Pick your own Apples Extended to October 8th!

We have great apple picking for 2 more weeks this season!  The pumpkin patch is now open as well!
 
Pick your own Apples hanging in the orchards at Great Country Farms in Virginia

Pick your own Apples!

Get September Tickets

Get October Tickets 

 

What’s Ripe and Ready for Picking?

Sign up for free U-Pick Alerts! You'll always be the first to know what's ripe and ready for picking at Great Country Farms.

Thanks for signing up!

By submitting this form, you are granting: Great Country Farms permission to email you. You may unsubscribe via the link found at the bottom of every email. (See our Email Privacy Policy for details.) Emails are serviced by Constant Contact.
Close

Great Country Farms

Community Supported Agriculture, CSA, Produce Farm, U-Pick, Field Trips in Loudoun County, VA

Farm Market & Play Area

Bakery & Play Area Open Daily

10am-5pm

Get September Tix!

Get Flashlight Corn Maze Tix!


Get October Tix!

  • Home
    • About
    • Attractions
    • Peck of Dirt Foundation
    • Blog
      • 5 Steps for Peach Picking Perfection
      • Apple Pressing Then vs. Now
  • Festivals
    • Sept Corn Maze + Apple Harvest
    • Family Flashlight Corn Maze Nights
    • Fall Pumpkin Harvest Festival
    • October Adult Corn Maze Nights
    • Pumpkin Chunkin’
    • Santa Jingle and Mingle at Great Country Farms
    • Raising Chicks with Great Country Farms’ Spring Chick Program
    • Easter Egg Hunt
    • Strawberry Jubilee Fest
    • Father’s Day Fish-a-Rama
    • Teacher Appreciation Week
    • Summer of Sunflowers & Peaches
    • Pick your Own Blackberry Bonanza
    • Peach Fuzztival
    • The Big Dig Potato Harvest
    • August Honey Crisp Apple Picking
    • First Responders Week~ Sept 5-10
  • UPick
    • Pick your own: Now Picking…
    • Crops By Season
    • U-Pick Tips and FAQs
  • EATs
    • Henway Cider
  • Market
  • Fan Season Pass
    • Fan of the Farm Season Pass
    • Fan of the Farm Season Pass ~ Frequently Asked Questions
    • Fan of the Farm Season Pass – Agreement
  • Birthdays
  • Groups
    • Fall Harvest Festival Group Admission
    • Picnic Venues
    • Barn Wedding Venue
  • Field Trips
    • School Field Trips
    • Pumpkin- Fall Tour
    • Apple Tour
    • Gem Mining Tour
    • Strawberry Tour
    • Garden Tour
  • Stay
  • Contact
    • Map out your Visit to Great Country Farms
    • Press & Media
    • Employment Opportunities
    • Farmhand Central
    • Donations

The Genetic Modification Debate Continues

March 25, 2016 by Kate Zurschmeide

imgresLet’s get personal: my opposition to genetic modification of the world’s food supply is motivated more by political concerns than by concerns about health. Most GMOs are seeds which Monsanto has altered to make them tolerate large doses of glyphosate, an herbicide they produce and sell under the RoundUp trademark. They’ve created a cycle, in other words: buy these seeds from us, and then soak your fields in glyphosate so that nothing will grow there except the seeds you buy from us, which by the way we have patented, along with the glyphosate, so you can’t buy either of them from anyone else or we’ll sue you. And then next year buy more seeds and glyphosate from us! Doesn’t that deserve a smiley-face emoticon?imgres

The perpetuation of that cycle under the guise of flag-waving benevolence makes me angry, regardless of whether eating corn with that gene will hurt me or not. On that issue, the jury is still out, and may continue to be out for a couple of generations, but the politics are present-day.

Because the jury is still out, we don’t use GMOs at Great Country Farms, but that doesn’t mean we’re reflexively opposed to them. We like to learn as much as we can about genetic modification, and we like to pass information on to you. So please read this excellent article in Modern Farmer. It looks at genetic modification from the vegan perspective.

Still Life with Mass Hysteria: Are GMOs Really That Bad?

By Brian Barth on March 22, 2016 gmos-hero

Photographs by Plamen Petkov; Styled by Richard Alfredo

On a recent Saturday afternoon in Chicago, a handful of vegans gathered for a potluck lunch. Between bites of soy nuggets, tofu steaks, and baked pasta blanketed in faux cheese, the friends compared notes about a recent animal-rights demonstration and discussed the merits of a raw-food diet. For dessert, they chose among dairy-free brownies, eggless pumpkin pie, and two bowls of sliced apples—one labeled “Golden Delicious (conventional)”; the other, “Arctic Golden Delicious (non-browning GMO).”

Read more here.

Filed Under: Big Pictures Tagged With: glyphosate, GMOs, Monsanto, non-gmo, pesticide use

Are We Round-up Ready?

