8 Aug 2020
BONUS: THE CARROT KING & QUEEN
BONUS: THE CARROT KING & QUEEN
“There is demand. I think you can grow and sell anything. There’s not enough farmers.”
— Lynn Mayo, Spinach Creek Farm, outside Fairbanks, AK
Like a lot of the farms in Alaska, Spinach Creek Farm is a clearing in the forest at the end of a dirt road. An electric fence surrounds the 10-acre farm to keep the moose out. There’s chickens; a greenhouse full of tomatoes; rows of beets, potatoes and cabbage. And of course, carrots. Thirty rows of them to be exact.
“We started with like seven rows and then sold them in a day,” Lynn Mayo said when I visited on a warm day in August.
Lynn and her husband Pete started the farm in 1994. They cleared the land themselves. And like so many other Alaskans and particularly Alaskan farmers, they had to be pioneers. “You can’t find a lot of equipment,” Lynn said. “You have to go outside. You have to get it up here.” Or, you have to build it yourself.
They both work on the farm full-time in the summer, and they spend their winters fixing what’s broken and building new infrastructure. Like their greenhouse with in-floor heating, or Pete’s carrot-washing contraption that he built after he saw a picture of one. He also built something like a conveyer belt to get the heavy crates of carrots from the ground to the washer.
Pete shies away from the microphone when he comes out to meet me. He’s not the biggest talker, and there’s too much to be done. Summer in Alaska is non-stop for most of us, but for farmers especially so. He busies himself with disassembling their irrigation system for the season while we talk. August is usually a rainy month in Fairbanks, and this year—unlike most of the state—they’re getting some precipitation.
Pete grew up in Fairbanks, and he thinks fall is coming later than it used to. He remembers waiting until the first of October to go out on the ponds when he was a kid.
“Now there's no ice the first of October, or if there is, you better not go out on it,” he said. “That really seems different.” But, he’s hesitant to rely too much on his memory to provide insight into how the area’s climate might be changing.
“The big data is what’s really telling the story,” he said. “Me as a farmer, I don't know if I remember things that well. I mean some things you try to forget actually. You try to forget how horrible and rainy it was in whatever year that was.”
At their stand at the Tanana Valley Farmer’s Market, people line up before they’re even open. They sell out fast.
“I think you could grow and sell anything,” Lynn said. “There’s not enough farmers.”
They’re just growing a tiny portion of the food that people eat for the year. “It really should go up for Alaska to be able to support itself and not rely on so much trucking," she said. “There’s just satisfaction with fresher and closer and better (food).”
But whether people are willing to make the effort and pay the price is a different story. “It’s hard to know if that is really important to the whole culture out there or not. You kinda get a feeling that it isn’t really important to an awful lot of people,” Pete said.
“Yeah people have to work hard to go to the farmer’s market,” Lynn adds.
When I asked them what keeps them going on a hard day—why put in all this work? The answer is simple. “I love growing good vegetables, providing good food for people to eat,” Lynn said.
“Yeah,” Pete said. “That's the short answer.”
