Photograph by Jim Richardson
“Tomatoes here—just like your Grandma used to grow,” crows Jim Salzman as he works the crowd to sell garden-style tomatoes at the Dane County Farmers Market in Madison, Wisconsin. Salzman, who farms 47 acres (19 hectares) near Fall River, proudly differentiates himself from larger commercial farms in his refusal to use herbicides and his reluctance to use pesticides.“ I don’t want to put anything on my vegetables that I wouldn’t want to put in my mouth,” he says. Though the Food and Drug Administration assures the public that pesticide residues on U.S. produce fall within legal safety margins, an increasing number of shoppers want food grown without chemicals.
