Click Here for More Information

We started planting our orchard with table grapes. Next will be blackberries and fruit and nut trees. It’s a big project but will have long-lasting benefits. In addition to our experimental food forest our perennial landscape is increasing.  The plan is to add vegetable beds in between the rows of fruits, nuts, and berries. This year it will be melons, wintersquash, and pumpkins. The hope is that their vines and abundance of leaves will cool down the ground and help cover the bermudagrass, and make it less vigorous. The driplines are set and the beds are getting shaped.
At the same time we will be planting our sweet & hot peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, and basil. This month is a busy one, but very rewarding once we start harvesting.
We hope you are enjoying the sweet cabbages that we are sending you. They last a long time in the fridge, and if you can, try making sauerkraut. It is fairly easy to do and in a week you can enjoy this highly nutritious dish.

Lots of baby goats have been born and we have an abundance of milking goats. If you are interested or know somebody who is looking to start or increase their milking goat herd, we are selling a good amount of them for a very good price. They are highly productive and adapted to the summer heat of southern Arizona. We are also offering some of the kids for sale. Call or email for more information ASAP.

By the way, did you know that we now offer our own eggs as a CSA share?  You can sign up for a six-week share for $24; one dozen per week for $4 each.

Thanks again for being pioneers and supporters of this local organic food movement,

-The Avalon Gardens Family

Spiritualution - Justice to the People
Click here to check us out on Facebook

CSA Harvest List

Sometimes we have a featured vegetable of the week and we will give you historical information, interesting facts, and delicious recipes to try.  If you click on the vegetables in the harvest list, it will bring you to the past newsletter where that vegetable was featured.  All of our past newsletters can be found on our Farm Report website.

• Broccoli
• Summer squash - Zucchini, Lebanese, yellow Straightneck
  
• Salad Baby Mix- green and red lettuce leaves, baby kale red and green
• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Beets - Chioggia, red with white stripes
• Radishes

University strikes back against Occupy the Farm

By Twilight Greenaway

Photo by Steve Rhodes.

“Maybe you’ll be my one phone call from jail,” urban farmer and activist Ashoka Finley says, just before our phone conversation ends.

He’s joking, but I imagine he can probably see a group of police officers out of the corner of his eyes as he says it. Finley is one of a group of Occupiers who have been living and farming on a 10-acre piece of land on the outskirts of Berkeley, Calif., called the Gill Tract.

Finley has also just told me that he’s prepared to get arrested if things at the Gill Tract escalate. “We’re not going anywhere, we’re going to keep planting and farming,” he says, as if it’s the most defiant thing he can imagine.

Until recently, the Gill Tract was a fairly invisible piece of property many Bay Area residents have driven by for years: Its fence butts right up against a major freeway intersection en route to the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Then, on Earth Day, April 22, Finley and fellow activists cut a bolt, set up tents, and began planting food. Their occupation has transformed the Gill Tract into a kind of stage on which a very modern drama is playing out.

Since we first reported on the Gill Tract occupation last week here on Grist, things on the ground there have begun heating up.

On Wednesday, the day I spoke with Finley, the land’s owners, University of California at Berkeley, had officially lost their patience. The college had sent in campus police officers to blockade the entrances to the property in what appeared to be a slow-and-steady tactic similar to their approach to a student-led tree sit that took place at UC Berkeley a few years back. Later in the afternoon, UC announced its intent to take legal action against 14 of the group’s organizers for trespassing and illegal encampment, among a list of other grievances.

UC cut off the water supply to the property shortly after the occupation began, and Finley says they have been trucking in water ever since. Once vehicles could no longer enter the property on Wednesday, the Occupiers parked at the edge of the plot and set up “a water train” of people passing buckets. “Watering three acres by hand is no small task,” he says.

In the last week, university officials have met with the Gill Tract Occupiers, and in the days since then the university issued an ultimatum. Then the Occupiers responded with a list of their own demands.

Both parties want decision-making power over the land. The Occupiers want to see it farmed in perpetuity as a sustainability-focused education center, while the university sees the tract primarily as an agricultural laboratory. It also has plans to redevelop buildings at the edge of the property into retail space, including, ironically, a Whole Foods Market.

In the short term, the farmers want access to water, and the university says it will grant that access only after the tents have been removed.

“We’ve been really patient. This occupation has been going on since April 22 and we’ve taken no direct action until today,” said University of California spokesperson Dan Mogulof on Wednesday afternoon. “The last thing we want is confrontation.”

That makes sense, of course. University officials know that the eyes of the media are on the Gill Tract. And not much time has passed since the 10-campus university system was criticized for its response to Occupy protests last fall (including at UC Davis, where the famous pepper-spray incident went down). In fact, just last week, UC released a draft of a report that urges restraint and mediation in cases of civil disobedience.

But Mogulof prefers to frame the discussion as one about the core principles of academia. “We cannot negotiate academic freedom,” he said, referring to the research that takes place at Gill Tract. “It’s the heart of what every great research institution is all about — the ability of our faculty and students to pursue their intellectual and academic interests in a free and unfettered fashion without interference from the administration, corporations, politicians, or government. And certainly not from a self-selecting group of individuals.”

It’s odd to hear the word “corporations” on this list of unwanted external influences, since UC Berkeley has been heavily criticized for its corporate relationships, including a recent collaboration with BP and a five-year research deal between plant biologists and the biotech company Novartis. There are no genetically engineered crops grown on the property. But many of the protesters have pointed out the sharp contrast between the typical Gill Tract tableau of the past and the new scene there today: Instead of the uniform rows of industrial corn that have grown here every summer for the last several decades (thanks to research funded in part by the nearby Western Regional Office of the United States Department of Agriculture), Occupy has brought a multigenerational crowd to the location, looking excited and sun-kissed as they work together to build a farm.

Not that all Gill Tract’s neighbors support the occupation. In fact, several see it as a brash and aggressive approach by outsiders to grab something many of them had been working to get for a long time — access to the Gill Tract. (In this recent op-ed, a nearby citizen refers to the four-year negotiation he and other neighbors participated in with the area city council.)

Of course, as UC sees it, getting the Occupiers off the land is the first step to a negotiation process that could, they say, involve some inclusion of urban farming on the plot — at the university’s discretion.

“There is room on the site for both our research and for urban farming. It’s possible that some or all of what [the Occupiers] have planted could remain. But that’s far from certain,” says Mogulof.

The Occupiers see it in reverse; rather than a research facility with some space for actual farming, they envision a farm with some space for research. In fact, one agroecological researcher who grows experimental crops in the Gill Tract tried to begin his research for the season on Wednesday morning. Miguel Altieri appeared at the plot in an effort to plant dry-farmed tomatoes, but was reportedly told by university police that he wasn’t authorized to do so [hear a short audio interview with Altieri]. Apparently, he then passed the tomatoes through the fence and instructed the Occupiers how to plant them.

“Obviously research can continue under the context of this organic farm,” says  Finley. “But the UC administration has forbidden all research — just as a political move. If researchers started cooperating with us, it would send a message that it can continue without their supervision.”

It’s clear, however, that the right to do research is only part of the issue for UC. One recent university statement read, “If the encampment is ended we are, as previously stated, more than willing to discuss opportunities for a metropolitan agriculture program affiliated with the campus.” Either way, says Mogulof, “We think it’s clear that there’s shared interest if they’re willing to take the simple step of allowing the rightful owners to regain the supervision and control of the land.”

Then again, the Occupy movement has always been about giving a voice, however fleeting, to disenfranchised young Americans who feel they have very little to lose. Ownership might not be a sacred concept, or even a major priority, for many of the younger Occupiers. They graduated at a time when the relationship between student debt and the availability of work for people under 25 might lead them to doubt they will ever be able to own a car, let alone a piece of land. Meanwhile most young people who do dream of farming probably know they’re likely to have to rent land for the foreseeable future.

Former UC agroecology student Anya Kamenskaya, an Occupy the Farm organizer who is named in the UC lawsuit, told me that the Gill Tract started as a 104 acres of prime agricultural land — the kind with soil that can grow food without needing much preparation (scientists call it “class 1”).  As she described it to me, I started thinking about how many houses, streets, businesses, and gas stations has been built right over this soil.

“There are only 10 acres left, and only about five are really presently useful for farming,” she said. “We want to highlight the fact that it started out as farmland and it’s been parceled out and cut down.”

That’s why, on Wednesday night, the Occupiers were gathering at a nearby community center, marching to the farm, and preparing — if necessary — to get arrested for those five acres of good remaining soil.

Update: On Thursday afternoon there had still been no arrests, but the #occupythefarm Twitter feed reported that UC police has stopped allowing anyone to enter or exit the Gill Tract. The farmers tweeted “asking for sandwiches, prepared food, nuts, power bars, dried fruit, things that are easy to get over a fence.”

