Produce fine right off the vine

Published 5:00 am Saturday, July 29, 2006

For island-grown organic produce, it’s a short journey from earth to plate.

● This is the first of three parts of the “Earth to Plate” series on local farming. Wednesday: Butler Green Farms’ tomatoes move from the field to the marketplace.

The furrows in Brian MacWhorter’s soil-stained hands look fertile enough to have sprouted the fiery little tomatoes rolling between his palms.

“I won’t tell you what kind these are,” he says as his fingers slip back under velvety leaves to snap fruit from vines creeping along greenhouse trellises. “I’ll just tell you they’re my ‘slicers.’ They’re all-purpose. Nice size, they come early, they hold well and they taste good.

“I’ve been looking for 30 years for a tomato like these. I don’t want to let the secret out.”

MacWhorter, who has operated Butler Green Farms on Bainbridge Island for 23 years, keeps his secrets and his tomatoes close to home.

While a range of destinations await, most of this fresh-picked batch won’t leave the island. MacWhorter’s “slicers” – along with a number of odd-shaped heirlooms and grape-sized hybrids – will travel a short trail to a local chef’s cutting board and a downtown supermarket’s produce aisles.

The tomatoes’ early season glow will catch eyes at the island’s farmer’s market and spark suppertime inspiration in customers who frequent Butler Green’s produce stand on Lovgreen Road.

It’s there that MacWhorter’s full bounty is put on display. Garlic, carrots, kale, chard, lettuce, potatoes, berries, fennel, snap peas, pole beans – along with tomatoes – are collected from 17 acres spread over nearly a half-dozen parcels MacWhorter cultivates on the island.

It’s rare, MacWhorter says, for a modern farmer to have a direct link – a full earth-to-plate connection – with every facet of the business.

He plants the seed and harvests the crop. He markets it, sells it, delivers it and sometimes gets to watch tomato juice drip from the chins of regular customers who’ve waited three grim, gray seasons for his summer crop.

It’s hard, tiresome work – with over 100 hours often put into the farm each week. But seeing the end result has satisfied MacWhorter over a three-decade farming career.

“I’ve hustled around so much that it’s nice to have that personal connection with people who are excited, who bring their kids out to play on my tractors and come away liking organic broccoli,” he said.

It’s also where his produce doesn’t go – and what doesn’t go into it – that is a primary source of pride for MacWhorter.

No packing houses, processing plants or diesel-powered journeys to far-flung markets are in his crop’s future.

The tomatoes picked from 7-foot-tall greenhouse aisles won’t undergo chemical preservation, fertilization, irradiation or genetic modification.

“‘Organic’ means it’s the real stuff,” he said. “You are what you eat so you don’t want to put junk in your body. If you don’t care about how your food is grown, you don’t care about food.”

By U.S. Department of Agriculture standards, organic foods have been grown or raised without the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides or growth hormones. Butler Green has long subscribed to these guidelines and has carried the stamp of organic certification for years.

MacWhorter trucks in natural fertilizer from Poulsbo and infuses his soil with a concentrated “compost tea.”

Planting a diversity of crops avoids the ecological weaknesses inherent in monocultures – such as the spread of disease and pests – and ensures the farm will have a backup produce supply if one plant type fails.

“Blight wiped out a whole greenhouse in a couple days last year,” he said. “You just have to be ready for that and deal with it.”

Organic trade

Although organic food still represents a small percentage of overall food consumption in the U.S., the industry has lately grown at an annual rate of 20 percent.

The Organic Trade Association estimates organic food sales last year represented nearly 2.5 percent of total U.S. food sales, up from just over 2 percent in 2004.

By 2010, foods labeled “organic” are expected to draw in $23.8 billion, or 3.5 percent of total retail food sales in the U.S., according to the USDA.

MacWhorter has found especially fertile ground on Bainbridge for selling his organic produce. He increased output from about 2 tons of tomatoes last year to an expected 4 tons this summer.

“We’re doing well,” he said. “We’re growing more than ever.”

MacWhorter also helped establish an internship program with other island farms last year to bring more hands to his fields.

“It’s tangible work,” said Mike Heitke-Felbeck, a 19-year-old intern from Minnesota. “What you do has results and what you don’t do has results.”

You also get to eat the results, he added.

“I like working with food,” he said. “I like growing it, I like cooking it, I like eating it. I get to eat the best stuff in the world.”

The three interns – employed by Butler Green and three other farms on Day Road – earn a $500- per-month stipend and are provided a place to live for the summer.

Workdays typically start at 6 a.m. and a week’s worth of harvesting, watering, hauling and selling typically tops 40 hours.

But for intern David Hughes, “five hours in the field feels like 15 minutes.”

“It rarely feels like work,” the 24-year-old Pittsburgh native said. “It just feels like we’re keeping up with Mother Nature.”

Heitke-Felbeck was drawn to farming by a “philosophical and romantic view of farming life.” After stints on Bainbridge and two farms in his home state, Heitke-Felbeck has gained a “more realistic perspective.”

“It’s hard,” he said. “It’s a lot of repetitive, physical, menial labor. And for the farmers here, from what I’ve seen, it’s both physically and emotionally hard. They put in long hours for not much money and they all have families with kids.”

While blight, temperature changes and pests are constant causes for concern, MacWhorter is more afraid of condos uprooting his crops.

Sharply rising property values and higher taxes are on the minds of all of the last six remaining commercial farming families on the island.

“We’re a heart attack and a few bankruptcies away from having no farms,” said Gerard Bentryn, who owns Bainbridge Vineyards and Winery on Day Road and works closely with MacWhorter, produce farmer Betsey Wittick and berry growers Akio Suyematsu and Karen Selvar. “Pretty soon, you’ll have just (fields of) Scotch broom here on Bainbridge Island.”

MacWhorter owns none of the land he farms on Bainbridge and knows he’ll never have any under his name.

“The only way you can start a farm here is if you inherit land,” he said. “I hope farming here continues. I hope to pass on what I’ve done to someone – my kids, an intern – so when I come out of this trip, my knowledge gets passed on. Hopefully, I can pass on that connection to nature and so maybe what I did was not in vain.”

Until it’s time to pass along his shovel and hoe, MacWhorter says his hands will stay firmly rooted in island soil. At some point, though, he’ll have to start letting go of those close-kept secrets for growing his “all-purpose” specialty tomatoes.

“The only secret you need to know is that it’s a lot of work,” he said.