News Coverage
Pick & Choose
Published May 6, 2004
Spend a little while talking to Donald Fulks, and you will never take a strawberry for granted again.
Mind you, we're not talking about the flavorless, seasonless hothouse variety, but rather about that sweet, plump, red jewel of a spring berry grown with its roots in the dirt and its leaves spread out beneath the sun.
To end up sliced over someone's breakfast cereal or baked into a pie, that strawberry has made a journey so fraught with peril, uncertainty and incipient disaster that Odysseus looks something of a slacker by comparison.
From the day it is planted until the day it is harvested, a strawberry seems to be the very definition of a leap of faith. Sitting right down on the ground as it does, the plant is altogether too prone to fall prey to myriad pests, diseases and things fungal. It does not care to be too warm in the cold months or too cold in the warm months, and takes umbrage at desiccating winter winds or too much spring rainfall or rapid changes in the weather. A heat wave in May can stop a harvest season dead. A single, wind-driven freeze in April can kill an entire year's crop inside of an hour. In last year's long, raw, rainy spring, Fulks lost 80 percent of his strawberry crop.
So when you meet Fulks on an early April day, after he has spent most of the previous night pumping water over his strawberry plants to coat them in a thick protective layer of ice as the air temperature sank into the teens, and he is amiable, and even jokes of the travails of the strawberry-grower ("Why do we still grow strawberries? Because we're insane"), it's hard to tell if he is possessed of an inordinate, Zen-like calm or if he's just too tired to shake a fist at the fates.
Fulks farms Belvedere Plantation -- about 1,000 acres of fields and trees along the Rappahannock River just outside Fredericksburg. As long ago as 1774, strawberries were known to be harvested on this land -- along with wheat, melons and honey -- and when the Fulks family purchased the property in 1968, they carried its farming tradition forward into a third century. Today, you can go there and buy honey still made by Belvedere bees, pluck strawberries ripe from their plants and, in the fall, stagger from the fields bearing bright orange pumpkins to carve into jack-o'-lanterns.
Belvedere Plantation is one of a number of regional farms offering "pick-your-own" crops for the public. (It's also where, this weekend, you and as many as 20,000 other spectators can witness 4,000 to 5,000 reenactors stage a Civil War living history weekend commemorating the 140th anniversary of the Battle of Spotsylvania -- a first for the farm and staged in conjunction with the county itself. If you're just looking for strawberries, you might want to wait until next week.) More generally, Belvedere is in the business of what's known as "entertainment farming," which is not, as its name suggests, Paris Hilton slopping the pigs in a micro-mini and Jimmy Choos, but rather an entrepreneurial approach to preserving farmland by making it a destination location. At Belvedere, that means attractions such as hayrides, square dances and a fiendishly difficult, professionally designed "Maize Maze" each summer.
What makes Belvedere Plantation worth considering for your pick-your-own list, however, isn't necessarily the moon bounce or rope swings, or even the educational tours, but something much more basic. It's how the crops are grown.
The Fulks family has actively and enthusiastically embraced the principles of "biological farming" on their land. Biological farming focuses on building soil and plant health and warding off pests and diseases through natural means, such as composting, crop rotation and the planting of cover crops -- and thus minimizing or eliminating the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
"It's a paradigm of prevention and health," Fulks explains, and a philosophical change of heart that at Belvedere Plantation began in the 1980s, when, despite the use of the conventional agricultural chemicals, the farm experienced increasing problems with both diseases and pests.
"The chemicals didn't solve the problems we were trying to solve," says Fulks, and at the same time, he adds, "that stuff just about ruined my immune system." Now, Belvedere Plantation's soil and crops are nurtured on a rich compost made on the farm in eight weeks at the end of winter through a carefully controlled and monitored process.
"You have to change how you do everything" in converting from conventional to biological farming, Fulks says. "Once we had enough healthy elements in the soil, we didn't need rescue chemicals."
Belvedere Plantation is not an organic farm. For its strawberries, for example, "We have the technology to grow them 100 percent organically, but it's exceedingly expensive," Fulks admits. "However, we use probably only 10 percent of the fungicides of strawberries from California or Florida. We haven't used any soil fumigants in at least 10 years."
INFORMED CONSUMING
Does that matter?
