Author: Brooke Lucy

by Ashley Lodato, Bluebird Grain Farms staff writer

photos courtesy of Alyssa Jumars and Red Shed

Miles Griffin of Posterity Farm

It doesn’t always happen, but when demand and supply are aligned, it’s a collective win.

When the COVID crisis hit the United States, several things happened simultaneously in Methow Valley food systems. First, The Cove, the Methow Valley’s food bank, experienced a surge in requests for food assistance, many from people recently laid off. Second, with farmers markets and restaurants closed, as the growing season waxed, food surpluses from farmers and growers began to accumulate. Third, the Methow Conservancy established an online portal where food producers could sell items that they would normally be selling at the local farmers market.

It was the fourth thing, however, where demand, supply, and system converged. Longtime valley resident and board member Gordy Reynaud, along with his wife Adrian Chavey, asked the Methow Conservancy about making a monthly donation that would allow a low-income Methow Valley family to shop through the online farmers market channel. And suddenly the idea took shape: pairing local households in need with fresh foods grown on Methow Valley farms.

Lazo Gitchos of Red Shed delivering carrots to The Cove

Within a few short weeks, the Methow Conservancy’s Farms to Neighbors program launched, in partnership with The Cove and sponsored by donors who were invested in helping Methow Valley families in need access fresh foods, as well as supporting the local farming and growing community. Alyssa Jumars, the Methow Conservancy’s Agricultural Coordinator, says “The idea was to invite donors to contribute to this fund, and then find a few farmers and buy what they had to spare, and distribute this surplus through The Cove to its clients. We thought we might get enough donations to work with a couple of farms for four to six weeks.”

Amy Wu, Rest Awhile Fruit, provided six hundred pounds of tree-ripened peaches

To everyone’s delight, the program was popular for all involved: donors, farmers and growers, and recipient families. “We ended up purchasing more than 6000 pounds of food from a dozen farms over the course of twelve weeks and distributing it to families throughout the valley,” Jumars says.

“Growers whose normal market channels had been disrupted–restaurant orders were cancelled, farmers markets were cancelled–had a means of selling their crops,” Jumars continues. “We’d buy from these farmers and they’d deliver straight to The Cove on Thursdays, when The Cove is open for people to come get food.”

The harvest bounty couldn’t have come at a better time. The Cove usually serves about 40-50 Methow Valley families each week, but with COVID-related unemployment that number surged to 60-70 families. And while some food banks are able to access only unsaleable surplus or #2 quality produce, with bruises or blemishes, the Farms to Neighbors program prioritized top quality produce. “It was really important to everyone involved in the program to give families produce that was every bit as beautiful as what you’d find at farmers markets,” says Jumars. “The farmers and growers appreciated being able to give their best products to families in need.”

Jumars worked with The Cove to learn what food types would be most useful each week, and sourced those items from the participating farms: Bluebird Grain Farms, the Channing Family Farm, Hoodoo Blooms Farm, The King’s Garden, Posterity Farm, Rest Awhile Farms, the Red Shed, Ruby Slippers Farm, Sunny Pine Farm, Twisp River Organic Apples, Wild Plum Farm, and Willow Brook Farm. “We all learned together,” Jumar says of figuring out the details of the Farms to Neighbors program.

Emmer flour has a sweet flavor with caramel undertones

Pancakes were a definitive favorite for Cove customers, and Bluebird’s Organic Emmer Pancake & Waffle Mix satisfied that hotcake craving. Not your mainstream spongy tasteless disks, Bluebird’s emmer pancakes and waffles melt in your mouth with the sweet nutty flavor of freshly milled emmer farro. High in protein, fiber, and B vitamins, the pancake mix is a great source of energy and nutrition for all ages.

Glen Schmekel, the Executive Director of The Cove, says that the Farms to Neighbors program was “A wonderful gift from the Conservancy to the food bank.” He continues, “We were able to give a full bag of fresh fruits, vegetables, and grains to each family every week during the season. Sometimes each bag was 20#.”

Schmekel acknowledges the donors that made the program possible. “What a fantastic idea,” he says. “It helped everybody.”

