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There was a farmer
You’ll find Eero Ruuttila’s organic produce in soup kitchens and on the tables of some of Boston’s fanciest restaurants. But you won’t find it at the supermarket.
BY TAMARA WIEDER

EVER SAT IN a high-end restaurant in Boston — say, Radius or Mistral — and thought about where the produce on your plate came from? That pretty arrangement of mesclun, those haricots verts, the opal basil, the baby-cut daikon? Ever wonder who planted it, nurtured it, harvested it, delivered it into the hands of the chef?

Next time you do, think of Eero Ruuttila. Because chances are, he grew the stuff you’re eating.

And chances are, you won’t see him at the table next to you. That’s because Ruuttila, the director of the organic Nesenkeag Farm, in Litchfield, New Hampshire, rarely has time to sit back and relax at a fancy restaurant. He works between 70 and 90 hours a week to ensure that his clients — Radius, Mistral, 647 Tremont, Oleana, Rialto, Icarus, and Chez Henri among them — have fresh produce to serve to their customers.

But it’s not just the rich who eat what Ruuttila grows. He also supplies produce to several New England food pantries and soup kitchens. It’s a stark juxtaposition, but it works for him. One part of his business feeds his soul. The other feeds his family.

Q: What was it like coming to Nesenkeag?

A: The farm had been going about three years before I came here. It was not doing well financially, so when I came here, I had the challenge of how to reverse the cash-flow drain and try to stabilize the farm, and to continue its mission. And I’d never even farmed before. I had, like, an acre garden. But I’d been visiting the best farmers in New England in other job opportunities I’d had, and had a clear idea, on a philosophical or political basis, how I wanted to do things.

Q: Your farm workers are Cambodian. How come?

A: Well, they’re the best farm workers you can have, for one, around here. It’s a huge problem for farms in New England to find skilled labor. I’ve been working with the Cambodian community for about 15 years; my core farm workers come from the Cambodian community. Most of them are middle-aged women who grew up on farms in Cambodia, and then they moved to the refugee camps during the regime of Pol Pot, and then came over to Lowell through the sponsorships of groups, so there’s a very large Cambodian community in Lowell. Early on in my tenure here at the farm, I started to make contact with the Asians through selling my produce at some of the small mom-and-pop, traditional Southern Asian stores in Lowell. So things evolved from there. I have four women and a guy; three of the four women have been with me for eight years.

Q: What are the working conditions like?

A: They work very hard, six days a week. They primarily harvest. And part of the benefit of working here is they get any food on the farm that they can bring home. So they bring home quite a bit of food for their large families. It’s something they like; they don’t speak English very well, so here they’re happy because it’s work they’re familiar with, they’re very good at, they’re respected and appreciated for their skills, and they can basically establish their own little kind of micro-Cambodian community while they’re working here. They don’t have to worry about their English skills.

Q: Was it your idea to start supplying produce to high-end restaurants?

A: When I first came here, [the owner] was leasing three acres of the 45 acres to a guy named Ken Ryan, who was really the pioneer in Boston of making relationships with chefs and selling directly to chefs. So [for] some percentage of what I grew, I paid a marketing fee to Ken, and Ken got that into his high-end restaurants. He had a small van, and he sold to about 12 restaurants. Most of what I grew went to wholesale channels, because I was really trained as a wholesale produce buyer, so I saw wholesale production as being a more efficient way than having small sales to a number of clients at higher prices. So I was kind of working with two possibly not compatible marketing strategies.

We grew a fair amount of produce for the Boston Food Bank, supported by Project Bread. Over time, that kind of transitioned to working with Share Our Strength and growing for the New Hampshire Food Bank, and then I had a number of projects with the Southeast Asian community in Lowell, which has morphed to the present. I’m working with a group called Project Foodshare. In both of those situations, I get paid the wholesale value of the produce, and then either they pick up or I deliver to distribution points; the produce then gets distributed to small soup kitchens, food-pantry-type organizations that work specifically with Southeast Asian women. Federal food-relief programs for the Southeast Asian community do not really contribute to their traditional diets. They don’t eat dairy, they don’t eat peanut butter, they don’t eat beans, cheeses — all that stuff doesn’t really relate to them, so we’re trying to get programs to have supplemental, traditional Asian ingredients and produce that is in fact rather expensive in the stores, so for [those with] the lowest incomes, Southeast Asian women and children, they get access to food that’s free to them.

Q: On the one hand you’re supplying food to food banks, and on the other hand, you’re selling food to some of Boston’s most expensive restaurants. Do you have to sort of be of two mindsets in order to do that?

A: No, because it’s all integrated. All the production is integrated. Ken left the farm about three years after I was here; this is my 16th season. Basically I was growing specialty crops, but in a wholesale setting; that’s where I saw a niche for the farm. Over time, those wholesale niches started to deteriorate as more production came into the East from California, and organic agriculture really expanded on the West Coast. I mean, it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry now. And once I started competing with the large organic-produce operations on the West Coast, I just could not compete with that. So six or seven years ago, I completely changed the marketing concept of the farm, in that it was 80 percent wholesale, 20 percent kind of more direct retail, and we switched it. I dropped my largest wholesale account, a $70,000 account, and we went directly to the restaurants, eliminated the middleman. I went 80 percent direct retail, and retained a couple of wholesalers, 20 percent wholesalers. And that’s where I’m at now. Basically, we don’t serve the middle very well; we serve the high and the low.

