CONCORD, – Farmers in training at the Elma C. Lomax Incubator Farm say they received notice from Cabarrus County on Thursday that the power would go off this week and the water would be cut off after Aug. 30, leaving many wondering whether they’ll lose their crops this year.

Angie and Mark Olear stand to lose about $15,000 worth of Jerusalem artichokes that will not be ready for harvest until after the first frost.

““I think he’s (Oesterreich) trying his best to save money for the public, which is a good thing, but I wish he’d done his homework. I don’t think he wanted to put a bunch of hard-working farmers out of business. To pull the plug on it doesn’t seem like true conservatism by not considering the consequences.”

“It’s going to destroy us if they shut it down,” Mark Olear said, adding that they use the artichokes grown at the farm to make an artichoke relish. They just recently received word that the new Whole Foods Market opening in Huntersville is interested in stocking their product.

“It’s just disheartening,” said Angie Olear, who owns Crouch’s Gourmet Specialities, Inc.

‘CAN’T AFFORD THIS STUFF’

The Elma C. Lomax Incubator Farm lost county funding on June 16 when the Cabarrus County Board of Commissioners voted 3-2 in favor of several last-minute cuts to the fiscal year 2015 budget, which was proposed at $209.7 million by County Manager Mike Downs. That total budget included $114,017 for the farm’s annual operating budget. That amount included the funding for the Food Policy Council. The cuts are effective Tuesday, July 1, and included 11 job cuts across several county programs, including the farm manager position at Lomax.

Commissioner Jason Oesterreich proposed the reduction in the farm budget, stating that the county had spent $400,000 in the last year on the farm. It’s unclear where that number came from, and Oesterreich did not respond to questions about the farm Friday. Commissioner Vice Chairman Larry Burrage and Commissioner Chris Measmer voted for the cuts. Commissioner Chairman Liz Poole and Commissioner Steve Morris voted against them.

Burrage said Friday that the county should not be funding a program like the Lomax farm.

“It’s still government doing something it shouldn’t be doing,” Burrage said. “You could just put each one with them with a different farmer. You’d learn a lot more than working a 10-by-10 plot. The whole thing is that government is too big, too costly, and the people can’t afford this stuff no more.”

ECONOMIC IMPACT

Farmers in training at Lomax, which is located of N.C. 49 at 4335 Atando Road, have up to a half-acre to farm, according to those working there. They come up with a business plan that is submitted to and approved by the county. They invest their own money and labor and start building a business. One farmer has purchased an 18-acre tract in Cabarrus County to start farming on a larger scale on his own. He already employs three seasonal workers and hopes to expand. Another said she is ready to start working on her own farm as well.

There are currently 10 farmers in training at Lomax, along with several volunteers and about eight community gardeners who aren’t quite at the full-farming stage yet. Farmers cycle out of the program, making room for others to join.

On Friday, nine people were working the land at Lomax. Seven of them said they planned to launch new businesses because of the program.

The Lomax farm represents economic development for small businesses, farmers there say. Shutting it down means shutting down growing businesses with the potential to create jobs and attract positive attention to Cabarrus County, they say.

Ford Craven, president of the Cabarrus Homebrewers Society, said the society began using a plot on the farm that is unsuitable for most crops because of its slope. But it’s perfect for hops, which are used to make beer, he said.

Craven said the society now could lose about 20 to 30 pounds of certified organic hops that were drawing positive attention to Cabarrus County from across the state. There are only two places in North Carolina where brewers can get certified organic hops, and one of them is in Cabarrus County at the Lomax farm, Craven said. The other is a commercial operation in western North Carolina.

“It’s just an industry that is growing in North Carolina,” Craven said.

Central United Methodist Church in Concord volunteer Dan Barrier said he’s worried the church will not be able to harvest its current crop of cauliflower, yellow squash, zucchini squash, crowder peas, green beans, cucumbers, okra, tomatoes, peppers and eggplant – all of which would be donated to Cooperative Christian Ministry’s food pantries. Last year, the church donated about 1,200 pounds of fresh produce. The church, which expected to exceed that amount this year, will not be able to plant and harvest its fall crops for the food pantry. The church crops have the potential to help hundreds of local families, Barrier said.

