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Harvesting a community
By Joe Bonwich
The Rev. Maurice Lange is on mission to spread the good news ... about Community Supported Agriculture.
"It's easy to show people right away that vegetables grown here and harvested today simply taste
better than something grown in California that was harvested two weeks ago," Lange says.
Lange is a member of the religious order of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, often simply known as the
Oblates. The Oblates are perhaps known best in this area for their operation of the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville.
New members - including Lange, when he first joined - enter the
order by living and working on a property called a novitiate, which for the Oblates is on a sprawling old estate on the Mississippi River bluffs in Godfrey.
About eight years after he was ordained a priest,
one of the major epiphanies of Lange's life came from Genesis - the name of a large farm in Blairstown, N.J., that was a pioneer in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement.
CSA was introduced into
the United States in the mid-1980s by farmers who had seen it in Germany and Switzerland, whose farms in turn had been inspired by a co-op movement in Chile in the 1970s. In essence, CSA is a co-op arrangement in
which community members buy "shares" of a farm at the beginning of the growing season and share in the harvest - or other products grown or raised on the farm - throughout the year.
"The
experience at Genesis so transformed my perception that I went back for a two-year internship," Lange says. After completing the internship, he approached his superiors with the idea of replicating Genesis on a
smaller scale at his old novitiate.
They approved, and thus began La Vista, which takes its name from the panoramic views from the bluff side of the property. Lange was also assigned to Sts. Peter and Paul
Catholic Church in Alton - giving him, he lightly jokes, "a platform to preach from about CSA."
"Once they were able to taste the difference in our crops, they said, 'Hey, this guy's got a good
thing going,'" Lange says.
Many of the 60 or so shareholders who signed up that first year were parishioners. But, Lange notes, the 140 current shareholders represent many faiths.
"The word really seemed to get around in the community," he says.
The centerpiece of La Vista is a 4 1/2-acre farm. Early crops start to come in during the first part of spring in a bare-ground
greenhouse donated by the Alton-Godfrey Rotary Club, with field crops taking over thereafter.
"This used to be a mule pasture," Lange says. "That's why it's so fertile."
Robyne
O'Mara, a member of the "core group" - the La Vista equivalent of a board of directors - acknowledges that while La Vista does not use pesticides or chemical fertilizers and otherwise grows its crops
according to the principles of organic farming, it can't officially claim to be organic.
"We follow all the requirements, but we can't track the history of the field, and we're only in our fourth
season," O'Mara says.
A full share in La Vista costs $500 and allows shareholder to visit every week on either Tuesday or Friday to pick up an allotment of the garden's bounty. A limited number of
"alternate" shares, which provide access every other week, are sold for $300, and 10 percent of the total shares are made available at reduced fees to families with low incomes. La Vista is currently fully
subscribed, although a waiting list is available, and some turnover takes place from year to year.
Shareholders can collect their produce in a shed near the greenhouse, but they also have opportunities to
wander the fields and pick their own vegetables. But Lange, his staff and the core group also make ongoing efforts to ensure that the "community" aspect of community-supported agriculture has plenty of
opportunities to flourish. Toward that end, for example, earlier this month La Vista held a tomato festival, which included everything from a tomato cooking contest to golf games with overripe tomatoes as the balls.
The festival drew dozens of shareholder families.
The cooking contest was judged by an Oblate known as "Chef Jacques," who for the rest of the year goes by the Rev. Jack Lau. The title of
"chef" has actual grounding as Lau comes from a long line of chefs, graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and worked at a country club in Palm Beach, Fla., and at other food-service jobs before
entering the order.
"My grandfather actually studied with Escoffier and worked at the Waldorf in New York City," says Lau, who was at the novitiate to cook and lecture as part of a weeklong seminar
run by the Oblate Ecological Initiative, an educational program run in parallel to La Vista.
Another key player at La Vista is "Farmer Kris " - Kris Larson, who was hired at the beginning of this
year as the full-time farmer on the property. An Illinois native, Larson was drawn to the CSA concept after completing a degree in natural resources planning at Humboldt State University in California; he most
recently worked on a CSA farm in western Massachusetts. On the day of the tomato festival, he was out working in the fields, a floppy straw hat on his head and his year-old son, Jacob, on his back.
Shareholder investments pay for many of the farm's needs, although the Oblates also lend their support. They purchased a new tractor - the first on the property in more than 50 years - in 2003. That tractor, shared
with the novitiate, now pulls something called a European spade plow, a special kind of plow that must be run more slowly but has less impact on the soil than a traditional plow.
"The whole idea here is
to promote a naturally enhancing relationship between human beings and the earth," Lange says. "To put it another way: Can we not just take? Can we give back as well?"
Looking forward, Lange
would love to see animals reintroduced onto the property - other than Magpie, his parishioner-donated Lab who helps shy away deer and other critters when she's not having her stomach scratched by the children of the
community. He'd also like to plant raspberries and fruit. But he acknowledges the need for patience in expanding the garden while still remaining true to sustainability principles.
"Growing things
organically is a challenge," he says. "It's going to take time to work up to that."
For more information on La Vista, visit its Web site, www.lavistacsa.org, or call Lange at 618-466-5004 or
e-mail him at lange@omiusa.org. The Web site www.localharvest.org also provides a search engine that returns a short list of other CSAs in or near the St. Louis metropolitan area.
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