Bill Sittig: Good morning, everybody.
Welcome to today's program,
featuring Jim Crawford and Sam Fromartz.
I'm Bill Sittig, Chief of the Library Science Technology
and Business Division, and this event is one in our series
in which we learn from important writers, thinkers and practitioners
in the various fields of science, technology, business and economics.
Before I introduce today's speakers,
I would like to just briefly mention our upcoming programs
in the next several months.
On June 7 in this same room, local landscape designer Jane Mcleash
[ spelled phonetically ]
, recently featured in the new book Leading Landscape Professionals,
will speak on a new way of looking at garden design.
On June 27, Mark Imhoff   [ spelled phonetically ]
, a scientist at the Biospheric Sciences Branch
at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center will give a lecture slide
show on urban sprawl and its effect on global climate change,
using information from Earth observing satellites.
On July 26th, in conjunction
with the John Kluge Center we will sponsor a lecture
by 2006 Nobel Prize winners John Mayther
[ spelled phonetically ]
, Nobel laureate in physics, and Craig Mallow, laureate in medicine,
speaking on the origins of life in the universe.
And on a lighter note, on August 2, Pamela Peak,
internationally known physician, scientist, nutritionist
and fitness expert will speak on her just recently published book,
Fit to Live: The Five-Point Plan to be Lean,
Strong and Fearless for Life.   [ laughs ]
You're not going to want to miss any
of these programs, so please join us.
I would also like to take this opportunity
to thank Allison Kelly, Mary Jane Kovalo
[ spelled phonetically ]   and Jennifer Harbster
[ spelled phonetically ]
of our science reference staff for all their good work
in preparing for today's program.
Allison has assembled a number of books from our collections
on organic agriculture and has prepared some guides
on sustainable agriculture and kitchen gardens
for you to take with you.
The guides are right on the side there,
and the exhibit is just outside this room.
It is now my great pleasure to introduce today's speakers.
Sam Fromartz, immediately to my left, is a business journalist
and author and resident on Capitol Hill, hailing from Brooklyn.
He graduated from Reed College in Oregon and began his career
with Reuters, writing the news ticker that ran
in Grand Central Station in New York City.
As a correspondent and editor in New York
and Washington he covered almost all aspects of business.
He left Reuters 10 years ago to become a freelance writer.
His work has appeared in many publications,
including The New York Times, Business Week and Fortune.
He has written on a variety
of interesting subjects such as luminous
[ spelled phonetically ]
and glass sculpture and Japanese-style tiko
[ spelled phonetically ]
drumming, which he will demonstrate after this lecture.
[ laughter ]
But for the past several years he has concentrated
on the organic food business.
Sam relates that as a long-time Whole Foods customer he noticed how
successful the store was, and he bought its stock.
It was the only stock in his portfolio
that did well during the dot com bust.
He then realized that there must be a story here.
In addition to his articles, his research on the topic lead
to his authorship of his book, Organic Incorporated,
published last year by Harcourt.
Michael Pollan author of The Omnivore's Dilemma,
has praised Sam's book as "the definitive account
of organic food's rise and move into the American mainstream."
We are pleased to have Sam Fromartz with us today, and he has agreed
to stay, following the program, to sign copies of your book,
which is for sale just outside the room.
In last month's issue of the journal Eating Well, writer David Camp,
commenting on what will be the next hot trend in food, wrote,
"I think we're going to go
from celebrity chefs to celebrity farmers."
[ laughter ]
Maybe it won't be the same vapid machinery
in which celebrity chefs are cooked up and presented to the world,
but this idea of the pedigree of an apple or a hunk of beef
or an asparagus spear will become important
if you identify it with a specific farm.
Well, we are fortunate to have with us today one
of the new breed of celebrity farmers --
[ laughter ]
-- Jim Crawford of New Morning Farm in Houstontown, Pennsylvania,
who is also sitting to my far left.
A native of suburban Boston and a graduate of Rice University,
Jim was of the generation of the late 1960s and early '70s
who decided to try their hand in rural America.
Starting out in 1972 on rented land in West Virginia,
with little capital and even less experience,
Jim began growing a variety of vegetables.
In 1972, after hard work and gaining much valuable experience,
he and his wife Moy   [ spelled phonetically ]
purchased their present 95-acre property in Pennsylvania.
And after more hard work, creative financing and much trial and error,
they have built their soils organically,
accumulated the right equipment, and designed and built a variety
of buildings to create a very successful farm.
