Canning and Preserving Food - A Family Affair

As a child, one of the memories etched in my mind was the late summer and early fall canning of ripe peaches and pears, and the later fall canning of chunky applesauce.  Sometimes there was late summer canning of tomato juice or stewed tomatoes.  Occassionally there was the making and canning of fragrant, deep purple grape juice, made from Concord grapes.  My Mom was in charge, and did this annual food preservation well and with skill.  The results were outstanding.  Come the end of fall, the fruit room in the basement was lined with jars of preserved food, to be eaten through the fall, winter and often into the next summer.

There is a serious question to be asked of why someone would actually go through the process of canning, or otherwise preserving food, when satisfactory food can be easily purchased at a grocery store.  The answer to that question is intensely personal, and not the same for each individual.  Some would say that it is simply not worth the time and effort, or other priorities trump the ideal of home food preservation.

My answer to that question is multi-faceted.  First, I put food away in order to know how to do it and to know how to care for myself and my family.  I put food away because I can control the ingredients and the recipes toward the ends of a better, more healthy, more tasty outcome.  I also put food away to be prepared.  The preparedness is along a number of dimensions, including easily preparing a meal from food on hand, having food on hand for weather or other natural "emergencies," and having food on hand to be prepared in the event of economic issues.  Those economic issues can relate to my direct family, or the families of my children as they spread their wings and make their way in this journey of life.  I don't do it because someone told me to.  I do it because it makes sense to me to do it.  And if you didn't catch it already, it simply tastes better.

I learned to can at my Mom's side.  I mostly watched, but sometimes I got my hands in on the action and clumsily tried to peel peaches and pears, while halving and pitting or coring them.  I always worried that I was destroying these fragile, delicious fruits, but Mom was always, always patient.  The water bath canner would hold seven quart jars.  I would get one jar done and Mom would get six jars done.  She was better at this than I was or am.

I was lucky enough to have my Mom hand write her recipe for peaches, pears, and applesauce.  She has the most beautiful handwriting.  This scanned recipe was written probably 25 years ago.  The paper is yellowed and there are food spots and other things on the recipe.  It is precious to me.  I hope you will treasure it as well.  For peaches and pears, this is a very light syrup, which lets the natural flavor of the fruit shine.  For those of you concerned about glycemic index and the potential impact of syrup packed fruit, my experience is that eating one or two halves of a peach or pear, without the syrup, canned this way has no perceptible impact on blood sugar.

SCAN OF MOM'S RECIPE

Michelle and I have both taken the lead at times in canning and other food preservation.  Sometimes we do it together.  Sometimes we do it with the kids.  Sometimes we do it with friends.  Sometimes we do it alone.  The key is that we do it.  Simply doing it hits on my first point of why I can and preserve foods.  I know how to do it and I keep my skills honed.  There is virtue in knowing how to do stuff.  We are losing our ability to do stuff.  Learn how to do stuff and teach your kids, teach your friends, and teach the friends of your kids and your friends.

When canning peaches and pears, we always use my Mom's recipe.  It works well, the kids like it, and we like it.  Enough said.

Canning in the kitchen in August and September is a hot affair.  The idea that the pioneers had of a summer kitchen makes a lot of sense.  Keep the heat out of the kitchen where you live.  An ideal is to have an outdoor kitchen that can be used in part for summer and fall canning.

Michelle has canned spaghetti sauce and salsa with her friends using a pressure canner, which is required for low acid foods.  Whoever thought of spaghetti sauce and salsa as low acid?  Well, it's on the margin because of all of the non-tomato content in these foods.  For safety's sake use a pressure canner.  In those events, Michelle and her friends would gather together and prepare and can these foods.  Canning as friends is a great way to learn, teach, build skills, have fun, and make some good food.

For grape juice, we have used a steam juicer as part of the processing.  It makes much of the process easier, and yields tasty, wonderful grape juice that may or may not require other processing, depending on which recipe you are following and the care taken.

