Midway Farms - Winter Oasis

Thanks to Midway Farms, my favorite winter farm stand, I just had the best lunch. It was sautéed kale and onions with two poached eggs on top. Fresh, organically grown, kale is one of the best things and the pastured eggs from Midway Farms are just too tasty to mess with so I poach them for the purest flavor.

Midway Farms is my favorite year-round farm stand. I found them while on a search for pasture raised eggs. They have so much more than amazing eggs, they are one of the few farm stands open all winter selling fresh local produce.

Yes, Cynthia, owner of Midway Farms, has figured out winter vegetable farming in Oregon. Not with a big giant green house full of out of season tomatoes but with real outdoor beds growing the many things that grow here during our generally mild winters. Midway farms has an abundance in the summer but it’s in the winter, when the farmers markets are closed and the grocery store has nothing but produce that has traveled thousands of miles or sat for months in cold storage, that Midway Farms feels like an oasis. When I arrived in their farm stand in the end of February last year I stood in front of the cooler in awe. There were fresh greens of all sorts and root vegetables everywhere, there was a cooler of the eggs I’d come for but the vegetables so amazed me that I left only when I’d spent all the cash I had and a half hour talking to Cynthia. We talked about the farm, about children learning where food really comes from, about the value of local produce to the community and about how we can help small farmers make it.

Midway Farms sits midway between Corvallis and Albany on HWY 20, hence the name. It’s the kind of farm your great grandparents might have grown up on had they lived the self sufficient farm lifestyle of the early 1900s. It’s got all the vegetables you can imagine, it’s got blueberries and fruit trees all around, it’s got flowers everywhere, it’s got at least 100 chickens, it’s got a cow for milk, it’s got geese and if you want to teach a group of school children where food comes from, call Cynthia, she’ll happily show them.

Cynthia told me a story during my first visit about taking her children out to eat, a rare occurrence for small farmers. When her daughter got her meal with chicken she asked Maggie, “Whose chicken was this?” Maggie was initially confused and told her it was her chicken but her daughter insisted she wanted to know whose chicken it had been. You see her daughter was so used to knowing where her food comes from that the concept of a chicken whose owner you hadn’t known was new to her. This made me think about my freezer and how now, after spending a year buying much of my food direct from farms, I know whose chicken I have, and whose berries and whose beef.

When you visit Midway Farms you come away with so much more than great food, you come away knowing that you have had a part in building a more sustainable future for all of us. That and the best eggs you will ever eat.

Midway has a website at www.midwayfarmsoregon.com

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