Community Supported Agriculture: One Woman's Journey From Chemist To Organic Farmer

Savvy Vegetarian News

Vol. 3, Issue 3, April, 2005

Editor's Note: I recently read about Jocelyn Engman's evolution from chemistry to organic farming and community supported agriculture in Iowa's Enlightening Magazine, The Iowa Source. I gobbled up every word, and I'm delighted to share it with you! Conventional net wisdom (could there really be such a thing?) says this article should be one third the length it is. But then we'd lose two thirds of the intelligence, energy, and passion in this inspired piece of writing. So, it's reprinted here in it's full and glorious length! The Marie Curie poetry bits throughout the article are from the poem "Power" by Adrienne Rich.
Read on.

This is a story of the transition state, of one chemist turned farmer, and of Marie Curie and healing, but mostly of what I learned this past year as my husband, father, sister, and I began our community supported agriculture farm, Choice Earth CSA. It's also a great big thank you to the people we met along the way, and to the communities of southeastern Iowa, and to the underlying energy that brought me home to farm.

Community supported agriculture (CSA) is a movement to provide consumers with healthy organic food and bring them back into harmony with the spirit of food production. This movement has been going on in the United States for about 25 years now, but it was begun by women in Japan, who referred to it as tekei, or "food with the farmer's face on it."

Transition State: Do you ever wonder about the timing of your life? For example, if I had been born a century earlier, when the electron was just a mysterious unknown in the experiments of J.J. Thompson, I would not have dedicated two years to earning a Masters degree in chemistry, learning the intricacies of the enzymatic reactions of our bodies and preparing for a career I will probably never follow. Of course, a century ago I probably wouldn't have been a chemist at all, for women were few in the field at that time-those were the days Marie Curie was studying radioactivity.

I chose chemistry because I was dazzled by its theories and models, its stretches of the mind, and its creativity. I think that the study of chemistry is the search to understand the transition state of a chemical reaction. When does hydrogen cease to be hydrogen and oxygen cease to be oxygen and the two become water? Who, what, when, where, why, and how is that infinitesimal moment of transformation when the atomic particles shift energies, at once changing everything and nothing?

Learning the nature of change goes beyond chemistry. It is the story of us all. If we could understand and control the energy shifts of this world, we could control our fate. We could end disease and extend life. Marie Curie pursued her work with radioactivity because she believed that it had the power to heal the sick, and so

it seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin    of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold    a test-tube or a pencil

My career as a chemist lasted approximately one year. There is a great divide between inventing theories and proving theories, and I was in on the latter. So one July evening after an hour of crunching carrots on the commute home (the crunching was for relieving stress), when my husband Tim greeted me with the idea of a new life in gardening, to which my grad schooltraining had dedicated zero attention, I embraced this possible transition and said, "why not?"

Home To The Farm:

Starting our CSA is another issue in which I ponder the timing. How great it would have been to start a CSA 10 years ago and be a pioneer in reconnecting communities to the richness that lies in the Iowa soil! But alas, our CSA was born last February when Tim and I slid into the seats of our Saturn and commuted out of the Chicago suburbs for good.

Though we aren't pioneers, Tim's discovery of CSA was good timing for us. My dad had prepared 13 acres of land to be certified as organic and was deciding what to grow on them. I needed land, as I had fallen in love at first sight with CSA. It's a powerful idea. I, who rarely even cooked before that summer, wanted my food to be personal. I wanted to know it was good, and I wanted to know where it came from. I guess I wanted to control my fate. Not only that, but I wanted to help others do the same.

Ambiguous Organics:

Organic is such a buzzword these days, which is too bad, because its concept is sliding into ambiguity. Organic for me is about more than food without chemicals - it's a philosophy of life. It's about harmony, abundance, and giving. It took me a year of gardening to reach this conclusion, because I started out the skeptic. In chemistry, the word organic has its own meaning, and it doesn't take much to be organic in chemistry. You just need some carbon and hydrogen, and here and there a little oxygen and nitrogen.

In grad school, I lived on nonorganic produce. I figured that the difference between nonorganic and organic was a few supplemental chemicals of unknown identity and that whatever was coming in on my food couldn't possibly be worse than the tritium that I experimented with everyday in my research. If you stick around in biochemistry long enough you'll learn that everything is bad for you. For example, in January 1912 Xavier Mertz, a Swiss scientist on a disastrous Antarctic expedition, ate Huskie liver to stay alive and fell into a delirious sleep from which he never woke-a sleep induced by too much Vitamin A.

