Showing posts with label Love Dove Farms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love Dove Farms. Show all posts

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Love Dove Farms

Love Dove Farms, Woodbine, Md.
John Dove's family is living the story you read about in books. Not the fairy tale kind of story, but the kind highlighted by Michael Pollan and so many others about the plight of the American farmer. A fourth generation farmer in northwestern Howard County, the family's dairy business fell by the wayside a few decades ago, and John's father turned to conventional grain and soy crops to make money. When he could no longer feed a family with four kids by toiling in the fields, he didn't sell their land to a big developer, he got a job. When he's not working the fields, John's dad is delivering fuel. But John's got big dreams for this beautiful farmland and they don't involve Monsanto. John hopes to figure out how to scale an organic sustainable farm to the point he can earn a decent living and be part of changing consumers' choices to a healthier way of life.

Love Dove Farms lies off Old Frederick Road nestled in an expanse of rolling hills of grain fields. Here, John, his father, and grandmother live on about 200 acres that the family has farmed since the early 20th century. That's a significant difference from the majority of organic farmers I know. While most are farming and living in 5-10 acre plots, Love Dove Farms really does have the capacity to scale, if he can work out a healthy ecosystem. So even though this is John's first year selling organically grown produce, he hasn't started small. We toured his three large plots together, and I was impressed by the quantity and variety of plants he's got in the ground. Several long rows of garlic, their scapes and browning foliage indicating he'll soon be pulling hundreds of bulbs from the ground. There are, of course, all of the usual suspects: heirloom tomatoes, radishes, various greens, potatoes, peas, peppers, and herbs. But there are also blueberry bushes, as well as several rows of asparagus, and he's trying his hand at organically grown chick peas. The magnitude is huge when you consider he's doing it almost entirely alone.
  
Looky at all that organic asparagus!
This is what 40lbs of garlic plants look like -wow

Besides coming from a family of farmers, John earned a degree in environmental science, and he's interned as part of the Young Farmer's program. While still in college, he interned with Serpent Ridge winery, a fabulous Maryland winery out of Westminster. Last year, he worked for Calvert's Gift Farm, a 5-acre organic farm in Sparks, Md. that has proven they can provide for a lot of families without a lot of land.  Since 2009, they have sponsored a New Farmer's Training Program with the University of Maryland with the goal of increasing the number of young farmers, particularly in Baltimore County. There he learned a lot of tricks of the trade, including hand methods for working the soil and maintaining an organic farm.

One of the huge challenges he and other small organic farmers face is how to manage the heavy physical demands of many organic practices while producing and selling enough to keep afloat. The hourly wage of farmers using all manual practices is extremely low. John talked about an organic farm in Salsbury he visited recently, where they have incorporated some technologies that help reduce the manual labor. At that farm, they have also integrated produce and livestock into a holistic system. John finds that very appealing. We walk down one of the many long rows of tomatoes , and I ask whether he rips the buds of arterial shoots - side shoots that grow at the join with the main vine. Ideally you want to cut all these off so that your tomato plant puts its energy into producing fruit. The trouble with this is as summer begins, tomatoes grow like crazy, and if you don't grab these shoots quickly, they'll be thick stems in a few days. In other words, it's very man intensive. As we walk along pinching plants, we both agree it'll be nearly impossible for him to do this for his plot through the season. That's the difference, or a difference, in garden scale and farm scale.
Love Dove Farms - a look over the main field

In this first year of business, John is selling at a few farmers' markets and restaurants. On Friday, he is at the Howard County Hospital market in Columbia from 2-6 pm. This small market offers a nice variety of produce and baked goods, as well as local cheese and coffee. On Saturday, he is trekking south toward D.C. to sell at the Mt. Rainier market. He's also made deals to sell to Aida Bistro, a yummy Italian wine bar in Columbia, and to Drovers Wine and Grill in Mount Airy. I've always found Aida excellent and love their dedication to locally sourcing their foods. Drovers is not a place I'm familiar with, but they sell only Maryland wine. I look forward to checking it out. Another dream of his is to sell at Centennial Lake in Columbia on the weekend. What a great idea! If you've ever been there, you know the throngs of health conscious folks who descend on the park to circumnavigate the lake on its paved 2 mile trail or to take a spin on a canoe or paddle boat. I imagine this would be a great setting for farm fresh local produce.