They produce over 40 different organically certified crops,
including berries and herbs as well as most of the standard vegetables.
In addition to the family, they have two full-time workers
and approximately 15 seasonal workers and apprentices.
The Crawfords started by operating a roadside stand,
but have now built a many-faceted, successful direct-marketing system,
retailing and wholesaling in the Washington, DC area.
I'm happy to say that my family and I are among their loyal
and satisfied customers, and are looking forward to their return
to our neighborhood; next week, I hope.
In addition, the Crawfords helped found Tuscarora Organic Growers,
a wholesale marketing cooperative.
And Jim helped found the Pennsylvania Association
for Sustainable Agriculture.
Jim believes passionately in organic farming and sustainable agriculture,
and avidly shares his knowledge and experiences with others.
He and his wife have presented workshops over the years,
and have conducted field days for local growers at their farm.
They have appeared on NPR and have been interviewed
by numerous publications including The New York Times
and The Washington Post.
We are pleased that Jim is here today
to share his knowledge with us.   Welcome to the Library, Sam and Jim.
Sam Fromartz: Thank you.   [ applause ]
So we're going to do something a little different today,
because we're both used to being invited to talks and standing
at podiums and talking for a while, and noticing that people, you know,
start to yawn in the audience.
So I've known Jim now for about three years, and I've had a lot
of conversations with him over that time.
And so that's what we decided to do today;
is just have a conversation about our work, really.
I just want to start off by saying a few things.
I want to, first of all, thank the Library of Congress
for inviting me, and us, here.
Actually, even as I was just beginning my research,
I got a shelf in the main reading room.
And I quickly filled it up with books, and over the course
of three years I spent every week
in the main reading room doing my research.
And the resources of the Library --
I couldn't have done this book without the Library.
And not only the books here,
but also the electronic resources were very valuable.
So I feel it's sort of coming full circle, coming back here.
As for Jim, I first met him --
I called up the people who run the Dupont Circle Fresh Farm Market.
A woman, Ann Yonkers, there, is one of the principles.
And I said, "I want to talk to organic farmers.
You got anybody to suggest?"
She said, "Oh, you've got to call Jim Crawford."
So I called up Jim Crawford.   I called up Jim, and immediately
in that first phone conversation I think we talked for about an hour.
And I realized Jim's the man.
I mean, a lot of times you do interviews
and the people just don't really respond,
or you can tell they are being very guarded or they don't trust you.
You know, in that first conversation Jim laid his stuff right
out on the table, so that really began what became a friendship.
But from there I went up to his farm.
And the first time I went up there, I think it was
in the summer; it was pretty hot.
And we were walking around these fields,
and all the people were working outside,
and Jim was showing me around.
And I'm used to sort of working inside,
you know, in front of my computer.
Pretty quickly, within a couple of hours as we were talking
and walking around, I started to get kind of dizzy from the heat,
and I had to repair to an office where there was an air conditioner.
And I quickly realized, you know,
this is how our lives are quite different.
But anyway, so we're just going to kick it off with --
we have questions for each other, and hopefully this just will devolve
into a straight conversation.   So, Jim, why don't you tell them?
I'm sort of curious.   How did you start?
Why did you start?
Why did you become an organic farmer?
Jim Crawford: Well, let me just digress for a second.
I just wanted to say I'm honored to be invited to speak here,
and I have a lot of respect for the Library of Congress.
The last time I was here was to show my children as tourists.
And I'm also really thrilled that you're here to learn
about organic food, because I think the more that the general public
and consumers learn the facts about organic food,
the better off everybody will be.
I thought it was interesting that Bill referred to me and us
as practitioners of a field of technology;
I never thought of myself that way.   [ laughter ]
But I'm definitely a practitioner in a field.
[ laughter ]   Sam Fromartz: A few fields.
Jim Crawford: But I also just want to say to Sam
that we have had a great friendship and relationship that started
when Sam started researching his book.
We had a lot of great conversations; a lot like this --
I hope this one will turn out that way.
And we both learned a lot.
First I learned a lot about journalists and journalism,
but then I started learning more about organic farms
because Sam became the expert.
After a couple years of researching, he knew more about it than I did.
So I started learning from him about the industry as a whole;
the bigger picture, stuff
that I don't necessarily see just on one farm.
So, that said, I will get back to Sam's question.
I started as a gardener, really, and as a food lover.
As a kid in the suburbs, I gardened a lot.
I also really learned to love tomatoes
and pretty much everything from the garden.
So that was my big motive.
