Lucky Dog Farm

Back in February, I read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. My friend from Cornell, Peter (who is the only person in the world I grant the privilege of telling me to read a book point-blank, no questions asked) raved about it as well and so we embarked on a quest to spend part of our summer (and our fourth Ernie-Peter extravaganza) working on farms. Some of you may not think getting up early and doing farm work as a vacation, but for Peter and I, the joy comes in the learning and the doing. I can speak for myself, in that sitting on a beach does little to interest me.

Peter (note I was a complete free-rider in the actual preparation for the trip as I simply showed up and had my fun) contacted four different suppliers of his favorite restaurant in Brooklyn and we chose to volunteer a week each at two of them. The first, Lucky Dog Farm, is located in Hamden, NY which is in Delaware County in the northern reaches of the Catskill Mountains. Lucky Dog is run by a couple (he a native of Mississippi and she of Texas) who left New York City eight years ago to establish an organic vegetable farm on 150 acres (he has 40 planted this year) hard against the West Branch of the Delaware River.

My tent, pitched in a field at Lucky Dog Farm

The view from my tent

The river behind our tents was our nightly bath.

Starting Monday July 30th, we were up at 6-7AM in the fields working with the six other workers he employs. We weren't treated any differently or given easier work, it was get out there and do the same work as all the others. It was great.

All produce starts as a seedling that is placed in a mud/soil mixture in the greenhouse. After the seeds have taken root, each is transplanted (as I am doing above) into a larger block of mud/soil.

The blocked seedlings are then let to grow to a size in which they are ready for planting.

The seedlings are then planted with a mechanical transplanter. According to Peter, this was the most stressful job he had all week (I didn't get an opportunity on this contraption). He had to drop the blocked seedlings into a hole in the machine which would open up a row of soil drop the seedling block in and then cover up the row with soil.

Tomatoes and flowers were grown in the greenhouses

Throughout the week, each an every day moved quickly because we never had to focus on one task for more than an hour. There was one exception but I will discuss that later. As a group we harvested at least four types of kale, swiss chard, five types of beans, tomatoes, fava beans, arugula, beets, five types of lettuce, salad mix, carrots, potatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, three types of onions, many types of squash and more that I'm forgetting.

The rhythm of most days has the crew harvesting crops in the morning. On Mondays and Wednesdays, the farm has an order from an organic produce distributor who supplies to NYC restaurants. Richard, the owner, tells the distributor what he has and then is told what is needed. On Thursday, harvesting is dedicated to the farm run Community Supported Agriculture service in which local residents prepay for seasonal goods which they come and pick up. Friday harvesting is geared towards the selling at the three farmers markets the farms sell at over the weekend.

The microclimate of the valley in which the farm is located consistently has dense fog in the morning until about 10AM. Here we are cutting arugula (the green row on the right) and some red lettuce as well. Notice that the arugula is covered with a synthetic cloth. Bugs like spicy leaves and so the arugula needed to be covered.

I am on the ground cutting green salad mix

After an hour of cutting, I've got a full crate ready to be washed and packed.

Richard G. the owner of Lucky Dog Farms with a bunch of freshly picked laccinata kale.

Micah with a full crate of redbor kale.

There are many machines on the farm which make life a great deal easier. Shown here is a potato harvester, which digs up the potatoes then shakes loose the dirt...

...and the drops them on the top of the upturned soil.

The last step is to get on ones hands and knees and pick up all the potatoes.

Another amazing piece of equipment, the potato washer.

This machine simply is driven over a patch of beans and miraculously separates them from the plant...

...then drops them in a crate.

Remember how I mentioned one task that we did for hours on end? That task was bean sorting. The following pictures shows Peter and another worker standing at the side of a table with grooves. The table sloped to the left and shook semi-violently to keep the beans moving towards the edge of the table. Our job was to pick out the short/broken/ugly beans or to pick out the stems and leaves that made it through the harvester. Each crate took about five minutes and was sent through the sorter twice. One day we did 15 crates, another day 20, but on our last day, we sorted 36 crates of beans.

The bean sorting table.

