Thursday, July 31, 2003

By Virginia Phillips

There's the cheerleader's lean-boned chassis, the elastic step, the palpable positive energy.

"I was a cheerleader," admits Margie Dagnal, 45.

	Margie Dagnal, left, and her 17-year-old daughter, Katie, cut microgreens at a greenhouse at Goose Creek Gardens near Oakdale. Margie left her career in electronics to start the organic farm more than a decade ago. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

Dagnal's microskirt may be mothballed in her mom's suburban attic, but not her varsity attack.

The letter she's wearing now would be "O" for organics. The mother of two teens is five years into a late-breaking career growing organic greens, microsprouts and culinary herbs for Pittsburgh chefs and farmers' markets.

The family lives in Carnegie; the farming is done near semi-rural Oakdale.

Dagnal opted to buy a tiny property close to a metropolitan area rather than cheaper acreage farther out. She grows many things, rather than putting all her eggs in one basket. She aims her wares at an urban market. And she is a woman.

This profile places her midstream in a trend that is changing the face of American agriculture.

Federal statistics show that with agriculture generally languishing, the number of American farms, male-operated farms specifically, is dramatically dropping. Women, on the other hand, constitute the largest fastest-growing group purchasing farms in this country today.

Many women who choose to enter agriculture, according to a 2001 federal survey, are micro-farmers (working fewer than 50 acres) with "eco-friendly" values. Typically they choose to grow organic products and sell them directly to consumers.

Dagnal's move was one she thought long and hard about and eased into strategically.

The "green" vision took root soon after she married. Before the kids came, she was working long hours as a successful manufacturer's rep selling electronics. Seeking to round out her life, she filled out a Girl Scout leader's aptitude test.

	WHERE TO BUY Goose Creek produce is sold at the Original Farmers' Night Market, Route 50, South Fayette, 5:30 to 8 p.m., Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; the Mt. Lebanon Farmers' Market, Mt. Lebanon United Lutheran Church, Washington Road, 4 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays; and Farmers at the Firehouse, 2216 Penn Ave., Strip District, 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Saturdays. For information about Penn's Corner Farm Alliance, Community Supported Agriculture's "vegetables by subscription," call 412-719-6906.

"You would be happiest working in a greenhouse," it insisted. She loved working outside with plants. This was the '70s. A person was supposed to be fulfilled. But it wasn't until a family trip to Boston 12 years ago, school-age kids in tow and well into her second decade selling heavy cable, that she could connect that statement to herself.

"Every day we went to farm markets and bought the freshest herbs, leeks, shallots -- things that Pittsburghers only read about in cookbooks then. It hit me that there had to be a market for culinary herbs.

"I get home to Pittsburgh and what do I find? Giant Eagle has just introduced packaged herbs. I went ahead anyway."

The embryonic market that Dagnal identified has grown to the point that her husband, Mark, 45, left the family landscaping business this year to become her full-time business partner.

She is filling planting beds as fast as he can build them.

"Restaurants are crying for any kind of greens," she says. "I can't grow enough salad greens and culinary herbs. Beth and Ken Marshall of Next Life Farms in Indiana County sell to the same co-op I do. They worried if they grew salad greens they would be competing with me. ... I said, 'Please grow them. I can't keep up.' "

When the Dagnals purchased the property they had been leasing, it received a new name: Goose Creek Gardens, "a bit more masculine" than Margie's Garden.

The place does have a goose, Mr. Gosling, a refugee from a school science project, and a creek, Robinson Run. But it would be inaccurate to picture a Grandma Moses scene with red barn and frame farmhouse.

Instead there is a utilitarian beige shed not unlike a mini-storage facility, which makes up for what it lacks in charm by funneling as much as 160 gallons overnight through its 20-foot rain gutter into a waiting cistern. Facing the road is a former pipe-fitting shop, where Dagnal brown-bags her lunch in front of the computer. Less than a half-acre is in cultivation, most of it within a series of "high tunnels," or greenhouses, structures made by stretching clear plastic over 8-foot-tall hoops.

In shorts and tank top, Dagnal resembles any not-particularly-weatherworn suburban gardener. She's not in the elements that much.

	Mr. Gosling is the resident mascot of Goose Creek Gardens. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

The farm has no need of heavy equipment. Mini-crops are harvested with scissors.

Besides family, farm hands are likely to be her mother, Lois Foss, and friends she's known since high school who volunteer once a week or so, such as her maid of honor, Vicky Thompson of Venetia. Her mom and her dad, Norman "Bud" Foss, still live in Brookside Farms in Upper St. Clair.

Grow the weird stuff

In the mid-'90s executive chef Bill Fuller of big Burrito Group was suffering. He was just back in his native Western Pennsylvania from working in San Francisco, where finicky chefs command limitless specialty produce.

Here he found only two growers, one of them Three Sisters Farm in Mercer County, then pioneers (and Dagnal's role model) providing organic produce for chefs, and a supplier in Ohio.

