Photos by John Nation
Every Saturday morning from mid-April to mid-November, Highlands neighborhood residents and other Louisvillians desc/files/storyimages/upon the Bardstown Road Farmers’ Market. The market, in its 16th season, is a social event as well as healthy-food outlet: The 30 vendors there from 8 a.m.-1 p.m. each week specialize in all-natural foodstuffs — herbs, freshly pickaed produce, range-free meats — most produced without the chemicals favored by large agribusiness farms. Flowers, baked goods, farm-fresh egg scrambles cooked up on site, and live music add to the street-festival flavor.
Permanent vendors are assigned each of the spots in the parking lot of the Bardstown Road Presbyterian Church on the street’s 1700 block. Guest vendors fill in for those who miss a Saturday, and the demand for selling space is high — on many days, more than 1,000 people pass through and make purchases, many of them regulars. "People who are serious about the market know that all of the good stuff is gone by 9:30," says Vicki Himmel, its manager.
The vendors are serious as well. Most are bucking agribusiness trends, producing on a small scale with sustainable techniques that eschew chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. They take their bounty directly to their customers, selling what they’ve nurtured or crafted with their own hands. Here are the stories behind a few of the faces at the farmers’ market.
Keepin’ on Truckin’
The Payneville, Ky., spread of Ralph and Kathy Packard has a Norman Rockwell feel to it. A red barn with pens for the hogs and laying boxes for the hens stands across a circle from the farmhouse. Goats and chickens mill about the circle and a yellow delivery truck is parked nearby, which Ralph fills up each week and drives to the Bardstown Road market. The Packards have been farming with all-natural techniques since 1989, when he retired from the Army, and they’re committed to an enterprise that produces approximately 60 varieties of vegetables, 55 dozen eggs per week and the range-free meat of goats and pigs.
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The Packards at hail-damaged Misty Meadows Farm; |
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Misty Meadows was recovering this spring from some horrible late-May weather. After three and a half inches of rain one day followed by five inches the next — and a hail storm in the mix — bean seeds were washed out of the fields, recently set heirloom tomatoes were endangered and greens were damaged. "This is Swiss chard, not Swiss cheese," Packard says as he inspects the leaves that look like they’ve been hit with buckshot. "This is one of the best-eating greens you’ll ever have in your life. The problem is, a lot of people eat with their eyes. It’s still perfectly edible, but I won’t take it to market because it won’t sell."
The Packards (he’s 51 and she’s 48) are Massachusetts natives, and while he spent summers as a child on farms operated by his grandfather and uncle, neither knew the business. They started farming using sustainable agriculture techniques in 1989 on acreage near Wolf Creek, a few miles from their present property. They lost nearly everything in a 1997 flood, sold that land and moved up to their current site on the highest point in Meade County. They don’t get swamped now, but they’ve become a target for lightning strikes. Their breeding boar was killed by a bolt during that violent spring storm.
"You won’t find chemicals at all on this farm," Kathy Packard says. A special mix from Producer Feeds in Louisville that contains no chemical additives is fed to the animals; a compost of manure, limestone and bark mulch is used for fertilizer; and an organic mix containing, among other ingredients, fish parts and kelp, is sprayed on plants to keep deer out (they hate the smell of fish) and foster growth in the crops. Ralph Packard spreads this latter solution with a mid-1940s-vintage Farmall tractor. That tractor, he says, is more fuel-efficient than recent models; he goes a whole season on one tank.
Bardstown Road regulars since 1993, the Packards say they earn 30-40 percent of their revenues there on Saturday mornings. At that same time each week, Kathy Packard vends their meats and produce at the Meade County Farmers’ Market. The two get another 30 percent of their revenues from Community Supported Agriculture by supplying 46 families who pre-pay in the winter — some in Louisville and some in Meade County — with weekly baskets of goods. They will not reveal any annual revenue figures for their operation. "We’re not going to be millionaires overnight, but we’re paying our bills,"
she says.
Their three grown children used to help regularly on the farm, but are now unavailable while occupied with families and careers. Adam Barr, a 26-year-old who grew up in Lexington and graduated in 2003 from Case Western Reserve University, is "interning" with them this summer to learn natural farming techniques he hopes to apply on 170 nearby acres owned by his family. The Packards, who specialize in heirloom vegetables and drive up to Maine each year to purchase seeds from Fedco Seeds, a co-op devoted to small, sustainable farms, say it’s hard to hear people at the markets tell them their products are too expensive.
Kathy Packard says she doesn’t know how others price their goods. "But I know why I’m selling mine for what I am. Someone who’s in this business is passionate about what they do," she says. "It’s not always about the money. It’s doing something for the environment. It’s about doing something to help people. It’s a
whole picture."