A favorite at our house is freezer jam.  Oregon strawberries are the best.  None of those California grown flint stone strawberries for our jam.  Raspberry jam is a favorite.  We have dabbled in Marionberry jam as well.  Marionberries are a locally developed trailing blackberry variety.  They are incredibly delicious.  Sometimes I call them "crack berries" because they are so addictive.  All of the deliciousness may be called into question when you read the recipe for freezer jam, but only momentarily.  The sugar content is outrageous.  Our freezers are generally very well stocked with freezer jam, which are delicious above and beyond anything, I repeat, anything you can find at the store.

Another serious question is whether or not canning is an optimal, or even good form of food preservation.  As a teen, I started to wonder whether or not the sugar often used in canning was good for you, not that I cared much, but I wondered.  Learning about the adverse health impacts of what Dr. Weston Price called, the "foods of commerce," which included canned goods, sugar, white flour, I wondered about the place of canned goods in a healthy diet.  I determined that fresh foods were better and that lacto-fermented foods (e.g. real pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi) were oustanding as well.  I have learned that properly dehyrated foods had an important place in food storage as well.  I have determined that there is a real and important place in a healthy diet for canned foods, particularly if you can control the recipes.  It is reassuring to look at the canned goods on the shelf and realize they will be there if you have unexpected guests, if the power goes out, or if you just want to reach back and taste that delicious peach or pear of summer.

Back to the Portland Area - Sequent, an Apartment, and Our First House

As is often the case with startup companies, my adventure at Proficiency did not end with long term employment.  Lack of traction in the marketplace and an increasingly reluctant funding source led to the reorganization and closure of the company.  There was good news on the horizon at the time.  The manager, that hired me at Tektronix, John Jonez, had moved to a different company in Beaverton, Sequent Computer Systems.  When he was aware that I was looking for work, he pulled out all the stops and helped me land a job back in the Portland area.  In a very real sense, we felt like we were heading home.

We found an apartment in Hillsboro that we liked very much.  When we moved in, we were three.  When we moved out, we were four.  The apartment had nice amenities like a swimming pool, which Michelle and Kirsten used regularly.  We had a washer and dryer in the apartment.  It was located convenient to the grocery store, the library, and other things.  But, like most people, we wanted a house.

We moved into our first house in the summer of 1992.  That year, drought had hit the Willamette Valley.  There were watering restrictions on the watering of lawns.  The lawns went dormant during that summer.  We were allowed to water trees, bushes and flowers.  Related to the watering restrictions, there was one thing that I learned, which would become more important over time.  In the brown fescue and ryegrass lawn, there were bright green plants.  I wondered why the lawn went dormant but there were three plants in particular that stayed green, even in the heat and dryness of the summer.  I know two of the plants, I don't know the third.  The two that I know are dandelion and chickory.  The third looks like a close relative of dandelion.  All three had deep tap roots.  They could reach one to two feet down in the soil to find moisture, whereas the grass was limited to about three or four inches of root depth.  This became relevant as I considered pasture plants for non-irrigated pastured in the Willamette Valley.

Another thing I learned at our first house related to the cycling of nutrients through the grasses and soil of the lawn.  Most people bag their lawn clippings, and along with it, their soil fertility, and send them off to the dump or yard debris recycling center.  The process of bagging the lawn clippings and sending soil nutrients away created the necessity of bringing in soil nutrients from elsewhere.  This is why people who send their lawn clippings away have to bring in fertilizer in order to maintain vigor in their lawns.  I learned that using a mulching lawn mower cycles the soil nutrients right in place, greatly diminishing the need to fertilize your lawn. The soil nutrients move into the grass plants, then are chopped up and decompose, returing to the soil to be utilized again by the grass.  That is quite an oversimplification, but you get the general idea.  I read about natural lawn care and how a long cut lawn would be rewarded with deeper penetrating roots, which would allow for the use of less frequent watering and potentially less overall water applied.  Additionally, long cut grasses, would shade out some of the plants that would normally be considered weeds.  In effect, I learned several important unorthodox principles.  Use a mulching mower instead of sending your lawn clippings away.  The lawn clippings feed to soil life and biology, ultimately cycling back to the grass.  Minimize your offsite fertilizer inputs.  Cut your grass long to minimize weeds.  Minimize, or don't use herbicides to protect your kids and pets, as well as that soil life that recycles your lawn clipplings.  Herbicides kill the soil bacteria and fungi.  These are things you don't learn from the Scott's or Ortho marketing materials.  I had become a lawn heretic.