FARMERS IN TRAINING

Joe Rowland is an example of why Cabarrus County’s Lomax farm started. It was an effort to create a new, younger generation of farmers as the county’s existing farmers aged out. Rowland said he came to Lomax from Charlotte about four years ago.

“I lived in a Charlotte apartment and wanted to get into agriculture, but I didn’t know a way to do it,” he said. Then he heard about Lomax.

Rowland now owns an 18-acre farm in Cabarrus County and has been building www.golocalncfarms.com, an online farmers market and delivery service for the Charlotte and Piedmont/Triad areas. Rowland said he wishes he had more notice. He’s building toward a completely self-sufficient business model but isn’t quite there yet.

“We’re in the middle of a growing season,” he said. “Thirty days notice seems standard. Sixty to 90 would be better. July is not really a good time for me to stop everything.”

Lynn MacDougall-Flemming, the only female farming mentor onsite, said she’s disappointed with the cuts but is hopeful something good will come out of it. She hopes either the funding is restored or the farm can change the way it operates and possibly be run as a non-profit in the future.

“One of the reasons for this is that our average age of our farmers was 58,” she said. “They’re aging out. A lot of them are in their 70s.

“I think it’s kind of sad,” she said.

Andy Thewlis, Lomax’s newest farmer, moved his family from Charlotte to Cabarrus County about two months ago to pursue his dream of becoming a farmer. He’s disappointed but is trying to stay optimistic that the farm isn’t done yet.

“I grew up in Ohio, and it’s just what I always wanted to do,” he said, adding that he didn’t grow up on a farm and wasn’t sure how to get started. Then he found Lomax.

“And now it’s in peril,” he said.

Doug Crawford, a mentor farmer at the Lomax farm, worked Friday to move his tractor off site because he was worried the county may lock the farm gates, preventing him from retrieving it later. He’s also worried about the farm’s certified organic status and what will happen to his crops as the farm shuts down this summer.

Crawford said the farm affects far more than the farmers working the land. For example, N.C. State University recently conducted a shiitake mushroom growing workshop attended by 80 people at Lomax.

‘LIKE A DEATH SENTENCE’

“You’ve got three rogue commissioners,” Crawford said. “It’s nothing more than a personal vendetta.”

Crawford said farmers and others from the markets where they sell their produce plan to attend the commissioner meeting on July 21 to voice their opinions about the cuts. The cuts were made in a motion after the public hearing on the budget ended, giving local taxpayers and those affected by the cuts no warning and no opportunity to speak about the cuts.

“A simple phone call could have avoided the budget motion from being passed based on false numbers,” said Lomax Farm Manager Aaron Newton, who lost his job to the budget cuts. “The result is new farming businesses scrambling to deal with this last minute development and a church congregation unsure if they will be able to access their 10,000 square foot charity plot after next Monday.”

N.C. Sen. Fletcher Hartsell, the lawyer who executed the deed from the Lomax property to the county, said the decision to stop funding the Lomax farm results in the farm's reversion back to the original donors. 

It also opens up the county to lawsuits for the farmers' loss of their crops, he said. 

"It’s a standard provision in the laws on the books for years," Hartsell said. 

Hartsell said the decision also goes against a statewide movement to support local food. The N.C. House of Represenatives passed a bill related to the local food movement last week, he said. 

"The local food movement is huge," he said. 

Don Boekelheide, who also farms at Lomax, drove up in his pickup truck as Crawford walked to his half-acre of crops Friday. He offered Crawford a stalk of purslane, which has flavorful leaves that can be cooked like spinach or used in salads.

“The biggest problem to me is that this is like a death sentence for this to come this time of year,” Boekelheide said, adding that crops from the larger plots must be harvested, cleaned and chilled for market.

“I think he’s (Oesterreich) trying his best to save money for the public, which is a good thing, but I wish he’d done his homework,” Boekelheide said. “I don’t think he wanted to put a bunch of hard-working farmers out of business.

