Thursday 3 January 2013


Hey Folks:

Happy New Year!  Raise a toast (I have a jug of Beau’s Lug-O-Tread local organic brew here for just that) to another year of fruitful farming and tasty eating.

I’m so glad I decided to grow Pumpkins this year.  Our New England Pie variety has turned out to be a versatile squash.  We have eaten it as soup, casserole, and (today), it is the centrepiece of our New Year’s Feast – stuffed with a pilaf of rice, cranberries, and Whitsend-grown Red Onion.  If it turns out, we will post the recipe on our site later.

Work in the barn continues unabated.  A new prep table will increase our harvest efficiency, allowing us to do a quicker job cleaning produce before it leaves the field.  The nursery now has a pair of doors and a real roof.  The nursery grow-lights will get re-mounted this week, and the final insulation bats (organic produce bags stuffed with straw) will be installed.  After that, some tests to determine the optimal temperature settings for the heat mats and space heater.  The Nursery should be ready to take the first seed trays for the Leeks and Bulb Onions by late January or early February.

As the work on the nursery finishes, we’ll start building Trellises for the vine Tomatoes and Cucumbers …

So much about Farm work involves anticipating problems and having a plan B ready.  Sometimes, however, problems requiring a quick response come out of left field. Read on…

The Invisible Fist of the un-free market strikes again

Canada and the United States have an agreement that ensures the organic standards of each country are equivalent.  As of September 11, 2012, this equivalency agreement was cancelled for some crops.

Sodium nitrate is the issue.  Sodium Nitrate is mined from a unique mineral deposit in Chile, and is used by both conventional and organic growers in the US.  In Canada and the E.U., Chilean sodium nitrate is not allowed in organic production.  The USDA and the Canadian Organic Regime had previously agreed to a “twilight period” to phase out the use of Sodium Nitrate on US organic farms. 

The phase out of Sodium Nitrate has “proved to be controversial”, and organic growers in the U.S. have successfully lobbied the USDA to postpone the phase-out date.  They claimed that discontinuing sodium nitrate use would decrease the winter supply of organic leaf crops.  Sodium Nitrate force-feeds the plants, allowing these growers to extract more product from smaller growing regions – southern California and Texas, for example.

The upshot is that many U.S. seeds that were organic last season, lost their Canadian organic status with the stroke of a pen.  Some of the US organic seed I have purchased (and some I had intended to purchase) for 2013 is no longer considered organic in Canada. 

Here is a list of crops that I may not be able to produce in 2013, unless I am able to find an alternate source of seed certified organic by the Canadian Regime:

-Ping Tung Long Asian Eggplant
-DiCicco Broccoli (the cut and come again type)
-Pink Beauty Radish
-Chinese Leeks/Garlic Chives
-Flashy Troutback Lettuce
-Komatsuma Asian Green
-Yakuna Savoy Asian Green
-Green Wave Mustard
-Evergreen Hardy Bunching Onion (The type for late fall and winter growing)
-Vivid Choi
-Sugar Anne Snap Pea

In addition, I had one request for a medium sized, sweet-flavoured Tomato.  Both tomato types I was considering are now unavailable, unless I can find an alternate source or another type that fits the desired criteria.

I have done some muckraking to determine which US organic growers use Sodium Nitrate.  I am certain some of these producers sell organic-labelled product in our area (eg organic salad mix, lettuce, spinach etc. sold in bunches or plastic shell packs at grocery stores).  If I find out which US producers rely on this “feed the plant not the soil” technique, I will be glad to pass the info along, so you have the choice to support real organic growers who use the “feed the soil not the plant” method.

I am drafting an inquiry to my organic certification agency to determine how they are responding to this issue.  I have included a paragraph in my letter saying I expect these “no longer organic products” will not be advertised as organic in Canada.  After all, as an entrepreneur, I expect to do business on a level playing field in the “free market”.