David DeWitt doesn’t look like a farmer. With his long hair, scruffy beard and t-shirt, he’d fit in more at a Phish show than behind a plow. But appearances are deceiving, and David’s comfy mien belies a passion that is influencing the culture of northern Cape Cod.

To wit: in 2009, David helped launch the Truro Ag Fair—an event that exceeded all expectations and brought huge crowds to local farmers’ booths. He runs the Rock Spray nursery, a Certified Natural provider of evergreens and ornamentals. And he manages the First Light Organic Farm, a lush green spot in a hollow of North Truro. Here, David and his partner Arthur Teubner work year-round growing heirloom and hardy fruits and veggies to sell at market.

David’s a dedicated and inspired agrarian, whose passion for farming keeps him optimistic. But farming on the Outer Cape is the sort of Sisyphian challenge that can wear anybody out.

The hard truth:

The soil of North Truro is not strong enough to support agriculture. Without fertilization, it deteriorates shockingly fast.

David points out a patch of sand with a thin strip of fertile loam along the edge. Last season it was a fertile veggie bed—but it was left un-fertilized as an experiment.

“This is what happens,” David says. “You have to keep feeding it organic material, or it turns back into sand.“

This plot was a test run, left untended for a single season. Last year’s rich loam is now useless sand.

It’s always been this way in North Truro. The Outer Cape is really just a spit of sand—but still, farmers lived here for generations. How?

Salt marsh hay.

There used to be a local tradition in this area: at each spring tide, the local community would head out to the bogs and marshes to harvest the grasses. This was called “salt marsh haying”.

Bringing in the marsh hay, circa 1900

Salt Hay Grass/Salt-Meadow Cordgrass
by Littoraria

Salt marsh hay has no weed seeds, and it doesn’t compact as heavily as other types of hay. This makes it an excellent and bountiful source of compost, and it was used for generations as a soil enricher. But haying had to happen regularly, says David:

“There’s so much oxygen in this soil, any added compost gets burned up in six weeks. All the nutrients get depleted.”

That means soil left for two months without fresh compost will become—you guessed it—sand.

The only way to keep things going here is to keep a steady flow of compost coming in. That means truckloads of hay, and that means a lot of work. Last year, David and Arthur brought in a semi truck loaded with leaf mulch. It worked—but it cost money, and it disappeared fast into the hungry ground. Not a long-term plan.

In bygone times, the whole town of North Truro would pitch in on haying days; now, David’s on his own. Without that community support, it’s nearly impossible for him to harvest hay often enough to keep the farm green.

Meanwhile, in Tourist Town USA…

Provincetown’s official population of 3,500 supports a tourism industry that serves millions of visitors each year. City folk marvel at the quaint charms of the Cape, its idyllic beauty and simple pleasures. And then they go out to eat.

Even if tourists were interested in sustainable food (they totally don’t care), they’d be hard pressed to find a locally-sourced meal. Raina Stefani serves David’s produce at her restaurant Terra Luna, but it only makes up a portion of her fares: the rest has to be shipped from the mainland. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, and you can’t get big vegetable crops from sand dunes. End of story.

Well, not exactly.

David isn’t giving up—in fact, he’s got plans and ideas to refashion North Truro’s farming community. Hence the Ag Fair, and the ongoing experimentation with varieties and soils at First Light. David isn’t alone: he’s got the support (and companionship) of a growing group of gamechangers. If the young farmers and foodies of Truro can organize, they might just be able to get local agriculture back on its feet.

Their main opponent? The tourism and real estate industries, which insist upon turning every arable inch of the Cape into somebody’s backyard. The same population that would consume the food produced here is actively inhibiting its production.

No surprise there. After all, what’s the point of farming on the beach?

Related posts:

1. Flowers, Lambs, Worms & Dirt: A Kid's-Eye View of Organic Farming
2. Little Farm on the Subdivision
3. The Real Dirt on America’s Counterculture

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agritourism, cape cod, community, environment, farm, featured posts, gardening, Massachusetts, organic, sustainable, tourism

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A little perspective: This is one of very few places in the Americas where you can watch the sun set over the Atlantic. It may be the only place where you can then cross a pier and watch it rise again. Enjoy the show.

Related posts:

1. Eco-Dining? Not on Cape Cod.
2. Friday Photos: Kittery Point, Maine
3. Friday Photos! One Year Ago: Humboldt/Siskiyou County Line

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: atlantic, cape cod, ecotourism, Massachusetts, outdoors, photography, Provincetown, sunrise, sunset, tourism, travel, water

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I’ve never met her before, but Raina Stefani treats me like a good friend. I’ve been in Provincetown a couple of days, and have been hard pressed to find the local green scene. Raina’s restaurant, Terra Luna, is the only place in the northern Cape with sustainably-harvested fare. When I email Terra Luna for more information, Raina herself replies, and before I know it she’s picking me up on Commercial Street for a personal tour of some local farms.

Why the warm welcome? I soon come to realize that we nature-minded types are few and far between out here. Raina is a Provincetown native, and has watched the Cape change throughout her lifetime; what was once a forward-thinking counterculture enclave has become something else entirely.

Provincetown, a picturesque fishing village at the very tip of the Cape, has long been a summer getaway for city-weary Northeasterners. In the 60s and 70s, it was colonized by hippies and gays, and soon became known as a freak’s home-away-from-home. By the 1980s, “P-town” was a hot spot on the gay circuit, and these days it’s one of the top regional destinations for fags and dykes, bois & grrls alike.