Hives Off Hurstbourne
It may surprise residents in the east-county suburb of Rolling Hills, located just west of Hurstbourne Parkway near E.P. Sawyer Park, that one of their neighbors is keeping a half-million honeybees in his back yard. But Tom Fisher, 63, has 11 thriving hives going behind the subdivision home he shares there with his wife. Contained in white wood boxes, each the size of a large desk drawer and some stacked two- or three-high, Fisher’s Louisville bees, along with the 12 other hives he maintains in rural Kentucky, produce nearly a ton of the thick nectar a year, which he bottles in his garage and sells as T.C. Fisher Pure Honey.
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| Fisher with his half-million backyard bees. |
He’s now a regular at the Bardstown Road Farmers’ Market, where he sells 50-100 pounds on a typical Saturday morning. Many of his avid customers are from the older generation, especially, he says, if they grew up during the World War II era when sugar was rationed and honey was the available sweetener. Many say their fathers kept a hive during the 1940s. His other big customer base comes from members of the younger generation.
"The younger people know the health benefits," Fisher says. "There’s a natural antibiotic in honey, and they still treat wounds in Third World countries by putting honey on them." It is cited for its antioxidant powers and is thought by some to have possible benefits for allergy sufferers. According to the beekeeper, the honey must be locally produced from nectars of the Ohio Valley ecosystem to offer the best chance for allergy alleviation.
"I don’t do anything to my honey," he says. "I bring it up to about 100 degrees and hold it for at least three days. The bees will allow the temperature in the hive to get up to 100 degrees, so that’s how you can still call it a raw natural product."
Fisher sells a light and a dark honey, but even his paler bottles have an amber hue richer in color than supermarket brands. "They’ll bring it to a real high temperature and quickly reduce it," he says of the mass manufacturers. "Well, they are actually cooking the honey. That’s why, generally, unless it’s from a local person, you won’t have the distinct different flavors."
Though bees produce their sweetness into the fall, Fisher only extracts from the hives in the spring. Blooms of flowering plants such as locust, honeysuckle, clover, tulip poplar and wildflowers provide the nectar that is transformed in the hives. Exploring bees locate a good source nearby and return to the hive, performing a dance that alerts others to proceed to that area. "If you want a single source — clover, buckwheat, tulip poplar, whatever," says Fisher, you can draw out the honey "as soon as they have those frames full of honey and capped over to seal out moisture." This method yields distinctive tastes based on the primary nectar ingredient.
The beekeeper says he profits "a little bit" from his hobby and has become fascinated with the complex social structure of his humming honeybees. The neighbors? Most appreciate the presence of pollinators in their gardens. And Fisher has become comfortable — perhaps too much so — in the presence of their stingers.
"Most of the time I wear a veil," he says. "If I’m extracting honey, I’ll put on a suit because I don’t want that stuff all over me. You know, it’s just a mess. But depending on the time of year, depending on the kind of mood they’re in — most of the time they’re pretty gentle."
Cottage Industries
Linda Ison’s 5.5 acres in the rolling Oldham County countryside comprise an experiment-in-progress. On one side of her ranch-style brick home, logs arranged in stacks, each pockmarked with drill holes that have been "seeded" with mushroom spawn in a sawdust mixture, sit in the shade. At the right point in time, plump shiitake mushrooms virtually explode from the holes. Ison takes them to the Bardstown Road Farmers’ Market, where they go like hotcakes. "They love these things, let me tell you," says Ison, 59. "If I had more of them, I’d make a million dollars."
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Ison shears her Ilamas for the yarn she sells at market. |
With an estimated $200 per year in yarn sales, plus her revenues from mushrooms, garlic, the herb-laced French bread she bakes each week and other items she takes to market, Ison isn’t carving out a living as much as supporting a lifestyle, one she enjoys. "I pay my property taxes and insurance with it," she says of her earnings from Bardstown Road and a Thursday market in St. Matthews. Born in mountainous Letcher County to parents who were educators, her family moved to the Bluegrass region and eventually settled in Frankfort. Ison enjoys getting back to the land, saying, "I’m pretty good at it."
Her grown sons Jesse and Harding have helped on the place, but Ison, who’s lived on the Oldham County property for 18 years and trucked (by Toyota Corolla, actually) goods to Bardstown Road for six, is principally self-taught in animal and plant husbandry. She’s attended classes at Kentucky State University to learn new techniques and new products. "I try to seek out things that nobody else sells," she says, "because it seems like at the market people think, ‘OK, I’m going to buy tomatoes today — I’ll go to Joe.’ And if you bring in tomatoes they go, ‘Well, she’s the garlic person.’"
