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Farmers' Pride, 'Goodness Grows' Tout Local Food
NORTH LIMA, Ohio -- With apologies to Jane Austin, it is a truth universally acknowledged that food grown close to home tastes best. This truth is so well fixed in the minds of the farmers who grow the fruits and vegetables, make the cheeses and raise the livestock that no one could possibly doubt their claim.
Lake-to-River 30-Mile Meal, which describes itself as “a food branding and promotional campaign aimed at increasing the awareness and availability of local food,” and Goodness Grows played host Monday at a press event at Common Ground Church here to promote agriculture in Ashtabula, Trumbull, Mahoning and Columbiana counties in Ohio and Mercer County, Pa.
Goodness Grows describes itself as “a faith-based organization that provides leadership and training for an ever-growing network of individuals, businesses and organizations working through community gardening, agricultural products and local food distribution to restore the vitality of local communities.”
With the Lake-to-River Food Cooperative, 30-Mile Meal and Goodness Grows are striving to increase the harvests, sales and customers of small farmers within a 50-mile radius of Youngtown.
A small number of restaurateurs, including B.J. Sulka, general manager of the Springfield Grille, Boardman, and Michelle Wade, a cook at the Lake Club, Springfield Township, endorsed the effort and told reporters how they buy the fresh fruit and vegetables and meats these farmers grow to the extent practicable.
Hospitals in the region, including those in the ValleyCare system, buy from the 12 farms represented yesterday, said Melissa Miller of the Lake-to-River Co-op. So do five school systems in Mahoning County (Poland, Boardman, Austintown, Springfield and Youngstown City) and another four in Trumbull County (Girard, LaBrae, Badger and Warren City).
The cooks in the school kitchens use the tomatoes to make salsa, which she says is popular with the children, and very little goes to waste.
The executive director of Goodness Grows, Greg Bowman, was trying to impress the concept of “Value Added” to the foods grown locally, that the fruits and vegetables grown nearby not only taste better because they’re harvested closer to when they ripen but also cost less because they needn’t be transported so far to market.
John Huffman of Huffman Fruit Farm, Salem, devotes 34 acres to growing apples, another 11 to peaches and 47 more to vegetables and strawberries and blueberries.
Of the red Delicious apples grown in Washington state, Huffman sneered because “They don’t have that much flavor” although they hold up well when transported. He favors the Rome and Empire apples he and his wife, Emily, grow. He says they taste much better and are eaten by the children in the schools that buy his apples because they’re tastier and look better.
He is working to store his apples in “controlled atmosphere storage” where the air contains only 2% oxygen instead of the 20% in the atmosphere. That allows them to be stored up to 11 months and they won’t go bad if picked properly. “Apples are a high-labor crop,” he says. “They have to be picked by hand, not machine.”
Of his efforts to grow blueberries, Huffman allows, “This is my fourth year. What the deer don’t eat, the birds will.” He’s hoping the rye he grows will protect this year’s crop. Last year he grew 10 acres of rye.
Among the vegetables grown nearby that end up in restaurants, schools and hospitals are tomatoes, asparagus, beets, spinach, arugula, kale and carrots, whether from traditional farms or the urban farms such as Iron Roots in the Idora neighborhood of Youngstown.
The manager of Iron Roots, Curtis Moore, announced that the urban farm will try to triple its harvest this year,
The Springfield Grille’s Sulka said his restaurant tries to patronize nearby farms as much as possible. “It’s a matter of availability,” he explained, “In season, 25%” of the foods prepared were from nearby farms. “Out of season, 10 to 15% we get from within a 50-mile radius,” he said.
“Twenty-five percent of our food sales come from our specialty sheets [daily specials printed separately]. All the fruits, all the vegetables [in season] are grown locally,” he says. Customers are informed of the nearby origin. “We train our servers to let people know.”
Wade estimates the Lake Club obtains no more than 20% of the fare it serves from nearby farms.
Both she and Sulka would like to buy more but the supply just isn’t there.
“The demand is,” Bowman says, and it’s part of his mission to meet that demand. Indeed, he estimates that were residents of the Mahoning Valley dependent entirely on nearby farms to put food on their tables, they’d starve. “Farmers produce only a small percentage,” he said, “less than 1%.”
Sulka prefers to by beef from nearby farms such as Pasture Perfect Beef near Grove City, Pa. There Chrystal Carlson raises 500 to 600 head of cattle on a 1,200-acre farm. “Last year was our first year in business,” she relates. The farm sold 25 head locally and other 50 on the commodity market she says. “We raise all our replacements,” she says.
Sulka likes grass-fed beef better than the corn-fed variety. “Grass-fed hamburger, grass-fed steak,” he said, “has more of a game flavor but less steroids. It’s about quality and that comes through.”
Sulka also has a fondness for nectarines. “I didn’t know until five years ago that Ohio grows nectarines,” he said, “and some nice-sized plums.” So he is awaiting nectarine season that begins in mid-July.
Also grass-fed are the goats and sheep that produce the cheeses Ed Gordos of Western Reserve Foods LLC, Chagrin Falls, sells on behalf of Middlefield Original Cheese Co-op, an Amish venture of 59 small farmers. Because the Amish can’t own electric equipment, such as milking machines, he provides such equipment and they tend cows, sheep and goats and make some 10 varieties of cheese including Monterrey Jack, cheddar, Gouda, Asiago and Swiss.
Published by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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