Harvesting, washing, and packing vegetables for market takes more time than anything else on the farm. Come learn lean and efficient techniques for speeding up these steps. Also come prepared to share ideas from your own farms.

AdAgrA 2018: Something Better

<p>Harvesting, washing, and packing vegetables for market takes more time than anything else on the farm. Come learn lean and efficient techniques for speeding up these steps. Also come prepared to share ideas from your own farms.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Session 3

Deidre Dealy

Food Preservation 101

Preserving food is processing food in a way that stops it from decomposing.

There are 2 main ways that food decomposes.

Microorganisms are things like bacteria and fungus.

And there are lots of other little ways, but those are the 2 primary ways that food decomposes.

And so microorganisms, those bacteria and the fungi, they create enzymes that then kind of digest the food and break it down and cause it to rot and decay.

And so when we preserve food, we manipulate the environment of the food by manipulating the temperature or the moisture content or the acidity or the oxygen levels of the food to make it inhospitable to the growth of those microorganisms.

We can preserve food so that we can obviously enjoy that food at times of the year when it's not in abundance, or when we're not harvesting it out of our garden.

That was 1 of the reasons that we started canning, because we started eating more organic.

To buy a can of organic peaches or even applesauce sometimes can be very, very expensive.

And so by canning those that produce ourselves, we can save a lot of money throughout the year.

You know what is exactly in your food because there are a lot of additives in our food.

Especially if you're growing it yourself, then you know what the inputs of the soil are, if anything's been sprayed on that.

Even organic farmers sometimes spray things on their food before or after harvest, and so you know exactly what you're eating.

It's really easy to share dried food or canned food with people, jams and jellies.

And they love it because it's something that's not very commonplace anymore, something that you've put a lot of time into.

And then also, just as stewardship, being good stewards of the things that we have.

So if you have a lot of food, it seems like you're not being a good steward to let all that food go to waste, right?

And also just to practice kind of a lost art.

Like I said, when we first started doing home food preservation, we had a hard time finding that knowledge because We've just, in the convenience of our world, kind of got out of the habit of doing those things.

Anyone who has access to fresh food and some basic kitchen equipment can preserve food.

For best results, you want to plan to preserve food when things are in season and at the peak of ripeness.

And kitchen setups can be anywhere from pretty basic to advanced.

I have some really awesome pictures on here of different kitchen setups that we've had over the years.

We've had very small kitchens that we've canned in, and we've had large commercial kitchens that we have done food processing in.

We've set up tables like this in the middle of our kitchen to give us extra space because we didn't have counter space.

And 1 year, my husband even took an old door that we got for $5.

He cut a hole in it and put a gas cooktop with a propane bottle underneath.

And then we could process our jars outside on the porch and not take up kitchen space.

So sometimes I will process foods in small batches and sometimes, you know, when it's apple season, we make a hundred jars, quarts of applesauce.

And a lot of times you can make things work for you.

My husband has even built, he took a big water tank at 1 time.

And we were getting ready to move and we had all these peaches that we had to process and so he made a firebox underneath this big water bin and we lit a fire underneath it and we put, he put racks in there and we could fit 20, 26 jars per rack and so 52 quarts at a time we processed, and we were just moving them through there, and got through all our peaches in a day.

A lot of it is really being creative and working with what you have available.

I'll just keep moving, and I can try to come back and show you some of the things that I'm talking about here.

So there are different methods that we use to preserve food.

I'm going to mention about 5 or 6 of them, but we're really going to talk about 3 today.

So the first 1 is freezing, where we manipulate the temperature.

And then dehydration, which we're taking out the moisture.

So all of these things, those bacteria that we're talking about, need those to survive.

So if you take away the temperature that they thrive in and make it a freezing point that bacteria and molds and things, they can't grow.

Dehydration does the same thing by removing the moisture.

Canning will do the same thing by manipulating the acidity sometimes or increasing the temperature to kill those microorganisms.

There's also freeze drying, which you have to have some pretty specific equipment for.

Fermentation, which uses biological action, like bacterias, fungus, those type of things, yeasts, to create acids and alcohols that then preserve the food.

And then, of course, you can just store things in things like root cellars.

And that will preserve the food if you manipulate the environment enough to make it ideal for.

Sorry, I'm distracted by the PowerPoint now.

OK, so we're going to go ahead and we're going to talk about freezing.

OK, so here's kind of some different setups that we've had in the past.