“To pull the plug on it doesn’t seem like true conservatism by not considering the consequences,” he said. “He’s never met with us.”

Crawford agreed: “They don’t know our story. We are the people. We are the public.”

Boekelheide added, “We are the stakeholders in this experiment that has gotten Cabarrus County great positive publicity.

“We’re all very grateful, but we need a seat at the table for reasoned dialogue,” Boekelheide said.



This story was originally published in the Independent Tribune here...
http://m.independenttribune.com/news/last-harvest-at-lomax-farmers-in-training-get-notice-to/article_4b10ad9c-ff8e-11e3-a0cc-0017a43b2370.html?mode=jqm

As more people are growing their own fruits and vegetables in North Carolina, we thought we'd share a few that can be planted once and harvested for years. Most of the vegetables we eat are annuals, but there are a few categorized as perennials. We think they all are delicious. We've also heard that they all have health benefits. Read on to see what you can plant next year and enjoy for many more to come....


1) Asparagus

Asparagus begins to shoot out of the ground in early spring. The first year after they've been planted will be considered the starter year. This strategy lets the asparagus plants expand for a heartier bounty during the second and subsequent years.... up to 30 years!

2) Onion
Onions can survive hard winters. Plant them in your garden in fall and expect to see them sprout the following spring. Instead of cultivating every onion, leave a few behind. They'll go through a growth cycle that sends new plants to seed, so more will be available in the future.

3) Garlic
Like onions, garlic should be planted in the fall. Leave a few garlic plants in the ground during harvest so the plants will continue to divide throughout the year.

4) Rhubard
We've mostly eaten Rhubard in a sweet pie during our childhood years. The stems are colorful and a bit tart, so when sweetened with sugar or served with other fruits rhubarb makes a particularly delicious treat. The leaves should not be eaten. Toss them in the compost bin instead. The stems are the only part of the plant that should be eaten.

5) Strawberries
Have you ever grown your own strawberries? The produced in your own garden are different from the ones you'll find in the supermarket. Typically strawberries are not ripe when they're picked, so plucking a fresh fruit from your backyard will yield one with a richer flavor and succulent fragrance. In North Carolina, strawberry plants typically start bearing fruit in June. Throughout the warm season, they'll produce runners that are the source for new baby plants. By trimming off most of the runners you can maximize your strawberry yield.

6) Sweet Potatoes
Sweet potatoes are easy to grow and actually do best the poorer the soil is. The tubers provide the nutrients to the rest of the plant, so sandy soil, prevalent in the eastern portions of the state, ensure maximum size as they swell to suck the limited minerals. They should be planted a little more than a foot apart with rows spaced a yard from each other. This spacing ensures the vines can spread out and not compete with its neighbors.

In a recent TEDx talk in Knoxville, Tennessee Chad Hellwinckel explained the importance of local food across the United States and the Southeast. The overarching theme was that the agricultural system that we know today is not sustainable. It depends on cheap fuel mostly in the form of refined oil, and there is a large mountain of evidence suggesting we are on the downward slope for petroleum extraction.

On average about 40 years is required to bring a newly found and drilled oil field to reach peak production. After the rate of oil extracted from the deposit has reached its maximum flow, the volume of oil that can be retrieved from the field drops year after year. The graph below shows the amount of oil discovered each(bar chart) and the volume of oil pumped from the ground each year (smooth curve). Based on historical trends scientists have found a way to predict how much oil will be discovered in the future.

In short, the amount of oil left in the ground is declining while the amount of oil Americans and humans across the planet consume is rising. As less oil is pumped from the ground, but demand rises (as it’s done every year since the Industrial Revolution began) prices will rise too. Because little of our food is grown in backyards and towns anymore, the price for a bunch of carrots has the cost of the fuel to ship the vegetable across the continent built in.

The amount of fuel energy required to transport produce has risen many fold over the past 90 years. In 1920 one unit of energy burned on the farm produced three units of caloric value in the corresponding harvest. Food grown on a 1920 farm tended to be eaten within a few miles or at the resident farm house. Fast forward to 2010, we now burn one calorie of fuel for every calorie the farm produces. Add to that the cost of shipping produce from California to North Carolina. After refrigerated transportation energy requirements are included, seven units of petroleum based energy are used to produce one unit of food energy.

