Cheap Shots

Photographer Andy Cripe and I work Saturdays, but somehow we almost always find the time to visit the Corvallis Farmers Market.

Andy is partial to the breakfast burritos and mushrooms; I can’t seem to leave without basil and country sausage.

We both had the same thought: How can we get paid to cover this?

The answer: Follow the work of one vendor as they prepare for, sell at and clean up after a Saturday market.

Turns out, the market is way more than a four-hour stretch.

The time and pain involved (it’s not fun to stand from 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.) were more than we anticipated, but it was fascinating to watch.

We hope you enjoy the fruits — or perhaps vegetables — of our labors.

-Rachel Beck

Friday night, Spring Hill Farm, North Albany

7:30 The harvesting and most of the processing is done for the day at Spring Hill Farm in Albany. The organic farm is known for its salad greens, including dandelion greens and escarole.

7:32 p.m. A blackboard at the farm’s packaging center displays how much produce was supposed to be picked, how much actually was, and where it all goes.

7:45 p.m. Employees Armando Perez, left, and Eduardo Vargas load bins of certified organic tomatoes into the backs of commercial trucks. Tomorrow, the trucks will head to markets in Portland, Beaverton and Corvallis. Harvesting started at 6:30 in the morning (5:30 a.m. for those picking basil).

7:54 Farm owner Jamie Kitzrow will be on the road at 4 a.m. headed for Portland. Friday nights, he’s lucky to get two to three hours of sleep, he says.

8:03 A truck filled with the last crop of the day, beans, pulls up. Urias Escalera cleans them by spraying a stream of water from a hose through a strainer.

8:13 Bunches of fragrant dill are dumped into water-filled bins to clean the herb and keep them hydrated.

8:20 Armando and Rosalio Vera continue to load bins of produce into the Corvallis truck.

8:27 Armando takes a 30 second, break while loading the Corvallis truck.

8:29 Armando moves bins of produce from the processing area to the truck.

8:35 The truck bound for the Corvallis market is loaded, but there is still plenty of space in the other trucks. The loading on those continues.

Market day, Corvallis

6:04 a.m. One vendor has arrived at the market site. Cops drive through looking for cars parked on First Street; the owners will be called and asked to move the vehicles.

6:21 a.m. The farm truck arrives at the corner of First Street and Jackson Avenue, with the market crew: Mother-and-daughter Ann and Abby Huster, Mary Arp and Vicky Herrera.

6:24 a.m. Ann assembles awning pieces, while the rest of the crew unloads the truck.

6:30 Unloading of produce starts. Armando, who drove separately, helps the market crew.

6:40 Ann and Vicky help unload the truck.

7:01 The last of the veggie bins comes off the truck, but other items – floor mats, baskets, a dust bin — are still being unloaded.

7:03 Armando moves bins of produce into the stand.

7:12 Vicky stocks peppers, including the first red peppers of the season.

7:15 Mary arranges veggies on display bins.

7:25 Market director Rebecca Landis walks by with a site map, checking things out. She also puts out the closed signs out on the streets.

7:48 The first transaction of the day has been made. The early shopper is Jeanette Fisher, 79, who thought the market opened at 8 a.m. She buys tomatoes, then lets herself be talked into a sweet onion for an onion-and-tomato sandwich.

8:03 a.m. Abby finishes hanging signs.

8:18 Delbert McCombs, who runs the Market Pad Thai booth, comes by. He wants to trade plates of food for spinach (which he’ll use in the food), but the crew is reluctant to give any up this early in the day. He ends up taking the usual chard and kale.

8:33 p.m. Armando sprinkles ice on the produce.

8:45 McCombs returns to buy spinach.

8:47 Abby calls Kitzrow. They’ve noticed other major vendors have their tomatoes priced lower than Spring Hill. With Kitzrow’s OK, they adjust their prices to match.

8:56 Mary restocks the spinach.

8:59 Armando restocks sweet onions.

9:00 The market is officially open. Spring Hill has had a steady stream of customers for at least the last 15 minutes

9:04 a.m. Abby, Ann and Vicky are all at the register, but at times the line stretches to the back of the booth.

9:09 Armando leaves. He stopped working at about 9:30 p.m. the night before and will head back to the farm today for an eight-hour shift.

10:57 The first item of the day sells out: poblano chilies.

10:59 Abby returns to the booth with lunch: a plate of Pad Thai for herself and Ann. It gets picked at during infrequent lulls.

11:00 Vicky, Mary and Ann have been helping customers for 2 hours.

11:12 Mary adds some condiments to her Market Pad Thai during a half hour lunch break

11:54 Mary restocks beets

12:29 A regular customer stops to fill a bag from the Spring Hill produce bin. She’ll feed it to her guinea pigs, Ann says. She also always buys 20 bunches of parsley.