And of course, in the early '70s, when we started, it was the "back
to the land" thing, and we were kind of into the romance of the farm
and all that kind of thing.
And we sort of tried that, but I never felt
like I was really a "back to the land"-er.
What I was, was a serious gardener and a serious food lover.
I was living in Washington, and I went out there to West Virginia
to a little farm we rented.
And I just happened to have the great luck of having some neighbors
who were "back to the land"-ers.
And they were forming this little commune --
just the clich you imagine in1971 --
but who happened to have all grown up on farms, and a couple of them
on organic farms, strangely enough.
They grew up in the '50s and '60s, on organic farms;
their parents happened to have that connection to the old 1930s "back
to the land" stuff from J.I.   Rodale and these people.
So, anyway, that was just a great stroke of luck.
I started out as an enthusiastic gardener.
I wasn't an organic gardener,
I was just a gardener, but then I met them.
And I was eating my own food from my own garden,
and then they had their food from their organic garden.
And I started thinking, "Gee, this is at least as good as mine,
but I know that theirs is pure as the driven snow."
But it also tasted at least as good; maybe better.
So I just thought to myself as I started to become a farmer --
I thought, "Well, if I don't know the technology of the chemicals,
why start now in learning them, if I don't know them already?
Why not start off without them?
I can see here, by example, that it can be done.
So why don't I just -- and it does appear to be a better kind of food,
so why don't I just start with the organic method?"
And it wasn't from paranoia about farm chemicals.
It wasn't from terror
about pesticide traces or something like that.
It was just sort of a basic sense that the best quality food must come
from these natural processes.
That's how I got into being an organic farmer and growing --
Sam Fromartz: Can I jump in here?   Jim Crawford: Yeah.
Sam Fromartz: Because Jim actually brings up a couple of points,
and just that last point, that he didn't have to --
why learn the chemicals and then switch back?
When I was talking to a lot of farmers around the country,
especially conventional ones who are looking into going organic,
it's a real problem because they have this whole sort
of farm business.
Their whole productive apparatus is set up in a certain way,
and at the root of that is chemicals, really;
it's applying chemical fertilizers
and applying chemical pesticides to deal with the pests.
And those are key -- what they call them is inputs.
Those are key inputs.
If you take them away, it's sort of like taking down the two cards
at the bottom of this house of cards.
And they're really worried that the rest of the house is going to fall.
So that's been a major impediment for people switching;
Jim didn't have that problem.
Another thing is a lot of the farmers that I met who were
like Jim, who started about 30 years ago -- he mentioned Rodale.
J.I. Rodale had started this magazine,
Organic Gardening and Farming.
He was a publisher, and he was really struck by the method.
That magazine really provided a lot of the how-to knowledge for people
to get in on the ground, so to speak.
But the other influence, of course -- I don't know if it was for Jim --
was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962.
And surprisingly, a lot of the farmers I talked
to had either had some sort of health scare, personal;
either bouts with cancer, or there was a health scare in their family.
And they were looking for some sort of alternative in the types of foods
that they ate, and that's why they got into it.
Rodale himself, he was one of five siblings.
All of his siblings died around or before the age of 50.
And he himself suffered a bunch of different health problems,
and that was his motivation for getting into it as well;
the sort of, you know, idea that he wanted to live healthier,
and that the foods he consumed would be part of that.
And so, you know, I guess you got --
I mean, the environmental movement had just gotten started around then,
around 1972 or so, and -- right?   Jim Crawford: Yeah.
Yeah. Sam Fromartz: And you had read Rodale.
Jim Crawford Yeah.   Uh-huh. And definitely,
environmentalism was a big motive for me.
Sam Fromartz: Yeah.   Yeah. So, Jim, I'm also wondering
if you could talk a little bit about the method.
I think there's this conception that, you know,
if you're organic you're just avoiding chemicals,
you're just avoiding pesticides.
You know, you see that in some of the farmers at the farmer's market
who aren't certified organic.
They say "no spray" or "no pesticides."
Can you talk about that?   Is that all it is, do you feel?
Jim Crawford: Yeah, I'd love to talk about that.
[ laughter ]
I think that people think of organic as a lot of negatives.
We don't; we think of it as many positives.
And people think of it, I think, many times simplistically; you know,
that this is just something without any pesticides.
We think of it as very complex, and anything but simplistic.
Organic food is -- contrary to what a lot of people think,
the organic concept is not a product that has guaranteed
to be measurably more pure, more delicious and more nutritious.
