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Produce Show Daily 3 9 Thursday, October 17, 2019 Painted Pumpkins for Everyone Bay Baby Produce Inc., a North American grower and leader in painted pumpkins, long stem ornamentals and winter organic squash, offers a vast array of painted pumpkin styles to fit every personality and decorating style. Bay Baby Produce began with just 30 acres of soil, and a vision of creating a family-owned farm around the whimsi- cal notion of giving pumpkins a person- ality. The original Pumpkin Patch Pals characters were designed and developed as fun characters and ambassadors to kids and young kids at heart for healthy eating and exercise. Bay Baby Produce now offers a vast line of painted pumpkins from fun personalities to many other unique and trendy home decor styles. Whatever your personality or decorating style, Bay Baby Produce has the perfect painted pumpkin just for you. About Bay Baby Produce Inc. Bay Baby Produce, a woman- owned business for over 30 years, is located in the Skagit Valley, Burlington, Washington. This area is one of the most fertile growing regions in North America. Bay Baby Produce's mission is to be a consis- tently reliable source for high quality painted pumpkins, long stem ornamentals, organic squash and value-added products grown on its farm. For more information, email sales@ baybabyproduce.com. Matrix Manages Flexible Packaging Needs With increasing numbers of consumers interested in eating more whole foods, the fresh fruit, vegetable and IQF mar- kets are booming. Today, these packers and producers need to increase their out- put and efficiently push more produce into the marketplace. Consumers not only are seeking to purchase family-serv- ing size packages, but they also want conveniently packaged single-serving sizes for easy consumption. As a leader in vertical form fill seal packaging equipment, Matrix can deliv- er rugged, well-engineered, cost-com- petitive and easy-to-use packaging sys- tems that are backed by large world- class service and parts teams. With more than 30 years in the packaging industry, Matrix demonstrates the abili- ty, knowledge and commitment to cre- ate profitable non-proprietary compo- nent packaging systems for customers on a global scale. Matrix has been working in the fresh fruit, produce and IQF industries since the beginning of its history. Matrix start- ed out packaging pre-washed lettuce and has expanded to cover most of the indus- try – from packaging fresh cantaloupe, tomatoes, grapes, carrots, broccoli and potatoes, to IQF fruits and vegetables. Matrix machines are flexible and durable, and the team works collabora- tively with each customer to ensure machines meet their unique require- ments. Whether you need an entry level machine to use with a hand loading pocket conveyor, or a fully automat- ed computerized net weight scale with a high-speed pack- aging machine, Matrix has a solution for you. Matrix machines work with a variety of film types – mesh, poly or resistance – and these sys- tems also can produce a wide range of bag sizes from 3 inches to 18 inches. Matrix also provides a comprehen- sive line of products reaching virtually every industry with its distributor part- ners; Toyo Jidoki provides pre-made pouch packaging systems that load, open, fill and cap pouches, optional Ultra Clean format. FL TECNICS (a ProMach brand) offers rollstock (HFFS) pouch making technology in both carousel and walking- beam styles, with speeds up to 400 ppm and can produce a pouch with top or corner valve on the same valve applicator. It all boils down to flexi- bility, whether you have retail or institutional needs, small or large bags, mesh, poly, resist- ance or some other type of film, low or high capacity. Matrix is uniquely qualified to provide its cus- tomers with a wealth of knowledge along the entire packaging line and can facili- tate integrating packaging and processing solutions for your products. For more information, go to www.matrixpm.com or email matrix.info @promachbuilt.com. Dryland Farmers Prosper with Organic Specialty Pulses By Lorrie Baumann Timeless Natural Food offers a gourmet line of heirloom certified-organic lentils, peas, chickpeas and specialty grains. Grown in Montana and its neighboring states, the pulses that Timeless offers in both retail packaging for specialty gro- cers and in 10-pound and 25-pound pack- ages for foodservice use come from a group of organic farming pioneers on a mission to preserve Montana's family farms by rebuilding soils subjected to a century of industrial monoculture wheat production. "We are not alone on this planet, and we have an obligation for stewardship, not only to our fellow human beings, but also for the environment," says company co-Founder and President David Oien. "Through the business that my three friends and I have created, called Timeless Seeds and the brand name Timeless Natural Food, we really have been instrumental in supporting many other farmers around Montana to convert some or all of their acreage to certified organic production to allow their family farms to survive." Oien grew up on his family's wheat farm in north central Montana's Golden Triangle before heading off to college for a degree in philosophy and religious studies that still informs his farming mis- sion today. After several years of work- ing and traveling in Europe following his college graduation, he came back to the family farm in 1976 determined both