12:35 “Look at the color on those tomatoes!” a man exclaims. Spring Hill sells pink, yellow and even purple tomatoes, but this man is blown away by the vibrant red Early Girls.

12:44 Mary goes to turn in market tokens. Customers buy the tokens using their debit cards or Oregon Trail cards; vendors cash them in.

2:52 Vicky starts counting how much of each item is left and records it in the book. Abby does some personal shopping while munching her third tomato of the day. “There’s a lot of tomato avalanches that happen,” she says sheepishly. “We can’t sell those.”

1 p.m. The market technically closes. There are two people in line.

1:02 Packing starts. A lot of the unsold produce is given to the Gleaners; some goes back to the farm for employees. Nothing will return to the market.

1:27 Ann removes the signs.

1:33 Gleaner, Pat Danton, arrives and loads some of the nine bins from Spring Hill onto a red wagon. The food will go to families in the Alsea valley.

1:34 Abby stuffs some parsley into an already full bin as the Gleaners take the second load.

1:47 Mary drives up with the truck and loading starts.

2:14 The last bins are loaded onto the truck.

2:15 Abby removes the weights from the awnings.

2:22 Mary sweeps up stray beans and lettuce leaves.

2:28 The truck door comes down. Even now, there’s work to be done. Mary, Vicky and Ann still have to drive back to the farm, unload and refuel the truck.

Portrait of a farm

Jamie Kitzrow, who has owned Spring Hill Farm for 20 years, took a path to farming that started in the forest.

Kitzrow was a forestry student at Oregon State University when a work study experience at a farm changed his professional course.

“I found my passion there and decided forestry was not for me, but vegetable farming was,” he said.

He eventually found a relatively small parcel of land to purchase. The 18 or so acres, combined with another 15 acres he rents, are enough to produce a wide variety of produce to be sold wholesale and at markets.

***

Kitzrow said he used to send a truck to the Albany market, but when momentum shifted to Corvallis, so did Spring Hill.

The farm also sells at farmers markets in Portland and Beaverton. The Portland market gets about 15,000-20,000 customers, Kitzrow said, and Beaverton attracts 8,000-10,000.

Spring Hill also has a booth in Corvallis at the Wednesday market and in Portland on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Vegetables are harvested six days a week. Sundays are the rest day; other days , the work goes pretty much sunrise to sunset.

Once harvested, some vegetables are stored in large coolers. Others, like peppers and eggplants, aren’t. If those veggies chill and collect condensation, Kitzrow said, they lose their alluring shine.

***

A compost bin at the farm holds a variety of vegetables that didn’t make the cut, including bruised tomatoes and circular eggplants.

“That’s the price of keeping quality up,” Kitzrow said. “You’ve gotta toss out anything that’s not perfect.”

But just because it isn’t salable doesn’t mean it’s wasted. The compost is used on trees around the property.

***

About half the farm’s business is wholesale, selling to Eugene’s Organically Grown, which distributes to New Seasons, Fred Meyer, Albertsons and other stores.

Spring Hill has carved out a bit of a niche with salad greens, particularly bitter chicories, favorites of Kitzrow.

“It’s much easier to grow something when you have a passion for it,” he said.
Not that it’s easy, by any stretch of the mind.

“We’re growing 60 different vegetables, and each one has its own little window of opportunity,” Kitzrow said. “We’re a glutton for punishment.”

But he likes watching the trucks go out, knowing that the produce is “dispersing throughout the whole city and many people are making their dinner from it.”

“Kind of gives me a warm fuzzy feeling,” he said.

And at the markets, he enjoys the face-to-face interaction with customers, which he said is “so important to keeping your spirit going.”

***

Being surrounded by delicious-looking food all the time means some of it ends up in his kitchen.

Kitzrow shares cooking duties with his wife, Lisa Schwartz.

“I love to eat well, and so I’m excited about the produce and we eat well at home,” he said.

“Working with produce all day long, you start scheming about things you can do with it in the kitchen. Sometimes it turns out well, sometimes it doesn’t.”

For summer, he likes anything on the grill.

But though his wife and daughter don’t play major roles in the day-to-day operation.

Schwartz works for a consulting firm with renewable energy. Their daughter, Hannah Kitzrow, graduated from West Albany High School last spring and is now in college.

***

Kitzrow has worked hard not just to make the farm a success, but to strike a balance between business and life.

“For a long time, there was no money and no free time. I finally got the money,” he said with a laugh.

He doesn’t see leaving the business anytime soon.

“It’s hard to imagine completely giving it up,” he said. “I’d want to keep dabbling in it at some level.”

-Rachel Beck

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