Our CSA experience - visit to the farm

Freedom Organix - vegetable patch

A couple of weeks ago we visited our CSA farm, FreedomOrganix. The farm is located right out of Harvard, so for us it is about a 40 minutes drive from home. Harvard is still a very rural town where farming is the biggest source of income. Judging by the look of the downtown it probably saw better days and the recession must be hitting it pretty hard. It is also known for its "Milk days" a festival that honors the fact that dairy farming is big in the area. In fact we passed by a Dean's milk plant, but we didn't see too many cows around, a testimony to the fact that the cows are probably mostly kept indoors in big plant-like facilities. What we do see is field after field of corn and soy, each one with their little sign specifying that those fields are planted with such and such genetically modified kind of seed whose patent therefore belongs to such and such firm. I used not to notice those, now I see them everywhere and it is kind of scary to think of what they mean.
When we got to the farm we were greeted by a menacing dog, and the farmer, Cindy Nawiesniak, yelling at us to get back in the car until she locked the dog. It was kind of a scary beginning, but that's how farm dogs are, after all they have to defend the cattle and animals from intruders. Things got better right away though, Cindy was very friendly and talkative and enjoyed showing us around. We met the chickens that make our eggs every week and some other chickens that she "boards" for some restaurant. I have to admit these last ones didn't look particularly good, as they were losing their feathers, but she said it was normal. The chickens live in a pen that is moved around periodically. Around the pen there is an electrified fence to keep predators away.

 Apparently that doesn't deter some owl who keeps attacking and decapitating the chickens through the pen, and I thought owls only ate mice and snakes! She also has cows, and she sells the meat by the quarter, a little too much for our small family, but who knows, maybe in the future it would be an interesting way to buy meat and just freeze it and keep it, it would definitely be cheaper than buying it at the farmers market every week. She had a lot of calves who were very cute and she seemed very fond of them too. We saw all our future vegetables, including lots of potatoes and tomatoes and a lot of fennel apparently, and we found out that for some reason she is not very fond of zucchini (too bad because we love zucchini!)I think the reason is that it invades too much of the space of other plants. Our son was probably too young to appreciate any of this, although he enjoyed seeing the chickens, but I think it is going to be great to bring him there every year and make him realize that that is where his food ( or most of it) comes from.

Cindy talked to us about how she grew up in her grandparents farm, and how she felt the connection, how she had milk right out of a cow and ate fruit right off a tree branch and found unbelievable that kids nowadays don't make this connection with  the source of their food anymore. I think adults don't make that connection either, many of my friends will admit candidly that they don't want to know where their food is from, that they don't want to remember that it was once an animal, or something covered in dirt. People like prepackaged, sterile, unidentifiable foods, and that way get fooled by the industrial food system that sells them corn shaped into a hundred different things, and they are happy with it. Maybe if we knew what a chicken really looks like we would realize that a chicken breast CAN'T be that big, or if we knew what a fresh tomato tastes like we wouldn't buy those artificially ripened tasteless things they call tomatoes in the store.