The lot that the house was on was small.  The entire back yard was maybe 20' by 50'.  Nearly a quarter of that was a patio and perhaps another quarter was covered with 1-2" river rock.  The front yard was larger than the back yard.  There was a nice red maple in the front yard.  In the back yard, there were two Asian pear trees.  I was delighted by the Asian pear trees.

I was introduced to Asian pears during my time in Korea.  I had never seen or tasted one prior to going to Korea.  I found the Asian pears to have a mixture of characteristics between an apple and a pear, as I knew them.  They were sweet like a Bartlett pear, and crisp like an apple.  Aside from the crispness, the texture seemed to be a cross of an apple and a pear.  In Korea, people would usually peel the Asian pears, prior to eating.  I found that it really depended on the variety.  Some varieties had thick skins that were not that enjoyable to eat.  Others had thinner skins that were fine to eat.  You see similar variations in apples.  The Asian pear trees were a wonderful novelty, but soon outgrew the small backyard.  Reluctantly I took them down after a few years.  It seemed like a sin.  In retrospect, it probably was a sin.  I didn't know enough about taking care of fruit trees to know what I could have done differently at the time.

The size of the backyard, dictated no real room for a garden.  I could have put two or three raised beds in the front yard, but at the time, I thought that no one would put vegetables in the front yard.  The conformist thinking of my previous experiences told me that was unacceptable.  Walt Whitman said, "Re-examine all you have been told.  Dismiss what insults your soul."  I suppose the idea of keeping vegetables out of the front yard, in order to be "proper," insults my soul, so I reject that idea now as a valid construct.  Later I found that many of the "Victory Gardens" of the World War II era were kept right in the front yards of the suburbs.  Now many Home Owner Associations prohibit the vile deed of planting vegetables in your front yard.  I have heard said that Home Owners Associations are for people who just don't have enough government in their lives.

Our first house was a wonderful house.  It got us through our Sequent years.  We have many fond memories from that house, but it was limited in space, both inside and out.

Moving to Farmington - Growing a Garden

After spending two years at Tektronix, I was tempted to change jobs.  My decision to change jobs was part fear, part dream chasing, part familial connection, and part a return to my roots.  During the two years I had at Tektronix, I saw four layoffs.  I kept thinking, "I am next."  I felt insecure in my job as I saw people leave as the company continued to shrink.  I also wanted very much to be part of a small business and have a significant impact on that small business.  I had what I perceived as that opportunity with Proficiency.  My brother, Todd, contacted me about the potential opportunity at Proficiency.  I interviewed there and after some consideration, decided it would be a good fit for me.  It also gave my family a chance to move back closer to where our extended family lived.  The move back to Farmington was filled with optimism and hope.

As we headed back to Farmington, one of the things I really wanted to do was to grow a garden out at my parents' "farm" in west Farmington.  We moved back to Utah in early spring, the perfect time for planning a garden and starting to plant a garden.

Since I had been out of school for a couple of years, I had had more time for reading and studying about new gardening techniques and approaches.  I had spent time at the Vancouver library, looking at magazines, checking out books, and learning.  I had pulled my few old books out of storage and re-read about techniques for efficient and effective gardening.  I had a few things I wanted to try.  I wanted to try cover crops.  I wanted to add organic matter to the alkaline, clay soils of west Farmington to improve the tilth and productivity of the soil.  I wanted to mulch under the tomato plants to minimize the growth of weeds, and also to keep the tomatoes off the ground.  I also had a few ideas for companion planting I wanted to try.  It was time to put some of my theoretical learnings to practical use.