Watch an Occupy the Farm solidarity march from Wednesday, May 9:

#OccupyTheFarm Solidarity March - Albany, CA 1 ratings 124 views

Thousands more farmers markets will soon take food stamps

By Rachel Cernansky

“That’s a huge transformation in the farmers market world, in terms of people being able to feel like they’re invited to the party,” USDA deputy secretary Kathleen Merrigan said in a phone interview.

Expanding SNAP at farmers markets is part of the agency’s broader approach to increasing healthy food access for low-income communities that lack adequate grocery stores and public transportation — areas known (if sometimes controversially so) as food deserts. So when this year’s budget talks came around, the USDA requested $4 million to expand the effort. (Cost is a major reason why more farmers markets don’t already participate: SNAP benefits are redeemed through the EBT system, which relies on wireless technology, and that doesn’t come free.)

Today, the USDA announced it will begin to allocate funds to states with the greatest numbers of EBT-less farmers markets. The states will then decide how best to spend the money for each market: Some may purchase just the wireless equipment, others may buy the equipment and hire someone to manage it, or make other investments that will help manage the program effectively.

Because of that variation, it’s not clear how many more markets will now start redeeming SNAP benefits, but Merrigan estimates that the machines could reach an additional 4,000 farmers markets.

She hopes those markets will help break some of the stereotypes that have developed around eating and cooking with fresh, local fruits and vegetables.

“Twenty years ago or more, people thought this was something for the elite. Clearly that’s not the case, and the expansion of farmers markets with EBT has really proven that,” Merrigan added. And she’s optimistic that more time spent at these markets can lead to other healthy lifestyle shifts as well. “Hopefully some of those people are going to farmers markets on their bikes and walking,” she said.

That said, use of SNAP at farmers markets isn’t going to be the solution that solves all the country’s food problems, and Merrigan recognizes that.

“There’s no silver bullet,” she added.

And because someone will be able to buy local kale or fiddlehead ferns using EBT doesn’t mean they’re going to have the time or experience to cook them. For that reason, Merrigan emphasizes SNAP as a piece of a broader, multi-pronged approach, which includes: “getting access to the food, figuring out what to do with it, and then understanding why it’s important.”

But while this effort by the USDA won’t produce miracles, it will likely give more SNAP users — many of whom do cook at home — quicker, easier access to fresh produce. And that’s no small part of the battle. As Merrigan said, “Getting people to those markets is inviting them into really healthy eating.”

Rachel Cernansky is a freelance journalist in Colorado. She focuses on the environment and social justice, and you can find her on Twitter.

A Geodesic Dome Promises Fish from the Sky

by Zak Stone

Ever since R. Buckminster Fuller popularized the design in the mid-20th century, there’s been something captivating about the geodesic dome. While the structure typically makes architecture lovers salivate, now it’s conquering the heart of another type of urbanist: the city farmer. A new dome-based prototype promises an affordable method of rooftop aquaculture for apartment and commercial buildings—as the website calls it, getting “fish from the sky.”

The Globe / Hedron bamboo dome would house an aquaponics system—a mini-ecosystem in which plants clean the water where fish swim and fish waste fertilizes the plants—capable of feeding 16 people year-round. The unique structure of the dome, designed by Conceptual Devices, would support the weight of the fish tank, enabling installation on flat roofs without adapting the structure of the building. The design firm is partnering with Zurich-based group UrbanFarmers, which developed the aqauponic technology, and they’re currently fundraising on indiegogo to get the project off the ground.

The project’s creators promise a harvest of 400 kilograms (about 880 pounds) worth of vegetables and 100 kilograms (about 220 pounds) of fish each year, including everything from tomatoes to spinach to trout. Panels on the dome’s exterior would provide both shade and insulation, allowing the the structure to adapt to local environments, while the compact size and easy assembly would enable it to be shipped around the world.

Click Here for More Information

This is the season of planting. Last week we continued direct-seeding the following crops: summer squash, cucumbers, asian noodle beans, edamame soybeans, okra, watermelons, honeydews, more lettuce, and others. We transplanted more celery in the shade garden, as well as varieties of lettuce.
The weeds are getting stronger and with diligence they are kept at bay. We are clearing and cleaning up our greenhouses to replenish the soil with compost to till in; to shape beds and transplant some tomatoes and peppers. Our propagation greenhouse is bursting; it’s like a tropical jungle in there. We need to wait at least another week before all danger of frost is gone. This Monday and Tuesday morning we had 32 degrees, which would have stunted our tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and basil. The beds are getting prepared for the big transplanting week coming up soon.
If you have an opportunity, come and tour our gardens and property; so much happens each month that you might be surprised what can be done.

Lots of baby goats have been born and we have an abundance of milking goats. If you are interested or know somebody who is looking to start or increase their milking goat herd, we are selling a good amount of them for a very good price. They are highly productive and adapted to the summer heat of southern Arizona. We are also offering some of the kids for sale. Call or email for more information ASAP.

By the way, did you know that we now offer our own eggs as a CSA share?  You can sign up for a six-week share for $24; one dozen per week for $4 each.

Thanks again for being pioneers and supporters of this local organic food movement,

-The Avalon Gardens Family

Spiritualution - Justice to the People
Click here to check us out on Facebook

CSA Harvest List

Sometimes we have a featured vegetable of the week and we will give you historical information, interesting facts, and delicious recipes to try.  If you click on the vegetables in the harvest list, it will bring you to the past newsletter where that vegetable was featured.  All of our past newsletters can be found on our Farm Report website.

• Broccoli
• New: Summer squash - Zucchini, Lebanese, yellow Straightneck
  
• larger Kale - several varieties of red and green
• Lettuce - red and green varieties
• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Beets - Chioggia, red with white stripes
• Red Radishes

Southern discomfort: Tracing a region’s history through its food

By Claire Thompson

Michael Twitty is about to embark on what he calls the “Southern Discomfort Tour” — a journey to follow his ancestors’ “foodsteps” through the American South.

This self-described writer, culinary historian, and Jewish educator from the Washington, D.C., area will be traveling with a small group for two months by car, from Maryland to Louisiana and back, covering almost 4,500 miles.

In addition to tracing his personal history, Twitty will be speaking, giving cooking demonstrations, and volunteering on farms and for food justice organizations over the course of the trip. He plans, as he puts it, to “make sure that organic, local and sustainable food in Southern communities — particularly that produced by farmers of color — is highlighted and supported.” He also plans to document the journey on his blog, The Cooking Gene.

Twitty’s roots go back through the segregated South to slavery in Virginia, and he also hopes to engage communities in conversation about the region’s fraught history, using the unique and beloved cuisine of the South as a medium for education and reconciliation. We caught up with Twitty as he was fundraising for the tour.

Q. Describe your approach to this project and what kinds of things you’ll be doing along the way.

A. I’ve been planning the road map [for this trip] for 25 out of my 35 years — learning about genealogy, African American history, and slavery. I really wanted to feel that I was not an armchair scholar. [To that end, Twitty has picked cotton and tobacco in the South.] I didn’t just want to do a project about my ancestors and slavery. The food thing makes it unique, because you can talk about it in regards to slavery, race, class, and power. It’s not just a cultural conversation about things that make people mad, it’s a way to do it that brings people together.

We’re going to be working with a couple different community garden groups, and working with African American farmers. And doing historic [cooking] demonstrations.

We’re going to be at a synagogue in Birmingham where there are black churches sharing the same street, and we’ll have this — hopefully — rich discussion about what identity means and how being Southern brings everybody together. I’m also looking for Chinese communities in Mississippi who have been blending Southern produce and African American food traditions with Chinese regional food traditions for years, and no one’s ever thought to ask them, “how do you make that collard green and crawfish stir fry?”

Q. What’s unique about Southern cuisine?

A. It’s the oldest verifiable, continuous American food tradition. Our food is this incredible blend of the earth, the sky, the water, native America, Africa, and Europe. And it just keeps on incorporating new elements, whether they’re Latino or they’re Asian.

Q. What’s the impact of race on how we eat, and how has that relationship evolved over history?

A. There is a really interesting, apocryphal anecdote [that] said that the only day black people were allowed to publicly eat vanilla ice cream was on the Fourth of July.

Food was a tool of control. To this day, there are certain overtones of food as a means to control. Also, I think people are uncomfortable with the notion that the mother of Southern cuisine is not just a black woman but an African woman. The image of this African woman coming from Senegal or Ghana, having to pick up those gadgets in a European American kitchen with those Native American foods and those African memories and make it work — that’s problematic because they don’t want the culinary DNA of the South to go back to Lucy.

Q. So food was a source of control as well as being a source of joy for African Americans. How does your project reflect that tension?

A. One of the elements of African American culture that people in the antebellum time struggled to understand was how can these people who are so oppressed feel such joy? How can they smile in the middle of hell? And isn’t that the story of the blues? Every element of Black culture [contains] that tension between pain and joy, between control and liberation. And you can use the food to liberate yourself, to figure out your identity. When I picked cotton for 16 hours, the only thing I had to eat was a hoe cake and some water. You don’t know shit about Southern cuisine or slavery until you’ve actually spent 16 hours in the fields sweating, running away from poisonous snakes, and getting your hands cut up by cotton. Then you find out what a hoe cake really meant.

