202 animal, vegetable, miracle
(they’ll knock against each other, sounding like croquet balls), and later
withdraw a few at a time for winter soups and stews. Having gone no-
where in the interim, they will still be local in February.
/In some supermarket chains in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennes-
see, shoppers can find seasonal organic vegetables in packages labeled
“Appalachian Harvest.” The letters of the brand name arch over a sunny,
stylized portrait of plowed fields, a clear blue stream, and the assurance:
“Healthy Food, Healthy Farms, Close to Home.”
Labels can lie, I am perfectly aware. Plenty of corporations use logo
trickery to imply their confined meat or poultry are grown on green pas-
tures, or that their tomatoes are handpicked by happy landowners instead
of immigrants earning one cent per pound. But the Appalachian Harvest
vegetables really do come from healthy farms, I happen to know, because
they’re close to my home. Brand recognition in mainstream supermarkets
is an exciting development for farmers here, in a region that has struggled
with chronic environmental problems, double- digit unemployment, and a
steady drain of our communities’ young people from the farming economy.
But getting some of Appalachia’s harvest into those packages has not
been simple. Every cellophane- wrapped, organically bar- coded packet of
organic produce contains a world of work and specific promises to the
consumer. To back them up, farmers need special training, organic certi-
fication, reliable markets, and a packaging plant. A model nonprofi t called
Appalachian Sustainable Development provides all of these in support of
profitable, ecologically sound farming enterprises in a ten- county region
of Virginia and Tennessee. In 2005, ten years after the program began,
participating family farms collectively sold $236,000 worth of organic
produce to regional retailers and supermarkets, which those markets, in
turn, sold to consumers for nearly $0.3 million.
The Appalachian Harvest packing house lies in a mountain valley near
the Virginia- Tennessee border that’s every bit as gorgeous as the story-
book farm on the product label. In its first year, the resourceful group
used a converted wing of an old tobacco barn for its headquarters, using a
donated walk- in cooler to hold produce until it could be graded and