One of the techniques I had learned about was a companion planting of corn and pumpkins.  This is somewhat akin to the historical "Three Sisters" planting technique used by Native Americans, but different and more limited.  Working for Rawl, and also growing sweet corn in a garden before, I was aware of the destructive neighbor, the racoon.  You see, racoons love sweet corn, especially the day before you planned on picking it.  Racoons will walk through a patch of sweet corn, pull down the ears of corn, strip the husks back, and have a sample of the sweet, tender kernels.  I have seen dozens of ears stripped down in a single corn patch.  I had read that racoons really do not like to walk through corn where pumpkin vines criss crossed the rows of pumpkins.  It was difficult for them to navigate, and the small prickly spines on the pumpkin vines hurt their legs.  Supposedly, planting pumpkins in with the sweet corn would greatly deter the racoons from eating the precious sweet corn.  I wanted to give it a try.  So I did.  

The pumpkins in the corn was a great success.  The pumpkins got a great start and the vines did not spill over into the space between the rows until the corn was waist high.  I was able to easily cultivate the corn until the corn shaded the ground and prevented any further weed growth.  The pumpkin vines continued to spread as the corn canopy closed.  Down the rows, the pumpkin vines spread.  The vines set fruit that began to grow and to mature.  As the corn tassled and the silks came out on the corn, I wondered if these criss-crossed pumpkin vines would really prevent the racoons from chowing down on the longed-for sweet corn.  Whether it was the pumpkins or some other fluke of nature, I do not know, but we had hardly any racoon damage that summer.  The technique appeared to work.  I became convinced that it was a technique worth trying again, and perhaps adopting for the long-term.

In addition to the sweet corn, we harvested tons of pumpkins.  We picked many of the best Jack-o-Lantern specimens, kept them in our garage, and gave them away to friends and family.  Halloween came and went, and we still have a few dozen pumpkins in the garage.  With the cold weather, they started to freeze and to rot.  The extra pumpkins had to go to the garbage.  If only we had had a couple of pigs to eat the extras....

Other aspects of the garden were a success as well.  We grew a great crop of tomatoes, beans, onions, etc.  We had more than we could use.  We gave some away and composted the rest.

One of the things that became very clear to me related to the importance of proximity of the garden to the kitchen.  The garden in West Farmington was probably about 2 1/2 miles from our house.  While that is not an extraordinarly long distance away from the house, it made it inconvenient to go grab a few things for dinner.  The idea of a "kitchen garden," just outside of the door started to germinate in my mind.  I wondered if it made sense to have a small garden that was very close to the kitchen for a few things for fresh eating, in season.  That might include things like one tomato plant, ten feet of pole beans, salad greens, green onions, one zuchinni plant, culinary herbs, a few feet of radishes, maybe a slicing cucumber plant, and a few feet of onions.  To me it made sense to incorporate convenience.  If it took more than 30 seconds to pop out to the garden, I was likely to just not pop out to the garden to get something for dinner.  It seemed to make sense to have a small kitchen garden, and a larger "production" garden for freezing, canning, and other storage techniques.  My thoughts about this garden provided foreshadowing of a series of ideas and concepts relating to gardening efficiency and ease of use.

The time in Farmington, was only one year.  We only had one season with this garden, but it was an impactful and memorable year.

My Time at Tektronix in Vancouver

Right after graduate school, we moved to Vancouver, Washington.  There I worked for Tektronix in the Portable Test Instruments Division.  The Portable Test Instruments Division made low end oscilloscopes.  In Vancouver, I had a few experiences that helped me along my journey towards the goal of farming or homesteading, and raising high quality food for my family.

When we first moved to Vancouver, we lived in an apartment, just off of Highway 14, Camas Highway.  The apartment seemed large to us, but like most other apartments, lacked outdoor space.  In summer when the windows were open, the road noise was constant.  At this juncture in life, it seemed my farming and homesteading aspirations were largely limited to occasional readings from my then limited collection of books.

