Nuts, stone fruits, olives and their juice, rice, grazing, microbreweries—the northern most part of central California are known for all. Now, wineries and farmstead cheeses win prestigious national awards. Millers grind wheat and produce bread from brick ovens, families sell artisan chocolates and cow shares, new farmer’s markets get planned in low-income areas and accept Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT), nutritionists bring Farmer of the Month into local schools. A small population spread across a vast area, people come together around food.

People, Places, Things

• The Healthy Lunch and Lifestyle Program—A nonprofit in Redding, organized by Bridgette Bricks-Wells, this program provides school kids with boxed, organic lunches at competitive costs, sourcing from local farmers whenever possible.
• Craig Thomas—Craig, chef at Red Tavern Restaurant in Chico, began welcoming local farmers and home gardeners at the door of the restaurant’s kitchen with their produce decades before it was fashionable.
• Growing Resourcefully, Uniting Bellies—GRUB is a collective of young people that offers a CSA, teaches young kids to garden at schools, collects kitchen scraps from local restaurants to compost, maintains a list of Chico’s fruit trees from which to glean.
• Alger Vineyards—John and Linda Alger employ organic and biodynamic practices to grow grapes for their wines. The vines are irrigated with water drawn from the bottom of a trout pond on the property.
• North Valley Farms Chèvre—A farmstead goat cheese produced in Cottonwood by Deneane and Mark Ashcraft. They are the first goat dairy farm in the nation to win the Animal Welfare Approved Seal.

Welcome to Edible Shasta-Butte magazine’s first blog post. We intend to regularly post items on our web-site, so please give us your feedback and suggestions.

After the 45 minute drive from Chico to Yankee Hill, Candace and I were met by Cheetah Tchudi at the gate to TurkeyTail Farm. The farm, 40 acres of oak savanna, brush-land, and pasture, is home to Cheetah, his parents, and his brother and his wife. Cheetah is the farmer-in-chief, his mother is the main gardener.

At the top of the driveway, near the house, is a pen that is home to a sow and half dozen piglets. Cheetah explained that he had never kept pigs, but now finds them to be “most delightful animals. Sheep look at you in a general way; but pigs, from the time they are born, will look you in the eye, giving you a feeling that there’s a little more going on in there. They have sort of puppy dog tendencies.”

We were there to get background information for an article on Community Supported Agriculture, or CSAs, for the Spring edition of Edible Shasta-Butte magazine. For the past 15 months, Cheetah has been operating a meat CSA for about 10 subscribers. Once a month he delivers a variety of meats – lavender-fed lamb and mushroom-fed broiler chickens and pork –and each subscriber gives him $120 per month over a three month contract. In addition, to the monthly staple of meats, the box includes in-season brazing greens, arugula, select gourmet mushrooms, winter alliums, and a salad mix.

Cheetah worked throughout high school in Reno with the Nevada Conservation Corps, and then went to the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA to study general ecology, a major that morphed into Food, and finally Ecological Agriculture. (Evergreen State College offers a dynamic interdisciplinary curriculum.) During his studies, his interest turned to mushroom cultivation and he wrote a successful grant to investigate mushroom cultivation as a means of generating compost. Acknowledging Cheetah’s deep interest in farming, his parents sold their residential property in Reno and invested in the rolling 40 acres of pristine, untamed land that is now TurkeyTail Farm. (Turkey tail is a species of mushroom known for its medicinal and spiritual properties.)

Everything weaves together on TurkeyTail to create a whole which is greater than the sum of the individual parts. The pig operation works in synergy with the vegetable farm—compost made from pig manure fertilizes the vegetable farm, eliminating the cost of compost (at $40 per pickup load). Organic feed for the pigs and chickens is very expensive, so Cheetah sources spent soy mash, or okara, from Ken Musselwhite at Cal’s Kitchen in Chico to feed the pigs and cultivates mushrooms on rice straw from Greg Massa’s farm to feed the chickens and the pigs (pigs eat a lot!). Mushroom mycelia digest the straw, leaving only a little of the cellulose undigested, creating a mushroom fruit very rich in proteins and vitamins and high in medicinal properties. Cooked and mixed with commercial organic feedstock, this mushroom stew reduces the cost of feeding the poultry and the pigs by two-thirds.

Cheetah’s business plan forecasts that, at steady state, 20 pigs, 1000 chickens, 35 ewes, and 70 lambs with a 50% feed supplement will net him $30,000 each year. And that will be enough to afford him aesthetic quality of life he yearns for with minimum impact on the environment.