And I have to show you 1 bragging picture of, so this is our farm family, we're very blessed to be farming right now with an older couple that are in their 70s, and then these are our 4 blessings on the bottom, a farm in South Dakota.

This is an example of what I was saying with kind of like the cooktop and the outdoor stove.

You can just use an old door and we got a cooktop off of Craigslist and you know, 2 by fours and you have yourself a makeshift canning table there.

And then the 1 on the left is our, was our new pressure canner.

So my husband's very proud of that and that makes her very excited.

I Love that he loves canning as much as I do Okay, so we're going to go ahead now and talk about freezing so freezing is the easiest method of home food preservation It preserves a lot of the enzymes and the nutrients, because you're taking it at the peak of ripeness, and then you're just freezing time until you use it.

There's a decreased risk of pathogens when you preserve in this method, and Like I said, you can preserve it at the peak of ripeness.

You can take a really soft, juicy peach and freeze it like that, and it's going to be so sweet.

But if you took that same peach and you tried to can it, there's heat, and you're essentially cooking it, so it would just be mush.

And so when you're freezing, you can really have a lot better flavor in your produce.

If your freezing temperatures are maintained, you can store frozen food indefinitely.

But the downside of that is that you do need the access to the electricity and the reliance on electricity for freezing and that you're limited to the space of your freezer.

So freezing is an awesome, easy way to preserve food, but it does have some downsides.

If you lose electricity at some point for an extended period of time and you think about all the work you put into filling up your freezer, you're shaking your head like it's happened to you before.

Yeah, so definitely a con of that method.

Okay, so the next method I want to mention is dehydrating.

So dehydrating is probably 1 of the oldest methods of food preservation thousands of years ago They were drying figs and dates and fruits and things You have less storage limitations like you don't have to rely on that freezer space you can keep dried food lots of places It's pretty convenient to use take with you.

You know we raisins out of a bag easy to snack on They have a long shelf life if they're stored properly, and you don't have to rely on the electric storage that you do with freezing food.

Also, when you dehydrate foods, you can control the temperature that you're dehydrating them at.

If you keep it at a lower temperature, you preserve more of those beneficial enzymes and nutrients in the food.

The biggest downside of dehydrating food is the time factor.

So your dehydrator's only gonna hold so much, and it can take 8 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, depending on what you're dehydrating to dry that dehydrator full of produce.

And so you fill it up once, and then you can't fill it up again until the first batch is done.

And so if you have a lot of food right away that needs processed, then that can be a big downside.

There is also an amount of vitamins and nutrients that are lost in the process.

And then you also need specific equipment to dehydrate, whether it's having a dehydrator.

You could make your own dehydrator or sun-dry foods, but even sun-drying foods require sunshine in a certain amount of time, at a certain temperature, without moisture, so You have to have the right environment for doing that.

Home canning, you're not as limited to the space as you are with freezing.

But the best thing about canning is that you have this array of options.

So there are a lot of options with canning.

Carol Sikora

Sharing the Simple Life: My Journey

But through this message and Spirit of Prophecy, I learned a lot.

I didn't know what I was doing, but I learned.

I learned year by year, moment by moment.

And I want you to click them if that's OK.

So My husband, the first 3 years of our marriage, taught me how to garden.

That's the garden he grew our second year of marriage, our first year.

And then pretty soon, I was taking it over.

You could go out in the garden, get all this.

And so I really loved that, being able to go out.

I loved my husband and I wanted to influence our children.

We weren't Christians when we were raised.

We wanted to keep that from happening to our children, so we moved out of the city.

We thought the city has really influences that we just would prefer not.

Not 1 of our children wants to drink alcohol.

All my family were alcoholics, same with my husband.

And they didn't get into drugs, and they didn't get into trouble.

And we really attribute that to hard work, because they were busy all the time falling into bed, and living on a farm, and being out, even out from town.

And you can go out in your pajamas if you want to, right?

We were looking for those kind of aspects.

And so I really believe, too, country living teaches virtues, moral virtues to your children.

I know that sounds funny, but it really does.

And I'll explain some of that as I go along.

It's a long story, but we move to Paonia, Colorado.

It's a sage juniper pinion area, which is basically a high desert in zone 6 and sometimes I can get away with 7 We have to pipe all our water to whatever we're growing We only have 14 inches of rain even with snow in a year.

So it'd be just desert if there wasn't irrigation water canals there.