If our supply of oil were infinite and the atmosphere could handle unlimited amounts of carbon dioxide without global temperatures being affected, this imbalance would not be so bad. Our oil demands could continue to grow at an exponential rate. Because we are inside a system with a finite amount available to extract, the food system is not sustainable in its current form. We must move towards consuming food grown close by.

If the graph above accurately depicts oil’s supply and demand, we have entered the peak. Despite some unpredictable variations, gasoline and diesel prices are guaranteed to rise. The question is not if, but when.

We can address the problem preemptively or wait until economics dictate the time for a solution.

In 1990 when the USSR dissolved, Cuba was abruptly left without its key trading partner. Overnight it experienced peak oil and had to adapt quickly. Almost overnight Cubans went from a diet of 3000 calories to 2000. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds of body weight by 1993. Looking to solve their unexpected food crisis, the country had to relearn how to grow its own food with little oil input. By 1998, the Cubans were gaining weight again.

The US can wait until fuel prices begin rising sharply before addressing the problem. There will be shocks and hunger for years with this option, but necessity will dictate that we find a new method of bringing produce to the table. The problem will be solved in time once we get hungry. Or, using our capacity to predict future outcomes based on previous data, we can decide to solve this looming problem before grocery store shelves go barren.

So what do we do now? In North Carolina, it is possible to grow greens all winter long with minimal resources. It is time we start growing more of our own food in our backyards. It is time to begin supporting our local farmer. It takes years to learn how to farm and garden well. It takes longer to move a small farm into full production. We can start now and go through the growing pains in the comfort of a multi-year buffer. Or we can re-experience what happened to Cuba and realize the urgency sensed on an empty stomach.


If you want to deliberately support the sustainable food movement in North Carolina, you might want to consider using Leading Green Distributing to help partner local farms with your home, grocer or restaurant.

"The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems." ~Mahatma Gandhi

A Charlotte-area chef and farmer may be dishing the real dirt on North Carolina food next year, if plans for a new public TV series work out.

Chef/farmer Cassie Parsons of Grateful Growers Farm in Denver, N.C., is working with two producers on a series that would be called “Parson’s Table” that they hope would debut in March 2015.

Julia Edmunds, who works with Parsons and her partner, Natalie Veres, is a producer on the show and says they plan to focus on farmers, chefs and food production. The show would begin in North Carolina in the first season, then expand into the Southeast and eventually other regions of the country in other seasons.

“It’s about how to be a locavore,” Edmunds said. “What does it mean to eat locally, what does it mean to eat seasonally?” The show would include cooking demonstrations and also would have an emphasis on how to feed a family local food on a budget.

Parsons is working with two executive producers, Brian O’Reilly, who was the producer of the Food Network show “Dinner: Impossible,” and Leland Gregory of Nashville, Tenn., who wrote for “Saturday Night Live” during the 2000 season and also is known for a series of humor books.

Edmunds originally approached them about doing video for Parsons’ website, but they convinced Parsons to shoot a pilot for a TV show instead.

While the producers are still working on lining up sponsors for the show, UNC-TV has expressed interest. Shannon Vickery, director of production, said that while they don’t commit to shows until they see the finished product, they have voiced interest and support of the concept.

Vickery said shows such as “A Chef’s Life,” with Kinson chef Vivian Howard, and “Flavor NC” have shown that viewers have an appetite to see how food gets to their table.

“We’re keeping in touch with them,” she said Friday.

Edmunds said there also are plans for several books out of the series, written by O’Reilly and Gregory with recipes by Parsons. They are in discussions with several publishers, she says.

Gregory said Friday that he doesn’t have a food background, but got interested in the project because of Parsons’ enthusiasm for local food systems.

“She’s very passionate about the whole sustainability and using wholesome foods and locally grown. Cassie is on the cutting edge of that.”


Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/05/31/4945627/charlotte-farmerchef-plans-tv.html#.U5832C-SOTw#storylink=cpy