West Milford farmer wants to share a growing passion

northjersey.com ^ | December 7, 2008 | TIM NORRIS

[Coleus]

When he pushed away from computer screens three years ago and turned to clearing and planting open ground, Pedro Guimaraes wasn’t just buying the organic precepts of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) or finding new avenues for small farms rooted in local economies. He was following a passion and finding a better way to live. "Working in an office, I used to have a lot of migraines, the bad headaches," he says. "Once I started working on a farm, I had very few. It’s not good for my head, being in front of a computer. Being outdoors improves your health." This time of year, when the outdoors can seem less friendly, might be the most crucial as he builds a CSA of his own, Bear Swamp Farm, in West Milford. In a mostly suburban region, he reaches out now through February or March for 35 local subscribers, at $30 a week or $600 for the growing season, paid up front, to share his weekly harvest.

It takes a commitment: In summer and early fall, members will pick up their bags of produce at the farm off Otterhole Road each Tuesday or Friday between 3 and 6 p.m. Guimaraes says he’d like to expand, in a year or two, to 50 shareholders. They will, he expects, come from many lines of work — lawyers, stockbrokers, teachers, trades people, vegetarians, seekers of alternate lifestyles — anyone who values the notion of fresh, local produce, free of chemical pesticides or fertilizer. And they will become part of a set of communities that extends to other CSAs in the area, to Jack Daly’s Sun Valley Farm CSA in Mahwah and Joy’s Farm, owned by Susan Joy, in Paramus, each as different in scope and scale as the person who runs it.

On a mid-November morning, Guimaraes stands at the edge of a narrow and seemingly empty plot of earth between a dirt road and a rugged outcrop of basalt. He has rented the land from the extended Hosford family, nearby. A cold rain drips off his hair and eyebrows. He reaches into a raft of leaves and mulch and pulls out a tiny garlic plant, fresh roots shooting out from its bulb. "I planted this Oct. 26, and look how the roots have already come out, in two weeks!" he says, and he smiles widely.

This is his sole autumn crop, to be harvested in February or March, but by next spring he’ll launch into a dizzying schedule of seedling growth in a greenhouse and of succession plantings for shareholders: peas, first, and then Swiss chard, kale, lettuce, onions, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes and a host of others, from arugula to zucchini. In a sloping back field, he will put in potatoes, pumpkins and winter squash. He sees himself as their caretaker, helping them fight off pests to grow vigorous and fruitful.

"I don’t leave them to chance," he says. "I’m out there with them, every day." He also wants to simplify the operation, to improve and smooth the soil enough to put his roto-tiller away and do as much as he can by hand. He has already troweled his fields with 1,200 pounds of lime, to balance acid in the soil and provide calcium to the plants.

"I want this to be sustainable," he says. "I want to grow food here using the least energy possible." His modest operation, three plots totaling an acre that previously fostered Christmas trees, is proving the right size for sustaining itself and for satisfying both his customers’ needs and his own. Each week, starting in June and running through at least October, he’ll divide everything pulled or plucked or dug up that week into 35 equal parts, a seasonally shifting selection from 29 vegetables, six herbs and two fruits. Shares are modest when the season begins but quickly grow in size. They can fulfill the summer’s weekly vegetable needs for most families of four, or two vegetarian adults.

Since he first read Henry David Thoreau’s "Walden," about living a simple life in harmony with nature, and began growing vegetables in his back yard in Wyckoff, Guimaraes found himself embracing CSA’s most basic tenets: a simple approach free of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, vigorous rotation of crops, a sparing use of machinery and a fresh harvest shared with a local community. The full embrace, though, meant leaving the comforts of home and office and bending his own back to farming’s outdoor, all-weather, quirky and chancy demands.

It meant finding and working for like-minded growers, digging out and hauling rocks and sod, sowing and weeding and tending, contending with pests, poring through books and Web sites, learning as he went. Guimaraes practices a kind of farming that goes back well past anything just called "organic" (though he has paid the $400 and parlayed the paperwork so his farm can be certified with that title) to a science, a philosophy and a way of life. Its promise, for him, includes becoming part of a community. "You have to be open to it, the whole idea," he says.

It does not include wealth. "If you look at how many hours you’re working and how much money you’re making, you’re probably below minimum wage," he says. He sees this kind of farming as finding a balance, not just of accounts or of the desires of customers and suppliers, but of values. Maybe his kind of farming encourages neighborliness, a generosity of spirit. For sure, he says, it brings a healthier interaction with nature, its chemistry and ways of working.

He found Bear Swamp Farm through Allison Hosford and her husband, Roger Knight, who also gave him use of their greenhouse up Otterhole Road at Two Ponds Farm for seedlings, for a fee lower than he offered. The land and much of that around it is owned by them and the wider Hosford family, which includes members still residing and farming nearby. This last season, Guimaraes worked with Jack Daly at Sun Valley Farm, reinforcing his belief that learning isn’t just a matter of an extension course or a DVD. It’s ground-level, hands-on, person-to-person.

The process they share is also, in its way, magical. "I’ve always liked growing things," Guimaraes says. "I like seeing nothing become something. A little seed is going to give me a ton of tomatoes." The quality of planting and nurturing, he adds, trumps the quantity of anything produced. Daly, among others, sees their kind of small farming on the upswing, despite pressure on the land from developers and other uses. Well-publicized food scares of last summer, involving contaminated tomatoes and cilantro and coriander and also imported grains and beef, alerted consumers to problems in the corporate and extended global food chain, he says.

Daly also credits a major corporate player, Whole Foods, with "bringing the idea of clean, organic food to the public consciousness." More than anything, he says, CSA farmers need a wider commitment, not just to a doctrine but to community and quality of life. They learn, he says, "to revel in the story of farming."

Guimaraes is living that story, now. Across Bear Swamp Farm’s browned fields, that day, the rain falls in a gentle, prolonged concert of patter-and-shush. The farmer stops to listen. "There’s life out here," he says. "You want to be out in the life."

[Coleus]

Pedro Guimaraes in the Farm Store on the acre he leases for his community farm in West Milford. Left, Guimaraes has only garlic in the ground right now, but come spring he’ll expand to peas, kale, lettuce, onions, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes and more.

Clients want, among other things, to see where their food comes from, at ground level and beneath.

FARM SHARES

Bergen and Passaic counties are home to three ongoing Community Supported Agriculture farms, now recruiting shareholders for the 2009 season. They provide details of crop varieties and amounts. Seasons generally run June through October, with weekly pickup. Shares are limited.

* Sun Valley Farm CSA: Farmer Jack Daly. Shares $700 per season. Bear Swamp Road, Mahwah; 917-796-8759; e-mail sunvalleyfarmsca@hotmail.com.

* Joy’s Farm CSA: Farmer Susan Joy. Shares $400 to $550 per season. 725 Pascack Road, Paramus; 609-412-3189; www.joysfarm.blogspot.com. 

* Bear Swamp Farm CSA: Farmer Pedro Guimaraes. Shares $600 per season. 81 Otterhole Road, West Milford; 201-574-6194, www.bearswampfarmcsa.org.

[exit82]

Ah, West Milford. Home of Forest Hill Park—what a great mountain lake to swim in as a kid.

[anniegetyourgun]

Wish I had bought more undeveloped land over the years....