The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (39 page)

Blueprint for the
Future

I
T
’
S
A
STRAIGHT
shot down Route 54 from Klaas and Mary-Howell’s farm into the town of Penn Yan. The highway runs through a patchwork of fields and pastures, the horizon rippling with glacier-cut ridgelines. Seneca Lake sits in the middle of all this, the largest of the Finger Lakes.

Klaas credits the lake with helping to moderate the climate. The lake effect, as it’s called, increases precipitation, warming the air during the coldest months of the year. It also cools the air on the warmest days; even so, the temperature on this particular morning had already reached ninety-five degrees.

As I leaned forward to turn up the air-conditioning, a police car appeared, coming toward me from the other direction. I quickly slowed, but the policeman made a U-turn, flashed his lights, and pulled me over. I watched him in the rearview mirror as he approached. He was well over six feet tall—trooper hat, black-tinted sunglasses, the works. I rolled down the window and the warm air flooded in.

“Eighty-five in a fifty-five,” he said. I feigned shock (
Really, officer?)
, then bafflement
(
Wow
,
I’ve never driven eighty-five).
Finally I apologized, sounding a little desperate. He stayed silent and motionless as I fumbled for my driver’s license and registration. “Sorry, officer, I’m harvesting wheat with Klaas Martens today. Rushing a bit.” The trooper lowered his face to the window.

“You know Klaas?” he asked. I nodded.

The officer smiled. “All right, then, have a good day.”

Klaas and Mary-Howell’s influence is inescapable here.

They were the first in the county to give up farming with chemicals on a large scale, and, while neighbors initially doubted they would survive, the farm’s success slowly convinced naysayers. A year or so after Klaas and Mary-Howell went organic, a dairy farmer named Guy Christiansen—an elementary school classmate of Klaas’s, with land just west of his—started noticing the success of Klaas’s crops. It was hard
not
to notice: Guy’s conventional corn, which he grew to feed his cows, abutted Klaas’s organic corn.

“The fact that Guy could
see
my corn—that he couldn’t help but see my corn—made a difference, I think.” Klaas’s crop was thriving.

Guy, whose own profits were dangerously low, decided to switch his entire dairy to organic. Not long after that, Floyd Hoover, whose farm abuts Guy’s, switched his corn, soy, and beef cattle from conventional to organic. Aaron Martin, a neighboring dairy farmer, took note of the prices Guy was getting for his organic milk and decided to convert as well. So did Eddie Horst, a Mennonite dairy farmer bordering Guy and Klaas, and Ron Schiek, just north from Klaas. One after another, in a growing circle, the Penn Yan farmers transitioned away from chemical agriculture. Each one would see a neighbor succeed and follow suit.

Mary-Howell began holding meetings in her kitchen for the newly converted. “You know, at the time, everything was so new,” she said. “We were just trying to get information. But it turned into a small community of support.”

In the mid-1990s, these pioneer organic growers got a lucky break. Monsanto, the agricultural chemical and biotechnology company, developed a genetically engineered growth hormone called BST, which increased the production of milk in dairy cattle. It offered farmers an opportunity to increase their profits in a notoriously slim-margined industry. But many consumers were wary of an engineered additive in their milk. Demand for
organic dairy—the only kind assuredly free of artificial hormones—suddenly skyrocketed.

“It was so fast. All of a sudden there was strong demand for organic milk, and the demand for organic grain to feed these dairy cows went through the roof,” Klaas remembers. “I’ve always wanted to say, ‘Thank you, Monsanto.’”

Other farmers considering the switch to organic began attending Mary-Howell’s kitchen meetings to listen and learn. As the group kept growing, they rotated to different homes, and then a few years ago Mary-Howell used her connections at Cornell to secure a large hall at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva. Now nearly one hundred farmers regularly attend, and the meeting is teleconferenced throughout upstate New York, spreading information and inspiring even more farmers to make the switch.

The last stretch of Route 54 before the town of Penn Yan attests to this flourishing community. There are five thousand acres of nearly contiguous organic farmland—all converted within the past two decades.

Penn Yan itself has benefited from the farmers’ success. The town earned its name from the Pennsylvanian (Penn) and New England (Yankee) settlers who came to the area in the late 1700s in search of farmland. Rather than fight over the settlement’s name, the two groups split the difference. Today it is the image of an American ideal, a postcard from a gentler, simpler time. Pleasant storefronts line peaceful streets, with names like Liberty, Elm, and Main. Traffic lights are few, crosswalks are wide, and stores are clean and inviting. Penn Yan’s largest business, Birkett
Mills, in operation since 1797, displays a twenty-seven-foot black griddle on one side of its building. It’s the same one the company used in 1987 to cook a pancake big enough to set a world record.

Small towns have always held an iconic place in American culture. They embody what we consider our country’s best qualities: community spirit, work ethic, and solid moral values. Since they can no longer be said to
represent America as a whole—more than 80 percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas, after all—the sentiment contains a good measure of nostalgia. Most small towns today are not as picturesque as Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
or Norman Rockwell’s midcentury magazine illustrations portrayed them. The view is marred by run-down stores and abandoned movie theaters, grubby diners, and seedy bars. Many have become ghost towns, without even a school, post office, or grocery store. The rise of industrialized agriculture and the rapid consolidation of family farms in the 1950s and ’60s drove the decline of these small towns. Penn Yan was no exception. Older farmers retired, and the next generation moved away or wanted out of farming altogether, to the point that Mary-Howell once described Penn Yan as having been “
a town with a bombed out center.”

