A flock of lycra-clad bicyclists race along the windy roads of the Presidio. Joggers sprint through the State Park’s misty eucalyptus groves, and junior soccer players squawk and run through a perennially green field.
Just past the grass, in a scruffy barracks warehouse, a Live Power Community Farm ritual takes place. It is called the Saturday Sort. It only lasts an hour, but it provides the answer for the final hurdle any farm must face: how to get the food from the farm to the people who will eat it.
I get a strange thrill when I see the vegetables, packed in their recycled boxes. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
I want to whisper to the ribbed green squashes.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some work at Live Power’s farm in Covelo, CA, which is about a three-hour drive north from San Francisco. Seeing the tomatoes makes me think of the apprentices on the farm, chucking the fruit mercilessly at each other. I stifle a giggle. Somehow they’ve made it here, to the heart of this very big city. I stick my head into a box of lettuce and smell—just like the farm. Well, maybe cleaner.
Next is what one of Live Power’s Community Supported Agriculture members warned me will be organized chaos. And it is. I feel in the way of all the rushing around, as people stack boxes, arrange old-timey wooden bushel baskets, weigh and count vegetables, bag and divvy up the harvest.
“This is the best part,” says Amy Miller, the Sort’s leader for today (they rotate every week), amid the pandemonium. “If a basket just came to me, I would miss the connection.”
It’s something that the CSA members tell me over and over again. They could have a box of food delivered to their door: It would be easier for them and cost about the same. Instead, they have a rotating group of workers who sort, then deliver the baskets to what they call their cluster. Friendships are built this way, and families often share produce with others.
Juicy turnips
Two squashes per share, Miller instructs.
A pound of tomatoes. Soon the baskets
are brimming, and I feel like I’m at a Martha Stewart photo shoot. The green stalks of the turnips are startling next to the vegetables’ purple shoulders; red and purple
peppers loll on top of blue-green leeks amid the leafy spinach, lettuces, and something called kyona mizuna. (These mystery vegetables are “what the Internet’s for,” says Miller.)
“Who’s ‘I’?” Miller yells. A woman in flowing black pants raises her hand. “Don’t forget the eggs.”
Eggs are procured from another farm, as is a share of butter and milk from Straus Dairy, a grain share from Windblown Farm, and chicken and meat from yet another farm. Fruit—this week includes heirloom apples, grapes, and pomegranates the size of softballs, sourced from their partners—also gets bagged and sorted. The eggs, plump and brown, peeking from cardboard cartons, are nestled into the baskets last.
Shareholders arrange these add-ons with Live Power’s main farmers, Stephen and Gloria Decater. Along with the Sort, it’s another example of their idea of associative economies. The Decaters began Live Power in the early 1970s as an organic farm. Seeking a deeper connection to the land, they transitioned to biodynamic methods in the ’80s. They view their
40-acre farm as working within a natural cycle: the animals and compost piles provide nutrients to grow the food, which feeds the humans and animals, who make the manure and compost. With this in mind, the Decaters grow a diverse palette of vegetables, fruits, and animal products. (They have all the CSA shareholders they can handle at this time; to find local farms with CSAs open to new members, check localharvest.org.)
Cheryl Pole, a mother of twin boys who are wandering around the Sort with a broomstick pony, corners me. “We
eat turnips now,” she says. “When they’re fresh, they’re actually juicy.”
Some say they choose Live Power because the farm uses organic methods, and for the community building the Sort can generate. Miller, the Sort leader, is an EPA employee who used to work in the agency’s pesticides division, where she saw on a daily basis the amount of chemicals poured onto tomatoes, grapes, rice—everything. “They make the landscape sterile and stale,” she explains.
Pole agrees. She doesn’t worry about peeling vegetables now: “This is clean dirt with good bacteria.” Ingesting small quantities of good dirt keeps her family healthier, she adds.
Other CSA members are more devoted to the biodynamic aspect of the farm. The oldest of a few “beyond organic” types of farming, biodynamic principles acknowledge a farm’s place in the greater cosmos. Its practitioners use special concoctions to balance the energy of the farm, and often plant and harvest crops according to astrological alignments.
The idea of a CSA, or eaters paying farmers directly, also has its roots in Steiner’s philosophies. In post-World War II Europe, groups of people bought stock in local farms, worked on the land, then divided the bounty among the group. Steiner urged that this process made for a tighter-knit community of people who were more connected to the land. Live Power’s Sort is part of this lineage.
Iris Parris, a slim redhead with a British accent, has been a Live Power shareholder for 15 years. She used to make regular trips to the farm, to visit the family and make jam with Gloria. Parris first heard of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian thinker and proponent of biodynamic principles, when she had a severe illness in Germany. She says that after doctors who used Steiner’s philosophies cured her, she “became like a sponge, you want to soak it all up—Steiner’s ideas about food, social life, doctors…” Parris, who is a nurse, explains that if science is about getting the same results from an experiment, then for her, “spiritual science is that if I can prove it to myself, that’s what works.”
You reap what they sow
But flavor is also important to Parris: “Live Power’s food tastes like the food I grew up eating as a girl in rural England.” When I argue that you could buy really good tomatoes at the farmers market, too, Parris is quick to respond. “That’s just exchanging money for goods. What we have is a direct relationship to the farmer—we know that they will get paid. They need to live.” She adds that she didn’t mind when the spring season started out slow. “That’s the reality. It was a bad April. But they make it up to us.”
Someone forgot to take their fruit shares with them. A shareholder sweeps the warehouse’s concrete floor, avoiding the forlorn line of paper bags filled with fruit. After consulting the rather complex, color-coded shareholder list, Miller calls the forgetful party, tells them the combination to the lock, then slides the door shut until next Saturday.
After witnessing the Saturday ritual, I wonder why it is that I don’t subscribe to a CSA myself. I value supporting farmers; I love eating seasonally. And yet, I think I resist the concept, as do so many people, because I imagine I have more freedom if I’m not tied to a weekly rite like this one. But as I walk away, through the fog of the Presidio, that freedom starts to feel a bit like a hollow prize.
Novella Carpenter is an Oakland-based writer and urban farmer. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, SFGate.com, Salon, and many other publications. She is at work on a memoir, to be published by Penguin. Novella also publishes the blog Your City Farmer.
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