Q. You wrote that “most of us are still enslaved to food systems that aren’t sustainable.” Can you elaborate?

A. We have serious addictions to things that we know aren’t good for us. But it’s not in everybody’s power to live the ideal. We’re blocked in by financial constraints, by lack of access. So there’s this idea of enslavement that comes into play — that I don’t have the ability to always make the best choices for myself or my family. I know that’s been my struggle in life several times over. People hear me talk a good game about organic, healthy, and sustainable food — but that’s not my complete life.

Q. Shouldn’t we all be more in touch with our food heritage? How can we go about doing that?

A. When you follow a family recipe, you have an opportunity to bring life to your family story. What sustained your ancestors and your parents? It becomes exciting because you can say, “This is what my so-and-so ate to celebrate the end of World War II.”

Q. Your Twitter handle is @koshersoul. What role does your faith play in your relationship to food? How do kosher food and soul food coexist?

A. I feel really blessed to come from two diasporas that circled the globe, and have touched every culture they’ve been a part of, especially on a culinary level. There are Jewish foods that incorporate some of the ingredients that you might find in the average southern kitchen. Black-eyed peas are eaten for good luck on Rosh Hashanah in the Sephardic Jewish tradition. But they’re also eaten by African Americans and Southerners on New Year’s for good luck.

For me, it’s like blending together Jewish soul food and Black soul food from all over the world and making it taste fantastic and having people go, “Wow, your identity is in this food.”

What’s your favorite non-your-background cuisine?

Q. I’m a fan of Vietnamese food.

A. I’m sure you’re a pho fanatic. That’s your identity cooking. You and other folks on the West Coast are on the Asia-Pacific rim, so how could that not be a part of who you are, no matter what color you are? People need to get over being locked in their ethnic boxes.

I don’t want people to read [the Southern Discomfort Tour] as a race thing. I am so humbled by the fact that so many people who are not of color have said, “This is something we’ve been waiting for, something we want to be a part of.” Knowing that makes me feel good.

Occupy 2.0

by Jason Mark

With the Takeover of a University of California Agricultural Testing Station, Occupiers Move from Envisioning a New World to Creating One

It doesn’t take an agricultural expert to know that you can’t grow vegetables without water. So it wasn’t surprising that after hundreds of people marching under the banner “Occupy the Farm” took over a University of California agricultural testing station on April 22, UC officials responded by shutting off water to the site. The next day a late-season storm brought a half-inch of rain to the San Francisco Bay Area, irrigating the thousands of vegetable starts in the ground and lifting the spirits of the urban farming activists who are determined to save the site from development.  Score: Occupiers, 1 — UC administrators, 0.

All photos by Jeff Conant/Climate Connections

Social change activists in Berkeley, CA have always been ahead of the curve. Today, May Day, is the spring re-emergence for the Occupy movement as activists around the United States engage in work stoppages, street marches, and various forms of civil disobedience to press their demands for a more equitable economy. The folks with Occupy the Farm got started early. On Earth Day they marched from Berkeley’s Ohlone Park to a 5-acre plot of land in the adjacent bedroom community of Albany. They cut the locks on the gates of the UC-Berkeley and US Department of Agriculture field trial plot, pulled up nearly an acre of thick mustard growing there, and got busy working the soil with a pair of rented rototillers. Then scores of volunteers planted 150-foot rows of lettuces, beans, cucumbers, and leafy greens. By the end of Earth Day, the Bay Area had a new urban farm.

The occupation of the Gill Tract (named for the family that donated the property to the university decades ago) appears to mark a new stage for the adolescent Occupy movement. The autumn encampments in Manhattan, Oakland, and dozens of other cities around the country were a kind of primal scream against the growing wealth disparities and corporate overreach that have come to characterize America. With their anarchist architecture and consensus decision-making, Occupy’s autonomous spaces gave people a chance to envision a radically different way of organizing society and economy — and in the process shifted the national discourse in a more progressive direction. Now, actions like the Gill Tract takeover, the occupation of foreclosed homes, and the protests outside of bank shareholder meetings are giving new potency and political relevance to the Occupy movement. Occupiers (some of them at least) are beginning to focus on actions that are at once full of political symbolism and fulfill people’s basic human needs for food and shelter. Activists have gone from imagining a new world to actually creating it.

“While those of us who originally organized this aren’t affiliated with the official Occupy movement, we are inspired by the last year of what Occupy has done,” Anya Kamenskaya, one of the Occupy the Farm organizers, told me when I visited the Gill Tract Friday morning. “We are taking that Occupy spirit and taking it to the problems in our community. You could call it Occupy 2.0”

Kamenskaya is a UC-Berkeley alum (class of 2009) who has been involved in sustainable agriculture initiatives such as The Greenhorns and Future Farmers. As we spoke, a convoy of borrowed pickup trucks was dumping load after load of dark black compost next to where a dozen straw bales had just been dropped off. Volunteers were busy painting banners for an upcoming weekend of community farming events. A flock of six laying hens pecked about among the trampled mustard stalks. “The reason we’re here is because it’s farmland, and it’s farmland in an urban area, and it should be used as farmland, especially since there are tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area who are food insecure,” Kamenskaya, wearing a floppy straw hat, said as she directed the delivery of some port-a-potties. “For years students, professors, and neighbors have come up with proposal after proposal for some kind of agro-ecology center to show people how to grow their own food. The university has had listening sessions so they can say they have listened. But they don’t incorporate our ideas into their plans.”

The land seized by Occupy the Farm is the last parcel of Class 1 agriculture soils left in the East Bay and the final remnant of a 104-acre spread bequeathed to the University of California in the 1920s. For decades this sliver of prime farmland has been used as an agricultural testing station by researchers from the USDA and UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. But a 2004 UC Master Plan for the area proposes a “commercial redevelopment” for the site.  World War II era buildings on the south end of the property are slated to be turned into housing for UC faculty and graduate students, as well as retail space (including, ironically, a Whole Foods). The land currently used for agricultural trials would be re-zoned for “open space and recreation” and could include the construction of little league fields, a community center, or a childcare facility.

The occupiers say getting rid of this final vestige of farmland would be a horrible mistake: “Farmland is for farming,” Occupy the Farm said in an April 26 statement. “We cannot allow the UC to destroy one of the best resources for urban agriculture in the Bay Area.”

In an open letter published Friday, UC officials said that they “have welcomed community workshops to explore future use of this land” and “are open to further discussions with the community about implementation of the Master Plan.” At the same time, university administrators expressed resentment with the occupiers’ tactics. “We take issue with the protesters’ approach to property rights,” the letter said. “By their logic, they should be able to seize what they want if, in their minds, they have a better idea of how to use it.”

On Monday, Dan Mogulhof, head of UC’s public affairs office, told me that it’s unfair of the occupiers to think they are the only ones with hopes for the property. “We are big believers in metropolitan agriculture,” Mogulhof said. “A lot of our professors, students, and administrators are involved [in urban farming.] But there are a variety of competing interests here. We can’t be marching to the interest of just one group. We have to be representing the full range of community interest.”

Occupy the Farm organizers counter that many Albany residents and Gill Tract neighbors have expressed their desire for a community farm at the site — but that the university has failed to listen. As far back as 1997, professors, students, neighbors and a collection of more than 40 non-profit organizations presented UC with a detailed proposal for an urban agriculture center at the farm.  Occupiers also point to the enthusiasm they have received from neighbors during the past week as evidence of community support: Since UC officials shut off water to the site, occupiers have been irrigating the crops with water donated by nearby residents. And scores of residents, many with children in tow, have visited the encampment.

“We had so many community members come out this weekend,” said organizer Ashoka Finley, another UC-Berkeley alum, who has worked as a garden educator since he graduated in 2010. (Full disclosure: Finley is a student in the organic gardening course I co-teach with another Gill Tract occupier, Antonio Roman-Alcala, at San Francisco’s Alemany Farm.) “Kids were being led through the farm by their parents. We started a permaculture garden with community input and support. We had face painting. Someone brought some goats, so we had a little petting zoo.”

The occupiers have enlisted another important ally to help make their case: UC professor Miguel Altieri, a global leader in the science of agro-ecology. Altieri has been running field trials at the Gill Tract since 1981, longer than any other researcher, and so he has one of the strongest claims to the site. “The Master Plan of the university is obscure,” Altieri told me. “They say it’s going to go from academic to recreational use. That could be baseball fields or whatever. This could be a huge opportunity for the university to play a huge role in urban agriculture, to create a center for urban agriculture that could show how you can reduce transportation, and lower emissions, by producing food in cities.”