Our bodies are essentially an immense and complex system of chemical reactions. Enzymes run these reactions, and they are the shield between us and everything in our living space that's bad for us: the sun, the air, the chemicals in our food and water, and excessive Vitamin A.

One of my favorite enzymes, superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalyzes the superoxide radical, which is a toxin derived from oxygen that contributes to aging and diseases such as cancer. The mere act of breathing creates superoxide radicals in our bodies. Toxins are unavoidable. So I figured that as long as my enzymes were doing their jobs, buying nonorganic produce was saving this poor grad student enough money to make those few extra toxins acceptable.

One of the first things that changed my mind about eating organic was reading Secrets of the Soil by Peter Thompkins and Christopher Bird. I had never given much thought to the soil before reading this book, which is full of fascinating stores of successful, nonconventional farming methods, but when I finished the last page, I was starting to view soil as the key to a long, healthy life.

Good organic farming focuses on creating nutritious soil. After a year of reading up on the subject, studying both anecdotal and empirical evidence, I am now convinced that the degenerative diseases that are becoming so prevalent in our society are the result of malnutrition in the soil. So all of a sudden, organic isn't just about what's not on the food we eat�it's about what is in the food we eat.

Remember my favorite enzyme, SOD? SOD catalyzes its reactions with the help of copper and zinc. Our bodies get this copper and zinc through our diets. The problem with working the soil, taking out nutrients such as copper and zinc and killing the living systems that replace these nutrients, is that the nutrient source becomes depleted. Commercial inputs include NPK: nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. As long as plants have NPK, they'll grow and they'll grow well, but there's no guarantee that they'll be full of the nutrition our bodies need when we eat them.

The nutrition in our food comes from humus, or organic matter, which is the result of a healthy, living soil system teeming with earthworms (which inputs kill) and microorganisms (which too much nitrogen overstimulates so that they start consuming organic matter from the soil rather than adding to it).

Crop rotations, having been reduced to switching between one or two crops in modern conventional agriculture, are important because the different root depths of different plants can access minerals at various levels of the soil and bring them to the surface for use by all plants.

In the early 1900s, Sir Albert Howard, Imperial Chemical Botanist to the Government of the Raj at Pusa, carried out agricultural experiments in India with the support of the government. At the end of his experimentation, he concluded that crops have a natural power of resistance to infection, and that proper nutrition is all that is required to make this power operative.

Dr. William A. Albrecht of the University of Missouri spent many years in the first half of the 20th century studying the soil. He concluded from his observation of soils all over the world and from his own experimentation that a soil fertility that was declining due to a lack of organic matter, major elements, and trace minerals was responsible for poor crops and nonresistance to disease in the animals (including humans) who fed from these crops.

Chemical inputs appeared in the agricultural scene in the 1920s. Deaths resulting from degenerative disease in the United States rose from 39% in the 1920s to 60% in 1948. How much of this statistic is coincidence, and how much is correlation? Insects and disease are the symptoms of a failing crop, not the cause, and because chemicals treat an effect, they will never cure the problem.

In all honesty, the best plants I grew were the ones I didn't intend to; they were the spilt seeds. Our plants want to grow. Growing and reproducing is their evolved destiny. So why do large commercial growers have to add so many inputs to keep them alive? What does that mean to us?

I remember the moment, the transition state, when organic first meant something to me on a personal level; it was when I ate the first carrot to come out of our field. The carrot was a Chatenay Royal. The ferny leaves were maybe half the size that they were meant to be and the root was still a little green, but eating that carrot straight out of the clean ground meant more than I ever thought it would. My reaction to the first bite wasn't an elevation of my consciousness or even of my spirit, but it was an elemental recognition - it was my cells instinctually crying out that for the first time in years they were being fed.

My Organic Philosophy:

As I learned, when you garden, you can fertilize the plant or you can fertilize the soil.

Flashback to my husband Tim and myself in 2003 as we're volunteering at Angelic Organics, a large CSA in Illinois. Today's your lucky day, they tell us, because we're making up a biodynamic spray and you get to perform the stirring.

What?

We sat, facing the west, side by side in front of two twenty-gallon crocks full of water, eyeing the farm manager as she measured out suspicious-looking black sludge to dump into our crocks. I was thinking, I have to put my hands in that? Though by now, I'm sure my hands have been in much worse.