Mary-Howell attributes the turnaround to a series of events. In the 1970s and ’80s, depressed land prices attracted large purchases from Pennsylvania Mennonite farmers. Then, in 1976, the Farm Winery Act allowed New York winemakers to process their own grapes and build wineries to sell to the public directly. By the time the backlash against BST revived the local dairies in the ’90s, new businesses had developed in Penn Yan to support the emerging farm and wine industries—supply stores, repair shops, and welding services, to name a few.

It was Klaas and Mary-Howell who made one of the most vital contributions to the town’s economy. In 2001, they bought a run-down Agway mill just off Main Street, renaming it Lakeview Organic Grain. Klaas remembers talking to neighbors who wanted to go organic but were locked out by infrastructure, especially the lack of available milling and proper storage facilities. Mill operators have generally been reluctant to serve an organic market, in part because thoroughly cleaning the equipment—a requirement if one is dealing with both organic and conventional grains—is onerous and expensive. Through Lakeview, Klaas and Mary-Howell could fill yet another niche in their community, providing milling and storage for organic grain and selling the grain to a growing market of organic dairies.

“You know that expression ‘If you build it, they will come’?” Klaas said.
“It was like that. We grew by 20 percent every month for more than two years. Pretty soon we had a half-dozen full-time workers. We literally couldn’t keep up with demand.”

Klaas and Mary-Howell looked at operating the mill as one part business opportunity (they insisted on good margins to keep the mill profitable) and three parts responsible land stewardship.

“We encouraged farmers to improve their soil by creating a market for those grains that added fertility,” Klaas said. “We paid—really paid—for so-called ‘other’ grains—like triticale, oats, and barley—because we knew these played a critical role in maintaining the health of the soil. Without a buyer, farmers can’t justify planting them into the rotations. Without planting them into the rotations, sooner or later soil fertility declines.”

Klaas acknowledged that if soil fertility in the region declined, the mill’s profits would decline, too. “So in many ways we were acting out of self-interest,” he said.

Creating a market for the less desired grains also helped the local cows. The standard feed mix Lakeview sells contains nine different grains. By dairy industry standards, most of those are considered superfluous, but the diversity does the cows good in the long run.

“Cows eating our diversified grain diet are getting minerals and vitamins that are not available to them through just feeding corn,” Mary-Howell explained. “They may produce a little less milk—and that’s debatable, especially over the long term—but they are healthier. Can I prove it? No, but a diversified diet means more amino acids, more minerals, less acidosis.”

I can prove it tastes better. At Stone Barns, Craig switched the feed for his pigs to Klaas and Mary-Howell’s mix a few years ago. The pork is more delicious than ever.

The mill, managed by Mary-Howell, now has eight full-time employees and has expanded into the seed business. “It was a natural progression,” Klaas
said. After all, the new crop of organic farmers needed a supply of organic seeds.

Why would there be a shortage of seed in the middle of the recent boom in organic farming? Monsanto again. Throughout the 1990s, Monsanto bought up small and midsize seed companies, eliminating many sources of organic seed.

“What we forget is that not so long ago, every farming community had a seedsman; some had several,” Klaas said. “This was an exclusive club, made up of the most cerebral, honest farmers. In fact, you had to be voted into the seed improvement co-op to become approved.” These farmers paid close attention to things like germination percentages, and they were especially vigilant about disease, weeds, and any contamination possibilities.

From an early age, Klaas was drawn to the wisdom and honesty of seedsmen. “I’d spend as much time as I could learning from them when I didn’t have to do farm chores,” he said.

One morning in 1983 when Klaas was harvesting soybeans on his own farm, he spotted a plant that stood out from the surrounding field. As he got closer, he realized it was soy, just not any kind he recognized. “It was an off type,” he said, “a mutation of sorts. It was an incredible plant. I stopped the combine just in time.” He ripped the plant from the ground by its roots, saved the seeds, and the next spring planted them in his garden. He wanted to see what would come up. But he also wanted a reason to consult with a young woman, a plant breeder he had met at Cornell University, less than an hour away.

“I pretended I needed help and didn’t know anything about seed propagation,” Klaas said. “Compared to her, I actually really didn’t know much at all. She was a terrific breeder.”
She
was Mary-Howell.

Their shared interest in breeding comes in handy in their burgeoning seed business. The mill encouraged more farmers to convert to organic; the seed business allows them to grow organically with the kind of crop diversity that will help soil fertility. The network sustains itself, and continues to grow.

The more I visited Klaas, the more I realized how difficult it was to fit him into a recognizable model of farming, especially the kind we’re most drawn to: the small family farmer, who tends the harvest and sells what he grows at the farmers’ market. Supporting these farmers is a good idea—they produce tastier food, for one thing, and since less than 1 percent of the population currently makes a living from farming, rewarding their efforts through direct transactions has made a difference. But they aren’t the whole story.