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Staff Photo by Dave Roback Michael Docter of The Next Barn Over Farm in Hadley with a selection of winter vegetables.
(Dave Roback)
The newest incarnation of the small farm may be the CSA, Community Supported Agriculture.
That's a fancy name for a concept that is fairly simple: Like-minded eaters join together to buy shares in a season's bounty at a farm. It spreads the risk. Many are organic certified; others advertise as "chemical free." In general, the produce is beautiful and nutritious. Some years are lean. Others are plentiful.
The first CSAs germinated in Japan and Europe, and came to the United States in 1984 with farms in New Hampshire and Great Barrington. It's hard to know how many CSAs there are across the United States, but the Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture's website lists 48 within Western Massachusetts.
Started by Michael Docter in 1992, the Food Bank Farm in Hadley was one of the first to combine the concept of the CSA with the mission to feed the hungry. I became a member in the late 1990s, splitting a weekly share with a friend.
(You can find a listed of participating area farms at http://www.farmfresh.org/food/csa.php?zip=01002
One sunny afternoon at the farm's Bay Road parcel overlooking the Holyoke range, I ran into Max Page. We might have been picking flowers. Page said something iconic. These are not his exact words but they're close: There's nothing about being here that doesn't make me happy.
Each time I go to my "new" farm, which is an offshoot of the Food Bank Farm, I think of his sentiment and smile. The Next Barn Over, which is headquartered around the corner on Lawrence Plain Road, carries on many of the traditions of its older sibling.
Once while in the share room at the Food Bank Farm, I was stopped in my tracks by mesmerizing guitar rhythms. I had to ask Sherry McKeon at the cash register to check the title of the compact disc that was playing.
The next autumn at the first season of the Next Barn Over, I had the same experience. At that point, I bought the CD, "Gypsy Fire," an anthology of Flamenco-inspired music produced by Narada World.
Different CSAs have different vibes and different methods of dividing the produce: Some go by weight; others go by cost; mine goes by volume. In the past couple of years, the farm has sold $6 custom-designed canvas bags, with lines on the side as measuring cups.
This year has been unusually bountiful. A week's recent share included salad greens, spinach, cooking greens, head lettuce, garlic, butternut squash and cabbage, along with the option to mix-and-match eggplant, peppers, carrots, beets, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, carnival squash, kohlrabi, sweet potatoes and turnips. Just outside the barn, there is unlimited picking of herbs and flowers.
Salad greens might include arugula, baby lettuces, baby dandelion greens, baby bok choy, mizuna, baby red Russian kale or tot soi. Cooking or braising greens, which benefit from steaming or a saute with olive oil and garlic, include kale, collards, Swiss chard and bull's blood, a burgundy colored beet green similar to chard.
During the height of the summer there are melons. Early-on there are strawberries. Cherry tomatoes this year were available in the picking garden from mid-August all the way until the second week of October, when the staff finally had time to take down the stakes.
Sometimes it's challenging to figure out how to use all of the edible colors in my share. I've figured out one way to make them disappear: Entertain. Ratatouille cooks down a lot of vegetables quickly. Sometimes I add salad greens to tomato sauce or load just about everything I've got into a fresh batch of chicken cacciatore.
Many CSAs have winter shares, including Enterprise Farm in Whately. I've decided to join that one. Its winter share is a half-bushel box of produce per week from the first week of December through May.
Enterprise delivers to in-town sites, including Sam's Pizza in Northampton, but I've chosen to take delivery at the farm on River Road because it's likely to give me a bit of choice. Still, I'm not sure what I'll do with all of that cabbage.
Not all of my winter share will be locally grown root vegetables. Enterprise is part of a network of organic farms that runs all the way down the Eastern Seaboard, so there will also be fruit.
This winter I'll miss my weekly jaunts for flowers, but I'm looking forward to finding organic oranges and grapefruit in my box.
Jane Kaufman can be reached at jkaufman@repub.com