Shortly after starting working at Tektronix, I learned that the site where I worked had a community garden program where employees could use garden plots on the east side of the facility.  I excitedly signed up to utilize one of those garden plots.  The size of the plot was not large, probably 20' X 20'.  I thought that was kind of odd that a garden plot would be sized that small, but I decided to not complain.  We took advantage of the opportunity we had.  We planted tomatoes, potatoes, peas, lettuce, and a few other things.  Given that the garden was not right where we lived, it took specific effort to get to the garden and tend to it.  The garden was a modest success.  We enjoyed the food.  We enjoyed being able to take our daughter to the garden.  We enjoyed getting out and doing something productive, away from the apartment.

About a year after I started at Tektronix, my boss, John Jonez, decided to take a job with Tektronix in the UK.  He asked if we would be interested in renting his house while they were out of the country.  We worked on finangling our finances and decided that we could do that.  It was nice to move to a nice little three bedroom house with a front and backyard on a quiet street.  The backyard backed up to a green space, so no one lived directly behind us.  Although tall fir trees were along the east side of the back yard, there was adequate sunlight to grow a few garden vegetables.  Our favorite, and our oldest daughter's favorite was peas.  Kirsten wasn't walking at the time, but liked to crawl in the grass in the back yard and sit herself down by the pea vines.  I would sit with her and pop open the pea pods.  We would relish in the deliciousness of the fresh green peas.  As a child, I thought of them like candy.  Sitting in the back yard of John's house, eating fresh peas, I thought the same thing.  They are just like candy, only better.

While living in John's house, I found the Vancouver Library, and checked out a few books, primarily on farming, gardening, and homesteading.  One that caught my attention enough to check out and read was Edward Faulkner's Plowman's Folly.  Faulkner's book challenged the status quo in agriculture of the heavy iron practice of plowing with a moldboard plow.  He argued that not plowing was much better for the soil and would yield higher yields.  This struck me as curious, because I had contradictory experience.  

When I worked for Rawl, one of the fields where he grew and I irrigated silage corn had the top section of the field sold one year.  Rawl plowed and prepared the bottom section of the field for silage corn as usual.  Very late in the process, the new owner of the top section asked Rawl if he wanted to farm the part of the field that he had purchased.  Rawl said he did.  The timing was such that Rawl couldn't logistically plow the field, so he only disked and harrowed it.  The seedbed looked much the same.  The corn germinated just the same.  But as the summer wore on, that top section of the field was clearly stunted compared to the lower portion of the field.  As a teen, I thought that was curious, but never really developed a solid idea of why that happened.  The treatment throughout the field was exactly the same, except for the plowing.  

I wondered why Faulkner's idea contradicted my personal experience.  To this day, this is still a conundrum to me.  I wondered if Faulkner's idea was purely unscientific speculation.  Faulkner's idea has had the chance to ferment in my mind.  I have read many other books related to tillage, no-till, fertility associated with aeration of the soil, weed pressures from tillage or not, etc.  Overall, I am clear that plowing severely distrupts soil biology, but provides an imediate burst of plant nutrients from the decay of soil biota.  Constantly plowed soils degrade over time as the soil biology is exhausted.  I wonder if there is a balance that I would call minimum till, or perhaps periodic till.  Maybe I will get a chance to experiment with that.

My time in Vancouver created the opportunity to experience the challenges of gardening away from where I lived, and also to begin a more technical journey through soil science, as I took advange of the "internet of the late 80's," the local library.

Pacific Northwest - My Interview at Tektronix

As I came to my last semester in graduate school, the impending end of my student loan access, and the sense of impending responsibility associated with the sight of my pregnant wife encouraged my very serious search for employment.  I had several opportunities that I pursued.  It was in this window of time that I decided that I really must consider living outside of Utah.  Employment opportunities were few and salaries were depressed in Utah at the time.

