Michael Coelho and Dave DeWitt in the Herb Fields of Paramin, 1992.
Photo by Mary Jane Wilan.
In Mexico, we cooked mole sauce in the middle of a farm of chile plants grown only in Oaxaca, shopped in numerous outdoor markets including Mexico City’s enormous La Merced, the largest retail traditional food market in the city of nine million people. We went out to catch hamachi (yellowtail) with the local fishermen in Baja in a ponga boat (that’s called harvesting from nature), and visited with a tilapia and neem tree farmer in Yucatán. On another trip to Yucatán, we visited the habanero chile fields, sorting and processing plants, and the laboratories devoted to that crop in Mérida.
On our culinary tour of India, led by England’s King of Curries, Pat Chapman, we watched paneer cheese being made in the open kitchen at the Shikarbadi Hunting Lodge in Udaipur, took cooking lessons, and enjoyed the meals that were specially prepared for us by the head chefs of the Taj Hotel Group. Singapore was market after market, each representative of the major population groups of the country: Chinese, Malay, and Indian. No, there was not a British market. We took cooking classes, had a drink at Raffles Hotel, and ate fish-head soup.
The Chile Pepper Institute’s teaching and demonstration garden at New Mexico State University. Photo courtesy of NMSU.
In Johor Bahru, Malaysia, we shopped in a mall supermarket and discovered two forty-foot aisles of racks eight feet high filled only with chile sauces and pastes. Some of the best spicy food we ate in Asia was in Thailand, so we had to go to the wholesale market and see their gigantic display of chile peppers packed every way you can imagine. A vendor warned me in sign language not to eat a tiny prik kee nu chile but I just grinned and popped it in my mouth. The vendor just shook her head in amazement that a farangi could actually eat one.
The United States offered us many agritourism delights like the largest produce show in the country in New Orleans, and I marveled at the weird warehouse of Melissa’s, the specialty produce company near L.A. in California, where I could only identify twenty percent of the fruits and vegetables I saw. In the Texas Hill Country, I went on a feral hog hunt and helped smoke some of the delicious pork we, ahem, harvested. We have dropped in on chile farms all over the country, and I did a demonstration on cooking with curries at the Scottsdale Culinary Festival before a crowd of eight hundred in a theater.
And, of course, we have visited a few cactus and succulent microfarms and they were every bit as interesting as botanical gardens, which is precisely what they were—with the exception that every display was for sale. The Demonstration Garden of the Chile Pepper Institute, on the campus of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, gets hundreds—if not thousands—of visitors during the growing season every year who want to see what 150 varieties in the same field look like. There’s no way to count the number of visitors because the field is in the open near Main Street with no fences, and when the pods are ripe, anyone can harvest them. Imagine a field like that as part of your “you pick ‘em” microfarm with, of course, a little more security and a cash register.
Now I will reveal five microfarm ideas with both value-added products and agritourism appeal. As far as I know, none of these really exist, but they could. Some would require a sizable capital investment; others, long hours and weekend work; and one, additional liability insurance. Now, can I write a coherent microplan for each of them? We’ll see.
The Mushroom Grotto and Pâté Factory. Not too many microfarms will have a natural cave on the premises, so you would have to build one like those winding “underground” zoo displays, or the museum designs that take you through the exhibits until you end up in the museum store. Of course, as a mushroom professional, you would not actually be growing them in the displays, but rather in separate, special houses that also could be visited by guests and customers.
It would probably be considered insensitive to hire children dressed like elves to work in the grotto, but I couldn’t resist mentioning the idea. Promotions to draw customers would obviously include Halloween, but don’t forget about Walpurgis Night, a traditional spring festival in central Europe on April 30 or May 1, exactly six months away from Halloween. Legend holds that mushroom fairy rings mark the spots where witches were dancing on that night. You could have a mid-summer mushroom festival modeled after the Telluride, Colorado Shroomfest, now in its thirty-third year. Activities could include mycologists giving mushroom and toadstool identification clinics, a mushroom cook-off contest, hands-on growing workshops, showings of mushroom movies like Shrooms (horror), Know Your Mushrooms (documentary), Attack of the Mushroom People (horror), or Now Forager (drama).
Value-added products for the Grotto Gift Shop include mushroom supplements and nutraceuticals for health, and edible mushroom-growing kits for morels, shiitakes, and oysters. Also, you could sell dried and fresh mushrooms, plug spawn, truffle oils, pâtés, herbal teas, books, and posters. There are dozens and dozens of mushroom-related gifts and accessories, including clothing, candles, art and sculptures, jewelry, magnets, and even lamps.
The Edible Aquarium and Sushi Bar. Everyone’s seen the live lobsters in tanks in the supermarkets, and Asian markets often have large aquariums with live fish swimming around in them. This idea for a microfarm expands those concepts and the choices for the consumer for the freshest seafood possible. If some microfarms are “you pick,” this one could be “you catch,” so that your customers could enjoy a fishing experience as well as a shopping one. It’s a good idea for attracting families with kids. There’s no charge for catch and release, but if they want to take the catch home for eating, they pay by the pound.
Admittedly, aquaculture has its technical challenges, but it is the “wave” of the future. Here are some of the methods used.
—Open-net pens or cages enclose fish such as salmon in offshore coastal areas or in freshwater lakes. Note that this practice is regarded as environmentally destructive.
—Ponds hold fish in a coastal or inland body of fresh or salt water. Shrimp, catfish, and tilapia are commonly farmed in this manner.
—Raceways divert water from a stream or well, so that it flows through channels containing the fish. In the U.S., farmers use raceways to raise rainbow trout.
—Recirculating systems in tanks treat and recirculate the water to keep the fish healthy. Tanks can be used to farm such species as striped bass, salmon, and sturgeon.
—Shellfish culture is a method farmers use to grow shellfish on beaches or suspend them in the water by ropes, plastic trays, or mesh bags. The most commonly raised shellfish are oysters, mussels, and clams.
A seafood restaurant with a sushi bar could be part of the microfarm, making it an even more popular destination, but of course not everyone wants to be a restaurateur. The Rappahannock Oyster Company has three such restaurants in Virginia, and their oyster farm provides the basis for them. Instead of value-added products, the aquaculture microfarm would have a gift shop with seafood related merchandise including cookbooks, seafood cooking tools and supplies, and fresh seafood for sale.
I would recommend that anyone attempting such a microfarm take university courses in aquaculture. Some universities offering them are Auburn, the University of California-Davis, Hawaii, Louisiana State, Maryland, Cornell, South Carolina, and quite a few more.
The Beautiful But Deadly Microfarm and Poison Museum. This microfarm would grow and sell beautiful, ornamental, and poisonous—but legal—plants. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about just such a microfarm in 1844: “Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener examined every shrub which grew in his path…. The man’s demeanor was that of one walking among malignant influences, such as savage beasts, or deadly snakes,