November 19, 2014 by Kate Zurschmeide

The other day my sister-in-law, who’s a nuclear physicist, overheard me talking to her daughter about the corn we grow at Great Country Farms.

“Most of the corn in America comes from seeds that have been genetically engineered to produce a protein known as Bt, which kills the worms that like to eat sweet corn,” I said. “We don’t use that kind of seed, so some of our corn has worms under the husk at the top of the ear. But you just cut off the part the worms have eaten, and you eat the rest.”

biohazardcorn

“The results of a comparison of GM and non-GM corn from adjacent Midwest fields in the US that first appeared on the Moms Across America March website [1] are reproduced in Table 1.”

“I didn’t hear the beginning of that conversation,” my sister-in-law said later, “but you must have said you’re opposed to using GE seeds. Why is that?”

Knowing that I’m temperamentally inclined to subvert powerful conglomerates that pretend my welfare motivates their business models, and believing that such temperamental inclination is a sorry excuse for indoctrinating twelve-year-olds, I told the physicist that I don’t yet understand the issue as well as I’d like, and that I’m trying to learn the benefits of genetic engineering, but the downsides I’m aware of now are these:

1. Genetically engineered crops haven’t existed long enough for anyone to have a clear sense of how they might affect the human body over time.

2. One company, Monsanto, makes both the herbicide that allows for greater corn yields and the GE seeds that tolerate heavier doses of that herbicide, and I distrust that kind of profit-driven harmonious interest, especially when it controls 90% of the American corn market.

“I thought genetic engineering was supposed to reduce pesticide use,” she said.

“I think Monsanto’s corn has one added gene that makes Bt and another that tolerates glyphosate, which is the toxin in Round-up.”

“So why is the glyphosate necessarily worse than the problem it prevents?” she asked. “Isn’t glyphosate actually less toxic than pesticides farmers used before there was Round-up?”

“I think that’s true,” I said, “but Round-up is used so heavily now that its cumulative effect may be worse than the pesticides it replaced.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but it’s also possible that the adverse effects are a reasonable trade-off for a lot more food.”

That seemed unlikely to me, but without any evidence to the contrary, I had to admit that it was possible. Two days later, Mark Zurschmeide sent me a link to this article, which provides a lot of specific information that makes glyphosate look like a bad idea. The argument in favor of glyphosate has always been that it doesn’t hurt people because it works by disrupting production of amino acids that are crucial to plants but not to people, so it kills them but not us.USDA-pesticides-applied-to-wheat

But Doctors Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Sennef of MIT recently published a paper pointing out that the microbial cultures in our intestines need to produce those same amino acids, and that glyphosate effects those cultures the same way it effects broadleaf cultures in a cornfield. So glyphosate may not in fact directly damage human tissues, but by killing off our inner flora, it undermines our health substantially.

“Roundup significantly disrupts the functioning of beneficial bacteria in the gut and contributes to permeability of the intestinal wall and consequent expression of autoimmune disease symptoms.” says Sarah Pope, the Healthy Home Economist.

I still consider myself relatively uninformed about these matters, and I realize that everyone who takes a stand on the issue has a bias of some kind — I’m trying to neutralize mine by copping to it — but it makes sense that glyphosate, a pesticide, would trounce my inner flora.

That can’t be good.

 

 

Filed Under: Big Pictures, On Foggy Bottom Road Tagged With: genetic engineering, glyphosate, GMOs, Monsanto, Round-up, seed patents

Get September Corn Maze + Apple + Pumpkin Pick & Play Tickets

Join us for apple pickign fun on the farm!

I want Pick Apples & Pumpkins in September!!

Get Unlimited Farm Admission with a 12 month Season Pass

Join us for our 30th Anniversary season with a FAN of the Farm Season Pass and your immediate family can come pick & play as often as you like!

I want Unlimited Family Admission!

Get Family Flashlight Corn Maze Tix

Join us September 15, 16, 22, 23, 29 & 30 for an evening on the farm!

Get details and tickets!

Get October Fall Pumpkin Harvest Festival Tix

Join us for our Corn Maze & Pumpkin Picking fun on the farm! Bonus Apples Available through Ocotber 8th!

I want to Visit in October!

Sign up for FREE U-Pick alerts

Latest from the Farm Blog

5 Apple Varieties to Pick in September at Great Country Farms

4 Ways to Enjoy the Summer of Sunflowers in Bluemont, VA

Pumpkin Chunkin’, A Smashing Good Time

Apple Pressing Then vs. Now

Celebrating the 15th Anniversary of the ‘Oinkin’tucky Derby Races at Great Country Farms

Connect With Us

Follow us on Social Media and stay up-to-date with all the wonderful happenings and fun events at our farm!
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

© Copyright 2016 Great Country Farms - All Rights Reserved
18780 Foggy Bottom Road Bluemont, Virginia 20135
540-554-2073

Small Business Websites by 5.12 Design Lab · Admin

▲