Adventures in asparagus

>> Working on an organic farm is tough, exhausting and dirty. But eager volunteers remain keen on getting back to the earth

Story and photos by NOEMI LOPINTO

When I left Montreal to volunteer on organic farms, my friends were artists farting on canvases, sucking on the government teat and toiling away in obscurity, polluting and raising idiot children while simultaneously torturing me as I found myself unable to tear myself away from their poisonous grasps. Now that I have seen country life, my friends are struggling artists and intellectuals trying to live their lives with integrity under extreme financial duress, some of whom I am very glad to come home to and lick the poison lovingly from their fingers.

On both of the organic farms that I visited in the last two weeks, my early “I love the country” euphoria wore off around Day Three. As I write this, I am soooo happy to be back in the good ol’ city, where ice cream is a block away and people of all planetary origins walk the streets doing their parasitic urban thing.

I became a member of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, also known as WWOOF, in March. WWOOF is an international charitable organization that promotes exchange between city dwellers and organic farmers, aiming to help farmers in the organic movement as the work is often more labour intensive and more expensive than their agro-commercial counterparts. For a $30 (Canadian) membership fee, WWOOF Canada will send you a booklet of names and addresses of organic farm hosts in all 10 provinces. I wrote an introductory e-mail to farms all over Quebec describing my fervour and verve. I received four replies.

A country welcome

Which is how my three-year-old daughter and I came to leave Montreal on May 17, headed for Les Serres Neville, an organic farm in Lennoxville. Mary Neville, 20, picked me up in Sherbrooke. She drove a beat-up old Ford Mercury with a faulty exhaust pipe and a loose shell. I rode in the back seat, choking on exhaust fumes and my skin puckering into goose bumps as the car scraped against the road on sharp turns, screeching and farting its way up to the farm in Lennoxville.

Mary’s parents, Cathy Brochet and Chuck Neville, have been together for 25 years. They own 165 acres of farmland and five flower greenhouses that they run with a handful of employees, their two daughters, and volunteers like myself. The Nevilles have been hosting WWOOFers, as the volunteers are called, since 1997. Cathy Brochet, 45, told me she gets a lot of Asian guests, mainly Japanese and Korean travellers who want to breathe clean air, learn English and pay no rent.

The difference between an organic flower farm and a regular one is in the absence of chemical aides. Organic farmers do not use fungicides, insecticides, glues or growth hormones. Commercial greenhouses use growth retardants—chemicals to keep the plants small and compact so there is room for more plants per square inch—and insecticides. Insecticides can cost up to $200 per bottle, but can last for 10 years; the Nevilles, however, buy predatory insects at 10 times the price. The bugs, stored in cans of wheat bran and then sprinkled into the pots, eat “bad” bugs like aphids and thrips that both carry disease and eat leaves.

Four out of five of the greenhouses are metal structures, pre-fab steel tubes that the Nevilles assembled themselves. The greenhouses are a lovely, if noisy, place to work. Temperature-regulating vents screech as they open and close using an elaborate system of wheels and pulleys in the roof. The first time I heard them open I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Greenhouse cascade

The Nevilles spend nearly 12 hours a day trimming, digging, spacing and watering plants. Spring can mean nearly seven hours of watering daily. Plants tend to stretch in cold, grey weather and need more room as they get bigger. In the greenhouses they are laid out on tables, hung from the rafters or placed on the floor. The floor plants are watered manually with an enormous hose with a flexible spout. Hanging plants have straw-thin runner hoses poking into their pots that are connected to larger pipes running across the ceiling. To water them, Brochet turns on a faucet and the water runs through the larger pipes to the smaller ones, flooding from the top plants through to the bottom ones, creating a giant, sparkling pyramid of falling water.

“I wouldn’t want to spend my days wearing a rubber suit, breathing insecticides in all the time,” Chuck Neville said to me. “Insects develop resistances to that stuff and you have to rotate bottles. It’s very expensive, and it’s very poisonous stuff—greenhouse growers get terrible cancers. The insecticides are used all across the ornamental horticulture industry, worldwide. Rona-Entrepôt and other greenhouses figure no one is eating them so there’s no danger to the public. But that stuff seeps into the soil and into water systems.”
I spent most of my time in the kitchen cooking meals, with occasional forays into the greenhouses to plant baby seedlings into earthen pots and watering and spacing plants. The first day I arrived happened to be the day they had freshly distributed a chicken-and-bunny-shit fertilizer on the garden, much to the dismay of my three year old. She took one whiff and promptly puked on her shirt. She was quite paranoid after that.

I had come to the farm with dreams of sweating in the sun with a hoe in my hand, chucking bales of hay at burly farmhands while my daughter played in the clean earth, chasing after small wild creatures. But I picked the wrong farm. The farmhands were a shy music student named Phil and a married med-school dropout named Basil, who was a dead-ringer for Cheech Marin. Furthermore, chaseable creatures were scarce—unless you count the family cat or the Nevilles’ epileptic dog, Nanouk. The greenhouse bored my daughter stiff, so she spent her time ripping the heads off the gardenias and removing identifying tags. Often, it was politely suggested that she and I go for a nice, long country walk.

May showers bring bad harvests

I left the Nevilles’ after five days, off to another farm in St-Marcel, a tiny town near Ste-Hyacinthe, the centre of agricultural activity in Quebec. I was picked up by Danielle Turpin in another beat-up vehicle, a Dodge Caravan with a spider-web crack gracing the windshield. On the road to their farm, La Récolte d’Osiris, we drove past endless miles of land where the earth’s skin had been scraped bare.

