By Jeff Walker
Stepping outside the barn into the cold November chill, his jeans already dirtied from a morning’s worth of digging in the garden, David Burk cracks a quick smile and sits down to admire the rows and rows of vegetable crops ahead of him a little longer.
No doubt about it. This is a special place for him.
Burk and partner Melody McClary manage the nine-acre Montesino Ranch organic farm, a picturesque plot of land nestled into a valley along the Blanco River just outside of Wimberley. As beautiful as the scenery is around them, their pride stems from the magic that’s happening just beneath the soil: The farm is providing a variety of organic vegetables to more than 100 families in the area.
“It’s a pretty special thing for me to be able to say that I grow food for all these families,” Burk said. “Watching something grow from a seed you can barely see to something that’s three feet tall and then harvesting it and giving it to somebody that’s really happy to get it, is really special.”
Burk and McClary are far from the stereotypical farmers. McClary is a 26-year-old New Braunfels native who became inspired by the organic food movement while working at Whole Foods. Burk, from Austin, happened upon organic farming entirely by accident.
“I was traveling through Canada when I as about 20. I was broke, and I saw a sign one day looking for cherry pickers. It was pretty good money,” Burk said. “So I stopped and I said ‘I’ve never done this before but I’m really interested. I had small gardens as a kid.’”
He picked cherries for a month, and eventually developed a routine that included waiting tables for six months and then traveling through New Mexico, California, Oregon, Washington, Tennessee and Texas working on vineyards, orchids and organic farms.
Two years ago he met Melody, who was working in the floral department at Whole Foods. The two were both impassioned about what they were learning about mainstream food production. The two both wanted better for themselves and those around them.
“Even a company that works as hard as Whole Foods does, I felt like there was still so much more that I could do personally,” McClary said. “Sometimes I can get on a soap box about eating organic or whatever, but to me it’s just about making really good things available to others.”
She began doing just that when she went to work for Montesino in 2007. She soon recruited David’s help and the two began adding more and more vegetables to the farm. With the help of one other staff member and a handful of regular volunteers, they sell their produce at farmers markets and to wholesale accounts in the area. They also provide a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program that sells a regular batch of local organic vegetables to a consumer directly from the farm. Among the current produce is brussels sprouts, peas, broccoli, bok choy, artichokes, arugula, lettuce mix, beets, carrots, turnips, cabbage and even some leftover tomatoes.
“It works sort of like a magazine subscription, but instead you get a weekly basket of vegetables,” McClary said.
Organic produce is generally defined as having been grown in organically-certified land without the use of chemical treatments like fertilizers or pesticides. A farm like Montesino must be certified as being organic by the Texas Department of Agriculture, and the producer must submit crop records, production or management plans and must provide updates to their farm plans annually.
With the help of best selling books like Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and recent documentaries like “Food, Inc.” and “The Future of Food,” the move to eat organic — and the general awareness of modern food production — is gaining steam. A Harris Interactive Poll found that 31 percent of Americans buy organic food occasionally. Thirty-six percent of those polled admitted that “the extra expense is worth it to have better food.” Organic alternatives are popping up in big box grocery stores nationwide.
For Burk, the advantages to buying local and organic produce is two sided: Removing pesticides and other potentially harmful chemicals from the equation makes for a healthier meal. But there’s also the taste.
“I think as consumers we’ve been robbed with a minimal amount of selections,” Burk said. “There’s 150 different types of apples grown in the United States, and we get four options at the grocery store. The same thing with tomatoes. When you get an heirloom tomato that was picked in the morning, you buy it at farmer’s market and then slice into it, it’s got 1,000 different flavors. That excites people, I think.”
The two say there’s no such thing as an average day on the farm. There’s fixing irrigation lines, weeding and hoeing, planting seeds, working in the greenhouse, delivering food to one of the three drop-off locations, repairing the tractor and frequenting the Wimberley and Sunset Valley Farmers Markets. There’s always a good bit of experimentation going on as well: They’re about to try and grow oyster mushrooms from inside the barn; while they are currently using water from an onsite well, there’s plans of relying predominately on rainwater collection. There’s organic flowers on the farm now, and by next year McClary and Burk hope to plant an apple tree and provide locally produced ginger.
And while the average age of the American farmer is 57, McClary and Burk represent a new generation of food producers, two young farmers dedicated to putting the best possible product on plates in Central Texas.
“It’s really cool to be my age and get to have all that knowledge of this amazing process,” McClary said. “It’s nice to feel so close to the source of something that sustains you.”
For more information about Montesino Ranch and the farm’s CSA program, visit montesinoranch.com
