Link: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/all-we-can-eat/to-market-to-market/notes-from-the-underground-mar.html

What is a primary producer? It is a plant. Primary producers are plants or foliage that are at the beginning of every food chain/web.

Stop me in my ever loving, chamomile cleaning tracks- here is a quote from today's Washington Post wrote,"technically, wild foods have no producer." Here is a picture , that is me, yesterday in the hot June sun- , yesterday morning in fact. The wild chamomile is a product and I am the producer- I can eat it, I can drink it- a hundred different products can be made from my work. This is a day at the office for a wild crops farmer.

A Day at the office of a wild crops farm

Those of us who work with wild harvests have heard it before. In fact, my mushroom harvesting friends are well acquainted with the problem. Another California friend of ours, Harvesting Howard (soft ware engineer by day - wild crop visionary by weekend) had to purchase Acorn flour from China, rather than harvesting California acorns because somewhere, sometime, someone had an unripe acorn and the health officials in California determined that acorns were not a safe food. It took two years for Howard to covience public health officals that California acorns were safe (despite 100 generations of people who have eaten them as a primary food source. When it comes to food policy in this country, people who govern seemingly epitomize "stupid gone to seed." (Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen A. Merrigan, excepted. She was kind enough to conect with me in Hillsboro MO a couple weeks ago.) I know 100 producers of wild products and they are not plants, but they know them well. Harvesting wild requires a special skill set including knowing when, where, how, knowing a hundred subtle ways of the natural world and the cycles of all things. This includes the history of the land upon which he or she is working and knowing the plants that grow there and those that do not. I am a producer of wild crops, and that includes many foods.

in) at the base of a pinyon tree that was about 2oo years old. She is not even a very old tree. I WISH people could see how full of cone she was and how very, very magestic. Counting the cones, I estimate there 35 - 40 lbs of pine nuts on this tree

I gather on my own land, on leased land, on public land - commercially with others as a business, producing . I work with two of the largests wild harvests on the planet, witch hazel botanical floral waters for the Health and Beauty Industry (certified organic)and American pine nuts. We are certified organic wild harvesters by Oregon Tilth and we are processors as well. I plan, I tend, (one does not lay hands upon a plant without tending it in one way or another), I harvest, I process, I package, I lable, I sell, I am a producer, albeit - Nature planted the seed. Now, back to cleaning my chamomile.