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Sustaining County Farms
By Chris Crane
Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
April 18, 2003
Ida Lofting's 100-acre, West Marlborough farm was alive on one of Chester County's first spring-like days. Under towering trees, riders trotted horses down a lane, past the main farmhouse. Inside the house, the dining room table was stretched to the last leaf with home-cooked food. Inverbrook Farm was crawling with farmers.
Lofting stood in her dining room with granddaughter, farmer Claire Murray, and surveyed the scene outside through an open door. About 50 people with paper plates occupied a sunny lawn as Ruth Sullivan prepared to talk about the future of Chester County's farms.
Sullivan, director of Southeast Programs for the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, also known as PASA, was there to rally local PASA members and guests behind the organization's "vision of a food system that is supportive of profitable local farms, that produces healthy food that is good for consumers, good for animals, and good for the environment," according to Sullivan.
What does that mean to consumers? Sullivan maintains it means that PASA helps preserve Chester County farmland, reducing sprawl at no cost to taxpayers. It means that PASA supports farmers' markets in Oxford, Kennett Square, Coatesville, Phoenixville, West Chester and West Grove, where consumers can buy farm-fresh produce, often organically grown. It means that PASA promotes approximately 26 roadside farm stands in Chester County. And, it means that county residents can still spill out of cars onto seven working farms and take home shares of local crops.
PASA promotes programs which, "help farmers stay profitable," said Sullivan, by helping farmers connect directly with retail buyers. In this way, farmers net more per-acre than they do with conventional, large-scale farming, and they are less likely to cash in acreage with land developers. Sullivan suggested that many PASA members are content with modest incomes and an enjoyable way of life.
At Maysie's Farm, a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in Glenmoore, PASA member Sam Cantrell sells shares of his farm's crop to about 170 shareholder families. From May to November, shareholders stop by the farm weekly to pick up, or pick, a variety of produce. Those friendly faces enliven Cantrell's farm, one reason, he noted, that "saving farms is different from saving farming."
Sullivan said that Maysie's Farm is a model of an ecologically and economically sound farm that is consumer oriented, an example of why Chester County is considered a "hotbed" of sustainable farming.
The county has "a tremendous number and variety of consumers who support local farming," Sullivan said.
At the nonprofit farm named after his mother, Cantrell cultivates supportive consumers by educating community groups, classes of children, even groups of teachers who soon will be required by the state to teach children agricultural basics. He also provides "an in-depth, intense, life changing experience" to interns who spend full seasons on his farm.
One of PASA's goals is to encourage members to swap information and share success stories. At the Inverbrook Farm gathering, Cantrell shared a story about Dawn Lawless, also known as Mrs. Lawless to her room of second-grade food-source experts at Kings Highway Elementary School, in the Coatesville Area School District. Lawless oversees the school's garden plots, which are tended by students in all grades. The garden has provided vegetable soup for a school social, produce for a food bank and a lesson, according to school principal Tyrone Carter, "in giving back to nature, and nature giving to us."
A harmonious relationship with nature is at the heart of sustainable agriculture according to Claire Murray, one of the newest generation to take root on Inverbrook Farm. Behind her grandmother's farmhouse, Murray's farm plots yield an array of healthy foods for her 45 CSA members (this year she could provide for up to 75.) Organic growing practices result in healthy food, and healthy soil that will sustain the farm and her shareholders for years to come.
Like many PASA members, Murray attended PASA's annual conference in February.
"I can't go to the conference without feeling compelled to make as many steps toward complete sustainability as possible. Just kind of being around all those spirited people rubs off on you," Murray said.
While local farms are unlikely to supplant large groceries as consumers' main food source any time soon, products of Chester County's sustainable farms are now widely available, through CSAs, farmers' markets, and farm stands, that sustainable agriculture finally may have entered into the mainstream. The Chester County Planning Commission now publishes a comprehensive brochure listing sources of locally grown food.
State Rep. Chris Ross, who had a food plate of his own on the lawn of Inverbrook Farm, observed that, "things that will help people succeed as farmers in Chester County are clearly good things for us to try and support."
For more information on PASA, log on www.pasafarming.org or call 814-349-9856.
"Farm Stands, Markets, Orchards & Community Supported Agriculture," produced by the Chester County Planning Commission, is available by calling 610-344-6285.