One of my particular soap boxes is that in Central Maryland there is this geographic separation between the bulk of organic consumers and producers. In Carroll County, the number of organic farmers is really quite remarkable. There is a strong enough community of farmers and like-minded individuals in the County to put on the Sustainable Living Maryland (or Go Local) Fair for several years now. This year, the fair had over 1500 visitors, indicating that there is a lot of interest from our residents. But, there is no doubt that Howard County has a much larger consumer base. There are several large organic markets in or adjacent to Howard County, where Carroll County has none. On the other hand, while western Howard County is every bit as agricultural as Carroll County, there really aren't many organic farmers in the area. Several farms are using IPM (integrated pest management), but not many are fully incorporating organic practices. That is why I was so glad to meet John at the market. His story is really quite different from all the other farmers I have interviewed, and I think he's in a great position to realize his dreams of keeping the family farm going organically. Give him a visit and wish him well. 

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Howard County Hospital Farmers Market and Food Sources

Every Friday afternoon this Summer, under a small band of white tents, you'll find a local farmer's market in the parking lot at Howard County Hospital in Columbia. The market runs from 2-6pm and has a few produce vendors, cheese, baked goods, and coffee. I stumbled upon it last week when I was in the area and was delighted to find a few farmers that will be perfect to profile on this blog. I'm visiting the first of them tomorrow and hopefully will have something out next week on that trip. For those who can make a weekday afternoon market, maybe on the way home from work, I'd recommend a stop. Here's a few notes on those I met last week.

Bowling Green Farm was there selling a wide range of cheese from their northern Howard County dairy herd. Almost every day that we drive south on Rt. 32 toward Columbia, we pass a group of cows grazing in hilly pastures by the side of the highway. The land is a bit hilly with a small dirt road that runs to the back of it, an assortment of craggy trees and a small stream. It's a bit hard to describe, but this little snippet of land - a mere few seconds in view as you speed down the highway - is picturesque in the context of cows. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had over the years about these cows with folks, all wondering to whom they belonged. I thought I'd solved the mystery for a minute at the market. Mitzi of Bowling Green Farm told me that their dairy farm is off Underwood Road. Indeed, I am quite familiar with the entrance to their family farm, marked by a small sign that heralds its family tradition. But, I'd also been assuming that this must be the source of our famous (ok, stretch) cows. Alas, I was wrong. Mitzi said those can't be her cows and the mystery continues.

Having said that, we did talk briefly about her farm and cheese. When I can get her time, I'll do an in-depth interview and write a profile for the blog. I'm quite curious about the history of her farm and how she ended up in the cheese business last Fall. Like most Maryland farms, they are taking their milk up to Pennsylvania and having cheese made there. They have a wide range of cheese, including mozzarella and feta, in addition to the standard cheddars and herbed-cheeses. They've been busy marketing, and the cheeses are actually available at a few markets - including Roots and David's (I think) - as well as farms with stores, like Larriland Farms. We tried the feta, and it was great in a spinach strawberry salad.

I also met John Dove of Love Dove Farm in Woodbine. I'm heading to see him tomorrow afternoon for a discussion and tour of the farm, but a quick look through his website shows that he comes from a long line of farmers and had farmed conventionally for some time in other crops. This is his first year selling organic produce and I'm really looking forward to hearing about his change and what his future looks like. We bought some wonderful spinach from him to go with that feta cheese. Last week he also had a salad mix, radishes, garlic scapes (yum yum), and a handful of other produce items that are escaping my mind right now.  More to come on the farm, the farmer, and how to connect to buy food!

A number of new readers have asked me specifically about sourcing organic or local foods, so they are much more interested in farmer profiles than my ramblings about my own journey... can't blaim them! but, over time it becomes a bit hard to track down the specific profiles. Here is a list of farms that I profiled last year -- the easiest way to find them is to click on their farm name in the word cloud to the right and then follow the link to the specific post about them, usually that's the earliest one. This will also take you to their own websites or blogs. Since the CSA season is now over for sign-up, I'm not going to note that here... just what you could actually obtain from the farm this summer. 

Truffula Seed Produce -- produce
Green Akeys Farm -- various meat
Nev-R-Dun Farm -- produce
Thorne Family Farm-- produce (I haven't done the full profile yet, but several mentions)
White Rose Farm -- produce and meat
Serpent Ridge Winery - wine
Furnace Hill Roasters - coffee
Sweet Simplici-tea -- tea house
Sattva Place - chickens (not profiled, but mentioned)


Most of these folks are at the downtown Westminster Farmers Market, which is 8-12 in downtown Westminster. I might have missed a few.