Fuller got himself onto the conference program of the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture at Penn State. His topic: "What a Chef Wants from a Farmer."

"I tried to teach them what a chef will pay money for. 'Focus on the weird stuff,' I said. 'Microsprouts, unusual varieties, edible flowers, odd greens like purslane.' "

Among those listening was Dagnal. Keeping her day job, she became one of the founders of Penn's Corner Farm Alliance, a grower's co-op supplying Pittsburgh chefs. The group met at Casbah, one of Fuller's restaurants. Fuller advised.

"They had no idea what their stuff was worth or how to fit deliveries into a restaurant's schedule," he said. "Their first year was abysmal. I bought everything they had."

After a few years, farming before and after work, Dagnal abandoned the selling job. In that first nervous year without a salary, "they let me be Penn's Corner assistant manager," she says. She became the co-op's president in 2000, a position she still holds.

"I just love her," Fuller says. "She listens and really knows how to talk to people. She's a smart one."

Another smart one is Dagnal's daughter, Katie, a lanky soccer-playing beauty of 17, who will enter Chatham College this year, aided by a Rachel Carson renewable scholarship she won for an essay on how pesticides harm sustainability.

The Carlynton graduate, whose high school aptitude test predicts she'll do well in English, math or farming, models for John Casablancas agency, but not during the growing season. Then she is working in the greenhouses or selling produce.

"Katie's been serious help since she was 10," Margie says. "I was still working full time and sending the kids and the baby sitter to the Carnegie farmers' market to sell my first fresh-cut herbs."

Charlie, 14, blond and freshman goalie for the Carlynton freshman soccer team, looks older than his age. He may be working the markets "under duress," as his mother says. But when he gets up off the cooler where he likes to rest his long legs, he can muster a deft and easy way with customers. He has been doing market duty longer than his dad.

It is Mark's freshman season tending the farm stands, where his joshing patter and talent for making/fixing anything make him popular. He claims that the last time he sat down was for a couple of hours on Father's Day, but, he says, he can't think of a better time to have quit landscaping than this wet spring.

Nurturing local-ness

Margie walks along the path toward the creek. Mr. Gosling waddles alongside, his round yellow eyes on her. He is her watchdog if she's alone. Let a stranger set foot on the property and he will honk a hullabaloo.

	Margie Dagnal sells her produce at the Original Farmers' Night Market near Bridgeville, one of the several markets at which Goose Creek items are sold. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

This expansion year for Goose Creek reveals the flexibility characteristic of women who farm.

How did someone with no formal training in agriculture and not a farmer in her family tree get the hang of growing so quickly? She reads. She tries things. She is coaxing seeds to germinate on her terms, extending the growing season. She is mastering "seed-saving," the collection of seeds from heirloom plants that are difficult to buy. She networks. She is "on the phone daily" with Pam Bryan, an Indiana County grower instrumental in the co-op's formation.

"We are each other's moral support. She has helped me with things it would have taken years to learn."

Margie shows the outlines of flower beds that one day will line the creek, providing a visual treat for joggers on the trail on the opposite side and also a money crop of cut flowers for the market stands.

In the high tunnels are vegetables, thriving on fertilizers made from fish emulsion and seaweed. In late summer these will join the profusion of greens and herbs. Sending up lusty stalks are seven kinds of heirloom tomatoes, including sweet pink-fleshed Garden Peach, full-flavored Cherokee purple, dramatic Black Prince and Eve's Purple Bell.

The produce roster includes white Tango and globular green-striped Kermit eggplants, leafy red amaranth (to be sauteed like spinach), French haricots verts, bull's blood beets and yacon (a jicama/potato-ish tuber from Bolivia).

Frills and spikes spill out of peck baskets planted with lettuces and herbs. A basket will keep somebody in salad for a couple of weeks.

"People still don't know how to use fresh herbs," Margie says, "or that for a dollar a bunch of local herbs are much cheaper and much fresher than at the supermarket."

She picks a sprig of rosemary. "Try this: Boil 1 cup of sugar with 1 cup of apple juice or cider for a few minutes with an 8-inch piece of rosemary. It's a delicious glaze for roast chicken or pork and wonderful on toast or a plain soda cracker."

There have been a few setbacks. A greenhouse burned early on. The process of documenting organic certification was so overwhelming and expensive she procrastinated for a year. Goose Creek is certified now.

"We should not be militant about certification," Dagnal says. "We need to be teaching and nurturing local-ness. We are strict about labeling, though. If the co-op has a multi-grower delivery of parsley, say, for a chef, with two organic suppliers and two not, organic won't be mentioned. We do try to keep the Farmers at the Firehouse market in the Strip organic."

She takes pride that the co-op thrives and will soon be delivering to restaurants three days a week. This past wet May, to the group's surprise, it posted one of its highest sales months ever. Sales records are usually set near the end of the harvest season when hundreds of things are available, not the beginning with little to sell but greens and herbs.

"I told Penn's Corner when they hired me, 'I'm always a cheerleader, and it's not going away.' "

and translator.

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