A picture of the washroom before the days harvest is unloaded from the trucks to be washed and boxed.

Purple cauliflower ready for washing.

Micah, myself and Calen at the end of a long week.

On the Saturday we left, Peter and I helped out at the on of the farmers markets that Richard sells at. This one was in Margaretville, NY.

So that's a whirlwind look at life on an organic vegetable farm. So what did I take away from the experience. First and foremost, I am in awe of photosynthesis. Plants are planted and given some sun and water and these amazing edible plants are produced. Second, I never understood how much thought and work goes into producing our food. Richard has to think so much in advance of when to start seeding plants to make sure that they are in season and will ripen at the right time. I will never be able to buy my vegetables again without thinking of Richard, Micah, Calen, Calen's sisters and Jill and all the hard work they put into growing and getting the food to us.

When my friends and I were studying at Cornell, we used to laugh at the major titled Agricultural Engineering. Well, no more of that for me. Machines make things so much easier on the farm. However, they are expensive and even more costly to maintain. This cost along with the amazingly low prices we pay for food as well as the huge subsidies the government gives to large farmers makes the Economics of small farms very difficult. It's still cheaper to buy produce in NYC that is shipped from California that from Lucky Dog Farm only three hours away from the city. We need to support our local farmers, and most of the time organic as well, by being willing to spend the time asking where our food comes from and being willing to pay more for it.

I end by telling you about the revelation I had at eating locally grown food. Each and every meal at the farm was like a "Vegetable Iron Chef". One night I ate a tomato that was grown right there on the farm and it blew me away. I had never eaten a Black Krem before. Food from the farm, food that isn't grown in mass quantities as is what we often buy at our local big grocery store, takes infinitely better. Perhaps I am late to this bandwagon, but I am certainly on it now!!

Final Thoughts on China

To the person, it seems to me the question I get asked is "How was China?" My response to that is complicated and there are different reactions to different parts of my experience there. I guess I'll take the cheap way out and express what I saw/learn/felt in a series of bullet points, instead of trying to combine them into one coherent well-crafted thematic essay.

• The first and foremost thing that struck me was how I felt like a foreigner in a foreign land, but wasn't seen as one. I could walk down the street and I would simply go unnoticed. In places like Europe, perhaps it is my self-perception that I'm being looked at like a tourist, but in China I was one of 1.3 billion. Sometimes I could even get away with speaking and they wouldn't bat an eye. However, when it came to having to read something, I totally was nailed and had to confess to being an American. It is truly different to be in the majority as to being in the minority The different is subtle but present. One funny story. I was at an internet cafe, typing an email and I look up and realize there are five people standing around me watching me in awe as I type not in Chinese. Yeah, I outed myself at that point too.

• Yes, China is an economic superpower. It's amazing to see how rapidly China is making progress in a traditional modernization way. We learn in Economics that developing countries start by manufacturing textiles and consumer items and move into high technology goods. China is racing along this path. Why is it happening here is a question I asked myself and lots of others have as well. I'm not a foremost expert, but from what I saw, the people of China are willing to do what it takes to achieve prosperity. They are taking advantage of the fact that the basic tenets of a free-market system are in place, private property rights, justice and then beginnings of meritocracy.

• What about all those left behind in the economic wake? I constantly thought about that. What about those people in the rural areas? The one thing that I heard was that this economic development has made hunger a relic of the past. Poverty surely still exists, but people going hungry is not nearly as endemic as in times past. The rising economic tide isn't raising all boats at the same rate. I wondered if there would be resentment and hostility to this fact. There certainly is a huge urban/rural divide in China and it's growing. I'm not sure how it will play out. It certainly is going to be a major issue in the decades to come.

• Pollution and the environment. Yup, it's huge. First of all, the country needs to install more public trash cans. One just can't help tossing trash onto the ground. It's an ethic that exists and will hopefully change. Environmental standards just aren't up to standards that we have and expect in the West. I guess what struck me as amazing was how the laws that we have implemented herein the West do work. All these emissions standards and regulations do make our air cleaner. What I do know is that we can't mandate China to do what we now know is right. Everyone and every country needs to make mistakes and learn from them. But hopefully, they will be willing work at developing their economy while maintaining the natural beauty and ecosystems that make the place so unique.

