Boulder Belt Eco-Farm: don’t call them organic, even though they are

By Ryan Peverly

rpeverly@registerherald.com

Don’t call the folks at Boul­der Belt Eco-Farm organic. They use the word “sus­tain­able”. Mostly because they have to. But at least that was their choice.

The quaint, homely eco-farm — that’s a fancy way for call­ing them­selves organic with­out using the word — sits on U.S. 127 North out­side of Eaton, where Lucy and Eugene Good­man have grown organic fruits and veg­eta­bles since 2005.

But the Good­mans have been eco-farming for 18 years, start­ing with a small patch of land in Col­lege Cor­ner, where they first lived together as a cou­ple. They know a thing or two about organic farm­ing — they may have even intro­duced the process to Pre­ble Coun­tians — even if they can’t legally use the word to describe the 50-plus crops they grow.

It’s a long story with hum­ble beginnings.

“We had no inten­tion of farm­ing like this, at this level,” Lucy said. “We had a small gar­den that turned into a huge gar­den. A year after we moved in together, we found the Rich­mond farm­ers’ mar­ket. And we had this huge gar­den, this mar­ket gar­den, so we decided to go. We didn’t think we’d make any money, but we got hooked, so we kept doing it.”

”It amazed us how cheap you get things there,” Eugene said. “Peo­ple would charge 25 cents a pound for toma­toes, incred­i­bly low, and there weren’t any new peo­ple com­ing in to shake things up. I think it got up to 50 cents a pound at one point, but we insisted on higher prices. It allowed other farm­ers to get fairer prices for their stuff. We knew you could get more than 50 cents a pound for your tomatoes.

“And they didn’t like us at first because of that. But we were won­der­ing how any­one could do this because they weren’t mak­ing any money, sell­ing things for 25 cents, 50 cents a pound. We wanted to make it into a more viable thing, we wanted to make it our living.”

Since then they have made it their liv­ing, going from inor­ganic to organic to sustainable.

”We showed up at the (Rich­mond) farm­ers’ mar­ket call­ing our­selves organic, and that’s when we found out we weren’t. We’d get asked about our organic prac­tices, and we were only a year-and-a-half into pro­fes­sional mar­ket farm­ing. We didn’t know what we were doing at all. We told peo­ple we used manure and com­post and didn’t really spray. Then we knew we needed to get cer­ti­fied organic,” Lucy said.

The cou­ple found out about the Ohio Eco­log­i­cal Food and Farm­ing Asso­ci­a­tion through the Pre­ble County Exten­sion Office, and were inspected in 1996. Their cer­ti­fi­ca­tion took effect in 1999.

That cer­ti­fi­ca­tion expired in 2002, and the cou­ple decided against re-certifying.

“When we were cer­ti­fied there was no USDA cer­ti­fi­ca­tion or national pro­gram. It was state by state cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. When the USDA came in we fig­ured out it would be 1,800 pages of paper­work, 10 copies of each page, all that paper­work to do to keep us cer­ti­fied,” Lucy said.

”It was too daunt­ing for smaller farms to worry about,” Eugene said. “We can still grow the way we know how to grow. It was the prin­ci­ple of it. The USDA says they know bet­ter than we do, but we’re the ones doing the job and doing the farm­ing this way yet they’re going to tell us how to do our job? That’s the prin­ci­ple I didn’t like.”

“It’s not that we were penny-savers — we just didn’t want the fed­eral gov­ern­ment intrud­ing on our farm,” Lucy adds. “They want to cer­tify the big cor­po­rate farms — that’s what the USDA’s National Organic Pro­gram was put in for — but we sell direct to our cus­tomers. Organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is really for peo­ple who are whole­sal­ing and can­not tell their cus­tomers how the stuff’s grown.”

Since 2002, and espe­cially since their move to their cur­rent loca­tion in Eaton in 2005, Boul­der Belt has estab­lished a loyal cus­tomer base, which cen­ters around its Farm Share Ini­tia­tive, a pro­gram that allows cus­tomers to buy shares of their crops and make weekly pro­duce pick-ups.

The Good­mans also farm year-round, some­thing nearly unheard of in this part of the country.

“We are pio­neers in sea­son exten­sion in this coun­try,” Lucy said.

But it’s a con­stant strug­gle grow­ing organ­i­cally in Pre­ble County. Nearby farms use pes­ti­cides that make their way to Boul­der Belt through the air — some­thing the cou­ple knows they can’t com­pletely combat.

“One thing we real­ize is we’re not keep­ing all the poi­sons and chem­i­cals off our land,” Lucy said. “We’ve had stuff destroyed by chem­i­cals that we know came from 10 miles away. But we can’t do any­thing about it.”

Then there’s the frack­ing issue, an issue that would involve drilling deep into the ground for nat­ural gas, extract­ing met­als such as lead and mer­cury, which could con­t­a­m­i­nate local water supplies.

Frack­ing is not an issue in this area now — but it very well could be in the near future.

”We really have to con­sider that as a real pos­si­bil­ity,” Eugene said. “I’m con­cerned it’d con­t­a­m­i­nate our water source, which is a deep well. When we come to that part of time, in the future, I guess we’ll deal with it when we have to. I’d like to say we’re smarter than that and will be able to keep our resources clean.”

”It’d take away our liveli­hood,” Lucy added.

Until then, the Good­mans will stay sus­tain­able — just the way they like it.

Posted by Acres Admin on Aug 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.