Above: Barbara and David Cohlmeyer

Growing and Nurturing
Cookstown Greens

BY STEVEN BIGGS
Photograph by Laura Berman

It was one of the key questions on my mind as I trekked from Toronto to this farm nestled in the bucolic terrain of southern Simcoe County, about forty-five minutes north of Toronto. Expecting a philosophical answer about food, I’m taken aback when David Cohlmeyer tells me it all started with a cooking class for men at George Brown College.

As we stand chatting behind one of the greenhouses at Cookstown Greens, I’m eager to move away from the noise of an idling tractor being coupled to a disc harrow. And I’d dearly like out of the beating sun. But I’m fixated by Cohlmeyer’s story about how – after growing up in Evanston, Illinois, studying chemical engineering and business management at Indiana’s Purdue University (he graduated in 1968), and working as a systems analyst in San Francisco and then in Toronto after arriving here as a landed immigrant in 1972 – he ended up as such a well-known (and equally well-loved) figure in both Canadian and U.S. food and agricultural circles.

Despite the name of that cooking class, he notes, women were enrolled, as well. Willy Brand, the noted chef-instructor, explained to Cohlmeyer that he called it a cooking class for men because it involved cooking without recipes and he thought men might be more attracted to this approach; it might have seemed unscientific for an engineer, but it captivated Cohlmeyer. Nodding reflectively while discussing Brand, he says, “He infected me with a love of cooking.”

That love of food and cooking launched Cohlmeyer on a culinary odyssey: He was the chef and owner of Beggars Banquet, a restaurant he opened in 1972 on Queen Street West in Toronto, and had a five-year stint beginning in 1977 as the weekly food and agriculture columnist and feature writer for The Globe and Mail. He emerged as an avid promoter of Ontario-grown foods and the well-respected founder of Cookstown Greens, where he grows high-quality produce for numerous fine restaurants, caterers and local-food purveyors.

While that first cooking class infected him with a love of cooking, it didn’t cloud over Cohlmeyer’s engineering background. He recalls how, when still new to cooking, he camped out at the library, poring over texts from the 1920s that explained to chefs of the time how to use new food additives. Taking these techniques and working backwards, he was able to understand how to create foods without those now-commonplace additives. For example, he realized he could make mayonnaise without an emulsifier by using garlic instead.

Food for thought

Chef Brand must have had an inkling of Cohlemeyer’s analytical skills. “When I told him I planned to study cooking he told me, ‘You know about business. Open a restaurant and have your customers teach you how to cook,’” he recollects. After taking his advice, Cohlmeyer noticed something interesting: When clients commented about a potato tasting especially delicious, they always attributed the taste to some special cooking method. If he told them the potato had merely been boiled, it was not a welcomed answer; patrons had the illusion that some culinary conjuring was involved. “In conversations with customers,” he relates, “I discovered that they actually noticed and genuinely appreciated superior tasting produce.” Getting a consistent supply of high quality produce, however, often posed a problem. “I couldn’t count on them at all,” he laughs, as he reminisces about a direct-from-the-farm tomato order that was promised in time for him to prepare a Thursday evening meal, but which arrived on Friday night.

In 1975, Cohlmeyer decided to sell his restaurant to his cooks (renowned Toronto chefs Andrew Milne-Allan and Greg Couillard) so that he could learn how to grow premium vegetables himself. He took a job at a vegetable garden/greenhouse operation near Hamilton, becoming manager within a short time. A few months later, he recalls, “I laid myself off because I did not see how I could earn enough money at market gardening to pay myself anything close to a fair salary.” Cohlmeyer spent the next several years doing vegetarian catering primarily for weddings, but also for corporate luncheons and private dinner parties.

In the business of the unusual

But the idea of starting his own farm was never far from his thoughts. “I wanted to demonstrate that exceptional quality could be reliably produced for chefs who sincerely wanted to provide the best for their customers,” Cohlmeyer relates. “After several Toronto chefs confirmed a desire to serve seedlings (micro-greens) and baby salad greens, I realized there could actually be enough cash flow to create a business plan that could provide a family income.”

As we stroll the fields of Cookstown Greens, which he founded in 1988, Cohlmeyer offers me a radish seedpod to munch. It’s sweet and juicy. Then, crunching on sweet raw asparagus spears, we make our way to the strawberry patch to see his Chandler strawberries. This variety is tricky to grow in our climate, but he explains that if he picks them when they’re fully ripe, he has a uniquely flavoured product that chefs clamour for. And because ripe berries don’t ship well, there’s little worry about California producers snatching the market.

I sample some celery-flavoured lovage leaves, a herb he says was so popular when he started offering it that he grew more. But this year, demand is down. “That’s the story of farming: when you have it, they don’t want it,” he remarks matter-of-factly.

In the melon patch, where he grows finicky French Cavaillon melons (also known as Charentais or Chanterais) that are renowned for their sweetness, the cool weather has put the crop behind schedule. Cohlmeyer explains that there’s more to growing melons than water and heat. The trick to super-sweet melons is not too much water once the fruits are forming.

