Three Roods Farm

Three Roods is the most suburban of the farms I've visited. The local chamber of commerce says that Columbiaville is part of the "Detroit metropolitan area," and you can certainly get the sense of that looking at all the former farms that have been turned into housing developments. Both Greg and Robin commute to nearby jobs several days a week, where they often sell eggs from the 40 or so chickens they keep. Their CSA members come out to the farm to pick up their vegetables...easy enough for the eight shareholders they ususally have. The Shack at Hill and Hollow Farm

Just four thousand miles and four farms into my tour, and I've already covered an incredibly broad ground: from Twin Oaks, where the community consumes all the produce it produces, to Three Roods, where a local food source has been plunked down into the midst of what is (or would be, if not for the fickleness of GM) essentially a suburb, and from an organic wholesaler supplying high-end turnips to Whole Foods, to a 90 member CSA working toward sustainability.

It certainly seems an appropriate coincidence (?) that here in the (former) heartland of industrial America (Flint, Michigan) I should encounter Michael Pollan's latest book (2006), The Omnivore's Dilema, a fascinating expose of the state of the world's (isn't the USA the world?) food supply. I recommend this book highly, even if it turned out that a lot of it was hype.

Hill and Hollow Farm home field

The weather is interesting here in Michigan. My first view of Lake Michigan only extended out about thirty feet, thanks to some serious fog. Then, there was the passover snow storm, at the beginning of April, daytime temperatures in the thirties, and down into the teens overnight. Robin tells me there was a similar storm a couple of years ago, when passover fell much later in the month. The latest frost, they tell me, was at the beginning of June one year. Perhaps not so bad as Minnesota, where, as Garison Keilor says, there is winter, and then there's July.

Rain on Flat Rock Creek

Things are pretty laid back here. Robin and Greg grow vegetables on something like an acre altogether, tilling with roto-tillers, and growing vegetables in raised beds. The sheep graze the rest, and Greg is working to reforest a significant portion of the 23 acre property. Greg tells me that the state was originally opened in the days of Jefferson. Surveyors were sent out to divide the land up into neat rectangles - there are almost no major diagonally-oriented roads here. It was sold off to lumbering operations which quickly reduced the almost complete Michigan forest to nothing. The land was then sold off to various northern european settlers (Germans, Dutch, Scots), who turned it into farmland.

Snow is falling, my feet are freezing, and my nose is runnig. They say spring will arrive any day. Greg says spring is pretty short here, sneeze, and you might miss it. If I'm lucky I might catch a glimpse of it before heading north and west again.

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