Crooked Run Orchard is a tiny tributary of the Goose Creek Scenic River system. It began at a spring where the IGA in Purcellville was built, now it surfaces and presently follows the inside of Main Street briefly before crossing under the road west of Pickwick near the pumping station at Main Street Village. North of the pumping station the creek flows through a large culvert below which is a bank of quartz rocks. Here the creek enters the farm. The organized content of suburbia suddenly becomes ragged greenery. The creek turns south. Along this portion of the creek is a minor floodplain and a small permanent well and area.

In 1933, Crooked Run ran dry for the first time in local memory but then so did the Goose Creek. Those were the Dust Bowl years, the worst drought locally ever recorded, and Loudoun County was rolling open space in every direction; Leesburg a condensed town of historic buildings, and Purcellville a diminutive Quaker community with a train station, local stores and largely self-sufficient households, dairy farms and a patchwork of uninterrupted fields, woodlands and creeks through which dirt roads weaved in a circuitous network which remains in fragments today. The well on the farm was 60 feet deep. It never went dry not even in 1933. Groundwater was clean and abundant. In the early 90’s, three wells 500 feet deep west of Crooked Run Orchard were drilled for Main Street Village. From that time on whenever a drought, however minor, hit the region, the creek ran dry. The wetlands along the creek dried up for the first time. Not until 2003 when we had double the amount of annual rainfall (72 inches) did the wetlands return in full. The farm well failed in the mid 90’s. The 60 foot well had lasted seventy years. It was replaced by a 425 foot well. The new well water stank the first year and is slowly losing its smell; we don’t drink it.

BUYING LOCAL PRODUCE is one of the most powerful ways you can:

For example, apples grown in the Northwest, aside from giving the consumer very limited selection, require such high inputs to:

The apple you eat from Washington State does not return (produce) in calories the amount of energy it took to grow it, a net loss in resources that is not sustainable. The highly selected perfect apples you see in the stores create a grotesquely unreal expectation of what “real” apples look like (see study below) and force growers to continue the heavy use of chemical sprays.

Let me address “organic” labeling. This term is widely abused. Demand certification from your grocer and if he can’t produce it, call the headquarters of the food chain. Find out where the food was grown, and exactly what they sprayed. (Oh yes, organically grown apples are heavily sprayed.) No one in their right mind would ever spray if food could be grown to present nicely enough that Americans would buy it. Spraying is very costly: it requires certification which entails training and may be given at infrequent and inconvenient times; it requires special clothing and expensive headgear, as well as costly machinery that needs to be maintained and cannot be used for anything else; it takes time.

I doubt an ordinary customer could find the provenance of the food he or she buys. Buying local produce gives you much more access and knowledge of the actual growing methods of the producer. This gives you much more power over your food sources.

One last point, the term “organic” is a buzzword I find particularly irritating because the conversation over food production should entail, I believe, first and foremost, a discussion on energy. Organic production can be more costly in terms of energy (calories, BTUs, etc.) than a low-input non-organic system. The central issue for me is efficient safe food production in a closed system where additional inputs are minimized if not abolished. Only then will the toxic by-products of growing foods will be eliminated and food production sustainable.