Seeing opportunities for Ontario food

Even before he started farming, Cohlmeyer was interested in food production and was frustrated by what he saw as missed opportunities for Ontario growers. On one occasion, after sharing Ontario cherries with classmates while taking a course in New York, he was surprised at the gusto with which they were consumed. His classmates raved, saying there had been nothing comparable in New York stores since cherry orchards in that state were pulled out. Seeing an opportunity for Ontario fruit growers, he contacted decision-makers who could further pursue this market. To his dismay, he says, boards and bureaucrats seemed more interested in reasons not to pursue it.

While the Cookstown Greens website says, “Cultivating and celebrating terroir since 1988,” Cohlmeyer was celebrating Ontario terroir well before he started Cookstown Greens. With the conviction that Ontario farmers produce top-rate fruits and vegetables, Cohlmeyer had visions of identifying and promoting an Ontario cuisine. So in 1984 he decided to bring together food professionals – farmers, chefs, food processors, cooking teachers, government employees, food scientists, writers, stylists and historians – to discuss food issues and build an awareness of Ontario produce. Over two hundred people turned out for the first meeting, and the Toronto Culinary Guild (TCG) was born.

The TCG quickly had over four hundred active members, but ceased being active in the late 1980s and closed down in the early ’90s after PR people took over the reins.

In matters organic

As we walk the fields, the low-key Cohlmeyer spends as much time talking about the soil as he does about the crops. Elaborating on a statement on his website: “Organic matter is what organic farming is all about,” he recounts discussing organic matter with the late Bob Rodale, son of the founder of Organic Gardening magazine. Cohlmeyer says Rodale had a firm belief that soil organic matter is the central tenet of organic production.

Cohlmeyer’s views on fertility are closely linked to his approach to managing the soil. Ask most farmers, he says, about the key elements in fertilizer, and the response is a resounding “NPK” (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium). That mindset, he explains, overlooks carbon and oxygen, which aren’t traditionally considered nutrients because plants take them from the air. But that air is an all-important part of a healthy soil – and having it there requires lots of organic matter to make a porous, air-filled soil structure.

The business of greens

Cohlmeyer has developed a product line based on quality and uniqueness. In many cases, the quest for quality and uniqueness means that what’s old is new again. Cohlmeyer seeks out older varieties, even if they are less suited to mass production or have lower yields. He’s interested in superior flavour. “I’m trying to make people aware that there [are] better tasting [options], and they just have to ask for it,” noting that not everyone realizes the difference that proper cultivation and the right variety can make on flavour. He cites the leek variety he grows, which was discontinued by commercial seed houses because it is light green, rather than dark green. The colour is irrelevant to Cohlmeyer, who now saves his own leek seeds so he can perpetuate this more-flavourful variety.

Cohlmeyer is perhaps best known for his seedlings (now often called micro-greens in the marketplace), which factored in as a key crop in that original business plan for Cookstown Greens, given their speedy growth and resulting quick cash turnover. He’s also known as an innovative grower of rarely seen, unusual vegetables such as Crosnes (a tiny, spirally, sunchoke-like tuber), salsify, and torpedo onions.

But product quality and innovation haven’t made him immune to pricing issues. He describes how the California spring mix (also known as mesclun) price wars and the persistent dumping of California produce on the Canadian market have pummelled prices below what’s needed for local farmers to make ends meet. His beef isn’t with American growers – it’s with the Canadian government. Cohlmeyer says he has sought government action to protect farmers from dumping, but his requests have been dismissed because it’s not the American farmers who are selling here, it’s brokers. As a farmer, he sees this as an irrelevant distinction.

Despite mesclun dumping, baby greens currently account for nearly 50 percent of Cookstown’s sales. According to Cohlmeyer, “We have done this by keeping the quality so high that there is an obvious difference from the cheap imports.” And government inaction on dumping doesn’t seem to stop politicians and foreign dignitaries from enjoying his vegetables. Over the past year, his produce has been served to Barack Obama and the Emperor of Japan (both the Governor General’s and Prime Minister’s chefs are clients).

Colder weather and snow do not provide for vacation time at Cookstown Greens. Winter is their busiest time of year, with salad greens from the greenhouses and roots from the root cellar. And Cohlmeyer is very proud to be providing year-round employment to his trained, valued employees, whom he sees as his greatest assets. “Year-round employment is an important part of fair-labour practices,” he notes. “It is not fair that unemployment benefits should be subsidizing our food.”

A lot has changed since the early days of Cookstown Greens, when Cohlmeyer, his wife Barbara (a social worker) and their daughters Lara, now 27, and Emma, 25, worked together, particularly at the Toronto Organic Farmers’ Market in the early ’90s. Cohlmeyer reminisces that, “The girls learned to reliably get up early every Saturday morning, make the table continually attractive, informatively communicate with customers, and add up totals and count change without a calculator.”

What hasn’t changed is his approach to bringing out the best from his food. How does David Cohlmeyer, a vegetarian, prefer to see his produce prepared? He says that high quality ingredients don’t need adulterating with sugar, oil or salt. “These are just crutches,” he remarks. No culinary conjuring is required.

Cookstown Greens
Thornton, Ontario
(705) 458-9077
www.cookstowngreens.com

A writer and horticulturist, Steven Biggs is also a lifelong gardener who has managed to garden wherever he’s lived, creating allotment gardens, container gardens, indoor gardens, and gardens hewn out of the overgrown backyards of rented houses. You can sign up for his vegetable gardening e-zine, Homegrown in Toronto, at www.the-locavoresgarden. com.