• Then there is this trade surplus that China runs with almost every country. From what could see, I don't think the majority of Chinese residents can afford anything that we can offer them. They can manufacture or grow everything themselves and for cents on the dollar. Their lives are simpler and simply don't need as much stuff, so of course they're going to export more and not need to import.

• Lastly, on a personal revelation, I have to say that spending two weeks in China opened my eyes to the fact that all those weird things my parents do and eat are what people do in China. As a child I always looked on it as something kind of extraneous in my American life. It felt like this additional stuff I had attached to my person but I never really understood how the food and the language were comforts to them. I never really understood how difficult it must have been for them to be young adults and simply moved to a completely different culture and have to assimilate. Almost every hour or so I would stop and think, "could I chuck it all and move to this country? What would I have to give up and what would I have to endure?

Overall, my trip to China was more than I could have expected. It was truly something I needed to experience and see.

The Li River

Being the geologist that I am, the beauty of the karst topography of the Li River has always drawn my attention. One of the highlights of my trip was getting to see this beautiful place.

We now are going to play a guessing game. One of the great traditions of cruising the Li River from Guilin to Yangshuo (which, by the way is much overrun by Westerners,a fact that I found disturbing and unsettling but more on that later) is to look at the shapes or staining on the rock faces to find items that others might identify as well. So, I'm going to present to you four pictures and see if you can figure out what shape or image people see. Answers revealed at the end of the post.

A

B

C

D

Now for the big challenge. Shown below is the rock face of nine horses. Legend has it that if you can find the nine horses you are something special. What that special is, I couldn't figure out in my conversation with John, but well, let's just say you're cool.

Find nine horses

Moon Rock Hill

The backside of the 20RMB bill

See anything familiar?

ANSWERS: A) Horse facing left and a rider facing backwards B) Apple C) Tortoise walking uphill D) Rooster

Sanjiang

I wish more of the biking was like the picture above, but, alas, it wasn't. The ride from the Rice Terraces to the city of Sanjiang was a beautiful stretch along a river. The first third of it was a beautiful and easy ride, but due to some pretty major road construction, we weren't allowed to ride and so again, we resorted to stashing our bikes in the van and driving to Sanjiang.

Sanjiang isn't really all that exciting a place, however, it is the launching point to visit the Dong minority. China is predominantly Han. It would be like saying the United States is majority Caucasian. I am Han Chinese. The country or China has numerous minority groups that speak their own dialects and cultures. It's just that they all look pretty much Chinese to most people.

Throughout the Dong communities, they have built these covered bridges all without nails.

We got to watch a performance by the Dong. The young boy in the middle was having the time of his life and not jaded by performing.

If you're Chinese you need to learn to squat. You are in this position when eating to watching television to working in the fields.

Wandering through the village, we looked through a window and saw this woman making cloth. She was nice enough to let us come in and watch.

I'm embarrased to say that it took me a while to figure out what each of the moving parts actually did.

Somehow I saw this as indicative of China

This region is known for building drum towers

The towers serve as a social gathering place for the community

Leaving the Dong minority village, we headed back for some time in the town of Sanjiang.

Visiting temples, there are a jar full of sticks on which a fortune is written. This is what I picked and John said it was really good but couldn't explain it. Mom? Dad? Help, please.

Want to known where our lumber products come from? By the way bamboo (or which there are 15 or so different types) grows like a weed here and is really strong!

Here at the chopstick factory, scrap lumber is cut into rectangular prisms of wood. Everyone in China uses disposable chopsticks. John says it's a sanitary thing, but I'm not sure about that.

The prism are run through a machine to shape the sticks into rounded form as well as putting the slit through the middle.

Each set of sticks is visually inspected by hand and visual imperfections as shaved off

Here's where the "Made in China" Pier 1 Import Chairs begin life

The strands in the foreground to become toothpicks and then thin strips in the background to become steamers

Myself and our driver Deng dining on the streets

Many nights we three would retire to my room and play Chinese Chess