Farm Feature Interview: Sue from Round the Bend Farm

Brian and Sue have been operating Round The Bend Farm for almost 40 years. During that time they have acquired so much wisdom and knowledge. Grab a coffee, tea, beer or glass of wine, settle in and enjoy hearing/reading some of what they have learned over the years...

Round The Bend Market

Why do you do what you do?

No farms no food. 

Food doesn't grow on shelves in the grocery store. Everyone should know where their food comes from and what it takes to grow it. Brian has been growing food for 46 years and every year we try to do something a little bit different. It still has to be seeded, it still has to go in the soil, it still has to be planted irrigated and cultivated. 

We did a thing with cauliflower; we found out that by the end of the season from the time we seed it to the time it gets sold, it has been touched or worked with 21 times. That includes the seeding in the greenhouse in the trays, the watering of the trays, the trays being put on the wagon outside, hardened up for a month, watered every day (sometimes twice), put on the planter; the ground has to be cultivated and rototilled until it's smooth, someone is making sure the plugs are on the planters, someone is walking behind to make sure the black soil of the plug is completely covered (because if you don't cover that black soil it'll dehydrate and the water will evaporate), after that, we run fertilizer down (or turkey manure whichever happens to be available), and then we run irrigation pipes between the rows (the irrigation pipes have to be moved from place to place by hand). Hand hoeing, between the plants, is something that is done almost weekly because you can't machine cultivate between the plants. Then you check it for bugs, and then you have to spray it (yes we use an organic spray it's called a BT spray which stands for Bacillus Thuringiensis; it makes the bugs sick so they don't poop all over your cauliflower and broccoli), then you have to start walking the field to see if it's ready. When it’s the size of the palm of your hand, that's when you go and cut and harvest and then everything is washed. Then it is stored and cooled and then it is sold. A lot of people have no idea, they think you just put the seed in the ground and then voila you have a cauliflower.

decorations abound

When we started 46 years ago, cauliflower wasn't self-wrapping, meaning the leaves didn't curl around the head. Before this, cauliflower heads were yellow because of the sun. People have been programmed by media that cauliflower should be white, so, what you would have to do is, when it was the size of a golf ball you'd go around and tie all the outside leaves up over the top of the head to keep them white. Every day you would have to do that with a different color elastic. When it was time to harvest, you would put your hand in and if it was the size of your hand then you knew all those, say red elastics we're ready to go. So, they're cut from the bottom turned upside down and you whack off the leaves. We don't do that anymore. We like vitamin D and we say if the cauliflower is not white it's been getting some sunshine it's not anaemic.

Farming is labour-intensive. When you plant 200 seeds, if you're able to harvest 60% you're laughing. This is because a certain percent won't germinate in the tray, another percent won't pull properly when we're planting, still more will get eaten by wild turkeys and deer and rabbits, and then some will be gnarly looking and not harvestable. So, just because you planted 200 seeds doesn't mean you're harvesting 200 plants. We always plant more than what we need to make up for that.

Big chain stores use produce, like asparagus in the spring, as a loss leader. They know they're going to lose money on it but they know you're also going to come to their store and buy that asparagus and a whole bunch of other stuff. So, they don't care if they lose money on the asparagus because they got you for everything else. People look at me cross-eyed when I say that, like “oh my word!” They also ask “why is it so big?” talking about cauliflower, “it must be GMO.” No! GMO is an economics thing. There aren't enough farmers that buy cauliflower seed to want to make them want to change the seed to be GMO because they don't make any money at it. Our cauliflower is big because we don't have to pack a dozen in a box to ship it; we can let it grow to whatever size we want it to be in the field because we're just bringing it up to our market. Whether a vegetable is big or small, popular or not, it's all about marketing.

What are some other loss leaders?

Strawberries. When strawberries are in season, farmers are absolutely inundated because strawberries just come, Bang! ready. So the stores will actually put the flats on sale and use them as a loss leader. Lettuce is often a loss leader and sweet corn is as well. Did you know that farmers are getting roughly the same price for sweet corn as they were 45 years ago? Maybe a buck or so more. People don't seem to value food in North America. They want things cheap. In Europe, they believe in supporting local. They do this by buying on a daily basis. But they don't have to travel half an hour to go to a grocery store. They also don't have the fridges and freezers that we have which means they need to shop local more often. The North American attitude seems to be “buy weekly, buy lots.”

Why do you offer a CSA bin program?