In an essay that he submitted to the Daily Cal campus newspaper, Altieri and another professor, Claudia Carr, argue that as a Land Grant university, UC has a tripartite mission — to educate students, to undertake research, and to share that research with the public through Cooperative Extension programs. An urban farm that balances undergraduate classes, graduate level research, and food production for the community would fulfill all of those functions.

UC officials appear to be listening. According to Mogulhof, on Friday afternoon J. Keith Gilless, dean of the college of Natural Resources, met with occupiers and told them “the university is more than happy to talk about shared custody for this growing season as long as the agricultural research can continue” and the overnight encampment ends.

If the occupiers are able to grow food at the Gill Tract this summer — and then use that foothold to achieve their larger aims — it would mark an important win for the Occupy movement. It would, for starters, demonstrate the power of community organizers to make a demand to the powers-that-be and then see it through to victory. It would demonstrate how to take control of public spaces, not just for symbolic reasons, but for productive purposes. It would demonstrate the time and patience required for real social change (the Gill Tract occupation was six months in the planning). And, perhaps most important, it would demonstrate that communities already possess the resources they need to build a more just and sustainable world.

This last point was made clear to me by veteran activist Gopal Dayaneni as I was leaving the encampment on Friday. “We don’t need corporations and we don’t need gene research to tell us how to farm,” he said. “We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. We just have to remind each other how to do it.”

Here is a video of the Gill Tract takeover on Earth Day:

Last weekend we hosted our first workshop “Extending the Growing Season and Adapting to Global Warming: Sustainable Growing Methods”. We spent seven hours sharing with the participants valuable knowledge, experience and references where to get the materials. It was a very good exchange with our students who were professionals in their field.
There is so much to learn every year how to adapt to this new climate, and as we make each other aware of the challenges and some solutions, we might create a better local food sources throughout the county, state, country and beyond. Every garden also requires community building in some way to be able to accomplish all the tasks at hand throughout all four seasons. The next workshop will be May 19th. Sign up and learn for yourself.
Many projects in our gardens continue to evolve and will create more beauty. In our lower garden that once was a horse riding and roping ring, we are currently building raised beds in circles and waves on the perimeters. This will help us to plant our perennial culinary/medicinal herbs and flowers for attracting pollinators and beauty. So far the bermuda grass has slowed down the establishment of these plants. These beds are two feet above the ground and have a thick layer of paperpulp/mulch on the bottom to inhibit the growth of the bermuda grass.  They are filled with a mixture of topsoil/compost and are outfitted with a drip irrigation setup to ensure all the plants will do beautifully. We are planning on using the south side as a seed-saving area.

Lots of baby goats have been born and we have an abundance of milking goats. If you are interested or know somebody who is looking to start or increase their milking goat herd, we are selling a good amount of them for a very good price. They are highly productive and adapted to the summer heat of southern Arizona. We are also offering some of the kids for sale. Call or email for more information ASAP.

By the way, did you know that we now offer our own eggs as a CSA share?  You can sign up for a six-week share for $24; one dozen per week for $4 each.

Thanks again for being pioneers and supporters of this local organic food movement,

-The Avalon Gardens Family

Spiritualution - Justice to the People
Click here to check us out on Facebook

CSA Harvest List

Sometimes we have a featured vegetable of the week and we will give you historical information, interesting facts, and delicious recipes to try.  If you click on the vegetables in the harvest list, it will bring you to the past newsletter where that vegetable was featured.  All of our past newsletters can be found on our Farm Report website.

• Broccoli
• Parsley
• larger Kale, several varieties of red and green
• Lettuce-  red and/or green
• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Beets , Chioggia, red with white stripes

Tanya Fields: Breaking locks and planting seeds in the South Bronx

By Andrew Leonard

All true. But the high-minded rhetoric doesn’t quite capture the drama of the moment when Fields decided to engage in some direct-action urban guerrilla farming by cutting the lock on a gate to a vacant lot near her home in the South Bronx.

“It was Memorial Day, 2010,” she recalls. “We were giving out vegan hot dogs, and planting sunflowers, and cleaning up weeds.”

And then suddenly the owner of the lot, who hadn’t answered Fields’ calls for a year, showed up. And then the police got involved. And then Fields had to scramble to find the cash to pay for a new lock and repairs to the gate.

It’s not easy being a food justice activist in the South Bronx, says Fields, who was born and raised across the river in Harlem. It’s especially tricky when you are the mother of four and depending on food stamps to keep everyone fed.

“If my name was Lauren and I was from Wesleyan, and I was living in Brooklyn, there would be people coming out of the woodwork to help me,” she says wryly.

But she’s not complaining. And what else would you expect from a woman who had read The Autobiography of Malcolm X by age 10, and whose father raised her to believe that “if we saw something that we thought wasn’t right, then we should speak up and we should try to change those things”?

Fields didn’t realize exactly what wasn’t right in the Bronx, however, until her kids started having trouble breathing.

“I always say to people there was no epiphany,” she says. “My kids started to get sick. That was it, you know. Both of my daughters, by the time that they were a year old, they had already been hospitalized twice, always for something respiratory.”

Fields started look for answers. She joined up with another South Bronx activist, Wanda Salaman, the executive director of Mothers On The Move.

“Wanda helped me connect the dots,” says Fields. “Did you know that there were 32 open-air waste transport stations in the South Bronx? Did you know we have a water treatment facility, and that around the corner from that water treatment facility is the plant that processes 71 percent of the sludge of the city? Did you know that they have terrible practices in terms of how they handle that sludge? Did you know that the type of particulate matter that is prevalent in the air at 2:50 p.m. is the worst kind, the kind that gives kids asthma? “

“I just became ravenous. I started to read up on everything. I started finding out about the state of the South Bronx. I started finding out about all of these different things in my community, good and bad, that contributed to the lifestyle that I was having with my kids. And I started thinking about food.”

“I have a very special relationship with food,” says Fields. “I like it a lot.”

She chortles delightedly. “This was right before food exploded on the national landscape. So I feel a little bit like I’m a pioneer in my community. Because I was talking about food when everybody was like ‘Oh, that’s cute, Tanya, but you know, we’re talking about air quality right now.’”

She looked around her neighborhood, a classic food desert, and noticed that it was full of empty lots — 10, she says, in “a one mile radius.” She wondered why her neighbors weren’t growing their own food. Eventually, she found herself cutting that lock.

And she’d do it all over again, she says –”absolutely” — if it weren’t for the fact that the police have told her that they would arrest her for any repeat unauthorized farming escapades.

But that doesn’t mean the citizens of the South Bronx won’t be hearing more from her in the future.

“I have this big personality,” says Fields. “I am a big woman. I have strong opinions. Sometimes people value those opinions. Sometimes it sparks some very intense conversations. But I have a lot to offer. And I am all up for making noise.”

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. He lives in Berkeley, Calif., with his two children and likes to ride his bicycle.

A young farmer’s meditation: Time on the farm

By Ben James

Photo by Geecha.

I didn’t notice the marks on the John Deere until I’d had the tractor for maybe a month. A couple of spots of brown, corroded metal etched into the green enamel on the top surface of the right fender. No big deal — a decades-old tractor should have all sorts of dents and dings if it’s been used for anything worthwhile — but the placement of these marks was interesting. Again and again, the times I noticed the marks was when I turned around to see the row behind me and placed my hand exactly upon them, the base of my palm on the larger spot, the tips of my fingers on the smaller. I can’t remember the moment now, but at some point while driving the length of one or another 300-foot row I finally got it: The marks were made by the hand of the previous owner. Every time he’d turned around to check his depth or adjust his steering or see the work he’d accomplished, he’d placed his palm on this same section of fender — an unconscious action that he must have repeated several hundred thousand times — and gradually his sweat had eaten through the paint and begun to corrode the metal.

Repetition is what we do here at the farm — animal chores morning and evening, picking the squash every day and a half, the beans and tomatoes every three days, the market and CSA pickups each week, spraying the foliar fertilizer every two weeks, the big clean out of the goat barn and the garlic harvest once a year, the three- and four-year rotations of the various families of crops — all these different time signatures in sync and then crashing against one another. There’s no way to do all that’s scheduled in a single day.

The tasks are completed in order, one after the other as time allows, but meanwhile there are all the ways that time on the farm overlaps and twines around itself.

We keep a log of all the things we intend to do differently next year (plant the first sweet corn a week earlier, don’t follow winter squash with carrots because of the weeds, don’t use biodegradable plastic under cantaloupe because the melons will rot). At the same time, wherever we are on the farm, we’re reminded of what was in the ground last year (volunteer cherry tomatoes, leftover potatoes, a weedy patch where the lamb’s quarters got out of control).

There’s a very real sense, then, that we’re farming three years at once, tracking where we’ve been and calculating where we’re headed, even as we try to figure out — at this exact moment — what in the world to do with the 800 pounds of  eggplant ripening in the field. (And this doesn’t take into account the perennials — the strawberries and asparagus and fruit trees — whose time signatures add an even greater level of complexity to the score).

