This CSA basket for the last refreshingly chilly week in November represents some things old and some things new: Old friends bringing new crops; the last bag of last season’s rice harvest; new peanuts from the hills around Chiang Dao; our first CSA “value added” product.
This week:
- Rice
- Peanuts
- Pesto
- Bananas
The rice and the peanuts represent the change in seasons here in northern Thailand, as the Hot Wet Season and its life-bringing moist winds from the Indian subcontinent have given way to the Cool Dry Season and its cold arid winds from China. That means it is harvest time for many crops.
The brown-paper bag of rice you’ve received is the very last of 2008’s Fair Earth Farm rice harvest. The next lot will be from this year’s harvest, some of which lies drying in the field outside my window as I write. The peanuts were just harvested by our ethnic Palaung friends in Chiang Dao District, new farmer-members of the CSA.
The bananas are from an old friend indeed: Sarah’s sister, Pam. She has a wonderfully diverse, natural and flower-filled garden just down the road. As a new member producer, we’re looking forward soon to some of her fresh eggs, a product of the care provided by her husband Peter (Boontham), and the corn they grow in the backyard.
Ah, I shouldn’t forget Sarah’s homemade pesto! (Please return the jar with the basket so we can refill it with more.) Sarah, Ai Seud and Ah Chu browsed around the agroforest, where the holy basil (Ocimum tenuiflorum) has volunteered itself in thick abundance. A few plants in a bed in 2007 found the place to their liking and went forth and multiplied, and the agroforest strips are lush with pesto material! The harvesting yesterday seemed not to have made a dent in the stock. Now the job is to prune and thin back the basil to make way for other things, churning out pesto and basil chicken along the way.
There are some more details below about the produce, as well as the accompanying video and stories about our visit with Palaung forest farmers, but you might want to tuck into some pesto pizza first, or roast up some peanuts. (Les suggests trying them raw first, while they’re fresh from the ground.)
Enjoy!
Jeff, for the CSA team
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Enjoy the slide show and video!
Details:
- Rice. This is our preferred variety of the two types grown last season. Personally, it’s my favorite of all the varieties grown and promoted by our organic friends: black, red, three kings, whatever. This is called locally khao doi, or mountain rice. We sourced the seed in 2008 from ethnic Karen farmers in Mae Jaem District of Chiang Mai Province, who grow the rice in low-lying paddies. As far as we know, it is distinct from the similar-looking rice grown in the rainfed hill fields in the same area. Yet this paddy rice is grown by mountain people, thus everyone calls it “mountain rice.”
- Emma from St. Olaf’s College harvesting your rice in December 2008.
This rice was grown without any synthetic inputs – or any inputs at all, really. It was the second season in which the land was not subjected to any industrial chemical applications: herbicides, molluskicides, insecticides or synthetic fertilizers. We planted and harvested it ourselves, with the help of many friends. This was milled as white rice – fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your tastes. This was so because it was our last sack and it is inconvenient for our friends at Rainbow Farm to mill just one sack of rice. Rainbow Farm is one of the few places that we know in the province where you can mill rice brown. The mills in the area produce white, or polished rice, stripping the germ and bran – and most of the nutrients – from the grain. According to my knowledge and taste buds, white rice is inferior to brown rice. So apologies for the white stuff. Anyway, give it a try for comparative purposes. The next round will be brown.
Eventually we’ll get reusable hemp (or something) bags for the rice. For now, the paper bags are fine for mulch or in your compost.
- Peanuts. We owe the peanuts to the Palaung. These good but hard-pressed mountain folk are a big part of the inspiration for this project in the first place. They’ve converted degraded hill fields into some very impressive agroforests and integrated upland fields. Peanuts are part of the landscape there, fetching a generally better price than the other main crops: feed maize and a variety of beans: red, black, lab lab. I think Les and his good mate Rick were quite taken by the site of rich blankets of peanut plants in the mango orchards.
The process of growing these peanuts does include the use of herbicides, including Roundup. The logic of CSA, as opposed to organic certification, demands full disclosure of information, so I’m telling you this. I’m also telling you that food is a dirty business. Paraphrasing Les, if you look for impurity in our environment and the food it produces, you’re not going to have to look very hard. Even mother’s milk is contaminated with pesticides. Without getting into scary detail here, if you talk to a colleague doing research on food safety in Chiang Mai, you’re not going to look anymore at a bag of peanuts from the market with much confidence. Despite the herbicides used in August to kill weeds in the cornfields before growing peanuts, we have pretty good confidence that the peanuts in your CSA basket are okay.
One order of business over the next year is for us to work together and see if we can’t help the Palaung to wean themselves from reliance on that single chemical input. Your food purchases could really help.
- Bananas. Pam grows several kinds of bananas, as do we on the farm. This type of banana is called kluai horm, or fragrant banana, and it was produced without any chemicals at all. It is similar to the common cultivar found in produce shops in the West, though the ones in Walmart in Illinois might as well be grown on the moon for all that they resemble a “banana” in taste. I prefer the local yokel banana, the short fat kluai nam wa, though I think the ultimate banana is the big red, which is a meal unto itself. Pam has one plant growing, and I’m waiting to get a sucker or two to plant in an auspicious place.
- Pesto. The ingredients of this pesto came from diverse sources. We should assume that, the basil aside, the ingredients were not produced under natural circumstances. That is true, of course, with any pesto you’re going to find in Chiang Mai. I challenge someone to prove me wrong, showing me a pesto in which the basil, garlic, Parmesan cheese, oil and pine nuts were all sourced naturally. If you win, I’ll feature the producer prominently on this site.
The olive oil and cheese were imports bought at Rimping supermarket. The garlic is local, but hardly organic. We used cashews instead of pine nuts, but they were likely either imported or grown in the south. No idea about the way they were produced. On the other hand, there are no preservatives in your pesto, so eat it up!
We are taking steps toward all-natural pesto produced on farm. We have one cashew tree growing, with one or two more to come. There’s a bed of garlic growing, and more of that to grow during the Dry. We have three local “olives” growing, ma gork nam, but don’t really know much about the trees, other than that they look and rather taste like Mediterranean olives. We know nothing yet about their oil potential. As for cheese, we’d like to raise a couple goats and sheep, and if any friends or volunteers want to get into cheese making, they’re welcome. In the meantime, we’ll work harder at sourcing locally.
I made pesto “pizza” for a late dinner last night, but Annie ate most of it! Ingredients: hazel nut bread from Pie Sabai, olive oil, pesto, onions, tomato, Parmesan cheese and thyme. Not bad!
