Agriculture: Dan Guenther & Phillie's Bridge Farm by Thomas Wanning

Dan Guenther dreamt all his life about being a farmer. But everyone knows that it is tough enough to earn a living on a farm even if you already own one. Two years ago, in the midst of a long and happy construction career, his children grown, he woke up one morning and announced to his wife he was going to become a farmer. This, despite the fact that things have been getting steadily worse for American farmers during the last 40 years, not better. He took the plunge, and now, despite a radical loss of income, he is surviving, and loving every minute of it. What made this possible was a new movement in America called CSAs, or, community supported agriculture.

The key to survival for many small farmers is selling retail. Hence, the burgeoning number of farm stands and farmer’s markets. CSAs go a step further. Instead of selling individual heads of lettuce, for a single annual fee you get a share of the entire year’s crop, for six months, bringing home each week a box of whatever is then available. Last year, boxes were generally sufficient to supply a large family with all the vegetables they might need. The advantages to both the farmer and the consumer are multiple. From an economic point of view, the farmer gets a guaranteed market for his entire crop which is paid in advance, in the spring, when he most needs it. The consumer gets a terrific deal. Last year at Phillies Bridge the fee was $350 (it is now $400) and Guenther estimates that it would have cost at least $700 to buy in store organic produce comparable to what he distributed. But, he insists, the real value of the arrangement is not economic. You might rationally conclude it is not worth driving every week for six months to Phillies Bridge farm to save $350.

Beyond strict economics, there is, obviously, freshness. Most organic produce, like most produce generally, is trucked from California, which means it’s at least three to five days old when it gets to the store. Almost all of Phillies Bridge produce is picked hours before it is distributed. But this, according to Guenther, is still not key. The key value, he says, lies in education and in the community that is formed around the growing and distribution of food. Food is our most basic need, after water and air, which we all share. Sharing food creates a deep tie. When that food appears, as if magically, wrapped in plastic in the grocers bin, critical awareness and vital connections are lost. Reflecting this concern with education and community, the Phillies Bridge Farm Project is a non-profit organization under the umbrella of Mohonk Consultations. The farm itself is only one aspect of a larger educational project which includes bringing school children to the farm, public lectures, and holding workshops and conferences on sustainable agriculture. One of the goals is, as membership builds, for the farm to support its farmer. Guenther is assisted by numerous volunteers and by two interns, one of whom receives a modest salary paid for by Americorps. The other two receive stipends paid out of farm revenues.

At Phillies Bridge, as in many CSAs, in addition to the annual fee, each shareholder is required to contribute 12 hours of labor (this can be distributed over several people). This not only helps the farmer, but is crucial to community building. Last year, as one of a group that had bought two shares, I volunteered many hours beyond the couple each of us were required. I found it the most rewarding work I did during the entire year. There was always something immediate, concrete and satisfying to do. The farm is very beautiful, both in the orderly rows of vegetables and in the magnificent views of neighboring farms and the Shawangunks. Dan was always ready for whatever deep, philosophical conversation I wished to initiate.

Farming is traditionally—especially in America, a lonely business. In Europe farmers generally live in villages and commute to their fields. But in America it’s each farmer on his own not forty, or 400, but now more likely one thousand or even four thousand acres with only his wholesale broker, his banker, his extension agent, a few truckers and maybe a few hired hands to talk to. But Dan Guenther has 130 shareholders dropping in every week! Plus, last year he hosted every fourth grader in New Paltz and a lot of second and third graders as well.

In the United States, food and fibers are treated like manufactured commodities. We are, as a result, in the midst of a very peculiar farming crisis. Peculiar, because it is hard to talk about crisis when the American consumer is confronted by the most extraordinary abundance and variety of cheap food of any people in recorded history. Americans, on average, spend 11% of their income on food, whereas the world average is 30%-40%. But meanwhile, it is rapidly becoming virtually impossible for any farm to survive except the very largest mega-farms which function more like gigantic factories than traditional family farms. Dan’s son, Mark, recently traveled across the country working on a variety of farms. One farmer, who owned a thousand acres in Ohio, stated that even though he had had his best yields ever last year, he didn’t think he could survive more than four or five years. Another, who raised 80,000 hogs, was going deeper and deeper in debt in order to expand, because he couldn’t compete with million hog farms. Think of it. One million hogs!

So what, you might ask, so long as we've got plenty of cheap food? The problem is that we are becoming more and more dependent upon fewer and fewer areas of production. Right now we raise over half of our produce in the Imperial Valley in California, which is entirely dependent upon irrigation. This area is going to face a water crisis in the not too distant future. Ever expanding Los Angeles competes for the same water. There are areas where they sink a pipe deep into the earth and create great circles in the desert of rich farmland a half mile across. The problem is that every year they have to sink the pipe a little deeper and buy a bigger pump. At a certain point it will become prohibitively expensive to pump that water. There is another problem. Rain water is distilled and therefore free of minerals—except for what is picked up from air pollution. Both ground and river water—which is where irrigation comes from—contains a variety of mineral salts which remain in the ground after it evaporates. It has been found that some organic lettuce which was grown on irrigated land has toxic levels of nitrates—despite the lack of any nitrate fertilizers! Back in the days of the Romans, when they wanted to permanently destroy a people, they salted their land. Some of that land salted two thousand years ago is still useless. We, by means of irrigation, are salting our own land!

Not only are we dependent on less and less land, but as that land is more and more intensively farmed, it is forced into mono-culture. This is because the capital costs of farming are so high. If a farmer decides that his land does well with beans and he buys a mechanical bean harvester, he is out a quarter of a million dollars. Once he has bought that machine, he has to keep it busy. He can’t afford to raise anything else but beans, year after year. And so he depletes his soil and must add more and more chemical fertilizers. And since his plants are weaker, he must spray for more pests, since weak plants are more susceptible to pests. And the more he sprays for pests, the more he must spray, because he is also killing that pest’s natural predators. He also plants fewer varieties of more highly bred plants which probably don’t produce their own seed, which he therefore must buy. Although he may be getting extraordinary yields, he is actually in a very precarious position. And so are we, since we are entirely dependent upon fewer and fewer of him.

Four years ago there were 14 commercial dairy farms in Ulster County. Now there are seven. New York State now raises only 15% of its food. The average bite of food consumed in New York has traveled over 1000 miles. CSAs began in Japan 35 years ago, spread to Switzerland, and arrived in America in the early 80’s. Now there are over a thousand registered CSAs in America, and probably several thousand more. CSAs are still a very long way from reversing the above facts, but they are a seed—a demonstration of one possibility. It is hard to imagine a million New Yorkers taking a cab into the country each week to pick up their produce. We are going to need a lot of alternative possibilities before the branch we are sitting on falls off. Finding those alternatives is going to take a lot of education and a lot of imagination. This is what Dan Guenther wants to help do.

For more information on local Community Supported Agriculture, call Phillies Bridge Farm Project, 256-9108.