Chelsea Green Publishing

Farms with a Future

Dreaming of ditching city life for your own farm share? Before you sign over the cash for those rolling hills, we highly recommend you read Farms with a Future: Creating and Growing a Sustainable Farm Business by Rebecca Thistlewaite, a former vegetarian turned farmer and livestock rancher (she dubs herself a "meat farmer") who is behind the blog Honest Meat and also does consulting work for small farms. We hope she sleeps well.

In the book, Thistlewaite hits more than a dozen small farms across the country and shares some pretty great, no-nonsense advice from farmers who have learned the hard way -- you know, from experience. Among our favorite nuggets: "If you don't like people, don't do a CSA." Hard to argue with that one.

Get ten more start-up tips from Farms with a Future, and our annotations (How could we resist?), after the jump. No desire to become a farmer? No matter. Most are pretty handy for the old life in general.

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Felicia Friesema

Red Rain mustard greens from Shear Rock Farms at the Hollywood market

The usual, painfully stereotypical story of success in our town is about the farm girl who comes to L.A. to make it in "showbiz." But the best stories are almost always a twist on the typical. So it goes for Shear Rock Farms, a story about the woman (in this case, Sabrina Bohn) who leaves Hollywood for rural Santa Paula with dreams of making it in agriculture. Bohn still comes back to Hollywood for business, but now it's just every Sunday with a pile of vegetables, melons and greens in tow. You also can find her at the Tuesday Highland Park market and she just started selling this week at the newish Altadena market on Wednesdays.

Becoming a repeat customer of hers isn't difficult -- the produce is always gently handled and immaculate, and Bohn is continually ready to talk about what's emerging from the 19 acres she works with her farm partner, Raul Barrios. The only difficulty right now is waiting the two weeks between pickings of her new Red Rain mustard greens. "The plants need recovery time," she says with some apology, though it's hardly an inconvenience to pick up something else from her in the interim.

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jgarbee

Clarita Coleman at the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers Market

When fantastic farmers -- and cooks -- like Clarita Coleman matter-of-factly say things like, "I don't write anything down," you stop to jot that recipe down. If there even is a recipe. With Coleman, you're likely to get a basic cooking outline. But really, with beans this fresh, that's all you need.

The co-owner of Coleman Family Farms makes dinner most nights from the gorgeous produce lining in the family's Carpenteria backyard: baby lettuces, purple amaranth, chard, kale and an ever-changing menu of herbs like Persian mint and Japanese shiso. This time of year, the farm's fantastic scarlet runner beans (Ayocote morado) are on Coleman's stove. "Cook a big pot, and then use them in salad the next day with a little olive oil," she says.

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Emily Green

There's a wheelbarrow in the kitchen. How it got there doesn't bear thinking about. The moment for thought is long gone. With every bang of my shin on the barrow, it dawns on me that this is only the first load of many of oranges, lemons and tangerines that needs picking, trimming, washing, drying, sizing and packing in the 18 hours before I debut at the Altadena Farmers Market.

The good news is that my hands no longer hurt. The bad news? They have no sensation whatsoever.

Folly this painful generally starts with an oversight. In my case, it was a 2011 move to an Altadena house where the enormous backyard held the remnants of an old citrus farm. I took the majestic orange, lemon and tangerine trees as little more than scenery when signing the deed. Soon, however, catching the fruit proved the single most difficult job in the garden. Letting it hang ripe indefinitely on the trees or molder on the ground was only an option if I wanted rats.

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A. Scattergood

chanterelles from Clearwater Farm

Hang out long enough with David West, a.k.a. "the mushroom man" of Clearwater Farms, and eventually a farmers market customer is bound to ask the "Big O" question. "Well, shiitakes are grown on oak blocks, so until someone decides to make certified organic oak trees, no, these are not organic," says West, who has a talent for both growing fungi and comedic candor.

"And those morels over there are wild," West continues, pointing at a box of mushrooms at his Santa Monica Farmers Market stand. "I haven't seen a certified organic forest yet, either." Ha. Neither have we.

Get some handy mushroom tips from West, and his chanterelle-corn risotto recipe (and soliloquy), after the jump.

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jgarbee

Breads on Windrose Farm's truck

For the second installment of our series on cooking with farmers, farm stand workers, farm hands and anyone else regularly heading home with piles of fantastic produce, we bring you a recipe for a great cornbread -- made with stone-ground polenta. We (literally) bumped into it last week in the back of Windrose Farm's truck at the Wednesday Santa Monica farmers market.

Stand employee Amanda Broder, who also happens to be a pastry chef, brought the brunch-worthy bread as a refueling snack for the stand's employees. (Sorry, Broder's rotating snacks are not available for public nibbling due to health code regulations and free-sample sanity issues.) All the more reason to bake it yourself and bring Broder a thank-you slice. Get more on Broder -- and her recipe -- after the jump.

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jgarbee

Susana Leyva of Coastal Organics with lamb's quarters

Welcome to a new series on cooking with farmers. Not just farmers but also the farmstand workers who patiently calculate your erratic "one bunch of this/two of that" weekly tab. And the guy you've likely never seen because he's stationed in the back of a truck, trying not to smash the basil as he sorts through 30-pound palettes of heirloom tomatoes for a crew of awaiting chefs.

All are people who know what to really do with an overabundance of summer squash, a few too many peaches and, yeah, that crosnes impulse buy. Because they often go home with the produce we don't buy, if they're lucky. They're also incredibly busy, often up before daylight, so their recipes reflect a practical hunger for a really great supper.

As summer is ideal time for things, quite literally, to grow like weeds, we begin with Susana Leyva, Coastal Organics' Santa Monica Farmers Market stand representative (most Wednesdays and Saturdays) on epazote (or lamb's quarters -- she uses them interchangeably as both are similar weeds; Coastal Organics grows the latter). And her frijoles de la olla (beans cooked in a clay pot) recipe.

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We've consistently maintained that the best way to understand where your food comes from and to know what it is you are eating is to get to know your local farmers. Making that connection isn't difficult -- head to your local market and say hi, ask questions, develop relationships -- but it does require a little personal investment of time and interest. In our "there's an app for that" world, expediency often wins out over meaningful humantistic connections. So the California Agricultural Communications Coalition has come to your rescue with knowacaliforniafarmer.com, a website that allows you to forgoe the gooey mess of developing relationships and ostensibly get a better understanding of California farmers via a slew of catalogued video interviews.

It's a great idea, one we've been wanting for some time -- more on this in a minute -- to help us better put faces to fields. But it doesn't take much to sense the marketing machine churning in the background.

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LA Farm Girl/Judi Gerber

Iceland poppies for sale last year at the Tom T. Ishibashi farm stand in Torrance.

Writing about the closure of a farm within city limits has echoes of microfiche readings from the 1920s when L.A. invented the suburbia that swallowed up our giant orange groves. One farm -- the Tom T. Ishibashi Farm in Torrance -- had managed to survive the evolution from rural to urban until now, and has the sad distinction of being the last in a long string of farms in an urban area that have ceased to be.

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Jgarbee

Pupusas + a portable griddle

Tired of ho-hum sack lunches? Time to talk to Sotera Jaime about her work-week pupusa plan of action. The cherubic abuela of Jaime Farms knows when to pull out that trusty electric burner at the office.

Jaime makes sporadic appearances at her family's vegetable stand at the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers Market, where she is known for spooning out make-ahead dishes like puerco con chile negro, which she reheats for stand workers and friends. But she also knows there isn't always time for a long pre-lunch simmer on weeknights.

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