Facts from the Farm started as a weekly segment highlighting New Jersey agriculture for listeners of Ed Hitzel's Table for One radio show heard across southern NJ every Saturday morning. It is an attempt to give foodies a glimpse into where their food comes from and some of the challenges of getting it from farm to fork. While I figure out how to archive some of the twelve years worth of spots and maybe set up the current one as a podcast, this is the transcript from this past week.

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Facts from the Farm for June 6, 2009

Bear with me Ed -- I hope you don't mind if I rant a little this morning. You see, all our spring crops are ready for market and being shipped daily. Johnnie Formisano raises about 300 acres of fresh vegetables and herbs in Landisville. Yesterday, he told me sales are steady, but prices are nothing to set the world on fire.

My gripe is with food retailers, food service distributors, and gullible consumers. The food industry is perceiving demand for all that is green and sustainable. Seeing that organic foods bring in only a small number of consumers, and their claims of having the best food safety certification system is negated by the fact that they're all the same, how will they attract new customers?

By claiming they are sustainable and that they only buy from growers or suppliers using sustainable practices.

Of course, there's still great debate about what practices are sustainable, but Johnnie will tell you that he's invested many thousands of dollars to reduce soil erosion, block the wind from blowing his topsoil away, employs integrated pest management to reduce his pesiticide use at Formisano Farms. Now his buyers are demanding that he document all his 'sustainable' practices before they will buy his produce.

And when they do, will they add a few cents to every package to help offset those investments? Don't bet on it!

If consumers want their stores to stock foods from sustainable farms, the first order of business sustainability is a positive bottom line! [You can't become green if you're always in the red!]

That's today's Facts from the Farm.

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Formisano Farms has been highlighted in What's in Season from the Garden State, Rutgers' NJ Farm Fresh website, in numerous newspaper articles and in cookbooks such as Starting with Ingredients (page 407) by Chef Aliza Green. Starting it all off was an interview by cookbook author and columnist James Beard who dubbed Ralph Senior the 'Fennel King of South Jersey'. Brothers John Sr. and Ralph Jr., along with John Jr., are maintaining the throne into the fourth generation.