We don't think that way.   We think it's a process.
It is a method of production, a method of growing
which honors the environment, but also is really focused on the soil
and the relationship of plants to the soil, and fertility,
and long-term balanced fertility that comes from natural processes;
and that the product that comes from that process is very likely
to be more nutritious, more delicious and more pure.
But isn't necessarily.
You know, we can't stand up there and say "The lab shows
that my tomato is" -- you know, those things.
What we can say is we guarantee you that the process happened,
and that the product is almost certainly going
to be better in many ways.   Did that answer your question?
I can't remember.   Sam Fromartz: Yeah.
Yeah. And actually -- again, to give context.
One thing that I was surprised about, in researching the book --
what I discovered here in the Library of Congress,
reading the great historical material here,
is that organic was actually -- the inception of it wasn't in the '60s;
it wasn't with Silent Spring.   It actually occurred much earlier,
and it was around the 1910s and the 1920s.
The people who were proponents of it --
one wing of it came out of the British empire, actually.
There were British scientists who were in India,
and they were studying peasant methods of agriculture.
And what they were concerned about at home was the growing use
of chemical fertilizers on the land.
And they were concerned about what the fertilizers were doing
to the land, to the land's productivity,
and also to the quality of food.   Now, pesticides and the ones
that are commonly used now hadn't been invented.
A lot of them weren't invented until after World War II,
but chemical fertilizer was put into use then.
And one of the main proponents was a scientist named Albert Howard.
And he came up with what I kind of call the organic mission statement.
And Jim alluded to it, although he probably doesn't know this,
because what Albert Howard said was that the quality
of the soil is directly connected to the quality of the plants grown
in that soil, and that affects the health of the animals
that eat those plants, and the health of the humans
that eat those plants, and also the health
of the humans that eat those animals.
And so he said, and I quote it, really, in the opening of my book,
that one defect in any part
of that chain will affect the rest of that chain.
And so in a sense it's a really holistic vision, and I think kind
of relevant and very resonant today, because in a lot of areas we start
to see that things we do in one area may have an unintended consequence
in the other.
I mean, even just think about the issue of climate change now.
We didn't really before connect our way of life, driving cars,
et cetera, to global warming.   Well, now that connection is made.
And so it was really kind of a holistic,
kind of an ecological connection, but it really did posit
that these pioneers felt
that organic was definitely more nutritious; that the quality
of the soil, the quality of the way the foods were grown had a direct
impact on the nutritious quality of the foods itself.
And interestingly, it was also tied into debates about diets and debates
about what school children should be eating.
All the things that we see today
about how nutritious are school lunches, should sodas be served
in schools -- this was a major debate in Britain in the 1920s,
when there was concern about processed food and tin food
and sugar content in food.   So, you know, sort of these --
and organic was one reaction against that.
So it was really quite fascinating for me to read that history,
and see how history kind of repeats itself, or that the same dynamic
that was present then, you know, is present today.
So that, I guess, gives you a little more context.
Do you have anything to --
Jim Crawford: I have something to add, yes
[ laughs ]   . Sam Fromartz: Go ahead.
I figured he did.   Jim Crawford: I like this talking
about holistic, and it's really true.
You know, conventional agriculture over the last 50 or 80 years
or whatever has really reduced a lot of problems
down to chemicals; everybody knows that.
Fertility comes from, you know, the things that scientists show
that plants need; the four or five or six elements that plants need
that we can definitely identify.
And pest control can be reduced to battling the pests and killing them
with chemicals and pesticides,
whereas the organic approach is definitely more holistic.
And it's all about -- as I said a minute ago, about this relationship
of fertility and the soil to the plants.
And organic growers respect the complexity of that,
and how it can't be reduced successfully by a few chemicals,
and how holistic and how large and complex it is.
Fertility affects the plants' ability
to resist pests, for example.
The environment as a whole being undisturbed
by pesticides means there are natural enemies of pests;
there are natural balancing species that attack pests.
And especially that fertility and balanced fertility
and complex fertility results in really healthy plants
that also are more nutritious just because they have more
of those traces, and mysterious --
which are unfortunately still mysterious,
in spite of technology and in spite of science.
There are so many things we don't know about the subject
of what happens to plants in soil.
Sam Fromartz: Do you think the plant can actually --
have you seen the plants, if they're really healthy, really vigorous,
that they can actually fight off a disease or a pest?
Jim Crawford: Well, thanks for asking.
[ laughter ]
That's a great story that I love to tell.