We push and pull at time. Time pushes and pulls at us. We encourage the arugula to mature more quickly by laying down row cover, and then we load the freshly harvested broccoli into the cooler to make it last as long as it can. The bean pick we thought would take an hour ends up taking three but yields half the crop it did a few days before. The turkey that fit in the palm of my hand six weeks ago now can hardly be held in my arms. I try to squeeze a nickel out of a minute with each pint of cherry tomatoes I sell, but here’s what will ultimately last: the flavor of those tomatoes in my sons’ memories, so that even as grown men no other food will ever taste as good.

Time on the farm is not static, it’s not a given. It’s not like a ladder with all the rungs evenly spaced. Rather it’s a substance, a material we try to manipulate just as much as we do the tilth and the fertility of the soil. How many tomatoes can we harvest before the lightning storm arrives? How many can we sell before they rot? How can we get everybody out weeding the carrots this afternoon even though there are all those watermelons to pick? And how can I get November to come more quickly, so that Oona and Wiley and I can take a nap together and the killing frost will give me some hours alone to read?

It’s the end of August. We’re no longer shaping the rhythm of the season. We merely step into the morning and let the rhythm of the harvest shuffle us along. The products of this rhythm — the song, let’s say — are almost unbearably fleeting. The tomatoes get sold, the goat barn gets dirty again, the turkeys eat and eat and eat until they themselves are eaten. The products of an entire season’s labor are devoured by shareholders and crew and customers and neighbors and friends, and the residue is harrowed back into the ground.

This is why I like the marks on the John Deere. They’re a reminder, a register of all the countless repetitions we perform. The other farmer (a potato grower, I’ve heard, who recently passed away) and I sitting in the same seat, looking back as we travel forward, resting our palms on the fender to stabilize our bodies, putting sweat to metal, making food for people’s bellies — sure — but here’s what’s left: a small, corroded imprint of our hands.

With his wife, Oona Coy, Ben James runs Town Farm in Northampton, Massachusetts. This year he is obsessed with compost-turning pigs, greenhouses on wheels, and doubling the value of food stamps at farmers’ markets.

Let’s put an end to ‘dietary tribalism’

By Andy Bellatti

Every time I’m on social media, I am reminded of a growing trend that worries me — let’s call it dietary tribalism. I use this term to refer to the many fractured groups with conflicting dietary views who, for the most part, don’t realize just how much they have in common.

This recent piece in the New York Times about the “challenges of plant-based eating in a meat-based world” got me thinking, as it described several people’s efforts to adopt a vegan lifestyle and how they were fraught with challenges. Not only did I find this lens problematic (for one, not everyone finds the transition that difficult), but I was struck by how it repeated a familiar, yet inaccurate frame: that one is either a vegan or they’ll eat an entire cow in one sitting.

But it bothered me even more that the comments turned, predictably, into “veganism isn’t natural” vs. “everyone should go vegan.” It was almost the perfect microcosm of what happens in the food world when, rather than discuss issues we have in common, we take sides. All this mud-slinging detracts from a more important conversation.

As I see it, all Americans need to eat more plant-based foods and less processed food, and to be more mindful of where their food comes from, how it is grown, how the people who grow it are treated, and how our dietary choices affect the environment. Instead of these core messages sinking in, dietary tribalism is rampant these days. You have –  just to name a few — the Paleo folks, the vegans, the raw vegans, the low-carbers, and the fruitarians. And while there is certainly something productive and empowering about engaging and connecting with like-minded individuals, these groups often turn into echo chambers where everyone agrees and, occasionally, points out how one or more of the other tribes has it all wrong. Meanwhile, Big Food continues churning out a litany of highly processed junk, young children are developing Type 2 diabetes (once known as “adult-onset diabetes”), genetically modified crops — and the pesticides they’re engineered to resist — are seemingly everywhere, and food support for the poor is seriously threatened.

In all our “no, but I have this mountain of research to back me up” statements, we easily overlook one critical unifying point — we’re all seeking out the same goal: health.

Regardless of our views on tofu, raw milk, and coconut oil, most of us who are passionate about nutrition and wellness are not happy with the Standard American Diet or the fact that highly processed and minimally nutritious “foods” are the norm. The fact that millions of Americans have minimal access to fresh, healthy food angers us. We don’t want kids’ food pumped with artificial dyes. We can’t believe it takes more than 30 ingredients to make a Dunkin’ Donuts blueberry cake donut. We are appalled at what the average elementary school student is fed in the cafeteria. We are terrified of Monsanto’s ever-tightening vice grip on global agriculture.

Of course we’re going to have differences. I certainly don’t agree with the schools of thought that consider fiber meaningless or think fruit should only be eaten on its own before noon or the idea that all humans must eat meat. And I laugh a little when I hear people tell me they think all whole grains and beans are “poisons.”

As a nutrition professional, I will set the record straight when I see basic nutrition information grossly distorted, and when I see food companies attempt to pass off highly processed junk as “better for you” simply because, say, the sugar has been replaced with aspartame.

But it’s the back-and-forth mud-slinging between members of different “dietary tribes” that troubles me most. I often imagine all the power that could be harnessed if we stopped and joined forces on some key issues, such as: getting food dyes and trans fat out of our food supply, demanding that the presence of genetically modified organisms and artificial hormones (at the very least) be labeled, ridding schools of nutritionally empty foods, and bringing more access to healthy foods in “food deserts.”

The past few weeks have seen the “pink slime” debacle, the arsenic in chicken feed horror, another crack down at a giant egg facility, and various food recalls (sushi tuna “scrape” being the latest). These are the issues that should awaken us from our dietary bubbles and get us thinking about the bigger picture. And yet, we are often told to pick one food system issue and privilege it over all others, rather than make space for multiple, complex possibilities. Take this recent Freakonomics video, for instance, which asks: “Does Eating Local Hurt The Environment?” It argues that eating less meat is more important than eating local, rather than making a place for both approaches.

Coalition politics are often the key to paradigm shifts. And it’s more than possible to disagree with someone on nutrition issues and still have some common goals. Who, after all, can claim to be against a better food system? Now, more than ever, the grass-fed beef advocates and the tempeh fans need to be sitting at the same table.

‘We All Are Implicated’: Wendell Berry Laments a Disconnection From Community and the Land

Ed Reinke, AP Images

The essayist, novelist, and poet Wendell Berry, shown at his home in Kentucky last year, delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Monday in Washington.

By Scott Carlson

At a time that has followed crises in the global economy, unrest in society, and deterioration in the world’s ecosystems, the National Endowment for the Humanities could not have picked a more potent speaker than Wendell Berry for this year’s Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. The essayist, novelist, and poet—a Kentuckian long known for his advocacy for family farming, community relationships, and sustainability—delivered a characteristically eloquent yet scathing critique of the industrial economy and its toll on humanity in his remarks here on Monday.

“The two great aims of industrialism—replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy—seem close to fulfillment,” Mr. Berry said. “At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny. Corporate industrialism itself has exposed the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given precedence to the common good.”

The Jefferson Lecture “is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities,” according to the NEH, which sponsors it every year.

Before the speech, delivered at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Mr. Berry wryly commended the NEH’s courage in inviting him without first reading his remarks. At the end of the event, Jim Leach, the chairman of the NEH, humorously added: “The views of the speaker do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States government.”

Mr. Berry’s reputation and strident prose must have promised fireworks: An official with the NEH said that Mr. Berry’s lecture was sold out three days after it was announced (although some seats were unclaimed on a cold, rainy night in Washington). Samuel Alito, the conservative Supreme Court justice, was rumored to be there.

Mr. Berry’s speech was a discussion of affection and its power to bind people to community. It was also a meditation on place and those who “stick” to it—as caretakers and curators. “In affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy,” Mr. Berry said.

The opposite of the “sticker”—in the words of Mr. Berry’s mentor, the writer Wallace Stegner—is the “boomer,” those who “pillage and run.” Mr. Berry described James B. Duke, the founder of the American Tobacco Company, as a boomer who had an impact on the author’s own farming family history: In 1907, Mr. Berry’s grandfather sought to sell his tobacco crop in Louisville, so the family could maintain a meager existence on their land in Kentucky. But thanks to prices driven down by the monopolistic American Tobacco Company, his grandfather came home without a dime.

Mr. Berry once encountered James B. Duke—in bronze, if not in the flesh—during a visit to Duke University.

“On one side of his pedestal is the legend: INDUSTRIALIST. On the other side is another single word: PHILANTHROPIST. The man thus commemorated seemed to me terrifyingly ignorant, even terrifyingly innocent, of the connection between his industry and his philanthropy.”

That disconnection is endemic to our era. “That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated,” Mr. Berry said. Our relationship to the land and to community is increasingly abstract and distanced.

“By economic proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods ignorantly purchased, now we all are boomers,” he said. “We have progressed to the belief that humans are intelligent enough, or soon will be, to transcend all limits. … Upon this belief rests the further belief that we can have ‘economic growth’ without limits.”

