Sometimes I wonder how any business can get started these days

Cabarrus County is exploring different ideas to improve our local food system. We have a 7 million dollar beef industry here in the county and a good market for people who want grass feed beef. But right now every cow that gets into commercial channels has to leave the county to die. Put everything together and it is fairly obvious that we could use a kill floor. The county commissioners are okay with the idea, the neighbors are okay with the idea and there is a local family interested in operating such a facility on their property. So the first step is to determine if there is enough ground water available to operate the facility. This study is going to cost $10,000. They didn’t offer me the $10,000 but I decided I would just figure it out for fun.
The facility would need about 2500 gallons of water a day five days a week. Of this amount about 2475 is returned to the ground for treatment. The rest evaporates. Subtracting gives me 25 gallons per day which I multiply by the 210 days they would operate per year for a total of 5250 gallons per year.
The underground aquifer is a shallow surface aquifer that is recharged by at least 10 acres that runs from a nearby fire department north to Barrier Rd and about 500 feet both sides of the proposed facility. (For $10,000 I would actually look up the contour lines and get a precise measurement and subtract out the paved area, but I have no doubt a 10 acre estimate is very conservative.) The area receives about 42 inches of rain per year. On the flat ridge top around this site, about 7 inches of this will go into the ground per year. Multiplying out 7 inches times 27,500 gallons per acre inch times 10 acres equals 1,925,000 gallons of recharge annually.
So the question is can you take 5250 gallons out of 1.9 million gallons. Well, since the recharge is mostly during the winter and the withdrawal is year around, plus there is some flucuation from year to year, I also need to check the amount of ground water to make sure it will budget out on a daily basis. The static water level is currently 20 feet. The depth of casing is 70 feet. Therefore the amount of water saturated soil is 50 feet. The amount of water held in a clay soil like this is roughly 10 percent. So that translates to 5 feet of water. Multiply times the 27,500 per acre inch times the 10 acres of surface recharge times 12 inches per foot equals a little more than 4 million gallons.
YES. There will be no problem taking out 5000 gallons from 4 million gallon aquifer being recharged at the rate of 1.9 million gallons annually.
I can be so definite about this because I use more water than this from a smaller aquifer than this to irrigate my garden.
When you get to thinking about this, the amount they intend to use is roughly equivalent to 40 houses on wells. If that caused a problem there would be lots of places in the county that would be hurting.
There it is. Roughly $10,000 worth of consulting at no charge.
By the way step 4 is to determine what it would take to treat the waste water. That will be a $5000 consulting fee. I don’t know the answer on that one, but for a $500 finders fee I could get them in touch with David Troutman who could give them the answer for half that price.

I expect to eat fresh peaches in October

The primary method I use to save peaches for a later date is to freeze them. Contender is probably my favorite one to freeze. When dead ripe, it has a beautiful flesh color and keeps the color very well. Of the varieties I have frozen, Sun Prince does a poor job, while Intrepid and Challenger does a good job. I have pickled a few peaches but not enough to figure out a variety difference. I have only pickled them whole and a cling peach might be the best choice for that. I don’t grow any cling peaches. I could try pickling them in slices but I have never got around to doing that. Some years I make peach jam. With jam, I just use whatever peach is available when I get some time to make the jam.
So how do I intend to eat fresh peaches in October? By refrigerating China Pearl. In 2006, I put a few China Pearl in the refrigerator on August 1. I pulled two or three out at the county fair and shared it with the volunteers. The quality was very good at that time. I continued to check on them and ate the last one on Oct 15th. Honestly, it had gone downhill by that point but I think part of the problem was low humidity in the refrigerator. I only had a few peaches in the refrigerator and they were drying out. This year I placed a half bushel of china pearl peaches in the crisper section. I figure to go through them every couple of weeks and pull out anything fixing to go to the bad. Peaches are not supposed to do this. In fact, when I mentioned that I had done this to the guy who selected China Pear (Dr Denny Werner) he was surprised that it could be done.
If this can be reliably done, there should be a point in the United States where China Pearl gets ripe around September and can be saved until November when you should get a premium on fresh white peaches.
I also save some peaches in the refrigerator using another process, again with China Pearl variety, but I won’t share that because I am not totally sure it is safe. You can find a similar process by searching the internet for recipes for brandied peaches that create the alcohol instead of pouring it over the peaches. Carla Emery in her book The Encyclopedia of Country Living also mentions a similar process.