Yeah, I have seen that exact thing happen.
And I heard about this for years; about what I just described,
and oh, it all sounds so good.   It sounds like a great theory.
But I really saw it in practice, really in a specific case.
We were trying to grow Brussels sprouts for all these years.
And Brussels sprouts are unusual because it takes a very long season.
You plant them in March in the greenhouse, you transplant them
in April in the field, and then you wait until November
or October before there's actually Brussels sprouts
on them that you want to eat.   So it takes so long.
So they're an unusual case where they need fertility that lasts,
and that's really long-term and balanced.
And so we just weren't having luck
with these Brussels sprouts for years.
But we loved them, and we kept saying, "We've got to have these.
They're great for our market, and our customers
like them, and we like them."   So we kept trying.
Finally, we noticed in one little place
that we actually had a little row of Brussels sprouts.
By that time we had given up on planting fields of them;
we just planted one little row in the garden.
And lo and behold, it did well.
So we looked, of course, to say, "Well, why did this do well,
and it didn't do well in the fields?"
And we took soil tests, and we asked them to show us the trace elements;
you know, a huge range of the environment in the soil there.
And lo and behold, here's this thing called Boron that showed up in
that particular place -- that was higher than any
of our other soil tests showed the Boron was.
So we thought, well, we better look into this.
We looked at one of our university extension publications, and here,
embarrassingly, was this article saying,
"Your Brussels sprouts need Boron."   [ laughter ]
So we said, "Well, okay."   So we started the very next season.
It turns out that elemental Boron is perfectly acceptable
as an organic soil amendment, and it has something you can spray
on the plants as a full-year spray, and it was perfectly acceptable;
it just comes from nature.
You have to use it in tiny traces, really tiny;
imagine three pounds to the acre.
There are hundreds of thousands of tons of soil in an acre,
and you're putting three pounds of Boron.
We put the Boron on there; here we had a wonderful crop.
That was in 2000, we had a wonderful crop of Brussels sprouts,
and they responded to the Boron.
But I forgot the important aspect of it.
One of the things that happened, in addition to the sort
of gradual decline after we planted them each year --
the gradual decline in how healthy they looked --
was that they were getting attacked by all kinds of --
well, especially by aphids, actually;
a couple of different pests, but especially by aphids.
And the better we did, the better we thought we were doing on everything
but the Boron, the more the aphids came in.
And then we thought, well, how can we defeat the aphids?
We've got to try some technique to defeat the aphids.
And we tried some sprays that we were allowed to use,
and we even at some point excluded the aphids by covering
with this material we can use, but nothing seemed to work.
But when we put the Boron on there,
all of a sudden the Brussels sprout plants were a whole lot healthier;
all of a sudden, lo and behold, no aphids.
I just couldn't believe it.
All these years of trying to battle these aphids,
and the aphids disappeared
because the Brussels sprout plants were healthier,
and they needed the Boron.
Sam Fromartz: Well, I have -- go ahead.
I have a related story.   Jim Crawford: That's fine.
Sam Fromartz: I have a related story.
So, Brussels sprouts are Brassicas, right?
The Brassica family.   Jim Crawford: Yes.
Sam Fromartz: So I have another Brassica story.
I was out in the central coast of California, and I used strawberries
in my book to -- I just wanted to drill down on the organic method --
like, how is it different, organic and conventional.
And I decided to look at just one crop, and I looked at strawberries.
And the reason I picked strawberries is because they are one of the crops
that has the most pesticides applied of any crop.
Most fruit does.
Strawberries aren't unique; peaches have a lot,
apples have a lot as well.
But I wanted to look into strawberries.
And I had an ulterior motive, which is I love strawberries.
[ laughter ]
I had heard about this organic strawberry grower
out in the central coast of California who was one of the first,
if not the first, commercial grower of organic strawberries.
And he started around 1980, and at that time he was told
"You can't grow strawberries organically
in a commercial operation.   You will lose money.
You will not have fruit.   You will be a failure."
And in fact -- Jim Crawford: I've been told that, too.
Sam Fromartz: Yeah.
And the grower's name was Jim Cochran,
and the chemical companies actually --
when they heard that he was growing organically, they offered to come
out and spray pesticides for free on his fields.
And he refused.
He had a hard time, but he was pretty small.
And he was also growing other crops, because one of the problems
with strawberries especially is you can't grow them year after year
on the same soil if you're avoiding chemicals.
What they do in the traditional,
conventional strawberry industry is they use a substance called methyl
bromide, which is a neurotoxin actually;
tear gas is one of the components of it.
