Join us for Live Music, the Farm Ninja Obstacle Course, Two Jumping Pillows and Family Fun on the Farm. Admission is $10/child and $12/adult and Strawberries in the Farm Market are $3.99/lb
May 25~PYO Strawberries are CLOSED as of 10am. Check back for Updates on availability for Sunday and Monday Morning.
Community Supported Agriculture, CSA, Produce Farm, U-Pick, Field Trips in Loudoun County, VA
Why Drink Apple Cider Vinegar?
Learn more here from Dr. Mercola.
In our last post, we concluded that when soil is healthy, plants and microbes dwell in symbiosis which produces high concentrations of the nutrients both need to thrive. Well, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the same relationship exists between people and the microbes that live in our digestive tract.
Ironically, however, the human species seems hell-bent on destroying those microbes, or at least reducing their numbers. One fundamental law of nature is that biodiversity is good, but modern culture seems to be at war with biodiversity. Most industrial agriculture functions on the principle of anti-diversity: single crops grown from genetically homogenous seed in soil rendered sterile by industrial grade antibiotics. And industrial medicine seems to work on the cleanliness principle as well: in 2016, the number of antibiotic prescriptions written in America corresponded to five out of ever six people in the country, and nearly a third of those were demonstrably unnecessary. We believe that cleaner is better, even though that may not be true.
It’s becoming clear that fighting bacteria is both futile and wrong-headed. It’s futile because within any given person, non-human cells out-number human cells by a factor of 1.3, and the number of non-human species living within a single person is comparable to the number of individual people living in one large city. And it’s wrong-headed for the same reason it would be crazy for a city to attack its own population. Sure: some people in town are deadbeats who pee in the pool and shoplift candy bars, but that doesn’t mean you fumigate the village with mustard gas.
We’re learning, for example, that some nutrients that play crucial roles in human health are produced only by the non-human species living in our gut, including three amino acids required to make the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. What’s more, many of those species appear to communicate with our human cells in ways that tell our DNA what kinds of proteins to manufacture. So in a real sense, the bacteria we’re fighting actually makes us who we are.
As Dr. Zack Bush says, we should stop thinking of bacteria as invaders and realize that this space is more theirs than ours. We should thank them for letting us stay.
One way to encourage that thought shift is to deliberately cultivate the growth of bacteria in our bodies, especially our digestive tracts, which do far more than process food. In our next post we’ll talk about things we’re doing on the farm to help bacteria grow inside us.
We’re studying biology on the farm this winter, especially the relationship between microbiology and macro-biology, and we’re discovering that people and plants have more in common than one might guess. Both derive their health and well-being from a vast, unseen realm, and the connections between what we see and what we don’t see are even more intricate that we imagined, for plants as well as for people.
We’d like to share what we’re learning about those connections in a series of blog posts. The first one focuses on plants.
Plants
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that large plants grow best in soil that’s full of small plants, especially bacteria and fungi. Most of us associate bacteria and fungi with disease, and it’s true that plants are susceptible to bacterial infection just like people are; but we’re coming to realize that the number of bacterial species that cause damage is much smaller than the number that don’t, and the good ones keep the bad ones in check most of the time.
Studies suggest that a gram of healthy soil contains as many as 40 million bacterial cells, which co-operate to create a fertile ecosystem, some producing exactly the chemicals and nutrients others need to survive. That symbiosis has been clear for a long time, but now we’re beginning to see that it extends beyond the invisible microbial plane into the plant species we see flourishing around us — or failing to flourish. We’re beginning to understand that you can’t disrupt any of those cooperative relationships without sending shock waves through the entire system.
“In natural ecosystems, most nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous, and sulfur are bound in organic molecules and are therefore minimally bioavailable for plants,” explain the authors of a recent article in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science. “To access these nutrients, plants are dependent on the growth of soil microbes such as bacteria and fungi, which possess the metabolic machinery to depolymerize and mineralize organic forms of nitrogen, phosphorous, and sulfur.”
