08/1/11Adding Value, A story by Jim Pfitzer
Often in farming we are faced with feast or famine. Crops come in with a vengeance in summer and we struggle to stay caught up. There is no time for weeding, tying up tomatoes, planning the next season, or hardly anything other than harvesting. The yield can be so big and so fast that vegetables over-ripen or fall to pests before we can get them in the barn, and even if we do manage to get most of crop in, we may have more than we can handle before it becomes too soft or attacked by fruit flies.
On the flip side, when the harvest is over, it is over, leaving us with weeks or months with very little coming in-a few greens maybe.
Of course canning and dehydrating are great ways to take that huge summer bounty and preserve it for the leaner winter months, but until recently state law didn’t allow for farms without certified kitchens to sell these value-added products at farm stands and markets. Now, thanks to a newly amended Tennessee Code, we can.
Mike Barron and Joel Houser have loaned their home dehydrators to Crabtree and are beginning to experiment.
Mike says that he has “no idea yet when we will have products available for market or CSA,” but he expects there to be something available in the next couple months. “We want to test it ourselves to make sure we have good products. We have to get the moisture level right and make sure it works.”
As for the types of products they have in mind, the obvious “sun dried” tomatoes was the first product that came up in our conversation, but Mike says they aren’t stopping there. Italian-style seasoning mixes, grape leaves for stuffing, and flavored teas were just a few of the more surprising possibilities we might see on the horizon.
These new products will do more than just make extra dollars at the farm stand, they could go a long way to improve the CSA boxes which admittedly can get pretty darn thin at times. Imagine late in the season finding dried mushrooms, tomato powder, and basil salt in your box along with the seven winter squashes you are faced with cooking! Or suppose you are headed to the Smokies for a little backpacking, so you stop by Crabtree for some potato-based dehydrated backpacking meals! The possibilities are endless.
It also may provide opportunities for all those folks out there who have always wanted to preserve at home but were a little leery of the risks or simply didn’t know how to get started. As with most operations at Crabtree, this new endeavor will have to rely at least in part on volunteers and work shares, giving the community a great opportunity to help out and gain new skills and confidence to take back to their own kitchen.
For now, Mike says they will used the loaned equipment and put any revenues from the products back into the project to eventually purchase higher capacity, more industrial dehydrators. In the mean time he says he wouldn’t mind collecting a little “rent” in the form of tasty treats.
As with any new endeavor, there is no telling where it this will lead, but as Mike said, “diversity in business is always good,” and in this case it sounds quite tasty as well!