So we do bring sprinklers and drip now but I learned on my first 2 acre piece that I did with my children to make and construct ditches.

And water flowed through those ditches to my crops, which was a lot of work.

I look back now and go, how did I ever do that?

We would even lay black plastic over the ditches so I can grow melons and different kind of produce so that the water, it was warming the soil, the black plastic.

All my 4 kids and me would lay like a quarter acre of black plastic.

And also at 5, 800 feet, there's a lot of sun intensity because you're so close to the sun.

I mean, you know, it's really harsh on things and plants.

And then the difference between the nighttime and the day, temperatures can range from 30 to 50 degrees, even in summer.

So it's really a challenge to grow and so I'm always trying to warm things and okay in 1991 so we got married in about the 80s in 1991 we bought a 40 acre piece which you're going to see Michael's going to show you some pictures on it We planted a hundred Fruit trees Michael's idea.

I'm so glad and and then and The kids loved the garden We were very small scale an acre and 2 acres is not very big I start out probably with a half went to a full acre and then went to 2 acres I was raising 4 children they were 7 4 and 2 and a newborn and I just started to do farming I really just got really into it I had no greenhouses and actually for not 15 years trading I was trading a place in a greenhouse to do seedlings and transplants, because I knew nothing about doing that, for watering her greenhouse every morning.

I mean, I just did anything to learn and anything to help me.

I was visiting and trading work for produce so I could learn farm practices by other farmers.

There were some great farmers where I live.

And I was just starting my first child in homeschool, which I knew nothing about.

I felt really incompetent, I'll tell you, to say the least.

But I also wanted to have the farm be an opportunity, a teaching tool for my children to learn work skills.

That's 1 thing I came away from with my parents.

And I knew that was so valuable for my children.

So the kids on the farm would weed 2 or 3 hours in the morning.

I didn't care how old or young they were.

And then they could go do whatever they wanted in the summer.

And we also had other things, because we had 40 acres.

20 of those acres were grass, hay, alfalfa.

And so we belled it, cut it, belled it, stacked it.

My older girls, we decided that was probably not good for them after a while because they were lifting 60-pound bells and stacking them because we didn't have a stack wagon.

Like, they're amazing, really, when I think about it.

My husband taught them how to run The tractor, the bobcat, the backhoe.

John Dysinger

Larry Lesher

Alan Seiler

Pick, Pack, and Wash: Challenges and Solutions

We're here to talk about what actually is a huge part of market farming.

If you haven't been there yet, what you'll find between Pick, Pack, and wash and marketing, once you get into the season, that consumes the vast majority of your time.

In fact, so much of your time that you have a very hard time doing the other stuff like planting and cultivating.

It's easy to create a lot of work on the farm.

When you plant seeds, they make a lot of work.

So this is an extremely important stage to try to increase efficiency.

The more you can increase efficiency in pick, pack, and wash, then the more time you have for all those very important things like planting and cultivating, planning, and so on.

So, obviously, there's 3 main sections, pick, And as I said earlier, it would be better to say pick, wash, and pack.

So we thought we could just kind of go through each of those and see what questions you have.

And then we can share our experiences in those 3 areas.

So I think there might have been some confusion when I first walked in.

People, I think, were thinking this was going to be like a lecture.

This is actually a roundtable discussion.

So just so everyone in here is aware of the format that we're going to be doing.

It's a it's a we're here we've all had wash stations for well quite a while at least And so the purpose of this is for us to just kind of share.

We can share our expertise, why we do what we do, experiences that we've had to kind of help, you know, encourage you or facilitate you getting down that road a little better.

Yeah, we have to know what crop you're talking about in order to know when to pick it so You know a lot of things people don't Realize can be can be picked at most any stage like a cucumber You know a ripe cucumber According to You know a ripe cucumber.

We would say is overripe right that's when it's ready to for seed so basically you can pick a cucumber this small and it's gonna taste wonderful.

So in large part you know a beet can be picked Like most people wouldn't buy a beet if it were this big.

My experience is when I have oversized beets, we eat them at home and they're perfectly fine.

But most people, if you're thinking about when should you pick something like a beat for instance most people want their beats about this big and they want them uniform in size so a beat is ready to pick in a whole gamut of stage of you know like a whole time large time frame but you want it when it's best for you to sell it you know and so if you're wanting to have beats let's say for without tops non bunched and you just want to put them on the table as loose beats typically I would say those are bigger beets, but if you're doing bunched beets, typically that's going to be a smaller beet.