A polymer is a large conglomerate molecule produced when small units of the same substance stick together. The tiny root hairs that connect something like a tomato plant with its soil environment can’t absorb those big conglomerates, and they don’t possess the capacity for reducing them to usable size. Well, it turns out that in undisturbed ecosystems, they don’t need that capacity — it would be redundant — because they’re surrounded by millions of bacteria and fungi that do have it. “In natural settings, these microbial nutrient transformations are key drivers of plant growth, and can sometimes be the rate-limiting step in ecosystem productivity,” the article suggests. In other words, if the microbe population drops, the tomato plant can’t thrive.
The flip side of that relationship works like this: plants like tomatoes, spinach, and broccoli combine carbon with hydrogen through the process known as photosynthesis, and their roots exude the product of that process, carbohydrates, into the soil because the microbes they depend on need those carbohydrates, and they don’t have the capacity to photo-synthesize them. “The growth of soil microbes is usually carbon-limited, so the high amounts of sugars, amino acids, and organic acids that plants deposit into the rhizosphere represent a valuable nutrition source,” the authors explain.
A wrinkle in this symbiotic relationship emerges when we acknowledge that tomatoes and broccoli are different plants with different nutritional needs, which means they need different microbial communities. They also excrete different photosynthetic substances into the soil, and those different substances attract the particular microbes that each variety of tomato or spinach or cucumber specifically needs. “It has been shown that plant root exudates contain components used in below-ground chemical communication strategies, such as flavonoids, strigolactones, and terpenoids,” the authors explain.
In other words, the macro-organisms appear to be calling out for the specific micro-organisms that will optimize their growth, and the micro-organisms respond because living in the root-shed of those specific macro-organisms will optimize their growth. The consequence of that symbiotic communication is what we call nutritional density: a high concentration of substances that make plants healthy. And it’s beginning to look like disrupting that communication is the first step toward disease.
Check this space next week for a discussion of that symbiotic communication in people.
One hundred and six members responded to our CSA 2018 Survey, and we’re grateful to those people for sharing their thoughts with us. Here’s a summary of what they said.
Features that people especially liked about CSA membership included:
The most common requests were these:
We packed 29 different items in our CSA shares last year, but most of those made fewer than four appearances during the season, which meant shares were heavy in certain items: potatoes, apples, squashes, peaches, and plums. We’re aiming for a higher number of items next year, more like 40, and we hope to reduce the dominance of certain items.
Some members requested that we add specific items next year, including carrots, celery, collards, arugula, pac choi, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet peas, field peas, turnips, and mustard greens. Last year our broccoli, cauliflower, collards, sweet peas, and turnips all failed due to record rainfall. We will try them again this year, with successive plantings in different locations. We also hope to offer herbs, such as basil, parsley, cilantro, and thyme. Carrots don’t seem to like our soil for some reason, and celery doesn’t like our hot weather.
Customizing group site shares is not feasible for us, but it is possible to trade some items for others if you pick up your share at the farm. Items in high demand and limited quantity, such as berries, are pretty much fixed, but other items may sometimes be swapped on a case-by-case basis. Just talk to Mark in the market.
Several people asked about the possibility of coming to the farm every-other week and picking a double you-pick bonus. That system would work with many items, depending on field conditions and picking pressure. If you’d like to try that schedule, let us know. We realize that the wagon ride schedule is sometimes restrictive, and we continue to explore ideas for improving that system. We welcome your suggestions.
With regard to information: we are pleased to learn that some of you would like to know more about field conditions. During this off season, we’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between the soil microbiome and the vitality of our crops, and we’d be happy to share what we’re learning with you. We’re also increasingly interested in nurturing the human microbiome, which appears to be the frontier of health and wellness; in fact, we hope to build a microbiome-friendly culture at Great Country Farms.
Another problem we hope to resolve this year is packing items in quantities too small to be useful. One member has suggested including a double portion of gradually-ripening crops like okra in half the shares one week and then packing a double portion in the other shares the following week. A solution like that might work in many cases. If you have other suggestions, please let us know.
Again, our thanks for taking time to offer that information. Your feedback is one of our most valuable resources.
There is just something about the fall season that puts a little more magic in the air. Maybe it is the cooling temperatures, the leaves changing, nearing the start of holiday season, picking the perfect pumpkin, or a combination of things. Whatever it is, if you plan on joining us this fall, we want to give you the inside scoop on how to plan the perfect day.