Farms to Neighbors was a pilot program for 2020 and its future in the next growing season is uncertain. But the 6,000 pounds, bunches, bags, and cartons of locally-grown peaches, apples, pears, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, green beans, carrots, beets, cabbages, potatoes, onions, garlic, leeks, leafy greens, goat cheese, free-range eggs, and pancake mix distributed to hundreds of community members are a testament to the Methow Valley’s commitment to its farmlands, its growers, and its people. When a need arises, the Methow Valley finds a way to fill it.

by Ashley Lodato

Bluebird Grain Farms staff writer

photos courtesy of Amy Halloran

Food activist Amy Halloran has a story to tell–many of them, in fact. When Halloran was a little girl, she learned that the easiest way to connect with her father was to tell him a story when he got home from work. “It was a super strong urge,” Halloran says. “I was always very conversational,” she continues. “It’s just the way I am. I had this incredible need to connect. My family says that when I was young I would go up to anyone and make a connection with them. If we were in the grocery store and I noticed them putting something in their cart, I’d say to them, ‘We get Sugar Pops too!'”

It was always the people who interested her, Halloran says, even as her career took her into fine dining and foodie-ism. “I made no pretenses about it,” she says of the potentially pretentious food genres. “I wanted to tell the stories of food through people.”

Halloran’s training in fiction writing served her well as she began to write profiles, “trying to catch the details of peoples’ work that would bring readers into the farm or into the creamery.” As the stories of people responsible for food production and preparation evolved, so did Halloran’s perspective. “Along the way I got interested in how we got here,” she says, of the United States’ largely industrialized food systems. “I felt compelled to tell the stories of food — not in mouthwatering words, but in the details that most of us can’t imagine. We live removed from the realities of farming. I want to illustrate the work it takes to eat.”

A self-proclaimed “Irish Catholic Polish mutt” whose family spirit is “kneejerk underdog,” Halloran’s scrappy approach led her down a path of discovery through on-the-ground experience. “I always knew I was going to be a writer and had an interest in food,” Halloran says, “but I knew that writing was not a great moneymaker.”Instead, Halloran says, she asked herself what other jobs she might do. Her local co-op newsletter posted a Farmers Market manager position and Halloran applied, successfully.

“That job really set my compass,” Halloran says. “It really made me see that I knew nothing about food production. It was this amazing revelation–all the prejudices I’d been given growing up in the USA, like ‘farmers are dumb,’ even though the farm kids were sitting right beside me in Honors Math class.” The job “laid out the greater job of discovery that I had to do,” she says. “I felt like I had to make amends. I was working for these farmers and I didn’t know anything about food systems. I realized that I was the dumb one in this game.”

Halloran gave up the Farmers Market position after three years to raise her children, but she never stopped telling the story of food. “How does change in food systems happen?” she asks persistently. Unwilling to subscribe to the tidy theory that “everything in food went wrong after World War II,” Halloran notes that “we don’t look backwards to the many ways that factories began to be applied to agriculture.” Halloran says she wants to “get up and close to our food systems, to take any given moment and frame it in historical context.”

One silver lining of the global pandemic, Halloran acknowledges, may be that consumers will form new habits. Early in the pandemic, store shelves were void of flour, and social media posts were rife with the home baking that was rampant in what seemed to be every American kitchen. “It’s been amazing to watch,” Halloran says. “Years ago I asked, ‘how are we giving away so much ability to cook for and feed ourselves?'”

Halloran remembers looking in 1985 King Arthur Flour catalogs and seeing mix after mix. “For years that’s been the market category,” she says. “People thought baking was too hard.” Now, though, Halloran hopes, “people are getting comfortable with flour and baking. ‘This is something I can do once a week,'” she imagines them thinking.

For Halloran, pancakes were the gateway to cooking from scratch; she writes about her love affair with pancakes in her book about regional grain production, The New Bread Basket. “Anyone can make a pancake,” she says.

But somehow we lost touch with our ability to take the things that come from the ground and turn them into food. “We need to engage with food for the transformative thing it is,” Halloran says. “We need to get people back into understanding agriculture and how food systems work.” Halloran advocates for regional processing facilities so that “farmers can have direct access to consumers in their communities or bio-regions.”

We need more middle men, Halloran argues: “distributors who are focusing on local food.” If we “give farmers the ability to sell into local markets at reasonable prices,” she says, “we have a transformative capacity to heal soil, create jobs in communities, engage with food, and get people back into agriculture and food processing.” If we moved food systems closer to communities, it would go a long way “toward renewing care for the earth and for each other,” she contends.

“I feel like [the pandemic] is opening up the raw underbelly of our food systems,” Halloran says. “There’s so much opportunity for change.”

Halloran suggests that the only way for us to “get over the despair of the pandemic is to believe that we are going to have to create change.” Progressive change happens through conversation, she says. “Conversation is an accelerant of change.”

