Local producers benefit from farm-to-table movement

There’s an easy way to get the freshest food from the earth to your plate - drive to a farm, and buy the food at its source.

Petaluma’s farm-to-table movement is gathering steam as more people are frequenting local farmer’s markets and restaurants are producing meals with hyper-local ingredients.

Green String Farm on Old Adobe Road offers a market just 20 feet away from the fields where their produce is grown. Founded in 2000 by Fred Cline and Bob Cannard, the Green String Institute, the academic wing of the farm, focuses on propelling the idea of organic farming into the world of fully sustainable farms, serving produce from farm to table without dealing with middlemen like grocery stores and shipping companies.

But the farm wasn’t always able to produce the crops it sells today.

“When we got the land, it was over-grazed and severely dry,” Cannard said. “The restoration and continued quality of the soil is a project I’ve dedicated half my career to.”

Cannard employed tactics like introducing soil improvement crops, including oats, mustards and other dense biomass plants over the first four years of ownership to prime the soil for other crops. He also added mineral-rich igneous rocks, sulfur-rich rocks, biochar, a porous charcoal that helps the soil keep nutrients and water and crushed oyster shell flour to give his produce the best nutrition when they grow.

“Soil enrichment and agricultural science is still in the stone age at commercial farms compared to us,” Cannard said. “We don’t use pesticides and we don’t kill bugs. In fact, we use certain bug populations as an indicator of our produce’s health.”

Green String Farm operates with four store employees and nine farm employees. They grow and sell tomatoes, peppers, kale, potatoes, cabbage, broccoli and many more seasonal crops. Later in the year their summer squash will be available for sale.

Showcasing farm-to-table practices in the culinary world, Tony Najiola, executive chef and owner of Central Market, started his own farm inspired by memories of working in New Orleans with his great-grandfather, a Sicilian vegetable farmer.

It’s called Muleheart Farm, Najiola said.

“We call it that because you need the heart of a mule to be a farmer,” he said. “It is incredibly hard work and you have to keep at it every day.”

At the farm, Najiola and his farmers grow vegetables, wildflowers for their tables and expect their fruit orchard to give a sizable crop in the near future. But at the center of his operation, Najiola raises pigs for his charcuterie plates at the restaurant.

“When the pigs get to about 250 to 300 pounds, which generally takes about a year from when they’re born, we send them off to get slaughtered. They hang for a couple days and then we receive them ready to start curing and fermenting them for salami and other charcuterie,” he said.

The pigs eat wild growing grass and have their own wallowing area, where they exercise, run and eat.

“When you look at mass-produced pigs, their life starts and ends with their noses to the ground. They don’t move, they don’t exercise and they’re crammed. At least we give them as much space as they need to frolic and grow. It doesn’t even smell like pigs because they have their own little corner where they do their business,” Najiola said.

Najiola takes a pig every other week to slaughter, but even a 300 pound pig isn’t always enough to satisfy demand at his restaurant.

“A pig that large would yield about 32 chops. We go through that easily every Friday or Saturday night,” he said.

He added that when the pigs are finished eating the grass in an area, he introduces chickens, which peck at the pig droppings and in turn deposit their own poop, which feeds the soil and allows the grass to grow again before they introduce more pigs to the area.

“All the solid waste generated at the restaurant ends up here, where we compost it and enrich the soil for our plants,” Najiola said. “It’s an everlasting job. We never stop enriching the soil.”

Local farmers who want to showcase their goods without an on-site market sell their produce at one of Petaluma’s farmer’s markets. Margarita Ducheva, who owns a dairy operation in Two Rock, goes every Tuesday to the Petaluma East-Side Farmer’s Market at Lucchesi Park to advertise her locally-made cheeses.

“We’ve been making cheese for four years, and we want to get it out to these people,” she said. “Farm-to-table is a great movement because it’s fresh, its local and the farmers don’t have to deal with middlemen. We get to drive here, set up shop and sell what we make.”

Ducheva added that by allowing the producers to deal directly with the customers, they can better facilitate communication and advertise more effectively for local farms and businesses.

“We get to meet all these wonderful people,” she said. “And they want our products. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

(Contact William Rohrs at william.rohrs@arguscourier.com.)