They suit up in these suits and gas masks
and they have these metal shanks on tractors that go down the field
and inject the gas in the soil off the front of the tractor.
And off the back of the tractor they have plastic that comes out
and covers the field so that the gas doesn't escape.
And what the gas does essentially is kill soil diseases as well as pests
and rodents and a lot of other things.
And once the soil is in this kind of semi sterile state,
then they can put in the strawberries
and they'll be free of these diseases.
Well, Jim Cochran, you know, didn't want to use that regime.
So he started growing organically, and was rotating with other crops.
And he found that his strawberries actually did really well
after he planted broccoli, and he didn't know why.
But if he followed broccoli with strawberries,
the strawberries seemed to avoid these soil diseases.
So he just did that rotation,
and it became a standard part of his growing regime.
So I looked into this, and this was around 1980.
Well, in the mid '90s a researcher, a soil scientist at the University
of California, Davis was looking into the use of broccoli.
And it was specifically due to diseases in cauliflower,
because cauliflower and broccoli are in the same family of plants.
They're also Brassicas, but for some reason the cauliflower was subject
to the soil disease, and the broccoli wasn't.
So he started looking at the broccoli --
well, what's going on with broccoli?
And what he found was that the roofs of the broccoli emit a substance
into the soil which feed a specific colony of soil bacteria.
And those soil bacteria actually consume the nodules of this fungus
in the soil, these soil diseases, and get rid of them.
And he was able to document this and prove it,
and broccoli became a pretty common rotation in central California
to avoid these soil diseases.
And it's now kind of a standard practice.
But Jim Cochran had kind of come up with it on his own,
and had put it into place.
So these are the kind of measures that organic growers will --
it's sort of practical knowledge.
It's not always -- there isn't a lot of research into organic methods.
Most of the USDA research budget, in fact --
the vast majority of it goes into conventional farming.
There's very little spent on organic research,
and so a lot of the methods
that have evolved have evolved among farmers themselves,
and then the knowledge spreading.
So that was pretty interesting to me.
And why don't you tell them about the wasps, too,
because that's kind of cool.
Jim Crawford: The wasps that we use in the --
Sam Fromartz: Yeah, the parasitic wasps.
Jim Crawford: Yeah.   Okay. Well, for pest control,
in several cases we use what we call biological pest control
beneficial insects.
And we can buy them and bring them in, actually,
in addition to the ones that we hope are encouraged
by just our natural environment there;
we actually can bring some in.
And one of the ones we do -- well, there are several, actually,
that are pretty interesting, I think.
But one of them is a tricogramar   [ spelled phonetically ]
wasp that Sam's referring to.
We bring it in -- oh, several thousand little eggs that come
on a little card that come from a thing called an insectory,
which is a place that produces insects.
We can buy them for $20 and bring them in once a week,
all summer long; put them out there,
and what they do is they parasitize the eggs of the European corn borer,
which is that worm that you see occasionally --
especially in organic corn -- down in the middle of the ear that's --
not the one at the tip of the ear; don't worry about that one.
You just flick that one off.
I'm talking about the one down in the ear that's really ugly
and makes a hole in there and stuff.
So the tricogramar wasp just naturally targets those eggs
of that species.
And so we release it, and it's been about 90 percent effective.
It's not 100 percent effective --
a lot of our solutions aren't 100 percent --
but it dramatically changes the picture.
So that's just one example.
There's another wasp that we release that's called Pidioveus favulotis
[ spelled phonetically ]
-- want to write that one down; we call them PDOs.
We can buy them also.
They come in and they parasitize the larval stage
of the Mexican bean beetle, which is a really common pest on beans.
You can watch them doing this; it's just great.
These little yellow worms that start eating our bean leaves gradually
turn golden brown and fall down on the ground,
and each successive planting of beans gets better and better
until you get to the Fall and there's no more bean beetles at all.
So, yeah, there's a lot of pest control we can do that way,
and sometimes it's dramatically successful.
In that particular case it's like --
I would say almost 100 percent successful.
By the time we get to the late summer it's really fantastic.
But of course it wouldn't work if we were using a lot
of pesticides around, because it would kill the ones we want to save.
Sam Fromartz: Okay.   You want to ask a question?
Jim Crawford: Yeah, I'd love to.
Sam's book talks a lot about the industry as a whole,
and this whole question of scale.
And big producers out west, for example,
are flooding the market with organic produce.
