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Area’s organic farmers offer produce, meats free of chemicals
This field of fresh produce at the Dancing Hen Farm includes various kinds of lettuce and herbs. The produce will later be gathered and sold at area farmers markets.
Don Carey photos/the times leader
Organic farmer Don Hess plants a few rows of fall vegetables while one of his free-range chickens roams underfoot.
Peck. Peck. Peck.
What’s that gentle tapping a few inches above your ankle?
Turn around and you’ll see a little red hen – one of the many “pastured layers” that roam freely about Dancing Hen Farm in Stillwater.
They give the place its name, they give its customers “delicious eggs with rich, orange yolks” and they add bucolic charm to the fields where farmer Don Hess raises rows and rows of organic vegetables and herbs.
“No chemicals. We’re pesticide-free,” Hess said as he pointed out various greens, cabbage and fragrant basil.
A few basil leaves showed evidence that insects had been munching. “Those aren’t the ones I’d put out at the roadside stand,” Hess said.
Still, it’s fine to clean those leaves and use them for cooking.
Besides, Hess said, “I deliberately overplant, knowing I’ll lose some of the crop to insects,” he said.
The farmer sells his produce at the Forks Farm Market in Orangeville two Saturdays a month and at the Benton Farmers Market the other two Saturdays. Dancing Hen Farm also delivers to CSA (community-supported agriculture) customers – people who pay in advance and receive a share of each week’s crop.
“I just signed up someone from Edwardsville for a partial share,” he said. “We’ll keep delivering till Nov. 5.”
On a recent weekend, Hess also displayed an assortment of crisp vegetables, from squash to red beets, at a roadside stand where passersby were on the honor system to leave $2 for a bunch of dandelion greens or $4 for a bag of mesclun mix.
Hess trusts people, just as he trusts the weather to balance out and the seasons to follow each other in order.
Speaking of seasons, he said, summer is a time to fill up on the rich harvest of vegetables. Beef won’t be “in season” until the winter, he said.
Nodding toward two cattle in a field, Hess said they’re providing manure to help fertilize the soil now.
Later in the year, they’ll be butchered, and Hess’s family and friends will eat the meat during the colder months, when the vegetable supply isn’t as prolific. “It works in a cycle,” he said.
Also following a natural cycle are Todd Hopkins and her husband, John, who raise 100 percent grass-fed beef and lamb, along with chickens and turkeys, at Forks Farm in Orangeville.
The animals aren’t confined but roam free out of doors. The humane treatment is one of the main reasons customers give for buying from Forks Farm, Todd Hopkins said.
“Our pigs are in the woods, rooting and doing what pigs are supposed to do. Our chickens are in the field, roaming free,” she said from the stand where she can be found most Thursdays through the summer and fall at the Wilkes-Barre Farmers Market.
Flavor and healthfulness are also factors, she said, handing over a brochure that described how both are enhanced when pigs eat “the seeds of the hickory, oak and cherry trees” and poultry feast on “nutritious grass, clover and bugs.”
Environmentalists agree it’s less stressful on the earth to raise animals in uncrowded conditions as opposed to “factory farms” where they’re confined, fed antibiotics and create great pools of waste that pollute waterways.