Farmer nurtures The Chef's Garden

Lee Jones looks like a parody of a farmer, clad in overalls, white shirt, red bow tie and ball cap. Although he is smiling and jocular, his tale is one of failure and salvation.

Jones preaches the gospel of sustainability, an entry in the dictionary of pop-agriculture alongside organic, local, slow food and farm-to-plate.

Starting in the 1980s, sustainability resurrected the family farm in Huron, Ohio, a rural community of 8,000 people near Lake Erie. Today, the Joneses rub elbows with celebrated chefs all over the country: Thomas Keller, Alain Ducasse, Daniel Boulud. In Charleston, those chefs include Bob Waggoner, formerly of Charleston Grill; Marc Collins of Circa 1886; and

Craig Deihl of Cypress.

Over the past week, Jones was engaged with chef Aaron Deal of Tristan restaurant in an unusual collaboration. Last Tuesday at the Culinary Institute of Charleston, he and Deal launched a road tour, Jones talking about his family's "The Chef's Garden" farm, the chef cooking its vegetables. Traveling north, they were headed to three more cooking schools and the James Beard House in New York City, where they put on a dinner Tuesday night.

But what is sustainability, beyond a six-syllable word in foodie jargon? An admirable concept, perhaps, but how can people wrap their minds around it?

One way is seeing sustainability through farmer Jones' eyes.

A new dawn

Twenty-five years ago, a hailstorm pounded the crops and the spirits of the Jones family: father Bob and sons Lee and Bobby. Farming had been the family's livelihood, at times as shaky and unreliable as the trucks that carried their produce to markets in Cleveland. This time, the farm broke, and they lost much of its 1,200 acres.

"We were desperate," Lee Jones says.

They began anew, deciding to chuck the conventional model and grow for quality, not quantity. They focused on farmers markets initially. One by one, however, chefs started taking notice of their vegetables and began asking for specific and unusual varieties.

They were picky, "about 2 percent of the business and 80 percent of the aggravation," Jones jokes. But they were persistent, building a relationship with the farm vegetable by vegetable.

Five years passed. The elder Jones called a meeting with his sons to determine the farm's future. The question on the table: Grow for the public or grow exclusively for the chefs? Or, as Bob Jones put it, "Be a jack of all trades or master of none?"

Lee Jones remembers the time well. He and his brother voted for the farmers markets. But his dad slammed his fist on the table. "Absolutely not!" he yelled. "There's more potential with the chefs."

Bob Jones prevailed. The farm traveled a different road, a new-age philosophy paved with the wisdom of generations past. They went forward by looking back to the time before small farms gave way to corporate agriculture, to chemicals and to chasing higher yields at any cost.

While the number of family farms in the United States is at a historic low, The Chef's Garden has bucked the trend by embracing sustainability.

Today, up to 350 chefs a week place "custom" orders with the farm. Vegetables such as heirloom tomatoes, miniature squash and "micro" greens and herbs are meticulously hand-harvested and shipped overnight, often going from farm to plate within 24 hours.

The linchpin of sustainability at The Chef's Garden is an age-old practice: nurturing the soil, Mother Nature's way. Only half of the farm's 300 acres are in production at any given time. The remaining land lies fallow to allow the soil to build up nutrients naturally or is used to grow components of compost. Managing the soil this way virtually eliminates the need for chemicals.

"If you think about it, nature designed a system far better than we can fake out," Lee Jones says.

But The Chef's Garden also has sustainability down to a science, guided by research, development and mostly "low" technology.

Laboratory soil analysis is the farm's compass. Seeds are selected for their weight and quality.

Workers examine every stage, including measuring natural sugars in the vegetables with a device called a refractometer.

The goal is to grow healthy plants from the start that will offer maximum nutrients at harvest, says Jones.

"Our belief on the farm is that 90 percent of what (Americans) are consuming is nothing more than roughage. We have a saying, 'There's no such thing as junk food, it's either food or its junk.' "

Meanwhile, what drives chefs such as Deal to The Chef's Garden is quality and exclusivity, such as the small "Tristan turnip" being grown only for the restaurant. Cultivated in a tray, the turnips hit the bottom and, with nowhere to go, "bulb out" as a result.

Deal's latest love is baby heirloom beets in colors of gold, red and champagne that he serves as a salad with micro arugula and a goat cheese mousseline.

"We try to provide that experience you won't have anywhere else," says Deal.

Spreading the gospel of sustainability has spawned other missions at the farm. One is Veggie U, a nonprofit organization that distributes soil and seed kits to fourth-grade classrooms nationwide. The program, which costs $400 per classroom, is in 1,600 schools and 24 states. Another effort is an "adopt a beehive" project at the farm.

"Is this going to save the world?" asks Jones. "No. But how can you help? It's a bite at a time."