Every year, hundreds of millions of pounds of pesticides -- which include weed and insect killers, fungicides, soil fumigants, and growth inhibitors -- are used in the United States. Although there is ample debate over whether the risks of so much pesticide use outweigh the benefits, one fact is undeniably true: As the Environmental Protection Agency's Web guide to pesticides puts it, "By their very nature, most pesticides create some risk of harm . . . because they are designed to kill or otherwise adversely affect living organisms."
Last fall, the independent nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) released the findings from an analysis of more than 100,000 government pesticide test results and ranked a "dirty dozen" of fruits and vegetables most consistently contaminated by pesticides. Ninety percent of the strawberries tested revealed the presence of one or more of 36 different pesticides. Apples, peaches and nectarines fared even worse. In almost all cases, the EWG noted, the results were found after washing the produce.
Is there a danger in chronic, low-dose exposure to so many different kinds of pesticides in commonly eaten foods? The problem is that nobody really knows.
"It's hard to assess the safety of this complex mixture of chemicals," explains EWG co-founder and Senior Vice President Richard Wiles. Add to them the pollutants and chemicals to which we are exposed in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the other food we eat, and in countless other items of everyday use, and, Wiles says, "At some level it's impossible to determine whether chronic exposure to this low-level mixture is safe or not."
Most worrisome, and equally uncertain, is what effect this exposure may have on developing fetuses, infants and young children, whose systems are still developing: The Environmental Protection Agency cautions that these youngest consumers "may be especially sensitive to health risks posed by pesticides."
No one is suggesting eating fewer fruits and vegetables; to the contrary, as nutritionists are forever reminding us, most of us could benefit from eating a lot more. However, the EWG recommends that with so much uncertainty, it's worth taking matters into your own hands and becoming an informed consumer, buying organic as much as possible and otherwise more often choosing those fruits and vegetables -- including kid favorites bananas and sweet corn -- found least contaminated, according to the group's analyses.
"There's nothing wrong with shopping your way to less pesticides in your diet," Wiles says.
That's advice worth keeping in mind not only when you're headed for the grocery store, but also when your destination is a pick-your-own farm. We go to these farms to enjoy the pleasures of tasting things fresh from the field; you have every right to ask what exactly your preschooler is getting into as she sits happily sticky and juice-stained in a row of lush strawberry plants.
"When you go to pick your own," Wiles says, "I think people should ask, 'When's the last time you sprayed these things?' It's not unreasonable to ask that question." What's more, he says, "You want to go to the farmer who will tell you."
If you're concerned about chemical contamination of your food and water, then voting with your feet in favor of those growers who are actively seeking to minimize or eliminate the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides is an excellent way to support change literally from the ground up.
IT'S IN THE SOIL
In that case, John Burns is one grower you'll want to put on your list. Though you won't find a moon bounce or corn maze on the 20 acres of Burns's Goat Hill Farm in Washington, Va., you will find the owner himself ready to welcome you. In his fields and greenhouses, Burns grows heirloom tomatoes, bedding plants, nursery trees, medicinal and culinary herbs, perennial flowers and berries -- including some unusual varieties you're not likely to find in your neighborhood grocery -- all with an abiding concern for the health of the soil, the plants and his customers.
Although Goat Hill Farm is not certified organic, "my growing practices are organic," Burns says. He knows what he's talking about, too. "I advised the USDA when they were setting up the organic standards," he says. His side job is training organic inspectors for both the United States and abroad.
Burns founded Goat Hill in 1988, when he returned to the United States to live after spending two decades overseas as a nutrition and agriculture consultant for maternal and child health care for UNICEF.
"Drive west and find a farm," a friend in the District advised him, and so he did, settling on a piece of property in Rappahannock County that had been abandoned since the 1950s and was overgrown with poison ivy, honeysuckle and the invasive multiflora rose. Burns brought on a crew of goats, who noshed happily through the thickets, clearing and fertilizing as they went.
"Depending on the rain and the sun," Burns says, Goat Hill's season begin about the end of May and lasts through September. Berries available to pic include strawberries, gooseberries, currants, blackberries, raspberries and jostaberries, which are a cross between a currant and a gooseberry. Then there are some 60 varieties of incomparably flavorful heirloom tomatoes in a rainbow of colors to pluck from the vine. If you like what you taste at Goat Hill, you can buy the plants and take them home to grow in your own garden.