The antidote, Mr. Berry said, is affection, connection, and a broader definition of education—to study and appreciate practical skills like the arts of “land use, life support, healing, housekeeping, homemaking.” Mr. Berry said that we should appreciate the word “economy” for its original meaning of “household management.”

“So I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities,” Mr. Berry said. “I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods. This is the economy that the most public and influential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us.”

To read Wendell Berry’s complete lecture, click here.

We just planted our Sweet Potato slips, which are like sprouts and each one makes one big plant with several tubers. We also planted Okra, Edamame (edible green soybean pods)  and Asian noodle beans. Next we will be direct seeding the first planting of summer squash and cucumbers. And soon we will start transplanting our celery seedlings into the ground under shade cover.
This is a very exciting time of year.  The next six weeks will be full of planting. With our tomato, pepper, eggplant and basil transplants, we always hold out until the very last frost has passed, usually around May 10th. Until then, we will continue to care for them in our propogation greenhouse. Most are standing a foot tall, and some up to two feet! When we walk into our small greenhouse it is very humid and feels alive; it’s like a tropical jungle in there.
We have an abundance of beautiful new lettuces, so you should see one green and one red in your share this week. Our early surprise this year is broccoli and you will also find a beautiful head in your share.

Lots of baby goats have been born and we have an abundance of milking goats. If you are interested or know somebody who is looking to start or increase their milking goat herd, we are selling a good amount of them for a very good price. They are highly productive and adapted to the summer heat of southern Arizona. We are also offering some of the kids for sale. Call or email for more information ASAP.

By the way, did you know that we now offer our own eggs as a CSA share?  You can sign up for a six-week share for $24; one dozen per week for $4 each.

Thanks again for being pioneers and supporters of this local organic food movement,

-The Avalon Gardens Family

Spiritualution - Justice to the People
Click here to check us out on Facebook

CSA Harvest List

Sometimes we have a featured vegetable of the week and we will give you historical information, interesting facts, and delicious recipes to try.  If you click on the vegetables in the harvest list, it will bring you to the past newsletter where that vegetable was featured.  All of our past newsletters can be found on our Farm Report website.

• NEW: Broccoli
• BACK: Parsley
• Baby Kale, red and green
• Da Cheong Chae:  Mixture of Tatsoi and PakChoy variety for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Lettuce-  red and green
• Carrots
• Beets -red

Vegetable of the Week: Broccoli

Broccoli is a member of the cabbage family, and is closely related to cauliflower. Its cultivation originated in Italy. Broccolo, its Italian name, means “cabbage sprout.” Broccoli’s name is derived from the Latin word brachium, which means branch or arm, a reflection of its tree-like shape that features a compact head of florets attached by small stems to a larger stalk. Because of its different components, this vegetable provides a complex of tastes and textures, ranging from soft and flowery (the florets) to fibrous and crunchy (the stem and stalk). Its color can range from deep sage to dark green to purplish-green, depending upon the variety.

Broccoli has its roots in Italy. In ancient Roman times, it was developed from wild cabbage, a plant that more resembles collards than broccoli. It spread through out the Near East where it was appreciated for its edible flower heads and was subsequently brought back to Italy where it was further cultivated. Broccoli was introduced to the United States in colonial times, popularized by Italian immigrants who brought this prized vegetable with them to the New World.

Broccoli is an excellent source of immune-supportive vitamin C, anti-inflammatory vitamin K, free-radical-scavenging vitamin A (through its concentration of carotenoid phytonutrients), heart-healthy folate, and digestive-health-supporting fiber. It is a very good source of enzyme-activating manganese; muscular-system-supporting potassium, protein, and magnesium; energy-producing vitamin B2, vitamin B6, and phosphorus; and anti-inflammatory omega-3 fatty acids. Additionally, it is a good source of energy-producing vitamin B1, vitamin B3, vitamin B5, and iron; bone-healthy calcium; and immune-supportive zinc and vitamin E

Broccoli is also concentrated in phytonutrients. In one particular phytonutrient category–glucosinolates–broccoli is simply outstanding. The isothiocyanates (ITCs) made from broccoli’s glucosinolates are the key to broccoli’s cancer-preventive benefits.

A Few Quick Serving Ideas

• Toss pasta with olive oil, pine nuts and steamed broccoli florets. Add salt and pepper to taste.
• Steam or Stir-Fry with other veggies to add to your rice or other grains.
• Puree cooked broccoli, then combine with seasonings of your choice to make a simple, yet delicious, soup.
• Add broccoli florets and chopped stalks to omelets.
• Cut up in small florets and use them as a snack with a yogurt dip

Joel Salatin responds to New York Times’ ‘Myth of Sustainable Meat’

By Joel Salatin

Cows at Polyface Farm. Photo by Amber Karnes.

The recent editorial by James McWilliams, titled “The Myth of Sustainable Meat,” contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a book, and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense to merit a response. But since it specifically mentioned Polyface, a rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book Folks, This Ain’t Normal.

Let’s go point by point. First, that grass-grazing cows emit more methane than grain-fed ones. This is factually false. Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical. Wetlands emit some 95 percent of all methane in the world; herbivores are insignificant enough to not even merit consideration. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start draining wetlands. Quick, or we’ll all perish. I assume he’s figuring that since it takes longer to grow a beef on grass than on grain, the difference in time adds days to the emissions. But grain production carries a host of maladies far worse than methane. This is simply cherry-picking one negative out of many positives to smear the foundation of how soil builds: herbivore pruning, perennial disturbance-rest cycles, solar-grown biomass, and decomposition. This is like demonizing marriage because a good one will include some arguments.

As for his notion that it takes too much land to grass-finish, his figures of 10 acres per animal are assuming the current normal mismanagement of pastures. At Polyface, we call it neanderthal management, because most livestock farmers have not yet joined the 20th century with electric fencing, ponds, piped water, and modern scientific aerobic composting (only as old as chemical fertilization). Hence, while his figures comparing the relative production of grain to grass may sound compelling, they are like comparing the learning opportunities under a terrible teacher versus a magnificent teacher. Many farmers, in many different climates, are now using space-age technology, biomimicry, and close management to get exponential increases in forage production. The rainforest, by the way, is not being cut to graze cattle. It’s being cut to grow transgenic corn and soybeans. North America had twice as many herbivores 500 years ago than it does today due to the pulsing of the predator-prey-pruning cycle on perennial prairie polycultures. And that was without any corn or soybeans at all.

Apparently if you lie often and big enough, some people will believe it: Pastured chicken has a 20 percent greater impact on global warming? Says who? The truth is that those industrial chicken houses are not stand-alone structures. They require square miles of grain to be carted into them, and square miles of land to handle the manure. Of course, many times that land is not enough. To industrial farmers’ relief, more often than not a hurricane comes along just in time to flush the toilet, kill the fish, and send pathogens into the ocean. That’s a nice way to reduce the alleged footprint, but it’s devilish sleight of hand with the data to assume that ecological toxicity compensates for the true land base needed to sustain a factory farm.

While it’s true that at Polyface our omnivores (poultry and pigs) do eat local GMO (genetically modified organism)-free grain in addition to the forage, the land base required to feed and metabolize the manure is no different than that needed to sustain the same animals in a confinement setting. Even if they ate zero pasturage, the land is the same. The only difference is our animals get sunshine, exercise, fresh pasture salad bars, fresh air, and a respectful life. Chickens walking on pasture certainly do not have any more leg sprains than those walking in a confinement facility. To suggest otherwise, as McWilliams does, is sheer nonsense. Walking is walking — and it’s generally considered to be a healthy practice, unless you’re a tyrant.

Interestingly, in a lone concession to compassion, McWilliams decries ranging hogs with rings in their noses to keep them from rooting, lamenting that this is “one of their most basic instincts.” Notice that he does not reconcile this moral imperative with his love affair with confinement hog factories. Nothing much to use their noses for in there. For the record, Polyface never rings hog noses, and in the few cases where we’ve purchased hogs with rings, we take them out. We want them to fully express their pigness. By moving them frequently using modern electric fencing, polyethylene water piping, high-tech float valves, and scientifically designed feed dispensers, we do not create nor suffer the problems encountered by earlier large-scale outdoor hog operations 100 years ago. McWilliams has apparently never had the privilege of visiting a first-rate, modern, highly managed, pastured hog operation. He thinks we’re all stuck in the early 1900s, and that’s a shame because he’d discover the answers to his concerns are already here. I wonder where his paycheck comes from?