to repay his parents for the upbringing and education they'd given him and to prac- tice a system of agriculture that's kinder to family farmers and to the land than conventional wheat farming. Today, Montana farmers like Oien inherit the state's history of dryland agri- culture, which began with the 1877 Desert Land Act that drew settlers to homestead in arid lands across the American West. These new homesteaders relied on assurances from agriculturists like Charles Dana Wilbur that "Rain fol- lows the plow," and when the climate refused to obey those prognostications, the development of modern irrigation assisted by the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902. With the newly opened land, irrigation projects across the American West, improvements in farming technol- ogy, and the introduction of hard red win- ter wheat in the 1870s, American wheat production took off. The country's annual wheat production more than tripled in the 50 years between 1871 and 1921; increasing from about 250 million bushels during the period of 1869–1871 to more than 750 million bushels during the period of 1919–1921. Then came the Great Depression and the collapse of agricultural markets that led to the paradox of huge national grain surpluses and widespread hunger. The New Deal followed, with the Roosevelt Administration's Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to fallow some of their acreage when the nation had a grain surplus. New Deal agricultural policies that controlled national grain supplies and stabilized markets remained in force until 1971, the beginning of Earl Butz's tenure as Secretary of Agriculture. Butz's poli- cies, encapsulated in his decree that farm- ers needed to "Get big or get out," reversed the New Deal's protections for family farmers in favor of industrial agri- culture, bigger equipment, more acreage. That was the farming economy that Oien returned to in 1976. His father had resisted that tempta- tion to get big even as neighbors around him were deciding that, presented with a choice that wasn't really a choice, they were getting out and putting their farms up for sale. "One of the pieces of wisdom he left me was that he'd rather have the neighbors than the neighbors' land," Oien said. "That meant we needed to make our small farm viable in a different way." Inspired by Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Frances Moore Lappe's "Diet for a Small Planet" and the connection between Earth and humanity explicated in "Black Elk Speaks," Oien set to work to convert the family farm to organic pro- duction just at the time Lappe and others were helping Americans understand that there might be a connection between what they were eating and their own health as well as the planet's. "My approach has always been, 'Get better and you can stay in.' For me, getting bet- ter meant converting the farm to organic production," he said. "Our farm is 260 cultivated acres, while the average farm in Montana is about 2,400 acres, nearly 10 times larger. There are some farms in my county that are 20,000 acres, so our farm is not only small – in a sense, it's obsolete. But on the other hand, convert- ing it to organic and developing the infra- structure to process our crops has allowed the farm to survive another gen- eration." Practicing organic agriculture meant finding a means of replenishing soil depleted by nitrogen-hungry wheat crops without the use of synthetic chemicals. "The challenge with monocropping, monoculture within a given field, is that it makes those crops more susceptible to disease, to insects, and also requires input of chemical fertilizers. The crops that we grow, such as lentils, chickpeas and peas, are soil-building crops by their very nature," Oien said. "They're legumes that have the power to capture the atmos- pheric nitrogen and convert it into nitro- gen in the soil that's accessible to crops." In 1987, Oien joined three fellow organic farmers: Bud Barta, Jim Barngrover and Tom Hastings, in a com- pany called Timeless Seeds to introduce those leguminous crops to other farmers in the northern Great Plains and spread the gospel of organic production. Their experiments with pulses, the edible seeds of legumes like peas and lentils, coincid- ed with the growth of the natural food industry in the early 1990s that created a demand for organic grains and seeds, and Timeless Seeds capitalized on that demand to grow the infrastructure they needed to turn their raw crops into mar- ketable organic food products. In 2001, the company created its Timeless Natural Food retail line of premium lentils, peas, chickpeas and heirloom grain. To supply that line, the company now works with about 50 certified organic family farms, primarily across Montana with a few in neighboring states as well. "We provide them the opportunity to grow crops that diversify the cropping rotation and to grow crops that are higher value," Oien said. "I think one of the things that's most promising is that we are not only supporting these farms, but we're also having a greater and greater environmental impact across the northern Great Plains. As the market for high-qual- ity plant-based protein grows, farmers can convert some or all of their land to certi- fied organic production, and Timeless is part of the infrastructure to find or create high-value markets for family farms by distributing to food retailers, restaurants and chefs, institutional food service and food manufacturers."