First off, it’s been kind of dead over here hasn’t?  Yeah.  I have no excuses.  I’ve been productive in other areas though—tons of yard and housework.  Last weekend we painted our bedroom AND worked on a dual purpose fence/trellis in our back yard.  No small task.

I also wanted to point out and thank Houstonians for looking to me (cough) as their farmers market guiding light.  I’m very humbled…right.

Bayou City Market Bag

A few months ago I wrote a little diddy about the insanity of having five or six farmers markets within a few blocks of each other (three of which are on the same day of the week!).  Well, in the past six months, the Bayou City Farmer’s Market (our personal favorite) has blown up!  Stacey and I dropped in Saturday morning at 9:15 and you couldn’t “stir people with a stick” (<–I love my grandpa’s old “sayin’s”).  It was a mad dash for people to get to specific vendors before they sold out.  I guess I should be careful for what I wish for in the future.  Our once leisurely Saturday morning excursion to the market has become something resembling Whole Foods the day before Thanksgiving.  I’m kidding it’s not like that at all. I’ve got a flare for the dramatic.  It makes for the good stories.

In all seriousness it is very encouraging for me to see a growing number of Houstonians that are deciding to opt out of supermarket shopping and instead patronize local agriculture.  It seems that the vendors are starting to “get it” as well.  At one point in time the Bayou City Market was the perfect place to go for say, beeswax candles or goat milk soap, but one never expected much beyond that.  Now consumers have more options:  Tamworth pigs, grassfed beef, and lamb from Olde World Farms, pastured chickens from Oaks of Mamre Farms (fed a complete diet of organic corn, roasted soybean meal, and kelp meal from Coyote Creek Organic Grain Mill in Elgin, TX), gelato by Trentino, a number of local fruit & vegetable vendors, as well as day-boat Gulf fish from Airline Seafood (fish purveyors to Reef, Feast, Textile, and Catalan).  All of this to say, it is now a realistic notion to “eat our view” in Houston, and people seem to be catching on.

All of that to say, a quick pass by the vendor’s stalls should still leave the thinking consumer with a number of questions.  Urban Harvest, the host of the market, seemingly tries to streamline things a bit by providing signs to vendors which they can tack on to the fronts of stalls extolling their all natural, or organic and sustainable virtues…or even (gasp) their “conventional” apathy.  The ultimate question that I’m left with is:  What is in a word?

Do the words “sustainable”, “organic”, “all-natural”, and my favorite, “humane” mean the same thing to you as they do to me?  No, probably not.  For the average consumers though (even the average consumers who are “opting out” by shopping at the farmer’s market), seeing some buzz words give them enough peace of mind to go normally about their business.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not intentionally picking on this sort of consumer mind set and I’m not picking on vendors who use the euphemisms as flash cards to quickly get their point across.  I want people to realize that one farm may do “sustainable” in a completely different way than the next and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  The same goes for “organic” and “all natural”.  I’ll get into “humane” later on.  It should become our responsibility to do the homework and figure out what we can and cannot live with.

Sustainable- What does sustainable mean?  What does it take to be sustainable?  In theory I suppose for a farm, sustainable ideally would mean that every aspect of an operation works together in a symbiotic relationship and that nothing from the “outside world” ever needs to be brought in or taken away in order for it to exist.  In practice this is virtually impossible.  If you’ve read The Omnivore’s Dilemna you’re familiar with Polyface Farms in Swoope, Virginia.  They’re third generation farmers doing things as sustainably as economically possible.  The business model works, but even they have to make compromises to supplement their poultry, cattle, and pigs with feed or occasionally hay from a neighbor’s farm.  The second a farmer brings in something from outside his (or her) farm, the farm is no longer technically sustainable.  Without getting into a lengthy discussion about different degrees of sustainability, I’ll conclude by saying personally, I’m comfortable with the idea of being sustainable enough.  Utilize the soil to its maximum potential.  Compost animal waste efficiently.  Capture solar energy and rainwater. 

Lavaca County

Organic-It’s a pretty safe assumption to say that what organic has evolved into is not the originally intended definition.  During the 1960’s, when a group of hippies in Berkley, California decided to stick it to the Man and grow their own food without the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, they were embarking on mostly uncharted territory.  It was unthinkable that 30 years later, their little “organic” idea would be an 11 billion dollar industry owned by large conglomerates that produce conventionally on one part of their property and organically on another, thereby capturing both audiences.  So yes, technically Horizon milk is organic which I suppose is a good thing.  The cows are fed organic feed instead of conventional feed, but they live in the same sort of environment that conventional dairy cows live—an intense monoculture of milk production; not the most pleasant of pictures, but I guess its still better to some degree, than the conventional alternative.  How about this scenario though:  A small farm west of Houston has a few Jersey cows that get rotated onto a new small paddock of pasture every day.  They eat nothing but grass (which is what they’re built to eat).  This grass hasn’t seen fertilizer in decades, but the USDA hasn’t put their stamp of approval on the operation (bless their hearts) and the farmer doesn’t care to jump through the Fed’s hoops to get it certified.  He knows that what he is doing is right and he doesn’t need the government’s fingers in his business.  Every day the farmer’s daughter (careful) hand milks the cows to sell at the farmer’s market (*labeled not for human consumption, of course).  The milk, as far as the USDA is concerned is not organic and can’t legally be labeled as such.  Which milk would you be more comfortable drinking?

And finally…

All Natural-This one is open to anyone’s interpretation.  Your guess is as good as mine.

When I began writing my thoughts down about this subject, I thought I would get everything into one post, but as I dove into what all “humane” can mean, it began to take on a life of its own.  In order to not cheat it out of a decent explanation, I decided that it might be better suited to its own post which will be coming shortly.

*It fascinates me that the government allows vices like smoking which is known to kill people…a good many people on an annual basis, but by and large prohibit the sale of raw milk to the public.  Makes a ton of sense…