Then McWilliams moves on to the argument that economic realities would kick in if pastured livestock became normal, driving farmers to scale up and end up right where we are today. What a clever ploy: justify the horrible by eliminating the alternatives. At Polyface, we certainly do not discourage scaling up — we actually encourage it. We think more pasture-based farms should scale up. Between the current abysmal state of mismanagement, however, and efficient operations, is an astronomical opportunity to enjoy economic and ecological advantages. McWilliams is basing his data and assumptions on the poorest, the average or below. If you want to demonize something, always pick the lowest performers. But if you compare the best the industry has to offer with the best the pasture-based systems have to offer, the factory farms don’t have a prayer. Using portable infrastructure, tight management, and techno-glitzy tools, farmers running pastured hog operations practically eliminate capitalization costs and vet bills.

Finally, McWilliams moves to the knock-out punch in his discussion of nutrient cycling, charging specifically that Polyface is a charade because it depends on grain from industrial farms to maintain soil fertility. First of all, at Polyface we do not assume that all nutrient movement is anti-environmental. In fact, one of the biggest reasons for animals in nature is to move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which insures that manure will concentrate on high lookout spots rather than in the valleys. Perhaps this is why no ecosystem exists that is devoid of animals. The fact is that nutrient movement is inherently nature-healing.

But, it doesn’t move very far. And herein lies the difference between grain used at Polyface and that used by the industry: We care where ours comes from. It’s not just a commodity. It has an origin and an ending, start to finish, farmer to eater. The closer we can connect the carbon cycles, the more environmentally normal we will become.

Second, herbivores are the exception to the entire negative nutrient flow argument because by pruning back the forage to restart the rapid biomass accumulation photosynthetic engine, the net carbon flow compensates for anything lost through harvest. Herbivores do not require tillage or annuals, and that is why all historically deep soils have been created by them, not by omnivores. It’s fascinating that McWilliams wants to demonize pasture-based livestock for not closing all the nutrient loops, but has no problem, apparently, with the horrendous nutrient toxicity like dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey created by chemical fertilizer runoff to grow grain so that the life of a beef could be shortened. Unbelievable. In addition, this is one reason Polyface continues to fight for relaxing food safety regulations to allow on-farm slaughtering, precisely so we can indeed keep all these nutrients on the farm and not send them the rendering plants. If the greenies who don’t want historically normal farm activities like slaughter to occur on rural acreage could understand how devastating these government regulations actually are to the environmental economy, perhaps McWilliams wouldn’t have this bullet in his arsenal. And yes, human waste should be put back on the land as well, to help close the loop.

Third, at Polyface, we struggle upstream. Historically, omnivores were salvage operations. Hogs ate spoiled milk, whey, acorns, chestnuts, spoiled fruit, and a host of other farmstead products. Ditto for chickens, who dined on kitchen scraps and garden refuse. That today 50 percent of all the human edible food produced in the world goes into landfills or greenie-endorsed composting operations rather than through omnivores is both ecologically and morally reprehensible. At Polyface, we’ve tried for many, many years to get kitchen scraps back from restaurants to feed our poultry, but the logistics are a nightmare. The fact is that in America we have created a segregated food and farming system. In the perfect world, Polyface would not sell eggs. Instead, every kitchen, both domestic and commercial, would have enough chickens proximate to handle all the scraps. This would eliminate the entire egg industry and current heavy grain feeding paradigm. At Polyface, we only purport to be doing the best we can do as we struggle through a deviant, historically abnormal food and farming system. We didn’t create what is and we may not solve it perfectly. But we’re sure a lot farther toward real solutions than McWilliams can imagine. And if society would move where we want to go, and the government regulators would let us move where we need to go, and the industry would not try to criminalize us as we try to go there, we’ll all be a whole lot better off and the earthworms will dance.

Joel Salatin is the owner of Polyface Farm — which was featured in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the documentary film Food, Inc. He is a third generation family farmer working his land in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley with his wife, Teresa, son Daniel, daughter Rachel, and their families. Polyface Farm, an organic grass-fed farm, services more than 3,000 families, 10 retail outlets and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs. Salatin writes extensively in magazines such as Stockman Grass Farmer, Acres USA, and American Agriculture.

The Value of Our Produce

By Ben James

Last week at market a customer complained about the price of our dill (two dollars for a not-huge bunch). He said the price was an outrage, but he was smiling, so I was too confused to ask why he was going ahead and buying the dill, or even how he’d arrived at his notion of its value.

This is not an unusual occurrence; every week at market we get at least one or two potential customers who shake their heads in dismay at a $2.75 head of lettuce or a $4.00 pint of strawberries. Sometimes I engage in conversation, sometimes I don’t. I try not to get defensive, and I frequently encourage a customer not to buy the product, offering suggestions of where to find cheaper food, either at the market or elsewhere. I do my best not to reveal that the value of our produce is a question that regularly fills me with a tremendous amount of anxiety.

What is a carrot worth? A bunch of kale? A handful of berries? Too often, I find myself on the tractor making quick calculations in my head. For a bed of carrots, there are the soil amendments, the cover crop last fall, the chicken manure, the organic fertilizer, the plowing, tilling, seeding, irrigating, thinning, weeding, harvesting, washing, bunching, packing, and selling. Plus the cost of the tractors, implements, and fuel. Plus the cost of childcare and preschool. Plus, somehow, all the time spent on the computer (where does that fit in)? And I haven’t even mentioned the cost of the land (hundreds of thousands of dollars, in our case). The sheer number of labor hours and material and property costs that went into helping this soil produce these carrots. I ought to shellac the carrots and hang them on the wall.

For us, the value of our produce can be measured — at least imprecisely — by how hard we and our crew work to grow it.

But what if the workers were just slow weeding the carrots that day? Or what if the farmer himself is a hack? What if it takes him three seedings over that many weeks before he even manages to get a row of carrots to germinate? (I’m not naming names….) Should the customer be expected to pay for the incompetence of the grower?

Fortunately for me, I suppose, incompetence is much less an issue than the very nature of the project we’ve undertaken. We grow many different crops (46 and counting) on a small amount of land (11 acres), and this — as each of our variously weedy rows can attest — is a fundamentally inefficient thing to do. Although we strategize endlessly about how to make our operation run more smoothly — setting up systems, buying new equipment, instructing and correcting the crew — it’s a hopeless endeavor. Eventually, we’ll need either to substantially increase the size of our farm or shift our marketing strategy to grow only a handful of the most profitable crops. Until then, we mechanize whenever and wherever we can, but even the potato harvester and the water-wheel transplanter I’ve got my eye on would have a hard time paying for themselves at our scale, and so we’re left with that most versatile and least cost-effective of technologies: our hands.

All of our hands: Oona’s and mine, the hands of our four full-time employees, plus the scattered extra people who frequently fill in the week. And if there’s anything to match the anxiety of assigning a value to our produce, it is, for me, the challenge of figuring out how much to pay our crew (currently at least $9 an hour).

I was raised by leftist labor organizers in Kentucky, Detroit, and Queens, and it’s fair to say that the plight of the Big Boss Man was not a frequent topic of conversation around our breakfast table. I learned the importance of work and the compromised position of the worker, and I was taught to question at every level the judgment and the ethics of the person in charge. So, to that small subset of the American population that was raised in the inner-city by Marxists before going on to start small, diversified farms and employ several recent college graduates, I say, “Hey, I can relate.” It’s not easy to be a boss, especially when your workers are getting paid more than you are, the pigweed is as high as your navel, and the man at the farmers’ market is smiling while he complains about the price of your dill.

And although some parts of Oona’s and my situation are unusual, the basic equation is not: Small-scale farmers and their employees are earning nowhere near the money they should be making for the endless, all-encompassing, dangerous, exhausting work they’re doing. Easy to say, but difficult to figure out what to do about it, whether you’re the farmer or the customer.

A whole can of worms, these questions, and in the midst of all of it is my son, Silas. He is four this summer and recently he’s made some startling revelations, namely that this is our farm, we own it, these are our vegetables and our workers, and momma and poppa are in charge. I’m pleased by his pride and sense of ownership in the farm, but I also want to laugh and say, “Yeah, we own these vegetables, but do you know what they’re actually worth?”

I also cringe a bit at the entitlement that comes with the package.

The few times I’ve seen Silas try to play boss to the crew, I’ve pulled him aside to say that when he learns how to do the jobs faster and better than all of the workers, he’ll have earned the right to tell them what to do. (I don’t say he’ll also need to learn to see things from their point of view, but he will.)

Recently he and I walked across the road so he could meet the new lambs I’d put on pasture. Along the way we checked to see what crops were coming in. The first sugar snaps brought tremendous satisfaction. I’d known they were there, but for him it was like discovering a room you didn’t know you had in your own house. His mouth was full of the juice and strings. We walked over a few beds and I pointed down a row.

“Go check out those,” I said, and he stepped into the field.
“It’s kale,” he said.
“Nope.”
“It’s onions.”
“No, look closer.”
He bent down and rubbed his palms across the curly greens.
“Look in the ground,” I said.
“Hey! It’s carrots!”

He’d been asking about them for weeks, and now we pulled a few, cleaned them off in the wet grass, and he ate his first one of the season. It was pale orange and slender, not even as fat as a Sharpie marker. It was gone before I could blink. And I say this with all sincerity: It was worth it.