Biodynamics is a fascinating approach to agriculture that began with Rudolph Steiner in the 1920s. Its most interesting aspect, I think, is the way it incorporates the cosmos into its farming methods. Our stirring, 20 seconds of stirring one way altered with 20 seconds of stirring the other, was creating vortex and chaos and potentiating our solutions with the forces of the cosmos. These solutions would later be sprayed across several acres in a homeopathic approach to soil fertility. It seemed like hocus pocus, and yet there is some hard science and empirical evidence behind these methods.

Performing the stirring in silence with my husband was an experience. At first I felt like laughing. But after awhile I began to feel peaceful. Vortex. Chaos. Vortex. Chaos. In the midst of both, there can be cosmic balance.

I straddle a weird world, being an idealist who accidentally wandered into the world of chemistry, instinctively ready to believe in the spiritual and trained not to believe without proof. Biodynamic farming, as well as other methods in Secrets of the Soil, fit well into this world.

Growing up as the daughter of a conventional farmer and later as a student of chemistry, I slowly took on the war mentality that often pervades the interaction of people with nature. In farming we use chemicals to fight insects and disease, and in the world of drugs and hospitals we also use chemicals to fight disease. In my research, I worked with a cancer drug, MTX, so potent I had to wear gloves to prevent my hair from falling out or worse! Ironically, medicines used to cure sickness also cause sickness.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered      from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years      by the element she had purified

In our fight against disease, I think we've hit another issue of timing. The fight against degenerative disease goes back to understanding the transition state, to understanding the moment of interaction between the molecules of our drugs and their target, whether the target is the cell walls of a bacterium, the capillaries of a cancer tumor, or the cholesterol building in our blood. When we treat disease, I think we are missing the moment of transition. It is not the moment that the chemotherapy medicine enters our bloodstreams. The moment of sickness or health begins the moment we neglect our soil. Thus the moment of healing must begin at our roots; it must also begin with our soil.

Again, organic is not about what's not there. It's about what's there. And it's not about fighting, it's about living in harmony with nature. Humus is working with nature, repeating a natural cycle of returning organic matter back to the soil. Pesticides and herbicides are about fighting nature.

And finally, to me, organic is about giving: giving back to the soil that sustains us.And that is also what being a small, local grower is about to me. Giving. I think it's hard to give on an impersonal level. Giving is a form of communication, and how often do you communicate with your growers when they are large industries thousands of miles away?

I have met some great people in my adventures into the local foods scene. In Iowa City, I met a woman who donates all of her time (for no financial gain) to helping families with income disadvantages while at the same time helping local growers. She runs a nonprofit organization called the Local Foods Connection, and she has given this charity her life. I look at people who seem to give away their lives and wonder at the courage it takes to do so. It's so great to have a local charity to know on a personal level, and to know that your donations are really helping others, and not only others, but your community as well.

Other growers, such as Lonnie and Valerie Gamble in Fairfield, Susan Zacharakis in Iowa City, and Larry Cleverly in Des Moines, were really great to us, helping us or referring customers to us even though we are in competition.

A great thing I learned this year is that CSA is not about competition in the market, but it is a means of giving everyone around me a chance to eat better, live better, and be better. I didn't know it when I left Chicago, but by coming home to grow vegetables, I came home to live in balance, abundance, and most of all, to give.

Gardening parallels life. If you truly care for your soil, it will care for you. I remember one July evening we stood in a squash patch that was so dry the dirt was starting to crack, watching dark clouds roll in the southeastern sky. I was thinking of all the times in my youth when we looked to the west to check the future forecast, because most weather in Iowa comes from the west. But that night in the field, those southern clouds rolled north, and I watched the sky turn black and blue and experienced raindrops so fat that I could feel them individually splash against my skin. I had done what I could to help nature, and nature helped me.

What a way to learn!

Marie Curie believed radiation could be used to heal people. And she was right - these days radiation goes hand-in-hand with cancer treatment. But if you read to the end of Marie Curie's life, you'll learn that she died from radiation sickness

She died    a    famous woman    denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds    came    from the same source as her power

What is the source of our power?

Remember how you can fertilize the plant or the soil? I think it's a good analogy for how we take care of ourselves: we either treat ourselves as a plant that needs saving, meaning we feed medicine to a sick being, or we treat ourselves as a living, dynamic soil that we feed regularly-a system that we respect and take care of. How are our choices affecting us? How will they affect our future? Transition states can be influenced; the enzymes in our bodies work by influencing transition states. So my final question is this: how can we influence our transition states?

The Right Fight!

I believe in the fight to save our food system, to save our health and our lives. I believe that you and I can join in this fight by buying from local growers that we personally know are working to enhance their soil and consequently, our food.