If we put health at the forefront instead of economics, Halloran continues, “we could effect change from field to food bank, with everyone at the table, with good wages and good health.”

Halloran’s activism in food systems and local grain movements takes several forms. She writes: LETTERS TO A YOUNG FARMER,  THE NEW FOOD ECONOMY, and CIVIL EATS.

She teaches writing classes at farming and food conferences, “focusing on marketing for farms and food enterprises,” as well as teaching at the Troy Public Library and other community sites, often weaving together history and personal experiences. She also teaches whole grain and sourdough baking classes, helping familiarize people with stone ground flours for quick breads, griddle cakes, and everyday loaves. And Halloran runs a community meals program and food pantry at Unity House, a human services agency. “We collect and redistribute groceries from America’s over-productive food system, and make meals to share in our dining room,” she says. “While my writing and cooking may seem very different, I think they share the problem that we don’t value food and feeding, farming and the environment. I want to change that, through conversations and stories.”

Creating sweeping change may seem daunting to the average person, but Halloran offers simple suggestions for becoming more engaged with food systems. Predictably, her first suggestion involves pancakes. “It’s the lowest bar,” she says. “Make pancakes with local flour. Everyone can make a pancake, right? Just find some local flour and make pancakes. Local flour will become more and more accessible as demand grows and people access their local channels for grains.” If making pancakes fully from scratch is daunting, try a local blend like Bluebird Grain Farms’ Organic Emmer Pancake & Waffle Mix.

Halloran calls grain mills “levers that farmers need to get new grains in the ground,” noting that at the turn of the 20th century, every small town had a mill, whereas currently there are only 169 USDA certified mills in the USA. “When consumers support small mills, they are participating in a revolutionary model for farmers.”

“Get a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) if you can afford it,” Halloran offers as another suggestion. “If you can’t do that, when you buy an apple at the grocery store, try to learn where it came from.” Is it a regional Honey Crisp or Jonagold? Or is it a Fuji from Japan? “Get curious about one food type,” Halloran says. “Learn how that food gets from the field to us. Challenge yourself with your food literacy.”

Halloran offers two other suggestions for those interested in increasing their food literacy:

1. Check out Soul Fire Farm as a leader in the work of ending racism and injustice in food systems. “Following them is an incredible education,” Halloran says.
2. Follow Ricardo Salvador of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Salvador “works with citizens, scientists, economists, and politicians to transition our current food system into one that grows healthy foods while employing sustainable and socially equitable practices.” Salvador makes complex food systems considerations accessible to laypeople, with podcast episodes like “The Broccoli Backstory” and “Science Advocacy,” which stresses the importance of evidence-based research in U.S. food policy.
   

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To learn more about Amy Halloran and her mission to improve food systems, visit Civil Eats and Amy Halloran. And don’t miss Amy stalking the perfect pancake!

Hi, my name is Frances, I am a senior in high school, and I was an intern at Bluebird Farms this July. I am interested in plant sciences and sustainable food systems and am very inspired by the work the Bluebird Farms does.

I definitely learned a lot over the two weeks, from soil health and weed control to marketing and branding. The one thing that really stood out to me was the importance of buying organic grains. I knew that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are harmful, but I never considered how much of an issue it actually is. While I was in the fields with Sam, he told me that conventional grain farms not only use herbicides to control weeds, they also use them to kill the grain plants for when they want to harvest them. Then from the moment that that herbicide is sprayed on the grain to the moment, it is scooped into the bag as flour, it never gets washed. That means that when you are eating conventional flour, you are also directly eating the herbicide. Not only is it bad for the people eating the flour, but for all the wildlife that surrounds the fields as well. In contrast, all the grain grown in Bluebird’s fields is cured in the field. You can very easily see how these methods are better for the surrounding wildlife because ladybugs happily hang out in the grain. Hearing that really made me understand the profound benefits of buying organic products and supporting organic agriculture.

I also experienced firsthand all the processing, packing, and marketing of the grain. Just growing good crops isn’t enough. They have to do every step themselves to maintain the integrity in what they do because of the systematic barriers that organic farming faces. They work incredibly hard to do right for the world and I am so grateful that they do. Besides, the grain is fantastic. I baked peach thumbprint cookies with the Einka flour, and let me tell you, they were delicious!

I want to thank everyone for working at Bluebird for being so kind, welcoming, and willing to show me around. I had a fantastic time with them, and I want to thank you all for supporting a farm that is dedicated to keeping not only us but our surroundings healthy.

Frances