And many growers like us, smaller growers in the east,
are scared to death that these big companies
and corporate farms are going organic and they're going
to ruin our market and depress prices, and so on.
Sam, when you got into that, what was it like?
What do you think of us being paranoid about this?
Sam Fromartz: Well, it's smart to be paranoid.
It's a good business practice.   You know, it's interesting,
because up on Jim's farm he has an area that's the processing area.
You walk into this kind of barn-like structure, and it's just this kind
of tin shelf that has water running down it, and it has the water coming
out of the bottom, and they wash the vegetables there and they pack them
up into crates and get them ready for the market.
And they usually do this a day or two before market day,
which is why all the vegetables at the market are so fresh.
Well, when I was working on my book I went out to California,
which is -- everything, in produce at least,
is quite large in California.
And I visited with the largest organic produce company
in the nation.
And I went up to their plant that processes the bag salads
that you see in supermarkets.
And where Jim has a little shelf with running water
on his little stainless steel -- or whatever it is --
shelf, they've got a plant that's 205,000 square feet.
It's got 14 robotic processing lines for lettuce.
They harvest the lettuce in the field with a special machine,
and it's loaded directly into refrigerated tractor-trailer trucks.
These are the huge semis that you see on the highway.
Fifty to 60 of those show up at the plant every day full of lettuce.
And out the back end of the plant there's anywhere from 50
to 150 tractor-trailer trucks being loaded with lettuce,
and taking lettuce around the country.
So it was quite stunning to see the contrast in this operation.
And actually, in lettuce, what I did find was that --
and the reason I looked into the lettuce story in my book was --
we actually travel to California together;
it was kind of a coincidence, but we were going out there together.
And we were going out at the same time, and I said, "Jim,
let's go visit some farms together."
So we actually went up to a small farm -- actually not that small;
a few hundred acres about an hour north of Berkeley.
Full Belly Farm; great organic farm.
They sell in farmers markets in San Francisco.
The people involved in that farm are sort
of the seminal California organic farmers.
And when we were both having dinner one night with one of the partners
that day we were there, he said, "You know, you should look
into lettuce," because what happened there was just a disaster.
What Earthbound -- what this large company did was predatory,
and drove a lot of guys out of the business.
And so what I did when I visited Earthbound was found
that a degree of that story was true.
There was a pretty vibrant wholesale market of growers
that were selling salad mix -- not only in California, but shipping it
around the country -- and what I sort of quickly realized
about California agriculture and agriculture in general is
that whenever a crop succeeds, somebody will recognize
that there's a high value crop, and they'll come in and try
and drop their costs of production so that they get
and make a bigger profit.
And eventually there's competition, and the price keeps dropping,
which is why on many food products we see such low prices.
And that's certainly happened in organic salad mix,
which is those bagged salads in the store.
And the price of that product for the farmer --
the farmers were initially getting around, I think it was $7 a pound,
and by the time the whole process was done, which took about 10 years
and a pretty big industrialization of that one product,
the price they were getting was 80 cents a pound.
So the only way they could afford to make a living was really to do it
on a much larger scale, and figure out the economics
to make it work at 80 cents a pound.
Now, the interesting thing about that is that's only
in the large, processed market.
That's only in the market that's feeding supermarkets.
If you go to the San Francisco or Berkeley farmer's market,
you'll see salad mix on sale in bins as you do in any farmer's market,
and it goes for about $5 a pound.
So those farmers are actually making quite a good deal more money
than the people in the wholesale channel.
And also, at $5 a pound they're actually undercutting the price
in the supermarket, because those bins of salad generally go
for about $7 a pound in the supermarket; it's a washed product.
So the smaller growers have found a way to survive,
but they're never going to compete in the wholesale channel
against an Earthbound type of farm.
And so what I have said is I sort of see the market, the organic market,
growing in two different directions; one is into supermarkets
with much larger scale companies feeding that channel,
and then also it's growing at the lower end in terms
of farmer's markets, direct sales,
cooperatives like the one Jim's involved in at Tuscarora,
that sells produce largely to restaurants
and co-op supermarkets in this region.
And so it's kind of growing in two areas,
and they're pretty different markets.
Just because salad mix is available at Whole Foods doesn't mean
that someone isn't going to buy either Jim's heads of lettuce
or some of the salad mix he sells in the winter from some other growers.
But, you know, the organic market as a whole has been growing
about 20 percent a year, and the co-op that Jim's been involved
in has been growing about the same rate.
