Thoughts from the dirt – a day at Miller Farms

Posted by dtpennington in Blog, Food, Grow, Life | 1 comment

I grab the tops of the carrots and pull up green. No orange, no carrot. Just the green tops. The vegetable I’m after is still entombed in the dry, sandy soil below. After dropping to my knees I start to dig through the dirt with my bare hands, my fingers attempting to gain a grip on the vegetable. A sharp pain hits me, I yank my hand back. In the frenzy to get the single, elusive carrot, I managed to slice my thumb open. Blood poured from the wound, working its way around the incisive element – a sliver of carrot.

Spilling blood while trying to obtain food is a rather sobering experience. My jeans and shoes are a kind of dirty I haven’t seen in years. In a way, I like it.

Well, I like the idea of it, seeing how my experience at the Miller Farm harvest ride is far from the real thing. What I’m expereincing is merely a tourist activity. An hourish ride north and east of Denver puts me on 80 or so acres of farmland. Some of the area has been left for parking and the farm stand, a few child-oriented attractions, and the homes and bunkhouses for those who own and work the farm. On the weekends farm tourists like myself pay $15 for the ride and walk away with as much produce as we could pull out of the ground and pack into a Radio Flyer.

If I had known, I would have brought gloves and maybe a hand tool. We may be leaving here with upwards of 80 pounds of food stuffed into flimsy grocery sacks. Not a bad deal for fifteen bucks, until you add the cost of marred hands, patches of skin that mysteriously itch, and sunburn.

Then again, that’s what it is to obtain food.

We are hauled around the field in a trailer pulled by a John Deere. Every few hundred yards the farm worker at the wheel (migrant, here for the season) stops and we pile out into the fresh patch of vegetables. The veterans, armed with gloves, get right to it and pull up onions the size of their head and potatoes from the freshly tilled soil. Ears of corn and heads of cabbage are twisted from their root. Over there, pumpkins and honeydew grow even though it looks like most of them have fallen from the vine, been kicked open and mangled by the local wildlife.

And the carrots. Those infernal carrots. Eventually I learn that they are best harvested from the side, not the top, and they start coming up from the ground by the fistful. Within the square foot patch I work, there have to be forty or fifty bright orange roots in the ground. They’re nothing like the novelty carrots we grew in our home garden – the ones we meticulously thinned per instructions on the internet and were pulled a week too early. Sure, they were pretty and brightly colored, but were definitely the dainty poodle of the carrot family. You best have a great story to back up why you have them.

None of this, probably, is organically grown. I’m sure the nitrogen based fertilizers and pesticides in the soil are welcoming themselves to my bloodstream through the slice in my finger. A truckload of migrant workers goes by, I’m certain they are all very amused at the stupid tourist who bleeds for carrots. The silly man who bled for what would retail as maybe a dime worth of produce.

***

I will endlessly preach about the benefits of urban farming and organic growing practices. What’s not to love? Food, grown by you, right out your back door. Since it is so local you start to think about what you’re putting in the soil, on the plants, what you’re using to control pests. I believe smart, small scale agriculture can go a long way to developing great communities and building awesome relationships with those you garden with and garden for, as well as those who eat what you grow. I think farms are pretty much the opposite of that. Homes and bunkhouses separated by fields of productive crop.

Then again, we’ve got a lot of people to feed. For now, this is the only way we can think to feed all of them. Pack as much as possible into as little space as possible and see how big you can grow it.

I think back early in the season when we were growing more lettuce and arugula than we knew what to do with. We ate pounds of it for dinner and salads became our primary meal. So much lettuce! I grew sick of it. We gave it away every chance we could and after a few weeks we still ended up having to release some of the harvest to the compost bin. I would love to say that I grow absolutely everything I eat, but that’s really not possible on the space I have or in the climate that I’m in. All I can hope for is a happy little reduction in what we spend at the grocer.

For years I have driven up and down the length of highway 85 – near where Miller Farms is located – between Denver and my alma mater in Greeley, Colorado. Although Greeley was a very agrarain town, I never got much of the agriculture except 1) when I drove around the enormous tractors and trucks full of food and 2) when the wonderous odors of the Swift meat processing plant (a gnarly cattle feed lot) wafted over the town, giving Greeley it’s iconic smell. Farms like Miller’s, and all of the farms surrounding it, had the responsibility of feeding a lot of people. And not just the ones who arrived that weekend to pick their own goods, but also those who only know the food in their grocery or restaurants.

Farms like this, growing in this way, and all I can think of is how much of the food is going to eventually wind up wasted. An entire family hauls back hundreds of pounds of food to their van, and I can’ t help but wonder if they have any idea how to make it last. I think about the food we bring home and wonder if there’s a way for two people to eat 20 pounds of onions (seriously, they’re huge) before they go bad. In the field there was produce that was stepped on, pulled from the ground prematurely, dropped and forgotten. I think about what will eventually fall off the truck and onto the highway, or will spoil in all of the time between harvest and consumption.

Farms like these do what they do because they can’t figure any other way to get food to people. When it’s out here, not even 100 miles from the city, it still seems far removed. Why should we be growing closer to home? Of all things, to gain an understanding of how delicate food actually is. Maybe we would only then harvest when we are ready to eat it, instead of bringing home a month’s worth of food and hope that it will be eaten before it spoils.

For what it’s worth, the Miller Farm is definitely worth the car ride and $15. Bring gloves and sun screen and have some good recipies in mind for what you’d like to do with your haul. When you’re on your knees in the field, your eyes get exponentially larger than your stomach (and, possibly, however big your car is).

 

 

 

 

 

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