A business risk

Last year Lisa decided to give up a career in real estate and become an herb grower and farmers market vendor. Lisa and I decided it would be beneficial to work together. My wife Rene doesn’t like to sell at the markets so Lisa could sell fruit and vegetables I grow on the weekday markets and then Lisa and I share a booth on Saturday. Working with Lisa has allowed me to keep my inside space at the farmers market. Otherwise, I would have lost my inside space this year. To some degree the herbs Lisa grows and the produce I grow are complimentary. We have never put our business association in writing since we have agreed to quit as soon as it doesn’t work for one or the other of us.
When we first started, I figured the safest thing would be if Lisa and Rene never met. Lisa caught onto this first and asked if Rene thought I had an imaginary friend.
I ignored that and kept them apart last year. This year I had to go out of town during the peak of peach season and the only logical way to get my peaches on the market was for my wife and Lisa to meet. It was quite a risk. I could have come back and found one dead and the other in jail. Turns out they got along very well. Now I guess I am more worried about them ganging up on me and tag team nagging or something.
I never did sell any tomatillos for WIC vouchers to get my tax money back. There were far fewer Mexican immigrants at the market this year. I suspect there are fewer around. For one thing, there are less job opportunities right now and I have heard more about enforcement against illegal immigrants. I am going to grow the tomatillos again. Sold enough to make it worthwhile although I doubt it will every be a major profit generator.
I did get some tax dollars back. Mostly sold the WIC people peaches and tomatoes. I did sell green tomatoes to several WIC customers. I have never considered fried green tomatoes to be a food for poor people. If it is, the rich people are really missing out on that one. Still the only people who bought them certainly gave the impression of being poor.
My first WIC customer (who bought some top of the line tomatoes) really aggravated Lisa. I asked Lisa if she didn’t like getting her tax dollars back. She started complaining about the $200 dollar stroller and the $100 dollar tennis shoes the lady was wearing. I explained that you couldn’t expect somebody who made those types of decisions to have any money left for food. If Lisa was in charge of the world, that lady would have gone hungry.

Gardening update

Finishing up peach harvesting. Well not really, but I can see the end of the row. I picked a few China Pearls today and the Sweet Sue should get ripe in another week. Intrepid and Challenger were the best tasting peaches so far this year beating out even the Norman and Windblow. China Pearl might taste better once it comes on board. When I first planted the peaches I tried to plant them in order of when they ripened. I couldn’t find a date for Carolina Belle so it is way out of order. The information on Intrepid and Challenger was readily available, but somehow I managed to switch them around.
Within a couple of years, I am going to have to make a decision about replanting the peach orchard. My wife says we are not planting any more peach trees but I think she will change her mind about that.
Evaluating it by dollars over the lifetime of the orchard, the Contenders and China Pearl have been the best peaches. These are the least likely to have problems with late frost. Even the Intrepid and Challenger haven’t been as reliable. I attribute most of this years' crop other than the Contenders to the burn barrels I had going in the orchard. The radiant heat is what keeps blooms alive. I have considered planted only Contender and China Pearl in my next orchard. This would trade the production problem caused by late frost with a marketing problem with everything getting ripe at once. With the internet it may be possible to solve the marketing problem easier than the production problem.

Homegrown Tomatoes, No S***.

(*** salmonella )
Because of the food scare, tomatoes have sold real well this spring. It was a good year to start the high tunnel. I take the following steps to ensure safe food. First I grow high quality stuff. Second, I wash my hands before I pick it. I visually inspect containers to make sure they are clean. If they are not clean, I wash them. The irrigation and wash water come from the same well I drink out of. The only way I have used animal manure around my tomatoes is to compost it a year before it is used. I would prefer to apply it one year and grow a covercrop. Maybe I can get that done when I retire.
The reason we are having a salomonella scare is probably either human manure use in Mexico or poultry dust from a large confinement operation in some washwater at a huge packing house. Another potential food problem is human waste in the field when field hands are pushed so hard they fell like they can't afford to walk to the bathroom, or they don't feel comfortable going to the bathroom. Well, I can easily walk back to my bathroom and there are currently no chickens on my farm.
The only thing I know that would make my operation safer is to include chlorox in the wash water. I have used it. It takes roughly a cup per 50 gallons of water. The trouble is getting rid of the chlorinated waste water. Plus I can no longer tell people the tomatoes are pesticide free.

Gardening Failure

First total failure of this gardening season is the Gold Nugget tomato. Highly recommended but I don’t like it. It all got ripe at once and didn’t have very much taste. I am not even picking it for market. It has a beautiful color. I remember Ivory or Snow White as being a better option. Don’t really get much out of the different colored cherry tomatoes but they help sell the red cherry tomatoes. I have some partial failures. Peppers are not doing worth anything. They must need more water than I am willing to pump on them. In places where I can’t water them regularly, they really look bad. Tomatillos are doing okay. I have eaten several of them. I cooked them the same way I do fried green tomatoes. I haven’t used them in any other recipes. So far I have sold all them to gringos. So I haven’t directly got my tax dollars back. I think this happened because I sold out of everything by 10 am last Saturday and the WIC people tend to not get moving by that time. May be one of the reasons my tax dollars are going to them and not vice versa.

Carbon Footprint

Many of the vegetables I sell at the farmers market have a fairly low carbon footprint for the following reasons. Any early transplants are produced in a greenhouse completely heated by solar heat. (See article on solar greenhouse below). Some items are direct seeded. I am reusing pots that I originally bought in 1975. The raised beds require very limited tillage. In fact, what tillage is done is done by hand or a trowel. No gas powered equipment is used. The other handtools I use are a shovel or pitchfork to dig compost, a bucket to haul compost, and a tire tool on certain weeds. The majority of my fertility comes from site produced compost. I seldom use insecticides and never use fungicides or herbicides on this area. Post harvest is another place the carbon footprint is fairly low. I carry them out by hand, wash them and load them in the pickup. Since I sell at the market 3 days a week, there is very little energy intensive storage. And most of the packaging is washed and reused. The plastic landscape fabric had a high carbon cost initially but some of it has been down for 18 years which should put me far ahead of anybody using plastic mulch on an annual system. Another high carbon cost is traveling the 18 miles to the local farmers market. Even though my truck gets 28 miles to the gallon, the carbon cost per pound of produce is still fairly high.