Go Green

A tour with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture visits Sunrise Acres, an organic farm run by two retirees in Newcastle.

By John Sutter

There’s a movement passing across dinner tables in Oklahoma. Local foods appear to be coming back in a big way.

The number of farmers markets in the state has grown 75 percent — to 49 — in the past year. Sales at the online Oklahoma Food Cooperative are up 70 percent over those in 2007, with $65,000 worth of Oklahoma food sold each month to subscribers. (disclosure: my household has a membership to the coop)

The reason for the changes are many. Some people are concerned about health scares associated with industrially produced foods. Some worry about growth hormones and antibiotics fed to cattle and chickens, or the humaneness of feedlots and confined animal feeding operations. Still others are concerned about the greenhouse gases emitted when food is trucked across the country and flown around the world to the dinner table.

Behind those arguments, though, is an overwhelming sense that society lost something when people started buying food from fluorescent-lit shelves instead of from their neighbors. What’s missing is a connection with the land and with people who still work with it, advocates of local foods, or “locavores” say.

That connection inherently involves people — farmers who consumers trust with their food, their values and their health.

Plus, there are the kooky stories. Food that comes from someone you’ve met has a story. Oklahoma seems to have plenty of them.

To learn some of them, I went on a tour of six Oklahoma farms with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The non-profit group, which pushes for alternative and environmentally friendly farming methods, hosted the tour of part of an annual conference in Oklahoma.

On the bus with me were a number of types of people who were interested in local foods. There were would-be urban gardeners who just wanted tips for their tomatoes. There were traditional farmers interested in trying something new. There were farmers market coordinators and agriculture scientists. And there were a few local food pioneers — people like Cathie Greene, who requires that her customers visit her farm in far eastern Oklahoma (Wild Things Farm, in Pocola) so that they can see her methods and trust that she’s growing vegetables without chemicals and only sprays her strawberries sparsely with fungicide.

We started the morning at Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City, where one of the city’s busiest farmers markets is held (find a full list of farmers markets in the state here).

Then we went on to meet an angry sailor who grows peaches, a goofy retiree who attacks shoulder-high weeds with a shovel, and a bison rancher who wears suspenders with t-shirts.

Meet these farmers and some others below, and be sure to check out their videos. (The one of the peach farmer is YouTube-worthy, even unedited.)

Old School Revolution

Robert Stelle and his wife Barbara have retired from their desk jobs — but don’t look for them to be resting any time soon.The couple spends many waking hours pulling weeds and picking crops from their small organic farm — Sunrise Acres — in Newcastle.Robert Stelle, with his conductor-style overalls and scraggly beard, exemplifies an interesting point about local food: it’s not new. While the “locavore” movement has caught on recent years, it’s really more of a throw-back to old times than a push for innovation.People on the tour marveled at Robert Stelle’s old-school farming tools, for example.The 61-year-old cut a triangle out of the tip of a shovel to attack the big weeds that grow in his vegetable gardens, since he doesn’t use chemicals to keep them down. And he constructed a rolling cart with a seat welded to the top so he could sit down while pulling weeds out of the ground by hand. He uses his feet to push himself back between rows of pepper and okra plants.

In a greenhouse, Stelle joked with the group about how he hasn’t had time to tidy up lately.

“It’s a rainy day job to clean this up, and it hasn’t rained in 40 days,” he said.

He said that the “canned generation,” which grew up eating food straight out of cans, is yearning for a connection with whole foods that have an origin you can explain.

Loud mouth peaches

In Blanchard, there’s a former sailor — covered in tattoos and has a mouth as filthy as Ludacris’ — who raises peaches on Sailor Orchard.Robert Mearkle, 63, yells at his peach trees like he would a Navy enlistee. He gets red in the face and flaps his hands around with limp wrists, as if mocking the plants that produce what he says are the best peaches in the state.Last year, it rained so much that his peaches were watery instead of sweet. That ticked off the irascible Mearkle so much that he took a chainsaw to 200 of his trees. There’s a big patch of mowed grass behind his house where an orchard used to be.

He teases customers relentlessly. Once he falsely told a group of older women that his watering system was actually controlled by a computer that kept all the bugs away.

They seem to come back for his juicy fruits again and again. He doesn’t put a sign out in front of his house, but people just seem to search him out, he said, mostly because the taste of fresh-picked fruit is so much different than the “cardboard” sold in grocery stores.

Mearkle seems mostly to be selling the flavor of his juicy fruit. That, and the entertainment he provides on even a short visit.

Buffalo with personality

 

The tour stopped for lunch at the Wichita Buffalo Company in Hinton. There, James Stepp, 56, and family served bison burgers, bison hot dogs and Oklahoma-grown watermelon, which was the sweetest I had ever tasted.

Over the lunch, he made a pitch for the other tour attendees to take up bison ranching. Mainly, he’s concerned with the healthiness of local food.

Bison meat is lean (it is a quarter of the fat of choice beef and a third of the fat of chicken, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture), and therefore is good for the overweight and the health conscious, he said.

Stepp, a short man who looks a bit like Alfred E. Neuman and was wearing a faded green t-shirt with suspenders with jeans, showed photos of his animals. He’s given them names — Pedro and Sally were the first bison he bought, in 1997 — and says he knows their personalities.

All of this plays into his marketing strategy in that it helps his customers feel connected to the animals they’re eating.

 

 

“It’s what we sell,” he said. “We sell that story and we tell it over and over and over again.”

No-hormone cheese

 

 

One of the final stops was at Christian Cheese, which is operated by George Christian in Kingfisher.

Christian doesn’t use hormones, preservatives or antibiotics in his cheeses, for those who worry about what effects those may have on people. All of the cheeses are made in a tin-roof building with doors you have to duck through and outside walls that are painted to look like a cow.

We stopped here for just a short while. Other tour members tasted the cheeses, I spend some time admiring just how many kinds he produces. Entire walls of a back room are lined with bricks and bricks of the stuff — all different colors and textures. (It also didn’t hurt that this “cold room” was a nice relief from a 100-degree day).

Check out their Web site for some family heirloom cheese recipes.

At the table

All of these stories come together on the dinner table.

According to local food proponents, eating a meal that’s grown and raised by people you know is a unique and reassuring experience.

“While the environmental benefits are important, I think the most important (benefits) are the personal satisfaction of just having a dinner table that represents a lot of friends and family and neighbors and farms,” said Doug Walton, community foods coordinator with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture, a non-profit advocacy group. “It totally changes the whole proposition of food … it’s not just for the body, it’s for the heart and soul.”

That sounds all well and good, but for the average person it may not be possible — at least not all of the time. Some critics say local foods are too expensive for the poor. Others contend that all the cooking and shopping and thinking that has to go into an all-local diet doesn’t jive with our fast-paces lives.

Walton told me he doesn’t think local and alternatively farmed foods should take over the market. They have a niche, and that niche is growing, he said.

This was particularly evident as I left the tour. Our bus pulled into a parking lot in downtown Oklahoma City, and as everyone got off, I heard two of the tour’s leaders (Chris Kirby, director of the Farm to School program for the state Department of Agriculture, and Steve Upson, an ag consultant at the Noble Foundation) talking about how they wanted to grab something to eat.

It was 8 o’clock in the evening.

They said they wanted something quick.

Maybe … fast food?

[I don’t point that out to be critical so much as I thought it was an interesting illustration of a challenge facing the current sustainable food system.]