Three of the busiest times for restaurants, Bob Jones, Jr. of The Chef’s Garden explains, are between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, plus Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day – and none of those times mesh with peak outdoor growing times. “So,” Bob, Jr. says, “our winter farming, at its core, is farming at the most conducive times to help our customers: chefs and their restaurants.” Traditionally, outdoor farming took place from May to late September or early October, and then people stored vegetables in root cellars for consumption throughout the winter time. “And,” Bob, Jr. says, “in every farmer, a little bit of him or her probably looked forward to the freeze that signaled the end of the long hours of the busy growing season.” The Jones family first began experimenting with farming in the winter in 1982 and from that beginning arose The Chef’s Garden. One of the decisions that initially needed to be made and continues to need made is what crops to grow in the winter. “You can grow any crop, anywhere,” Bob Jones, Jr. says, “if you spend enough money.” As an extreme example, he shares how University of Arizona's Controlled Environment Agricultural program and NASA collaborated to grow strawberries that were buried 20 feet in ice. “The original goal,” he says, “was to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen and to filter water. As they purified the gray water, they just happened to grow fresh fruit and vegetables.” With the baseline understanding that, with enough resources, you can grow crops in virtually any condition, the decision then becomes what to sustainably grow in Ohio during winter months, and how to achieve that. “In December and January, for example,” he says, “there is significantly less light and heat, so the rate of plant growth changes. That makes scheduling more challenging, as we work on growing enough of the right items at the right time to meet and exceed the needs and expectations of our customers.”
They include, Bob, Jr. explains:
environmentally friendly farming: “This means we leave the soils in better condition than how we found them,” Bob, Jr. says, “and this is what most people think of when they hear the term ‘sustainable farming.’”
socially responsible farming: “This is reflected in how we treat our team, our customers, our vendors, and what we are doing in our community – which means locally, as well as in the village in Mexico where part of our team is from, as just two examples. Food safety is also part of this because we have a social responsibility to protect our customers’ customers.”
viable farm economics: “If you do both of the first two things, but go broke, you’re not being sustainable and you benefit no one. It’s important to create win/win relationships because, if someone always feels like a loser, then it’s not a sustainable relationship. This includes when we’re buying seed or a tractor or dealing with our water utility company, as three examples.”
The Chef’s Garden is also a non-GMO farm. “This means,” Bob, Jr. says, “that we are philosophically opposed to the genetic modification movement. We highly value the genetic diversity in plants and feel that nature has already provided all we need, so we don’t need to manipulate nature to improve upon it.” Bob, Jr. shares one more philosophy held throughout The Chef’s Garden team. “We consider our customer in every decision we make, whether it’s about what varieties to grow or what methodologies we’ll use. It all comes down to the impact each decision will have on our customers.”