Burns also offers educational and tasting tours at Goat Hill. "People come to the farm all during the year except for winter," he says. With school groups, "I have them eat flowers, taste mints, come and see the ducks and baby goats," he says.
Asked to summarize his growing philosophy, Burns says, "Basically, a healthy soil provides a healthy plant. You have a soil that is as rich and as high in organic matter as possible with an ample amount of compost."
"Ample," he adds, "meaning tons and tons."
VEGGIES TO THE PEOPLE
It's all about the soil, too, at 285-acre Clagett Farm in Upper Marlboro. Located within earshot of the Beltway and owned by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a not-for-profit conservation group, Clagett grows some 45 different kinds of vegetables on about 20 acres, using organic methods.
"We use a lot of cover crops, and we keep a healthy soil," says Clagett's vegetable production manager, Carrie Vaughn. "In terms of pest control, we try to keep a really diverse ecosystem on the farm. There are so many different kinds of vegetables we grow, and there are wooded areas, and we have pastures full of clover that keep the groundhogs and the deer out of our vegetables."
As a result, she says, "it is difficult for one pest to take over the way it would in a monoculture."
Because the farm is owned by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Vaughn adds, "there is a lot of emphasis on our relationship to the rivers here and the Chesapeake Bay, and how the things we do on the land affect the water and the bay and the things that live in the bay."
Clagett grows everything from spring greens and strawberries to summer favorites sweet corn and tomatoes to autumn's pumpkins, butternut squash and sweet potatoes. But Clagett is not a standard pick-your-own farm. Rather, it is a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm with a you-pick option.
In a CSA, customers purchase a "share" of the year's planned crops for a set price in the spring. "We use that money to pay for labor, seeds, supply and things like that," Vaughn explains. Once harvesting begins, "every week each member gets their share of what we have harvested." Share owners also can come to the farm, head out into the fields and fill up on the week's selection of you-pick items.
"We make a list each week of what is available -- it's anything that we have an overabundance of that week -- and you can go out and pick as many as you like from that list," Vaughn says.
If you don't want to purchase a season's share, though, you can earn a week's worth simply by giving four hours of labor at the farm on a Tuesday, Friday or Saturday morning. When you've earned your work-share, you can join the other CSA members in the week's you-pick harvest.
One more thing that makes Clagett Farm's CSA -- called From the Ground Up -- worth supporting: Each week, half the farm's harvest is made available, through a variety of means, to low-income families in the Washington area, who otherwise would have little or no access to fresh produce.
If it isn't always easy growing green, Vaughn considers herself amply rewarded for her labors. "You have to work really hard, but you see exactly what your work has created," she says. "I see every day how the things I do are affecting the fields."
GROWING THROUGH THE RYE
At Larriland Farm in western Howard County, owner Lynn Moore, who with her two brothers runs the 285-acre farm, says her growing philosophy is similarly inspired. "The land is a gift, and I would rather leave it in better shape than it was when I started," she says.
Thus at Larriland, where an abundant variety of berries, fruits, vegetables and pumpkins are grown for the you-pick market, the emphasis is on creating a rich, healthy soil and implementing practices that prevent problems from developing.
"You may be able to fight some problems with chemicals, but anything you can do ahead of time to decrease problems and use of chemicals is of benefit to you as the farmer and of benefit to the world in general," Moore says.
With the farm's pumpkins, for example, she says, "we plant rye in the field the fall before and grow it to a certain height, then cut it down, so it's like we are growing straw right there. We also grow a legume for nitrogen and then we knock it down flat on the ground and plant the pumpkin seeds through that, and that cuts down on a lot of soil-borne diseases."
When the vagaries of the mid-Atlantic region's variable climate and abundant supply of pests make it necessary to resort to chemicals, "we pick something that has low toxicity and a short residue," Moore says. "And we use the lowest rates, too. We put on the minimum amount to get protection."
For Moore, "Knowing that I have a safe product is the most important benefit," she says. "If the public is coming to our farm, I need to have it as safe as possible for them, for the children."
Mother Nature is temperamental, a fact that pick-your-own growers know all too well. "Probably the most challenging part of our business is that we have to make a lot of plans, but they may have to change hourly. There's a lot of days when we're up to Plan C or D by 10 a.m.," says Donald Fulks. If you're planning a trip to a farm, always call ahead the day of your outing to confirm hours of operation and crops available to pick.