“This land is used to grow corn as feed for cows that are slaughtered for meat,” explained Turpin. “The topsoil is dead, which is why there is so much dust in the air.” The sight of that desecration was enough to renew my long-forgotten vows of vegetarianism.
Turpin and her husband, Daniel Bigras, both 39, sow and reap a few hundred different varieties of vegetables every year. Their main concentration at this time of year is the asparagus patch: 80 acres of nothing but little green erections stretching out into the sky. Asparagus grows best in hot weather, and as May had been lousy in that department, so was the harvest. Normally, explained Bigras, this would have been the busiest time of the year.

I was, however, lucky enough to live in relative luxury in a slate grey school bus, renovated to accommodate three beds, a fridge, a kitchen sink, a television and a hot plate. There was a yellow bucket to piss in and electric heating.

Every day we rose at 7 a.m. to pick, cut, count and bag the asparagus. Bigras and Turpin require a minimum of six hours of work a day from their volunteers, which involves walking through the fields with a Sealtest milk crate under an arm and a 10-inch cutting knife in hand. Asparagus heads are delicate, so the crate can’t be bounced around. Twenty pounds of little green dicks poking out of a plastic crate can get heavy, and you have to carry them up and down the rows of asparagus, bending over to cut them at the base and put them in the box. Ten minutes of it is fun, 10 hours less so. When all of us were working in the fields at the same time, upturned bums dotted the rows like smiles.

I realized I must have forgotten why I never signed up for tree-planting when I signed up for this. I hate black flies with a passion. As if they sense my abhorrence (and my subsequent volcanic dermatological reaction), the little fuckers attacked only me. I danced and twitched my way through the rows of asparagus like Lennie Small with a severe form of Tourette’s syndrome.

Bigras worked in electronics before moving to the farm seven years ago. He designed an electric asparagus-picking cart out of two bicycles screwed to a chair seat. The vehicle wobbles over the rows, and he cuts the asparagus as they pass between his legs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well.

A bug’s life

The couple fertilize their crops with a fish emulsion, seaweed and compost. They too buy “good bugs” to eat the “bad bugs.” Different varieties of vegetables attract specific bad bugs—potatoes, for instance, are the favourite food of the Colorado beetle. The science of organic pest control has become precise. “They found the exact bacteria to kill off one species of bad bug,” Turpin told me, “but it takes time to work and you have to administer it under certain conditions: at night, or at certain temperatures.” Organic farmers use traditional techniques to ward off pests and protect the soil: crop rotation and strategic planting. “Conventional growers don’t even eat their own vegetables, because they know what went into them,” she said.

“If you plant your potatoes in the same place every year, the soil will become over-saturated with lime,” Turpin explained, “and you will be battling a well-established beetle infestation. The year after you’ve planted potatoes in a particular spot, you should plant a vegetable from a completely different family that needs more nitrogen. Even chemical farmers will rotate their crops, if they have any brains.”

Climate change, otherwise known as the end of the world, is a frightening development for organic farmers. While I was there, the weather was very weird. We began one day in summer and ended it in winter—flakes of snow were falling in late May. “Just to be dependent on Mother Nature is very stressful,” Turpin said. “There are so many things that could potentially ruin you: disease, cold or drought. But if the snow melts in February and then freezes again, the roots under the soil can snap. Perennials can be permanently damaged, roots and bulbs will die. Higher temperatures mean the insects survive through the winter, and we’ll have a full-blown infestation by spring.”

Musings on rural living

Clean air and fantastic sunsets notwithstanding, I don’t think the country suits me. I have never been uglier. The back of my neck looked like a teenager’s face. My hair swelled up like Medusa’s, complete with bugs and snakes writhing out from the curls.

Country life, I began to muse, consists of carrying out a series of thankless tasks that rob you of your youth and vitality while giving you endless time without cable, high-speed Internet or street festivals. Also, I noticed the Quebec countryside has yet to become fully emancipated—I saw lots of ignored farm wives toiling alongside mealy-mouthed farmer husbands, the kind who’ll hide behind the paper when they get home and not speak for the rest of the night. The work being done in the fields is so segregated, it’s like traveling back to 1950.

I came back to the city sitting on a crate of organic asparagus and listening to a homely, hippie couple bicker in the back seat. I was dropped off at Crémazie metro only to discover that the metro was closed because someone had set a fire in the tunnels. The Metropolitan roared above my head and every taxi I flagged was already full of disgruntled metro passengers. I held five bags in one hand, a cranky, confused three year old in the other, and I was stranded on an embankment between two lanes of traffic. Finally, a nice guy gave me a lift. Hurrah. I am covered in bug bites and ready to never leave the city again. :

Getting organic goodies

If you are interested in receiving an organic food basket, contact Equiterre, the people at the forefront of a project called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). You can become what they call a “sharer” with a farm by paying for a share of the harvest in advance. Farmers deliver baskets of fresh vegetables, and meat, every week, to drop-off points around the city. Sharers are invited to become involved in organizational work and occasionally to come to work on the farm. The Quebec CSA network involves more than 50 farms, all of which must be certified by independent certification bodies (OCIA, Garantie-Bio, Demeter, or Québec-Vrai), and cannot use synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. Share prices range from $10–25 a week.
Maps of drop-off points and a list of farms can be obtained from the people at Equiterre. They can be reached at 522-2000. Leave a name and address and they will send you information by snail mail. Their Web site address is www.equiterre.qc.ca.
If you are interested in going anywhere in the world and volunteering on an organic farm, write to WWOOF Canada at: WWOOF-Canada, 4429 Carlson Road, Nelson, B.C., VIL 6X3. You can also call them at (250) 354-4417 or visit their Web site at www.wwoof.org/canada. Membership is $30 plus postage.

Social events include meetings with the farmers, harvest festivals, workdays at the farm and evaluations. These events can be initiated by the sharers or by the farmers. :
—Noemi Lopinto