Community-supported agriculture

Call it the anti-supermarket.

Fifteen miles from the supermarkets of Yuba City and Marysville, Jim Muck’s group of plots and greenhouses east of Wheatland is home to a farming enterprise unlike almost any other in the Mid-Valley. In place of shopping carts and shelves are rows of organic tomatoes, green beans and squash - and one rangy farmer overseeing it all.

Whether harvesting seeds from a greenhouse, hand-picking vegetables or packing produce for his customers’ Thursday pickups, Muck’s Fresh My Farm Vegetables is a one-man show - and an example of community-supported agriculture, a movement joining local growers with consumers attracted to hand-tended produce from close to home.

“It makes people who don’t live on a farm think like a farmer, to be conscious consumers of food and not just consumers of calories,” Muck said last week while inspecting squash and eggplant plots on his family’s 180-acres. “A lot of people lack that connection to the earth.”

Five days a week the 40-year-old Muck performs nearly every task among his organic gardens - then he boxes anything ripe and ready for about 35 customers who have paid him in advance for a season’s worth of produce.

“It makes me feel really good because it’s community-driven,” said Regina Guzman, a Wheatland resident who learned about Muck’s farm from a client at a veterinary clinic. “Living and working in the community, it’s really important to take part in it.”

Fresh My Farm Vegetables - Muck says the name comes from a grammar-challenged sign painted on the side of a restaurant in Charlotte, N.C. - began simply as the fruit of necessity. The land has belonged to Muck’s family since at least 1851, but after growing up there, he found his way to Sonoma County as a beer brewer and winery worker. He rediscovered his roots by working a community garden plot.

“What got me into growing was I was pretty broke and I wanted to cook with more exotic ingredients, so I decided to grow them,” he said. “And that’s why I could never be one of those farmers who grow, say, 500 acres of bell peppers.”

Muck and his wife, Amanda Johnson, moved to Wheatland seven years ago and established vegetable gardens on the family land, which had long been devoted to walnut trees. After two years selling his vegetables at farmers’ markets, he made the leap to community-supported agriculture, commonly called CSA.

Since CSA projects started in the U.S. in the mid-1980s, such methods have provided small-scale farmers a way to lessen the financial risks inherent in the business - by convincing shoppers to buy into their products in advance, several weeks at a time. In return for their up-front investment - and agreeing to take different foods each week with the changing seasons and harvests - partners receive vegetables tended as carefully as those Muck once nurtured on a community garden plot.

“I’ve been very happy with it - even tried a few things, like Swiss chard, that I’d never had before,” said Dodie Winstead, a manager of a Beale Air Force Base thrift shop who signed up as a customer this year.

The enterprise is a rewarding one for Muck, but one that gives him almost no rest for 38 weeks of the year. Other than the part-time aid of a high school student, he does it all. Promotion consists of a weekly flier to his customers - complete with recipes to help them use the green tomatoes, cilantro and other produce of the week.

“You have to do it all; there’s no system to rely on,” he said while using a pitchfork to uproot a cluster of sweet potatoes. “I’m responsible for planting the crops, weeding, doing the seed, all the harvesting, the packaging, the delivery, the marketing. You have to be versatile.

“Now I work longer hours than I have anywhere else, but at the same time, it’s what I love to do, even though I have to do most everything. I get tired, but who doesn’t? I’m a happier person; I love being outside, love being around the plants, love planning it, love feeding people - and I love talking to people about the crops. It’s just very fulfilling.”

Appeal-Democrat reporter Howard Yune can be reached at 749-4708. You may e-mail him at hyune@appealdemocrat.com