As the heavens unceremoniously opened above Wadson?s Organic Farm on Sunday morning ? a delectable meal was awaiting whetted appetites that were soon sated.

It was there that chef Jack McDavid, of Jack?s Firehouse, Fairmont, Pennsylvania, created a scrumptious meal for the Brunch on the Farm, which was part of the Bermuda Culinary Arts Festival.

The meal was of totally organic foods, most of which, were produced on the farm.

Mr. McDavid who believes in feeding people ?the good stuff? made a dozen layer eggplant loaf of local greens, lobster and sweet potato quesadilla with sherry peppers, a delicious sage smoked chicken hash and poached eggs, on roasted beets with pumpkin and squash, a heavenly dill cured black grouper with mango and cucumber slaw, honey and Black Seal Rum chicken with basil, apple and jalapeno infused green and a smoked filet of beef and three potato salad with Outerbridge?s Steak Sauce.

Not mentioned in the menu, and an excellent addition, was Wadson?s Farm fresh lamb marinated in mint and other herbs.

The champagnes, which perfectly complimented the meal, were Prosecco Zardetto, Wolf Blass Brut and Chateau St. Michelle Brut.

The day started with a tour of the facilities where guests were led through the hydroponics green houses, which housed towering tomato and cucumber vines.

After which, guests were led back to the dining area where rain sent most further into the tented area.

The brunch was followed by a discussion led by Dana Cowin editor-in-chief of Food and Wine Magazine. The topics were on why was organic farming important, the benefits of eating and preparing organic foods.

Farmer Tom Wadson told the audience how the balance was reached between the free-range chickens and his Dorper sheep.

He said the chickens are moved around a pasture on a daily basis and their droppings nitrate the soil. The sheep mow the grass and once the land had been rejuvenated with nutrients the land is then re-used for agriculture.

?Organics are pretty simple ? pretty effective,? he said, ?We are members of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, which is a huge resource to us.

?There is such a different train of thought in this business now. We are 13 months into this livestock programme and it has totally changed the whole character of the farm and it is really good food. That?s it in a nutshell.

?This is a good deal and in order to keep farming in the traditional way we set up an irrigation system so we could afford to farm and buy all the chemicals and stuff, but now we don?t have to buy them and clearly today we don?t have to do any irrigation either.?

Mr. Wadson said they had farmed traditionally for years and they were keeping it as clean as they could, but there were fertility issues.

?You go down to the ?Jo Blow? fertiliser company and buy yourself a bag of 20 percent nitrogen and some formulated chemical, but it is simply harsh and it is quite often derived from the petroleum industry ? so that outlaws it,? he said.

?But the thing about manure is the whole natural process and it clearly produces more than just body from the soil.?

Mr. Wadson added that there was something special about grass based farming.

?It doesn?t look like a whole lot, but under the ground there is a huge amount of organic material being formed just in roots and so forth and it is a whole matting process and it becomes more and more resilient so you can run it harder with the animals,? he said.

?So once you start grass-farming you are building up the organic matter in the soil, just by the grass itself and it can be supplemented with the manure, but the whole thing is managing.

?So we built the pasture pens the animals get plenty or air and plenty of sunlight and they get moved to a new patch of grass everyday.

?We were dealing with cannibalism and feather picking amongst the chickens, but we got access to fabulous chicken nutritionists and they suggested that we cut a hole in the cage and let them roam.

?The next day it all stopped. There weren?t any fly problems as before ? to nothing. They scratched the manure in better and then grass started growing better and the sheep started getting fatter.

?Our estimates are we worked an acre and a third from last October and we produced nine tons of organic chicken and that just stunned me.

?It is not that it doesn?t have its challenges ? you can?t run out of feed. We have a custom blended feed.?

Mr. Wadson said some of the beef that comes on the market says that it is grain fed, but he suggested: ?Guess what? Cows never decided to eat grain. A cow has four stomachs ? they are grass fed.

?Take a look on the website eatwild.com and it will be explained that under no uncertain terms how just different that facts are in grass fed cows and what a huge difference this makes.?

Chef Jack McDavid, a farmer?s son, believes in only cooking with the organic products and his thoughts on cows fed with corn and grain were as follows. He said: ?When I started cooking almost 40-years-ago you couldn?t find produce or animals that weren?t filled with antibiotics or steroids and now through different methods of farming we are finding ways of farming without using it.

?And if we eat this kind of food we don?t have to keep the drug companies in business because we ate this kind of food.?

Mr. McDavid said chefs were now buying more organic produce because they found that it tasted better. ?It is different to work with organic or free-range food and it changes the way you cook or think about food,? he said.

?When Tom spoke to me about cooking a lamb for the day, I said, it is really simple and the more you put into the food, the more you get out. ?For years and years, people have been asking, ?what have we been doing wrong?? ? (with) so much cancer and all these problems. It may be what we are feeding ourselves.

?The water table gets destroyed with all the chemicals all over the place. But what you put in you get out and the better the food is grown the easier it is to flavour it. A lot of the food has to have sauces today, but this food has enough flavour and you don?t need the sauce. The food didn?t have a lot of sauce and the poached eggs, without hollandaise sauce. So if you have great food you don?t have to do so much with it.?

He said during his first job as a chef in a French restaurant he thought that he would never figure it out. ?I grew up on a farm and we grew our own food and we slaughtered our own animals,? he said. ?I remember when everyone had frozen vegetables ? no one had anything straight from the farm ? and I remember thinking, ?gosh, why couldn?t my mother do like this??. And then I started thinking gosh, why couldn?t anyone do anything better?

?I remember scrubbing the pans in which my mother made fresh strawberry pies, we would pick them and then eat the pies an hour later.

?We grew fruit for ourselves one way and commercial another way. Organic wasn?t ?in? so we grew commercial. So I discovered that everyone that I fed, I wanted to feed them the good stuff.?

Warren Brown, of Bermuda Gardens, said the old gardens of Babylon probably had hydroponics and they were growing using a root system rather than the roots just being in open water trough.

?We changed our substrate to cocoa fibre this year and it is a completely renewable resource,? he said. ?It works very nicely and it works quite well for organics. We are moving towards an organic system by using a combination of fertilisers and some are mined from the earth and others are from seaweeds.

?The plants have good nutrition and the calcium is high. Everyone is taking a lot of calcium supplements, but if you eat a lot of tomatoes you don?t need it.

?Our yields are very high and are about 20-times that of a field on an annual basis and the next step is to become completely organic.?

Mr. Brown said everyone had jumped onto the organic bandwagon, but the reason it was good for you was that organic products grow biologically as well as chemically and they take in from the soil complex forms of fungi and bacteria as well as chemical forms and they give that to you when you eat them.

?It is a way of inoculating yourself with good things,? he said, ?It?s like passing through an aircraft and someone is coughing and you are not likely to get sick, because you have inoculated yourself with good things.

?It is also good for the environment and it stops soil erosion, but just in terms of the health of the person who is eating it ? I think it is also important to mention it.?

As the discussions ended a few people queued up to order fresh lamb meat from the farm. For more information ( 238-1862.