Okay, so the question was, is the fragrance of the fruit, I'm guessing, like in melons, I'm guessing would Possibly be 1 of those that fragrance would be a factor and as far as the ease of which it comes off the plant is That also a factor the quite.

That's the question I'm trying to I'm racking my brain here ease of come off Okay, I haven't grown a lot of melons.

There are certain melons, they call it full slip.

If, you know, if you'd give it a little tug and it comes off easily then it's ripe.

But I'll tell you melons are rough at least on the scale we grow them.

I always when we take melons to market it's always with a prayer Lord please just make them good for these people.

Because this is your reputation at stake here.

And I'll tell you, on our farm, We grow a fair amount of melons.

We don't grow a ton of melons, but we put them in our CSA, so we grow enough to have them several times throughout the year.

We do a musk melon, we do a honeydew melon, we do watermelon.

We do a large watermelon and a small watermelon.

We have a guarantee, because melons, you can't look inside of a melon and Typically our melons are decent at the worst But if someone's unhappy my guarantee is bring it back, and we will make it right If you get this home, and it's not what you expected it to be.

If you're expecting it to be the sweetest thing on the planet and it was only moderately sweet, we want to meet your expectation.

If it doesn't, come back, we'll make it right.

And so, things like that, we just kind of put that out there for people and we make it clear to them when they buy it, you know, this is our guarantee.

You know, and I think you were talking about vines so maybe something like peas is that what you were?

You were you were taking about a well the way he did you described it at first I almost thought you were talking about picking peas or something and for picking peas something like that this is how I know when they're ready.

We're not supposed to eat between meals, but.

You know, you can say like a snap pea, you know, it should be plump and full.

If a snow pea gets fatter and you start getting seeds in there, they're probably going to be kind of starchy.

And so each thing is going to have its own nuance as you're determining when is this product ready?

You know and a lot of times for me if I'm selling to like a higher-end restaurant They actually want things immature And if I'm picking them when I would take them to market, they're totally not interested like to them.

That's Garbage really and so they want you know so you got to know what you're picking for and definitely, you know taste stuff because If you like it, most likely your customers are going to like it.

In my experience, most chefs want like, for instance, zucchini.

They're going to want that 8 to, well, maybe not even that much.

They're wanting it small and they're wanting it uniform and so, you know, that's a big thing because they're chopping a lot of stuff up and The more uniform it is the easier it is to process that product 1 1 key word is baby If you call it baby, you can charge a lot more for it.

So we used to have beets that, in our mind, were kind of castoffs because they never sized up.

But you just harvest them and bunch them and call them baby beets and you can sell them for the price of big beets okay well we yes no I think we we are we need to move on I think if you come tomorrow to the salad mix class You'll get your answer But For the short answer is yes, you do need to know there are state regulations on what's called field cut greens.

And so if you aren't a processing facility, you cannot process greens legally.

And when you come from somewhere that doesn't have a processing license, you cannot call that ready to eat.

If you call that ready to eat, you're breaking the law.

And so you can, and what you should do, and we'll get to that in this, well right here, you'll see the bubbler on the screen, but we'll get to the process of what that looks like.

But to answer your question directly is something like, say you're going to do radicchio.

Does everybody here know what radicchio is?

The red stuff you find in your mixed baby greens, the little kind of almost looks, it's real crunchy, white.

Series

Session 3

Pick, Pack, and Wash: Challenges and Solutions

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

The Business of Farming

03 Business Basics

48m

Special Interests

Cover Cropping: A Tool to Rebuild and Restore Your Soil

1h 12m

Breakout Session 3

Cover Crops, Smother Crops, and Green Manures

1h

Specialty Crops

Healthy Profits: Growing Ginger and Turmeric

1h 2m

Plenary

Youth, Education, and Agriculture Panel

58m

Plenary

Agriculture and Evangelism Panel

1h

Short Course: Soil Health

Soil Health- Part 5

56m

Home Gardening

Every Seed Sown is a Harvest

49m

Business & Ministry

Hosting Interns

1h 5m

Home Gardening

Plan It, Grow It, Eat It!

58m

Special Interests

The “Up and Up” on Greenhouse Trellising

1h 1m

IMPACT Scandinavia 2012: Workshop B

Health Evangelism, Part 2

1h 11m

Sound Doctrine