Her extensive herb selection — many of which are grown in small pots on an old flatbed trailer near her driveway — also include lesser-seen-locally French varieties. She puts cuttings in potting soil during winter and brings them into her kitchen to begin maturation. "I need to get me a greenhouse," says Ison.
"People ask me if I’m organic. I can’t say that I am — I use Miracle-Gro." She says what’s planted outside is organic, but the potted things are not. "I don’t know how you do that," she says. "You can’t add manure to a pot."
From the Ground Up
A pioneer spirit is evident at Finger Picking Farms, where Nick Posante and Pat Ayers are scratching out a living as Kentucky truck farmers. This year, Posante, 30, and Ayers, 28, are cultivating nearly five acres on property owned by Ayers’ parents along Knob Creek in a hilly section of Bullitt County.
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| Ayers (left) and Posante dream of owning their own farms. |
This is season number two in Bullitt County for Posante, who started a vegetable plot on land he was allowed to work in Scottsburg, Ind., five years ago, then moved for a year to Sellersburg, Ind., gradually increasing his yield along the way. Ayers joined him in 2004 to help harvest a "bumper crop" of cucumbers and beans, and has been involved ever since. Posante got going by assisting another Bardstown Road Farmers’ Market regular, Ivor Chodkowski, during harvest — a form of apprenticeship often exercised in the all-natural small farming movement.
The goal for each is property ownership. "I’d like to buy a piece of property and hopefully have a family farm one of these days," Posante says. "I’d like to have a piece of land I can keep healthy and let the next generation come, and the next generation come — so they can get to enjoy earth, not just chemical-produced suburbia, which is what most everything’s turning into now."
These still-itinerant farmers scrambled together a 12-by-16-foot greenhouse this year from salvaged hoop framing, other materials and plastic covering (the only purchase). Previously, they started everything from seed in the ground, but they were able to get a head start this spring with tomatoes, peppers, some herbs and even a few flowers taking early root in small pots inside this sun-warmed space. Finger Picking Farms is known for its salad greens, summer squashes and baby vegetables.
"Legally, I can’t say I’m organic because I’m not certified," says Posante, who claims that the U.S. Department of Agriculture standards for certification are diluted and geared toward large-scale agribusiness. "So I just say ‘all-natural,’ which means no chemical herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers."
Ayers and Posante get manure from a neighbor who pastures horses and then compost their fertilizer. They say they might for the first time spray pesticide on some plants this year — with a certified-organic product — because the cucumber beetles, which survived the mild winter in excessive numbers, can spread disease among the crops. These regulars at the Bardstown Road market are able to cut out middlemen and get retail prices for their herbs and vegetables, a revenue advantage over the average American farm, which is getting approximately 20 cents, or even less by some estimates, of the retail cost for mass-marketed food items.
Saturdays on Bardstown Road account for approximately 75 percent of Finger Picking Farms’ revenue. Another 5-10 percent comes from customers receiving weekly baskets of the farm’s goods through Community Supported Agriculture. Ayers and Posante also sell items wholesale to Louisville restaurants and Rainbow Blossom and Amazing Grace natural food stores.
"My goal is to gross approximately 35,000-plus dollars this year," Posante says. "That’s split between two people, with expenses, but you’ve got to start somewhere."
An Urban Mission
A few years ago, when farmers began to abandon tobacco to plant more small plots of vegetables and other produce, the question arose: Who will buy these goods? The Community Farm Alliance, a statewide grassroots organization, and its Jefferson County chapter have been working to help get the truck farmers to market.
With 470 of the state’s 2,000 CFA members in Louisville, many of the best efforts to connect locally grown foods with local consumers are happening right here. "CFA is building a new farm economy to replace industrialized food as a mainstream system," says Jefferson County chapter member Sherry Hurley, who also serves on the organization’s statewide board. Activities so far include conducting a community-wide "food assessment" that identifies areas of need based on income and vehicle access; establishing farmers’ markets in underserved areas; and creating other opportunities for local food providers to distribute their wares.
Currently, there are 19 farmers’ markets in Louisville, according to CFA. Many of the vendors at the Bardstown Road Farmers’ Market are CFA members, but the organization’s main concentration here is connecting metro-area farmers with consumers most in need of their products, specifically residents of the West End and nearby communities. In Louisville, "people with the least amount of money are paying the most for food," says Stacy Brooks, a CFA organizer for urban projects. The organization’s food assessment determined that in west Louisville there is one grocery store for every 19,431 residents (which contrasts with one for every 6,100 residents in Louisville as a whole). To meet the need, CFA founded and oversees two Saturday morning farmers’ markets — one in Portland, now in its third season, and a second in the Shelby Park/ Smoketown area, in its fourth season. Further information is available at www.communityfarmalliance.org.
