Released: November 06, 2006

A growing trend: small, local and organic

Source: Michael S. Rosenwald, Washington Post (Free Registration)

his is where Michael Pappas farms: not in the great wide fields of Iowa or in California’s industrial salad bowl, but in Lanham. He is eight miles from the Washington Monument, three or four turns from the Beltway, at the end of a long road in a residential neighborhood. He’s growing crops on 2 1/2 acres with 2 1/2 employees.

How’s life? “Lately, it’s really pretty good,” Pappas says, in the middle of his fall harvest at a place he calls Eco Farms. He points out some lemon verbena, which he sells to chef Michel Richard for his D.C. restaurant, Citronelle, considered one of the country’s best. Nearby he has a little patch of wild arugula for chef Johnny Monis at Komi. He’s also got mesclun salad, basil, peppers, radishes, carrots, beets and pineapple sage, not to mention plenty of customers at a co-op, other restaurants, local grocery stores and a gourmet caterer.

Pappas has, on this hilly field, created what few people thought was possible in the age of industrial farming: a small organic operation that is both environmentally and economically sustainable. Like dozens of other farmers across the region, he has leveraged the grass-roots-turned-mainstream popularity of farmers markets to expand the market for locally grown produce to restaurants, caterers, grocery stores and even college dining halls. Pappas, who is single and has no children, typically can’t afford to eat at Citronelle, but he says he’s making a nice living.

It’s not just nostalgia for a quaint notion of local farming - or fear of E. coli in spinach - that drives Pappas’s success, though those are important components. He’s also benefiting from the heightened sophistication of Whole Foods customers and their ilk, people who want to feed both their bodies and their social consciences, and who ask themselves, “What good is eating organic if it’s been trucked 3,000 gas-guzzling miles across the country?”

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