Amongst other opportunties, I interviewed in Pennsylvania with Ford New Holland, the tractor and farm equipment manufacturer.  When I was there in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I saw Amish people with their horse drawn buggies and carriages.  I was fascinated.

I intereviewed with Hillenbrand Industries in Indiana, in a sort of diversified medium size-ish conglomerate of sorts.  I never traveled to Indiana, but I looked up the local.  It was in the heart of mid-western farm country, where they grew "corn and beans," the staple commodities of conventional agriculture.  How would it be to have enough rain in the summer to not require irrigation?  I could only dream of that possibility.

I had the opportunity to interview with Tektronix.  Tektronix was headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, but I intereviewed with a group that was in Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia River from Portland.  I had been to Washington one time previously, when I was age seven.  We visited my aunt and uncle and their family in Seattle, or more precisely, Renton.  I didn't recall all that much from the trip of my childhood.

I flew into PDX, the Portland airport, in the evening and stayed at the Sheraton Inn, just a bit east of the main terminal on Airport Way.  As with all of my interviews, I was a bit nervous.  I fretted.  I reviewed my resume.  I practiced answers.  I anticipated questions.  Luckily, I never really had a hard time sleeping.  In the morning, I met the recruiter from Tektronix's HR department in the restaurant for breakfast.  For a poor college student, I had a breakfast of kings, scrambled eggs, hash browns, and bacon.  And a little more bacon.  And a glass or orange juice, or two.  Such was the luxury of having my meal paid for by the recruiting company.  We had our interview then packed up to drive to the plant in Vancouver for interviews with others in Finance in some of the oscilliscope and instrumentation divisions.

Shortly after getting onto I-205 northbound, we crossed the Columbia River.  I was jaw-dropped.  In Utah, the Weber River, or the Green River were giant rivers.  Each of those may have been 50 yards across, in the spring runoff season, if it was raining.  The Columbia river was approaching two miles wide at the I-205 bridge.  There was so much water.

We got off the freeway onto Highway 14 and headed east.  The houses became sparse, the trees, both conifers (firs) and deciduous (oaks and maples) were plentiful.  Along the edges of the woods, I noticed what looked like berry bushes.  As we pulled off the highway onto 164th Avenue, I saw more and more of the berry bushes.  I asked what they were.  Non-chalantly, the recruiter said they were wild blackberries, a literal thorn in the side to many residents and farmers.  Now the truth is that I loved berries and I love berries.  Yet, I had never had a blackberry.  I was surprised by the idea that these berries could just grow wild.  In effect, they would spontaneously spring forth and bear fruit.

The green was intense, even in February.  Having grown up in Utah, where the common color is a parched, dry-grass brown look, or perhaps dry grass and sage, intermingled with snow, the green was captivating.  My imagination went wild with the thought that other berries or other fruits and foods may also grow easily in the climate and soils of the area.  I became excited and enamoured with the idea of moving to the Portland area.

My interviews went well, particularly when I responded to questions with my experience and approach to managing the raspberry farm that I ran with some of my brothers in the mid-80's.  I was told that I was exceptionally animated and engaged when I talked about the raspberries, the market analysis, the financial analysis, and my passion for the product and the production of the product.

I returned home and excitedly told Michelle of what I had seen and how it felt.  Then the waiting started.  It's hard to be patient, when you are hopeful and ignorant at the same time.  In that waiting period, my first daughter was born and I completed school.  Then I got the call.  I was offered a job as a financial analyst in Tektronix's Personal Test Instruments Division.  I was ecstatic!

Maybe soon, we could buy some property and grow wild blackberries, and raspberries, and strawberries, and chickens....

Big Decision - PhD in Ag Econ or an MBA?

How does a decision regarding graduate school relate to farming?  Actually, there was quite a significant impact in my mind at the time.  In retrospect, I think the impact may have been different than I expected, but still significant.  Would a PhD in Ag Econ allow me to be closer to a situation where I could farm, or further away?  Would an MBA give me more practical insights into how to run a successful farm, either a hobby farm or a small business farm, or would it isolate me from any opportunity to farm?  These were among the considerations crossing my mind as an upperclassman at Utah State University.

