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

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Relish/Pastured-Eggs-Vitamin-D-Content.aspx?blogid=1508

Welcome

Welcome to Eating Local in the Willamette Valley. It’s about my passion, food grown in Oregon’s beautiful Willamette Valley. I’ve lived in rural Marion County Oregon for 22 years. I love the amazing bounty of local foods here. I’m not a purist about eating local, I just try to build my diet around as much local food as I can and visit the farms to buy it direct whenever that makes sense. While the farms I go to tend to be close to my home, near Independence, I scan the papers and the internet and make special trips for things like u-pick peaches, walnuts or pastured chicken. There is so much to find when you spend just a little time looking.

I’ve filled this blog with the resources to help you find great food here as well. Along the right hand side you’ll find web resources for local food. Most of these links are lists of farms that sell direct or search engines meant to help you find farms near you. If the listing has an address and specifies when the farm, or stand, is open to the public, then it’s pretty safe to just head out there. But, if you want to be sure that you can get what you are looking for, call first. Some of the farms have websites, and I’ll keep adding links to those. But most farmers are too occupied with growing food to maintain much of a web presence, hence the usefulness of lists like these.

My favorite farm stand section is currently focused on those open in the winter, but I’ll add the spring and summer ones as the seasons change. Some farm stands sell only produce from their farm, and sometimes a few nearby farms; others sell a mix of their own produce and products from around the world. If you see bananas, you can assume they buy from a traditional distributor in addition to moving their own goods. So ask where the item you want is from. Most farm stands are proud of their fruit and vegetables and will happily tell you about their origins.

I also include local processors here in creators of great local food. Oregon’s bounty is often canned, frozen or turned into jam. It’s still local, and buying it supports jobs both on the farm and in the processors. I love to buy fruit and vegetables fresh in their season, but I’d rather eat a canned bean that traveled around the valley a bit than one whose origin is a mystery. We also have an abundance of small specialty processors here from Cherry Country to Wandering Aengus Cider to Christine and Rob’s whose oatmeal really is different from anyone else’s.

I hope you enjoy my stories about finding local food and the farms it comes from. Please feel free to add your own stories of Willamette Valley food and farms.