So to me that says there's different customers
who are buying these products in different venues,
and right now there's room for both.
But I don't know, is that too optimistic in your opinion?
Jim Crawford: No, I'm pretty optimistic myself.
And Sam's right that, first of all,
the direct marketing is a really big advantage for growers like us.
We've always done it, and so in other words,
we get the final retail price.
So we don't have to put up with those rock bottom wholesale prices.
So that's a big issue, and there are a lot of smaller growers like us
that know this and do this.
But I think that even a bigger factor is that, you know,
one bag of salad mix is not the same as every other bag of salad mix.
You know, wheat is wheat, cotton is cotton,
but one tomato is not the same as the next tomato.
You know that because you eat them,
and so that in my opinion is what's going to save us.
It's a formidable problem.
I mean, the scale thing is a huge deal.
And as Sam says, I mean, they're out there figuring out all kinds of ways
to do it cheaper and price it cheaper and get it out here cheaper.
You can go to -- not necessarily Whole Foods, but some places --
and find it cheaper, like Wal-Mart, maybe.
But that tomato in there is not necessarily the same
as the tomato I got at my farmer's market.
And I'm going to hopefully demonstrate
that to you and get you to try it.
And when you taste the difference, then you'll know
that it's worth a few more cents.
So I'm pretty optimistic about that, because I think, really,
that consumers are really waking up to this difference,
and that one tomato is not the same as the next,
and are really supporting not just organic food --
in fact, maybe not as much organic food, but especially local food.
In our case it's both local and organic,
but consumers are really aware
that produce can be drastically different;
the flavor can be drastically different.
The freshness is always different if it's coming
from 100 miles away instead of 3,000;
the freshness is always better.
So that, I think, is what is going to save us;
is the consumer's perception of quality, in a sense.
Sam Fromartz: Right.
Right. Yeah, that lettuce, actually, in the bag --
it's going to be a minimum of seven days before it reaches the
supermarket shelf, from the time it's processed in the field.
And it only really has a 14-day life.
And so Jim's, I guess, are two days old when they get to market.
You know, that said, though -- and not to diss local growers,
but local growers have to do it right, too.
If you cut your lettuce in the field
and you don't refrigerate it right away, or you ship it in the back
of a hot truck, it's going to be a pretty bad product
by the time it gets to market.
So, local growers have had to really step up to the plate
and get their methods down.
And once they do, they definitely do have an advantage.
The strawberry grower I was talking about in California,
his strawberries are known all over the central coast and Bay Area.
Jim Crawford: Near where he produces it?
Sam Fromartz: Near where he produces them.
And he sells in Whole Foods markets out there,
but he will not ship his strawberries,
because they don't ship.
They have to be eaten within three days of being picked.
He delivers them to Whole Food stores.
They're picked in the morning, and he delivers them
that day directly to the stores.
So he can do that, but that's why I had to fly 3,000 miles
to try his strawberries; they weren't going to fly here to me.
[ laughter ]
And we actually both ate them right in the field.
Jim Crawford: Yeah.
I just love the fact that Sam got my foot
in the door of meeting that guy.
And he's really a terrific guy, and seeing that farm --
and his strawberries are fantastic, of course.
They're just delicious, and a lot like the ones we grow.
[ laughter ]
But I was just fascinated by the fact that you look around his place,
and, well, a couple of miles away, like Castroville and that area
by the central California coast there --
if you've ever been out there, it is incredible.
As far as the eye can see, these white plastic things
that have these strawberry plants growing on them,
with these strawberries hanging down off of them, by the miles and miles
and miles; all these totally chemicalized strawberries
that are just sprayed to death.
I mean, you see the sprayers out there, and the spray people
in their space suits to protect themselves from it,
and here's this guy right in the middle -- not literal; I mean,
it's like -- Sam Fromartz: No, he's north.
Jim Crawford: Couple of miles.   Sam Fromartz: He's north.
He's from Santa Cruz, right on the coast.
Jim Crawford: Yeah.
Which helps him, but there's only a few miles.
And these horrible white plastic things are all going
to the East coast, and they're all winding up in the store,
and they're tasting like you know what, because you've had them, too.
They just don't taste like anything out there in the stores
in the East coast, and his are going to the Berkeley farmer's market.
And I was at the Berkley farmer's market the next day,
and his strawberries were right there, and they were just
as wonderful as they were on his farm,
because they'd only traveled a couple of hours.
So it just goes to show you that California doesn't have to ship;
you know, it can still be local.   [ end of transcript ]