During my junior year, my favorite professor, Bruce Godfrey, asked me to come see him in his office.  This was a little unusual.  I was a little nervous as I came to his smallish office and closed the dark stained oak door.  He asked me, "Have you ever considered getting a PhD in Ag Econ?"  Frankly, at that point in time, the idea of a PhD wasn't something I had considered.  I was intrigued.  Bruce mentioned that professors often encouraged promising students to pursue a PhD or other graduate degree.  I asked more about it.  He got his PhD at Oregon State University.  At that point in time, the idea of moving away from Utah wasn't something I had considered.  When I asked what schools would be good, he mentioned four schools: Texas A&M, Oregon State, Iowa State, and UC Davis.  Each of those sounded almost like a foreign country to me.  It was exciting to consider.

I wondered if getting a PhD would give me the opportunity to work in a relatively rural location, like Logan.  I wondered if I could work on agriculture related issues in an area where I could easily afford a few acres and do some of the things I had wanted to do since I was a wee little lad.  I also liked the managerial economics aspects of Ag Econ that supported farm based decision making.  Those things I thought would help me to make useful economic decisions on any farm I might have in the future.

Since Ag Econ had many finance and financial decision making tools, there was a lot of overlap with the School of Business.  I took many Finance courses as part of my required and elective class work.  I liked the Finance classes.  There were common reasons why I liked the Ag Econ classes and the Finance classes.  I liked the idea of running my own business.  I thought that Finance related classes offered more generally useful skills than Ag Econ classes.  I started wondering whether or not it might make sense to get a Master's degree in Finance, or an MBA with a Finance emphasis.  I began weighing and considering the pros, cons, and tradeoffs.

At a family event, I was able to get a few minutes with my Uncle Lowell to try to pick his brain on the topic at hand.  My uncle was a successful businessman in the Salt Lake City area.  What he actually did was, and is to this day, somewhat of a mystery to me. He did things in the realm of real estate and investing.  That is about all I understood of what he did.  I laid out my dilemna to him.  I asked him what he would think about and what factors he would suggest that I consider with regards to deciding between a PhD in Ag Econ and an MBA.  This was all very simple in his mind.  He said, "I would ask whether I preferred to spend four to six more years in school, going further into debt to earn very little, or more quickly get an MBA and start earning much more money right off the bat."  I was a little stunned.  He was pragmatic, but didn't seem to even comprehend or place importance on the nuances associated with being associated with agriculture.  I certainly did and do appreciate his candor and frankness.  That said, I still wrestled with the decision for several more months.

As I worked through the decision making process, the idea of having my own business pushed me towards an MBA.  I would be dishonest if I didn't say that concerns over the higher level math requirements associated with a PhD in Ag Econ didn't concern me.  Another thing that concerned me was the relatively open ended nature of a PhD program.  Was it three years, or six years, or five years?  Where could I work when I was done?  Could I come back to Logan, or would I have to find a job in Arkansas or Michigan, or some other place far from family?  Overall, the answers to these and other questions pushed me towards getting an MBA with a Finance emphasis.

It seemed to me that getting an MBA would not push me away from the farming I had dreamed about doing.  I would never accept a job in New York or Los Angeles, so I should be able to find a job somewhere where I could acquire a few acres and do the farming I had wanted to do for so long.

The Beginnings of My Internal Debate - Conventional vs. Organic Agriculture

In the scheme of things, this topic looms large in my mental framing.  My ideas on this have evolved and matured over time.  This post frames my initial awakening to the topic of the conventional vs. organic question.  You may recall from an earlier post that as a child of the 70's and the OPEC oil embargo, I saw self-sufficiency as a key issue and as an ideal.  In a very real sense, I considered what it would mean to live in that time frame with greatly reduced access to petroleum and petroleum products.  At that point in time, my thinking revolved around the idea regarding how we might gain the needed fertility and energy required for farming from source materials other than petroleum products.  This was not a consideration regarding which forms of fertility were better or worse, but simply a thought about replacements for required farming inputs.  In my junior year at USU, I took the next step, wondering whether or not organic agriculture could substitute for conventional chemical agriculture, evolving to whether or not there were other pros and cons for conventional vs. organic.  This protracted query was a jolt to my farming "worldview."

