Copper Moose Farm

Chile must be a beautiful country. This assumption is based on my trips to the grocery store. The plums and pears, grapes and nectarines wear those little stickers announcing that they’ve come from Chile, which I assume to be a landscape of lovely sweeping orchards and vineyards nestled between the white-peaked Andes and the blue Pacific.

For the last 10,000 years or so, since humans figured out how to grow things, most people have lived in small communities surrounded by farms and pastureland. We watched and waited for apples to ripen. Today, when we eat a plum on a snowy Park City afternoon, we know it has been picked too soon and traveled too far. It doesn’t have the full juicy sweetness of locally grown summer fruit. And even if we’re not farmers ourselves, we feel a loss when an orchard or hay meadow at the end of our street is converted into yet another subdivision.

John and Kristi Cumming, owners of Copper Moose Farm in Snyderville Basin, understand that basic human desire for rural landscapes and the even more fundamental need for healthy and responsibly produced food. “We bought the property because it was so special,” explains Kristi.

“Also, my husband John had done a lot of reading about where our food comes from and autoimmune diseases.” In 2006 the Cummings hired Daisy Fair, a local organic farmer, to establish an organic farm and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program on two acres of their property along McLeod Creek. “The lucky part was finding Daisy,” says Kristi. “You really need someone with passion and integrity to pull this off.”

Daisy came with a lifelong background in organic gardening and years of experience farming in Summit County. Along with local builder Andrew Parker, architect Jack Thomas, and her co-worker on the farm, Craig Thomas, Daisy designed and built a passive solar greenhouse. While Daisy will tell you that this is a classic design, the greenhouse is anything but typical.

It’s embedded in the earth on three sides. This allows the structure to retain a more consistent temperature. A free-standing greenhouse heats up, like a tent, when the sun beats on it, and then dissipates all of its heat immediately when the sun sets. The Copper Moose greenhouse, on the other hand, stays cooler in the sun and warmer in the dark. Other structures, such as a “water wall” constructed of reclaimed 55-gallon drums filled with water, and solar chimneys that vent the heat of the day, also help regulate temperature.

As a result of these careful designs, Daisy and her team are able to grow huge vines of heirloom tomatoes that climb like Jack’s legendary beanstalk toward the ceiling, as well as cucumbers and eggplant. Outdoor beds flourish with root crops, field greens, beans, peas and flowers. In all, the Copper Moose farm produces 48 different crops for the members of the CSA.

The idea behind Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is that the community shares both the risks and the benefits of the farm. The risks include adverse weather that might ruin a crop or bugs that eat holes in the arugula. The benefits are both tangible and spiritual. Daisy points out that crops grown through her sustainable practices are actually more productive and nutrient-rich than produce grown using mainstream practices.

The participants in the CSA share a sense of community on a fundamental level. Every Wednesday during the 16 - 20 week season, when the 50 members of the CSA arrive to pick up their weekly boxes of produce, they get to meet with their farmer, see their crops growing, share recipes with one another, or even pick some of their own food from the “U-Pick” section of the garden, which includes cherry tomatoes, peas, and beans. “It feels so good when we see people arrive to pick up their food,” says Kristi.

Daisy, who often sees people on the trail alongside the farm looking with wonder at the greenhouse and rows of crops, believes that “people are drawn to gardens and farms. That’s our human nature longing for something that used to be part of our lives but isn’t any more.”

Many forces align behind the recent movement to buy locally produced food. Daisy hopes these forces will help us realize a “paradigm shift where people think about eating from their bioregion and what that means.”

It means no plums during Park City’s winter, but instead, such a shift would provide us with that sense of belonging to the local community that includes our farmers and our neighbors. Such a shift would mean that our choices might be limited, but the food we do eat will be fresher and more nutritious, and perhaps better appreciated than something grown in another state or hemisphere.

Perhaps just as important is that by supporting local agriculture, we can continue to see those farms and orchards at the end of our roads. And Summit County will be just as beautiful as Chile.

Cheryl Fox loves gardens, flowers and open space.