But let’s be honest: this is a set that is prone to profligacy. Six million tourists come to stroll these rainbow-strewn streets each summer, dropping their hard-won cash at lobster bisqueries, techno-thumping scene bars, overpriced B&Bs and gaudy gift shops. Peanut-butter doggie lollipops go for $4 apiece; “I Love My Mommies” t-shirts will cost you $25. From every corner rises the smell of deep-fried seafood, sold at obscene prices and in even-more-obscene quantities.

Almost noplace in the tourist area can you find a sustainable, local-grown or organic meal.

Raina aimed to remedy that glaring oversight by founding Terra Luna in nearby Truro. Her restaurant and catering service focus on local, organic, sustainably farmed and harvested foods. Dishes are top-tier (e.g. grass-fed filet of beef with a gorgonzola crust and port wine reduction glaze, Israeli couscous with toasted almonds, yellow raisins, basil, mint) and described by Frommer’s as “outstanding”—yet business is slow compared to Provincetown’s less-responsible locations.

Terra Luna is a ten-minute drive from Commercial Street. So why aren’t more people leaving the P-town bubble in search of better food?

First problem: Cape tourists don’t seem to care what they eat. Raina knows the local restaurateurs, and can say with certainty that popular restaurants are serving Sysco beef*. Many people are aware that lobsters are overharvested, and that lobster traps and ropes snag everything from seabirds to whales—yet they still mow crustacean like it’s going out of style. And don’t get Raina started on other questionable delicacies, such as foie gras.

The solution to this problem lies in a question: “where did your food come from?“. Raina wants to influence Cape locals and tourists alike to ask—and answer—that question. But so far, the response has been less than enthusiastic. People come here for a worry-free vacation, and they pretty much just stay on the tourist strip, gorging on fried shrimp without thinking of where it originated. Because there’s no pressure on restaurants to be eco-friendly, they focus on raking in as much cash as possible during the high season—which means cutting corners in quality and sourcing.

I know it’s true, because I do it too: sometimes you just want to eat delicious food without worrying about the consequences. But for Raina and other locals, watching millions of tourists rampage irresponsibly over a fragile landscape can be torturous.

There’s another, bigger problem with sustainably feeding a summer population of six million: this little sandbar isn’t capable of producing much food. Come back tomorrow for the hard truths of farming on sand, and the next day we can talk about tourism’s impact on the Cape ecosystem. And then you can tell me how to save Cape Cod.

 
 
*NOTE: Sysco is making a strong effort to serve more organic and sustainable meat; however, mass-produced and cold-shipped beef is ultimately unsustainable.

Related posts:

1. Friday Photos: September in Cape Cod
2. Farming on Sand
3. Death, Destruction & Carnage in a Provincetown Tourist Shop

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dining, ecotourism, environment, food, Massachusetts, Provincetown, sustainable, tourism, travel, truro, water

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Provincetown has a lot going for it, but I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow. On my first day out, I didn’t have a feel for the place yet. So I went and wandered the strip, and soon found myself in a shell shop.

And what a shop. The place was so packed with seashells, there was hardly room for the clientele. Bins of colorful starfish, mollusks, corals, and other marine doo-dads filled every corner; shellacked blowfish hung from the ceiling. Tiny shells had been arranged into adorable tableaux, often featuring googly eyes and little signs that said “Cape Cod.”

Except, of course, that most of these shells hadn’t come from the Cape. Out here you can still find mussels, clams and oysters—but for the exotic, collectible stuff you’ve got to go a bit farther.

Like, you know, Asia.

The fact is, most of the thousands of pretty dead things on display here had been harvested under questionable practices half a world away, then shipped in bulk. Odds are, the shop owners order their goods from a catalog like everybody else.

I remember shell shops from my childhood. My grandparents lived in Southern California, and would buy us shells as gifts. We loved ‘em, the more exotic the better. In fact, right now I’m looking at the jaw of a small shark, undoubtedly picked up in some tourist shop somewhere. It looks cool, and it was bought in the ’80s when we didn’t think about things like seashell harvesting. But those halcyon days of ignorant consumption are past, eh? So let’s think about seashells right now.

Horned sea stars are in serious danger from overharvesting.

I’ve checked around, and it looks like the best places to get seashells in bulk are Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, maybe Fiji. These are all places where the battles of industrialism vs. ecology are being waged in very real ways. Unsustainable fishing, lumber harvesting, pollution, hunting of endangered species: all of this is happening every day in a region known for its unmatched environmental beauty.

So you want to buy a shell? Well, just so you know, that dead animal you hold in your hand may or may not have been farmed, and very likely was “harvested” while still alive. No time to collect empty shells namby-pamby on the beach, not when fat Americans like glittery mollusks with googly eyes!

Your shell is also a part of a larger system, a business of extracting from the environment more than it naturally gives. Townspeople that traditionally collected shells to sell to tourists (like, back in the ’80s) have been driven out of their homes by large fishing businesses. Coastal dredging ruins reefs and massacres shellfish. Deep-sea trawling brings rare “treasures” from the depths. And any coastal dwellers that are unlucky enough to have pretty exoskeletons are being driven to extinction by seashell harvesting. And then, of course, they’re shipped around the world, on a big boat leaving a trail of petroleum through the ocean.

But look! It’s a baby pufferfish with a hat on!

Anyway, sorry to ruin your shell collection for you. I’m sad about mine, too. Let’s not buy any more shells, hey?

Want more guilt? Watch and weep:

Related posts:

1. Shades of Death and the Devil's Backbone
2. Eco-Dining? Not on Cape Cod.
3. Friday Photos: Kittery Point, Maine

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: buy nothing, ecotourism, environment, featured posts, harvesting, nature, photography, seashells, sustainable, tourism, water

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