During my junior year at USU, I started considering the many potential avenues into developing some form of agricutural business and also, how to efficiently produce food for my family in an efficient manner and at a scale that was greater than the suburban backyard vegetable garden.  This query led me to several books in the USU library about market gardening.  Market gardening is the idea of growing vegetables at a relatively small scale to be sold primarily direct to customers and/or restaurants.  The large commercial analog is a "truck farm," which you may find in California's Central Valley.  My review of these market gardening books highlighted the idea of organic production methods and conventional production methods.  The idea that these two forms of production were not merely substitutes for one another was brought front and center in my mind.

A debate was forming in my mind about issues surrounding both fertility, weed control, and other pest control (e.g. insects, small mammals, etc.).  The questions of fertility initially developed around access to the macro nutrients of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium).  All of these could be had through both conventional fertilizers and organic fertilizers, although perhaps more easily measured and applied through conventional fertlizers.  As I studied, it became clear that there was a raft of micronutrients, known and unknown, that were more readily available through organic fertilizer sources, but not included in most conventional sources directly.  It also became clear that nutrients supplied through conventional fertilizers were much more leachable than those same nutrients provided through organic fertilizers.  That meant that the fertility could easily be swept out of the crop root zones.... and into our streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans.  I also learned that most conventional fertilizers were also based upon salt bases, gradually increasing the sodium and chlorine levels in the soil over time, leading to overall fertility declines.  A final additional thing that I learned related to the role of organic matter in soil structure and fertility reserves and the decline in organic matter in our soils over the 20th century in particular.  In effect, our soils were becoming a substrate to anchor the plants while being fed hydroponically the major nutrients that impacted plant growth and quantity yield.  I started to wonder if this really made sense.  Not only did conventional fertilizers require ongoing purchases on at least a yearly basis, but their regular usage led to a long-term decline in soil fertility.

I recalled spraying cockleburrs on Rawl's farm as a teen.  I had a tank of 2-4-D, wading through a sea of waist-high cockleburrs, sweeping the spraying wand from side to side, trying to get rid of what was probably 1/2 acre of cockleburrs.  I waded through the mist.  I breathed in the mist.  2-4-D was meant to kill broadleaf plants.  But I wondered, did it have any effect on me?  Since the government had approved 2-4-D for agricultural use, it must be okay, right?  I started reading about negative health consequences for farm workers exposed to pesticides and herbicides.  While these products seemed to have great ability to reduce labor, what were the other costs that were not usually discussed?  I thought about the Hughes's apple orchard down the street, which they sprayed religiously every 21 days during the summer.  How did people used to grow apples before pesticides?  It seemed that there was no way to grow fruit commercially without pesticides.  That couldn't be right..., so I thought.  What about Johnny Appleseed?  I read that pesiticides were systemic and not only applied to the surface of fruits and vegetables.  You could wash those vegetables as much as you wanted, but you couldn't wash out the portion that was absorbed into the tissues of the food.  Were those absorbed pesticides "safe enough?"  What did the research say?  I saw many holes and many open issues.  Intuitively, it seemed that there must be a better way.

I had a visit with  my favorite professor, Dr. Bruce Godfrey.  I explained my questions and concerns and wondered aloud whether or not organic or conventional was better.  In true Aristotitialan thinking, he said, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.  There are pros and cons to each approach, and probably neither approach is completely correct in the way the questions and issues are discussed and presented.

At that point in time, I did not come to any specific conclusions.  I came to understand many of the questions, ideas, positions, and competing views.  It would take decades of reading and research for me to develop my current frame of thinking.  This was the beginning of the journey.