Latest news with #Providencia
Axios
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Hot new D.C. pop-ups to get through winter
A frigid week calls for spicing things up — and we've got some fun food pop-ups you won't want to miss. First up: Baltimore's smash hit Ekiben is popping up at Providencia on H Street, Wednesday only, starting at 5pm. Chef Steve Chu says he's "descending on the District like a deep-fried angel" and is teaming up with pastry whiz Paola Velez and host Erik Bruner-Yang. Expect noodles and crowds — the team is fire and the bar is cozy (reservations recommended). This Sunday, Lucky Buns chef Alex McCoy and co-chef Justin Ahn bring back their long-running Thai pop-up, Alfies, to the Adams Morgan bar for one night. Khao gaeng ("curry rice") is the show's star, with five styles of curries featuring local ingredients and homemade pastes over rice ($65), plus a la carte grilled skewers and boozy bevs. Email [email protected] for limited reservations. Look for monthly Thai pop-ups from the duo before they open a brick-and-mortar Alfies in Georgetown this summer. It's all about mashups next week. Monday calls for a Japanese-style cheesesteak at Kat's King of Suteki ongoing pop-up in Chinatown starting at 5pm. Or! "Thaitalian" dishes like red curry bolognese or shrimp tortellini in tom yum brodo from Yai & Nonna. The pop-up, which blends the best from Southeast Asia and Italy, happens every Monday and Tuesday at Shaw's Baan Mae through February, offering a la carte and tasting menus (reservations recommended).
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Here's the dirt on farming, one of the top 3 industries in Palm Beach County
This story was published in The Palm Beach Post on Feb. 7, 2005. Editor's note: Palm Beach County leads every county east of the Mississippi in agricultural sales, according to the Palm Beach County Cooperative Extension. It leads the nation in production of sugarcane, fresh sweet corn and sweet bell peppers and is among the Top 3 industries in the county. Once a farmer gets dirt under his fingernails, it's there for eternity. Unless you've worked in the dirt, put your heart into it and pulled your life from it, it is difficult to understand the soul of the farmer. Life is in the land, comes from the land and returns to the land. Eons from now, long after we and future generations have again become part of it, the dirt will remain. But industrialization is creeping into the cornrows and embracing the beanstalks. Fewer farmers are working the land. "I used to have school kids come out for tours, and I'd ask them where they thought food came from," recalled Wayne DuBois, now retired from pepper farming. "All of them, even the teachers, would say . . . Publix. That is really discouraging." How will city kids learn of the men and women who first tilled the sandy coastal soil along Lake Worth and transformed the obsidian-black muck of the Glades into the nation's food basket? The Historical Society of Palm Beach County has an answer in a new book that tells the story of Palm Beach County agriculture. James Snyder, a respected writer of local histories, was tapped to write it and photos were assembled from farmers and the society's files. Spearheaded by Harvey Oyer, the society's president, fifth-generation resident, lawyer and part-time farmer, "Black Gold and Silver Sands" is now in print. "It's a book that had to be done," said Oyer, the book's publisher. "We needed to get it all down before it's all gone, to show how important agriculture is to Palm Beach County." Oyer's great-great-grandfather Hannibal Pierce first settled and worked the land. A visionary to some, a dreamer to others, Pierce had packed his family onto a boat on Lake Michigan and headed south, even as the flames of the great Chicago fire set the marina ablaze. They eventually reached the east coast of Florida and made landfall at Jupiter, where he signed on as an assistant lighthouse keeper. Hearing of great opportunity to the south, the Pierces made their way to what is now Hypoluxo Island, subsisting off the beans, corn and pineapple they planted, hunting, fishing and scavenging beaches cluttered with driftwood and the hulks of shipwrecks. Once, they found several dozen men's suits that had washed ashore. A grounded ship, the Providencia, yielded thousands of coconuts that inspired the name Palm Beach. Vowing his first home would be hurricane-proof, Pierce salvaged 10-by-12s to serve as corner posts and enough planking to build a second story, making the house the region's first high rise. More than a century later, Oyer, the attorney, decided to get dirty, too. "I bought a cattle ranch out in Okeechobee and thought, 'How hard can this be?' " he said. "But I'm calling every rancher every week to ask them stupid things. It takes a lifetime. Once that institutional memory is lost . . . you're not gonna turn the switch back on overnight." That experience, combined with his family's history of farming, convinced him of the importance of the book. Among the folks Oyer likes to call for advice are three men whose roots in Florida agriculture are nearly a century deep. The Boynton, Stein and DuBois families have endured many hard times farming, but as they sit in Oyer's office overlooking the multimillion-dollar estates to the east, the three insist that paradise lies in the other direction. A 10th generation farmer and member of one of the most prominent farm families in Florida, Wayne Boynton grew up in Pahokee. After the deadly hurricane of 1928, his grandfather and his grandfather's brother-in-law made their first visit to the Glades. "The governor put out requests for people with boats to come down to look for bodies," Boynton said. "They came down from Georgia and put in at Okeechobee. He liked the area and came back in '29." They bought a section (a square mile) of muck land and began raising cattle and crops. Section by section, he acquired more land. In the 1950s the cattle business turned sour, so he got out and in the 1960s he turned to sugar. They're still in it. "Our farms are in the Glades but I live near Lion Country now, halfway to civilization," Boynton, 59, said. "But which way is civilization?" Another distant relative was Maj. Nathan Boynton, founder of Boynton Beach. He came down from Michigan in 1895 and hired one of Oyer's relatives, Frederick Voss, for his first boat ride down Lake Worth and through the canal Henry Flagler had just cut at its south end. Near the inlet, Boynton