“Once you cross 104 degrees Fahrenheit, photosynthetic rate declines rapidly.”

My older brother can really take the buzz out of a cup of coffee. He’s a marine biologist, working for NOAA. That means his job is pretty much all about climate change. His world is the oceans: fishing rights, rising sea temperatures, endangered species.

My life centers on climate change, too. Only my world is about keeping the farm in production, and building resilient community and family life. My work is definitely not as glamorous as his. Nor is their as much financial remuneration. Still, I think I took the sunnier route. I figured that, if people have meaningful connections and access to nourishing food, we adapt better. We make smarter decisions and we are in a position to keep life joyful while we try to unravel this mess the human race has created.

But it’s not always easy. And his casual remark over coffee Saturday morning at the cafe is a punch in the gut. But while he’s looking at how temperatures are rising, I’m staring into my freezer.

My brother is right. Photosynthesis is the core of farming, and this July was the world’s hottest on record. We were fortunate up here in the hills with our cooler weather, but the record high temperatures have set off a lot of alarm bells about food. As my brother’s scientific mind ponders the ramifications of the summer’s heat, my mind is already spinning from a headline I’d seen two days earlier in the New York Times: Heat, War and Trade Protections Raise Uncertainty for Food Prices. Still, I can’t stop thinking about the freezer in my basement.

Part of my job is to help navigate the farm through the uncertainty of pandemics, political upheaval, extreme weather, and the livestock diseases that increase through extreme weather. Some of the work is on the ground: building living walls out of willow to restore the stream bank and keep it secure in the face of the torrential storms that have become commonplace; or changing our chicken production schedule to minimize risks from Avian flu. Some of it is with the business structure: setting farm policies to protect biosecurity, or choosing marketing strategies that will keep food moving in the face of volatility.

That last one has had me stuck lately. Frequently, my head has been in the freezer as I contemplate it. From 1995 til 2020, the first quarter century where I helped Mom and Dad run Sap Bush Hollow, the challenge of farm survival was in appealing to consumers. We had to polish our verbiage and our branding until we could communicate effectively about our products. We had to find our way into the most lucrative markets to get premium prices for vacation steaks, cuts of meat that affluent tourists purchased while on holiday, when they were less likely to complain about price. We schlepped coolers of meat to farmers markets, tried to keep the product frozen, and hoped the prices we received on the premium cuts would compensate for the loss and waste of thawed and damaged packages of the lower cuts. Back home, we built a market for some of the lower cuts, selling to full-time residents who were cooking at home. But the system required that every cow, lamb and pig be divided and scattered: premium cuts to the wealthy vacation market, lower-end cuts to the upstate market, and lots and lots of waste. And before we surrendered it to waste, it was stored in freezers while we postponed making decisions about what to do with it.

Covid brought a quick end to that marketing strategy. The food shortages meant we couldn’t supply a vacation market and our local market. We had to make a choice. We left our premium farmers’ market and focused on our upstate clientele. Then came the processing shortages. Access to USDA butchers became nearly impossible that first year. If we don’t have USDA processing, the law says we can’t break an animal down and sell it as separate steaks or roasts. Around the country, animals were being slaughtered and buried when farmers couldn’t get them processed.

Suddenly, after 25 years of keeping the farm afloat by trying to give the consumer what they wanted, we had to make a shift and give the consumer what they needed. Whether they knew it or not.

We drastically reduced the amount of meat we made available for retail trade, and made a massive pivot to the CSA model. When people purchase a CSA “share” of a beef or pig, they are part owners of the animal. That changes the processing laws. If USDA processing isn’t available, this system lets us use state certified butchers. We are even able to process the animals directly on our farm if the need arises.

While that meat processing crisis of 2020 eventually settled out, we recognized that we could do a far better job getting food to the public with the new model. Selling meat as CSA shares reduced waste. It lowered our handling costs. We were able to pass along much lower food costs to our customers. While some of our retail prices climbed as much as 20%, our CSA prices barely budged. And it gave us assurance that, no matter what transpired in the global food system with political upheaval, pandemics, or climate change, we could still produce food for our local market and get it into the hands of our customers. It truly makes us more resilient. We developed all kinds of shares to work for large families and small households; to work for those with chest freezers, or those who just had the four cubic feet of freezer space that came with their refrigerator.

But here’s the thing. It’s a hard sell. I learned that I could explain to customers that we could save them 20 to 50 percent off their meat costs, but they still would resist, preferring to pay the higher prices for a pound of ground beef, or a single pack of pork chops.

