased to offer this guest post by Danielle Nierenberg and Ellen Gustafson, founders of the brand new Food Tank: The Food Think Tank. Danielle is based in Chicago and Ellen is based in San Diego, and I here in Colorado have added a few personal notes in italics to their guidelines, as well as links to resources they cited.

Cultivating a Better Food System in 2013

As we start 2013, many people will be thinking about plans and promises to improve their diet and health. But we think a broader collection of farmers, policy-makers and eaters need new, bigger resolutions for fixing the food system — real changes with long-term impacts in fields, boardrooms and on plates all over the world. These are resolutions that the world can’t afford to break with nearly one billion still hungry and more than one billion suffering from the effects of being overweight and obese. We have the tools—let’s use them in 2013!

Growing in Cities:  Food production doesn’t only happen in fields or factories. Nearly one billion people worldwide produce food in cities. In Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, farmers are growing seeds of indigenous vegetables and selling them to rural farmers. (Claire’s note: Kibera dwellers, many of them women, grow food in “vertical gardens,” as reported by Nourishing the Planet.) At Bell Book & Candle restaurant in New York, customers are served rosemary, cherry tomatoes, romaine and other produce grown from the restaurant’s aeroponic rooftop garden.

Creating Better Access:  People’s Grocery in Oakland and Fresh Moves in Chicago bring mobile grocery stores to food deserts giving low-income consumers opportunities to make healthy food choices. Instead of chips and soda, they provide customers with affordable organic produce, not typically available in their communities. (Note from Claire: “The Apple Pushers,” an award-winning film about fi8ve pushcart vendors bringing fresh produce to underserved communities in New York touched my heart. When superstorm Sandy wreaked so much havoc in the New York area, I wondered what happened to these produce peddlers. Anyone know?) Continue reading →

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Food Day is Today. Why Not Every Day?

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Second annual Food Day promotes healthy, affordable food choices

I’m not sure how much influence First Lady Michelle Obama has had in the declaration of an annual nation-wide Food Day as the harbinger of a movement toward more healthy, affordable and sustainable food, but her interest certainly did not hurt this creation by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. According to the CSPI, Food Day is “powered by a diverse coalition of food movement leaders, organizations and people from all walks of life.”

Food Day is not a floating holiday. It takes place annually on October 24 to address issues as varied as health and nutrition, hunger, aagricultural policy, animal welfare and farm worker justice and aims to strengthen and unify the food movement in order to improve our nation’s food policies. There are more 3,200 events across the country this year.

The foods we eat should bolster Americans’ health and well-being yet the profit-driven corporations that dominate food manufacture and therefore the American dietary landscape are known by scientists increase the risk of obesity. heart attack, stroke, diabetes, cancer and premature death each year. Additionally, food production is often harmful to farm and food workers, the environment and farm animals.

Food Day aims to transform the American diet from the preponderance of cheap, salty, overly processed packaged foods, high-calorie sugary drink, and fast-food made of white bread, fatty grain-fed factory-farmed meat and French fries. The Food Day message is “Eat Real!” It is a message presented persuasively by the likes of Michael Pollan, Jamie Oliver, Michael Moore and Mary Mazzio, whose award-winning film, “The Apple Pushers,” profiled a new generation of push cart vendors trying to bring fresh foods to New York food deserts — one of many small-scale efforts to address the problem.

Meanwhile, California’s Proposition 37, to be voted on next month, would require labeling of all food products containing genetically modified organisms within two years. Ethically, it should pass, but given the Monsanto money going toward its defeat, who knows? Meanwhile, Food Day 2013 is on the calendar for October 14 neat year.

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