bought a section that eventually became Boynton Beach. Just before World War I, Fritz Stein's great uncle "wandered off" to the Glades from Manatee County. "Seeing the black soil, he wrote my granddad a letter and told him, 'Sell everything you have and come down here. You can put a seed in the ground and it will bear fruit without any fertilizer — because we're in a nitrogen sink out here.' My grandfather sold everything and settled on the west end of the Hillsboro Canal," Stein, 73, said. His grandfather became the canal's first locktender and farmed around his home, his kids helping out, growing mostly beans. He, too, bought more land, and for 20 years, raising mostly beans and cabbage, scratched out a living. Then, as it often does, nature played a hand. When a freeze threatened his cabbage crop in December 1934, Stein's grandfather used a cultivator to cover his plants with dirt. When it warmed up, they took the dirt off by hand. "He had some of the only cabbage in the United States," Stein said. "He had the market cornered. They had to put armed guards out in the field to keep people from stealing it. I was told they shot a guy one night. Didn't kill him, but burned him up pretty good with some birdshot." When Stein's father died, the family didn't have enough money for creditors. Stein, in his early 20s, suggested selling some of their land to the state. They made enough to pay the bills and on the section they kept, he started farming sweet corn, celery and leaf vegetables. Stein and Boynton's father were two founders of the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative that ground its first crop in 1962. But they'll tell you in a flash that sugar isn't gold. "We got a lot more stories about struggles than success," Boynton said. "From the time my family started 'til they got turned around was like 40 to 60 years. I still have my father's tax returns stored in the barn. I look back through the '50s when he was raising cattle — there were losses year after year." "There's never been a farmer in South Florida that hasn't gone through struggle," added DuBois, the third member of Oyer's group. His family began arriving from Oklahoma about the same time as the Steins. "My dad went back but decided he liked it better down here and stayed through the war years," DuBois said. "Every time they'd get ready to draft him, he'd buy another cow and that kept him out of the war. But he was part of the war effort. People had to have food. A country can survive without shoes, but it can't survive without eating." DuBois became a working farmer in 1957, signing on with his dad for $5 a day and any profits he could glean from 1 acre of peppers. "I thought that was great, getting 1 acre of pepper, but they worked me seven days a week, 12 hours a day," he said. "I came out of it that year with about $25,000 and a brand new car. I thought I was rich." Farmers, the successful ones anyway, are known for two traits: ingenuity and being stubborn as mules. On display in a museum in Belle Glade are sets of mule shoes. "They're as large as dinner plates," Boynton said. "They'd strap 'em to the mules' feet so they could walk in the soft muck. Like snow shoes." Farmers had no choice. "All these farmers came from other states where they had hard soils and they got out to the Glades where the soil is soft and they had to reinvent equipment. Other farmers had to invent new machines for planting, harvesting and cultivating that had never been used anywhere in the world. DuBois' son Mark invented a pesticide applicator and holds several other agricultural patents. "Every farmer has come up with something to make his operation a little bit better," DuBois said. "We farm different than anywhere else in the United States. No other place in the world has muckland. We had to be inventors." "No matter what is thrown at these folks," Oyer said, "hurricanes, floods, droughts or pestilence — they somehow keep running to daylight. They switch crops when one becomes obsolete or no longer profitable. When the pioneers arrived, they didn't know how to grow anything in this soil, didn't know the weather patterns, faced new diseases and funguses. They learned to use water and Florida's unique climate to their advantage. They found something to make it work." No isn't in the farmer's vocabulary. When Stein picked his first bean crop, the packing house told him to forget it, they had too many rotten ends. He found a new packing house. "Farming is like a bird. When it comes nesting time, that bird is gonna make a damn nest, come hell or high water. A farmer is the same way. It's bred into him, I guess." More then ever, today's farmers have a "can do" attitude, DuBois said: "If you lose money one year, you don't worry about it. I mean, you worry about it, but you just dig a little harder to find somebody to loan you more money. The money's in the land. There's no successful farmer here today who doesn't own some land somewhere." But a "can-do" attitude can carry a farmer only so far. Many have given up, overwhelmed by unstable markets, government regulation, environmental issues and overseas competition. In the half century DuBois farmed, the number of farms along U.S. 441 south of Southern Boulevard dropped from 160 to fewer than 10. "Americans are spoiled," DuBois said. "They still buy produce cheaper than anywhere else in the world. When I first started, the yield on pepper was about 250 bushels per acre. When I quit farming, it was over 3,000 bushels per acre, But the profits haven't kept pace with costs." DuBois doesn't regret one day he spent as a farmer, but his sons have left the business. Stein expects to farm "'til they tote me off," and his sons are still at it. Boynton intends to farm until he dies and hopes his grandson will lead the 11th generation. "I long for the days when I could go to the farm and just supervise the men growing the sugar cane, planting, harvesting, cultivating and spraying it," Boynton said, "but I can hardly even think about the actual farm practices anymore. Last year I was selling sugar for almost $23 a ton. This year it's less than $18.60. That's half a million less in income this year, plus fuel and other expenses went up. Ask any other business in Palm Beach County, big or small, to take that big a hit, and see if they survive. The history of farming may be ending right now." This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: History of farming, one of the top 3 industries in Palm Beach County