We figured that maybe folks struggled with whole animal cooking. So we provided free cookbooks to teach them how to prepare everything, from the snout to the tail, and how to use the leftovers.

Still, our CSA market has grown at a snail’s pace. And as my brother laments the rising temperature of the earth and the oceans, and the New York Times screams forecasts about food volatility, I know, as the farmer, that this is where my customers need to move. They need to commit to a farmer, get a share of the harvest, then open up that vast freezer storage that is so uniquely American (because, yes, even our household fridges with their little freezers are vast in comparison to the rest of the world), and put farm fresh food away for the year.

Food in the freezer means the ability to capture the local harvest at it’s most nutritious and weather the vicissitudes of the world with home-cooked meals. Home-cooked meals mean our bodies and minds are better nourished. When bodies and minds are well-nourished, they can maintain calm and equanimity and find happiness. And when we can do that, we can be compassionate and caring to the world around us. And it makes every possible calamity that much smaller.

Why won’t people do it?

I go down to the basement and stare into my own chest freezer, my family’s bulwark against the mayhem of modern life. I’m afraid to open it and see what’s in there.

Because when I move things around, I have a hard time closing it again.

My chest freezer is full.

With raspberries from 2017. With ten pounds of desiccated strawberries that a customer gave us when she cleaned out her father’s freezer after he died. With frozen broccoli coated in rime from 2015. With ice-crusted frozen pork kabobs that I never got around to cooking because they were buried under the strawberries and three nearly-empty containers of ice cream. All that. Even though we clean our freezer out each fall.

There is a lot of food in my freezer.

There is very little to eat.

I shove and push and re-arrange until I can close it again. I can’t bear to look at this.

Then I do what most people do when confronted with an urgent chore. I procrastinate and start googling about it instead.

And I stumble across a statistic from 2020, where 70% of Americans were believed to be running out of freezer space. Eager to prolong my procrastination vacation, I searched for more statistics on freezer hoarding in the United States. There’s not a lot, aside from the estimated statistic that we waste 40% of our food (because, just like me, the scientists simply can’t see what’s in our fridges and freezers). Along my journey, I find a story from the New York Times from 2021, When One Fridge Is Not Enough, chronicling the American demand for second and third refrigerators and freezers. I blow up the images of the freezer interiors on my screen, photographs taken in households that have already invested in extra freezer storage. Their freezers look like mine: jam-packed, unidentifiable contents, and coated in ice rime.

Instead of returning to the freezer, I sit and ponder my conversations with my customers: “I can’t order a share until I clean out my freezer.” “I can’t pick up my share until I’ve cleaned out my freezer.” “I ordered a share three years ago, I’ve still got it in my freezer.” I don’t have a lot of quantitative data, but from where I sit in my trade, talking to people about their food, I have a fair amount of qualitative data. Americans have a food storage clutter problem.

No matter what’s in storage, Americans keep buying fresh retail products that are more convenient. Those are the foods that are most vulnerable to price increases and food system disruption. Because, even though the household freezer is full, there is nothing on-hand for dinner.

And we keep paying the energy bills.
And we keep demanding the electricity.
And the earth’s temperatures keep rising.

It sounds like such a mundane household chore….The kind of thing that a man in my brother’s position would never need to consider when he studies the rising temperatures of the planet.

But here in my mundane life, where I need to keep the land producing food, and then moving that food into my community with as little waste as possible, a little thing like a functioning household freezer means a whole lot.

Household freezers help communities reduce their demand on the global food system. They help reduce carbon emissions by cutting down food miles with local eating; by reducing trips to the grocery store; by reducing food packaging. They help us farmers stay on the land and keep it viable. They are critical tools for providing affordable, local, nutrient-dense food.

A freezer has an active role to play in a dynamic household ecosystem. It shouldn’t be a forgotten coffin for wasted food.

I step away from my computer, and over the weekend, Bob and I buckle down and get our freezer clean. At last, we’re ready to bring home our own CSA share of the Sap Bush harvest.

Wherever you are, please do the same. Over the coming weeks and months, the harvest will be coming in. So clean out your freezer. Use what’s in there for broth. Or add it to your compost and make soil. Then go out and take advantage of the bounty. Stock up on fresh, delicious, nutrient-dense food. And then, this winter, let the freezer do it’s job, reducing your trips to town. Use the food to feed your family well. Don’t argue that “it’s more efficient when it’s full” and then hoard old food and forget about it, while continuing to make demands on an increasingly precarious global food supply. We farmers can’t endure many more summers of 104 degrees Fahrenheit. We’re counting on you to help us do our job.

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