Q: How do you recommend that people in the middle get good produce?

A: Find another farmer!

Q: But for people on a budget ...

A: CSAs are very popular now — community-supported agriculture. There are a lot of opportunities for people to join these associations of consumers that support a single farm. Then they get, on a weekly basis, produce from the farm. My stuff is expensive; it’s not expensive because I’m making lots of money, it’s expensive because my costs are very high. [I’m] running a farm in southern New Hampshire with the high labor costs, and all the high costs of running a farm in New England. On my farm, income stops, goes to zero, for about five months of the year. It’s very hard managing cash flow. I have no income for many months. I lay my entire work force off for many months, and then start up again.

Q: So you’ve got to find a way to get comfortable with having those high prices.

A: I’m comfortable. If I didn’t get high prices, I wouldn’t be farming because the farm would not be viable. It became clear to me about seven years ago that I could not continue as a wholesale production grower, because my production costs were going up and the value of those crops was going down, and I reached a point [where for] what I was growing, I wasn’t making any money, and I was having to cut corners and compromise quality, and with the realization that there was no future. It was not sustainable. I had to find a new way of doing it or shut the farm down. This shift has made a big difference, and the support for that comes from the Chefs Collaborative 2000, which is an association of Boston chefs who see food as an opportunity to educate the public on sustainable farming practices, and the value of having a regional food-production system in place. Consumers have the benefit of quality food and having some say and some direct contact with the producers.

Q: What’s your relationship with the chefs like?

A: I do all the sales, and that means I probably have about 30 accounts that I contact twice a week. I deliver twice a week — two southern New Hampshire runs and two Boston runs, and then independent of that are the wholesalers I still deal with. It’s pretty intense. But it’s all organized: e-mail, fax, very narrow windows of time that I call people, that they expect to be called. And it doesn’t work for all the chefs. I work with chefs who are able to deal with what it means to work directly with a farmer, in that they can’t just pick up the phone, as they can with the wholesaler, and say, "I’m out of haricots verts; I need them at five o’clock this afternoon." The truck’s in town twice a week; I need 24 hours to harvest [produce] and get it on the truck, so they have to be able to plan their menu — the Boston run, I deliver on Tuesday and Friday, so I need the order on Sunday for Monday morning’s harvest and Tuesday’s delivery. The big day of the week is Friday, so I need the order on Wednesday afternoon for Thursday’s harvest, for Friday’s delivery. There are about 20 restaurants that are on those runs, so if I get the order late, then it throws the whole system off. And if I can’t reach the chefs during this narrow window of time that we’ve set to communicate, then it throws the whole system off. I lose my efficiency if I’ve already picked the crop and then I get a phone call at three in the afternoon, then I have to go back and pick it again.

It doesn’t work for everybody. But I have a core group, and they’re happy, because what they get that they can’t get from a wholesaler is that when it comes from my farm, everything is custom harvested; I don’t maintain a generic inventory in my cooler. Every order is custom harvested, and anything they get is 24 hours or less from harvest into their kitchen. And that 24 hours puts me at least 24 hours ahead of the best that any wholesaler can do. They might be cheaper, but they can’t bring it to the doors of the kitchens fresher. And to the high-end restaurants, fresher — that’s the quality. The things that I grow don’t taste good if they’re five days old. They might look good, but the flavor is lost.

Q: You talked about the system not working for everyone. Have there been restaurants that you’ve had to say, "Sorry, I can’t work with you anymore"?

A: Yeah. Every year. And there are also accounts that can’t pay. You know, the restaurant business is down somewhat since 9/11, and since the collapse of the whole dot-com, inflated economy that we had. So I’ve had some accounts go bankrupt on me, and I’ve had to absorb the hit. So I’m becoming tougher; if I don’t get paid, I can’t continue with the account. And if I can’t get the orders in a timely basis, then it doesn’t work for me.

Q: I’ve heard you say you wouldn’t ever buy, say, tomatoes from a grocery store. For someone who, financially or otherwise, has to shop at a supermarket, do you have tips for what they should look for or avoid?

A: I always say support the local grower. Organic and conventional, buy locally. And if it’s not in the store, ask the produce manager why it’s not. I think that food that’s fresh is going to taste better, and you’re supporting a local or regional economy. That’s really where my politics are. I’m not going to buy a California tomato. If it’s not fresh and local, then to me food’s kind of boring.

Q: Anything you grow that you don’t like?

A: I’m not really fond of radishes, and I grow a lot of radishes. I’m not really crazy about turnips, and I grow a lot of turnips. I grow crops that are unique, particularly in either shape or color. I like the black radish; it’s the only vegetable I know of that’s black and white. It’s kind of like a film-noir vegetable.

Q: When’s the last time you got to sleep in?

A: I haven’t had a day off since May. Sometime in May.

Nesenkeag Farm Day will be held on Saturday, October 19, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Call (603) 224-9298 for information and directions. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com.



A complete archive of our weekly Q&As
Issue Date: October 17 - October 24, 2002
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