We started our CSA bin program because we were tired of planting and having to walk away because nobody wanted it because it wasn't perfect. The CSA bin program, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture, means I grow it, you get it, and you get what you get and you don't get upset because sometimes the vegetables can be a little wonky. Because you're supporting local, sometimes at the beginning of the season the bin is light. It might only have eight items in it, but by September the bin will have 12 items in it. It'll be heavy and have cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, potatoes, and cucumbers and all kinds of stuff in it - because that's what Ontario grows. 

I do a newsletter for our CSA members. In the newsletter, we're very clear that we are not looking for perfection. This is naturally grown - if the carrots are a little crooked it means they grew around a stone or there was some other challenge in the soil. If the tomatoes are funny looking it means that maybe it was particularly hot in that particular week or not hot. We grow our food for taste, flavor, and nutritional value which is why we grow heritage or heirloom varieties. Your new varieties are created for ease of packaging and shelf life, they're not meant for nutritional value. If you get carrots now and they're pointy this is because it makes them easier to slide into a bag without breaking. The original carrots are blunt on the end and have a high brix content. The original varieties would break when pushed mechanically into a bag so they developed a pointy carrot that has less nutritional value but it's easy to package and has a long shelf life. 

In our CSA bin program, we will give you beets with the tops and we will give you recipes for the beets and for the tops. You will get carrots with the tops and I will give you a recipe for the carrots and the tops. (You can make an awesome pesto with the tops.) So in my weekly newsletter I tell people what they're going to get and then I give recipe ideas, because if you get a Kohlrabi and you don't know what it is, it's just like an exploded broccoli stem. I tell you how to use it and what you can use it in. If I give you broccoli leaves, you can use them like collard greens and they're great in pasta and stuff like that. 

We believe in using the entire plant. If we don't use it, we chop it all up and cultivate it back into the soil. We try not to waste anything. People need to know you don't need to throw away the leaves around the cauliflower. Now, we have CSA members who, when the bins start getting big and they haven't finished the bin and they know they're getting another one, they will freeze everything so they can use the fresh stuff. I have CSA members who are signing up this year and it's almost April and they're still eating last year's frozen produce because the bin is so big they can't get through it, so they freeze it.

What’s a good rule to follow for freezing produce?

As long as you get the air out of it it's probably good for over a year. Now, things like asparagus, if you freeze asparagus it's good for soups as it won't hold it’s structural integrity. Things like carrots and beets and cauliflower and broccoli - a very quick blanch and then an ice water bath and put them in a bag and suck all the air out, it'll good for months. I have stuff in my freezer that's a year old and I'm still using it. It's called being a cheap Dutchman. Seriously though, my parents went through the war so they had a real, I mean when you are starving and you don't have food, you appreciate the food that you have. They didn't waste anything. An apple could be frozen and then turned into an apple pie, apple crumble, apple sauce, or apple juice. I mean, everything got used and preserved. We've lost a lot of that. People don't see the value in saving stuff. It's a whole lot cheaper to buy a bushel of apples when it's in season and do your freezing, than trying to buy an apple pie in the winter that's maybe $15.

What would your advice be to people who have limited storage space for long-term storage?

The first place to start is buying what you need not what you want. Having a meal plan in place, well that's why I give recipes with my CSA bins so people can look at the list and say okay this is my meal plan for the week. You have to be really intentional to eat all that produce within the week. Don’t go out and buy fast food, don’t get lazy. A very simple thing as well is have a list when you're going to the grocery store. It's not as easy to off-road. 

My friend got me freezing cubes. It's a silicone cube which you put your stuff in it and freeze it. It's cubed, it's exactly two cups and then you put it in a baggie and shove it in the freezer. That has helped with how I store things because a cube is much easier to store than a round bag or a mason jar. 

What do you enjoy most about the work you do?

So we've been at this farm for 39 years. We've been married for 39 years and Brian worked for a few years before that as well. I personally come from a dairy farm background. Brian's big thing is he enjoys talking to people; talking about what we do and how we do it and how we do it differently. Talking about our solar panels - I mean people will stand in front of the solar array in front of our barn that has all the output stuff and he will stand there and talk to people for hours. Or he'll be fixing something and explain why he was fixing it because equipment is expensive. The old stuff works well if you keep it up. If someone asks about how something grows, he’ll walk them to the fields and talk about how they grow. That's what he loves. He loves talking to people because when you're sitting on a tractor by yourself all the time it's pretty lonely and sometimes your wife doesn't always want to talk to you.

For me, I like to read to unwind. I like a good book. Right now I'm reading war stories. Things like “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Often, I read books about women in war. One, “The Dressmaker of Paris,” is about how they sewed secret compartments in the clothing to get messages across. I also like to keep my brain going with Wordle and wordscape, you know you got to keep your brain active.