California Authors series: Rites of spring

By David Mas Masumoto

Spring arrives with the first warm breezes and fogless mornings in our Valley. On our 80-acre organic farm south of Fresno, I disk our soil, breaking winter’s crust. The peaches and nectarines awaken with blossoms, initially revealing their pink buds, then blooming into a glorious canopy. Millions of pink dots blanket the landscape. A new year has begun.

But harsh memories of a cold, bitter winter linger because it rarely rained. Welcome to a new climate age; massive swings in weather have become the rule.

Every spring, I plow the earth and something is plowed into me. Usually it’s the spirit of the land, a sense of renewal, a bonding of family with the earth – and now it includes our daughter who has come back home to work the farm.

But this year that something is a new realization: Change, especially with the weather, is the new normal.

The lack of rain troubles me the most. We’ll get very little surface water due to a limited snowpack in the Sierra. I can pump from my wells, but water tables will quickly drop; wells can go dry. Most of the Central Valley has received less than half of normal rainfall. This may change with a late March miracle, but long-range forecasts are not optimistic.

Of course, what is normal? Typical weather models are based on 30-year increments, counted by decades. So if you were born in the 1960s or earlier, your weather memories don’t count. (Lending credence to my claim, that as I get older, the weather just isn’t what it used to be.)

Droughts are common, occurring in 1976-77, 1987-92 and recently in 2007-09. We farmers live with risk; a lack of rain has been fairly common in the last century. Old-timers remember the Great Depression, including California’s decade-long drought from 1928-37.

But we have been spoiled – we’re ending a century of abnormally consistent weather years. We developed farming systems built on a culture of expectation. When considering much longer timelines, the relatively wet periods in the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California. Our few dry years have typically been followed by extremely wet seasons.

We’re entering a new “weirding time.” Much more volatility is to be expected, with extremes in weather part of the new norm. There’s still debate concerning how much is a direct result from global warming, but it’s clear: something is changing.

This past year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its climate zone guide. Nationwide, a warming trend has advanced northward. Planting guides suggest gardeners can experiment with new plants typically grown in warmer regions. That doesn’t mean I’ll plant bananas and pineapples on my farm. It may simply mean spring comes sooner and lasts longer with more erratic weather.

I know change comes slow to a farm and farmers. But I do recognize a few years of severe drought demands immediate actions.

In San Diego, some farmers are stumping their avocado trees, cutting them in half to save water; they lose a few years of crop but try to keep their investment alive. Other farmers are switching from lower value row crops, like vegetables and other annuals, to higher value tree crops, hoping to earn more from their limited supply of water. These farmers will quickly learn a new reality: perennial crops mean they can’t be uprooted and transplanted; you plant with a future expectation.

Even on our small farm, we’ve begun a gradual process of change. One of the best acts I did years ago was to fallow 15 acres, much to the chagrin of my father. He grew up with the premise you farm every precious acre you had.

I rationalized: why fight these swings of weather, not to mention poor prices (for raisins a decade ago)? With a new pioneer spirit, I pulled out old vines and, among other benefits, created a new avenue that splits the farm. What a joy every spring as I rediscover the new short-cut on the farm. Who wouldn’t jump at such an opportunity in life?

Major shifts in weather point to a new challenge: Survival in agriculture will be based on the ability to change. I can imagine a two-tier strategy. One is based on the very large model: economies of scale benefiting the largest and most efficient operations. The other works for us small operators who are adept at the culture of change; we easily accept, adapt and adopt, finding our niche in the new food chain.

What I’m not so confident about is policy and technology. We don’t have policies in place that are equipped to cope with the new normal. For example, we are still fighting over water as if we’re clans locked in tribal warfare. We cling to a myopic sense of time: What happens when we have a 30-year drought?

Also, many believe that we can invent our way out of problems. Technology has created miracles; productivity increased, labor-saving machines introduced and are now part of the landscape. But efficiencies can only reach a certain level before there’s a decline on a return of investment. Have we begun to max out technological benefits?

I’m an optimist who has faith in a new creative human spirit that will foster hope on the farm. I believe in the art of farming. Great farmers will balance the forces of economics and productivity with the forces of nature, we will respond to weather as opposed to the fallacy of controlling nature. I don’t seek solutions, thinking I have all the answers. Farming in the future is more like a mystery to live; I accept that I won’t (and can’t) farm the same way every year.

Recently, farm timelines have changed for me. Our daughter, Nikiko, has returned home after college and graduate school, and is taking over the farm. I watch her struggle with learning curves and witness her response to new challenges. I also bite my tongue, knowing my way of doing things may not fit this new age of agriculture.

She’s better equipped to handle change: She doesn’t expect to, nor want to, do it all my way. She’s young. She’s naive. She’s full of enthusiasm. All that’s exactly required for future springs.

But perhaps this isn’t much different from when I came back to farm after running away for college. Or when my father took a huge risk following World War II and the tragic uprooting and evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. He returned to the Valley, gambled and bought a farm, and planted family roots.

Likewise, is this any more dramatic than my grandparents who left Japan, sailed across an ocean to farm and work in a new, very foreign land? They struggled but stayed – a shared story by many whose ancestors who came to California from other places.

Spring does this to me: I think a lot about what is and what is to be. At the same time, plowing the earth is an ancient rite, a renewal of the past, a ritual others have done for centuries and hopefully will do for many more. Like many, I’m reborn every spring.

CALIFORNIA AUTHORS SERIES

To read other installments of the California Authors series written by John Lescroart, Georgeanne Brennan, Gerald Haslam, Belle Yang, Dale Maharidge and Eva Rutland, go to www.sacbee.com/CAauthors

We are still in the “day at a time” season, “will-it-frost-or-not tonight?” In the last week we had mornings at 22 degrees and highs into the mid 80’s. The leaves of all the mesquites are now in a very rapid growth and their flower buds used to pollinate and produce beanpods are swelling up. The climate changes that we are all experiencing is even tough on the experienced old mesquites. They used to not leaf and bud out until all danger of frost is over. In gardening a little risk is good, and we have planted many things out in the ground except the most frost sensitive: tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, beans, basil, cucumber, squash, melons, okra, and others. We will transplant our main summer crops in the second week of May and start direct seeding at the end of April. Our propagating greenhouse is now becoming a jungle-like atmosphere with several hundred tomato plants in one gallon pots already two feet tall, as well as hundreds of hot and sweet peppers and a hundred eggplants.

Another very exciting heritage crop is our White Sonoran Wheat; the same variety that was brought into this area with Father Kino over 300 years ago. Several small and larger growers committed themselves to regrow the seeds to create  a better seedstock and make them available for others, as well as selling it to bakers, breweries, restaurants, and the public.  It is know for its good gluten and protein content and is also used in Sonoran large tortillas.  The wheat is now beginning to mature and with about three acres we hope to have a good yield. We just hosted a group of growers at Avalon Organic Gardens & EcoVillage beginning a partnership on how to educate the public about its use and to promote and make it available.  It is an exciting outreach for the future and all participants are very special people.

By the way, did you know that we now offer our own eggs as a CSA share?  You can sign up for a six-week share for $24; one dozen per week for $4 each.

Thanks again for being pioneers and supporters of this local organic food movement,

-The Avalon Gardens Family

Spiritualution - Justice to the People
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CSA Harvest List

Sometimes we have a featured vegetable of the week and we will give you historical information, interesting facts, and delicious recipes to try.  If you click on the vegetables in the harvest list, it will bring you to the past newsletter where that vegetable was featured.  All of our past newsletters can be found on our Farm Report website.

• NEW: Red Radishes
• NEW: Spinach (mixture of green and red veined)
• NEW:Baby Kale, red and green
• NEW: Da Cheong Chae:  Mixture of Tatsoi and PakChoy variety for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Lettuce-  Romaine
• Rainbow Swiss Chard
• Carrots
• Beets -Chioggia- red, with white rings

The mother who stood up to Monsanto in Argentina

By Rachel Cernansky

When Sofia Gatica’s 3-day-old daughter died from kidney failure, she didn’t connect it with an environmental problem. It was only as she noticed neighbor after neighbor developing health problems that she started to wonder about the agrochemicals that were being sprayed on the farms nearby.

“I started seeing children with mouth covers, mothers with scarves wrapped around their heads to cover their baldness, due to chemotherapy,” she told me recently through a translator. It was then, Gatica says, she knew something was seriously wrong.

Her city, Ituzaingó, Argentina, is surrounded by soybean fields where farmers use some of the same chemicals used on crops grown in the U.S. — chiefly glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup. But in Ituzaingó, the industrial-scale farms that grow soybeans for export have crept right up to the edge of the residential community, and many of the chemicals are sprayed aerially, allowing them to drift wherever the wind or water will take them.

“There are soybeans to the north, to the south, and to the east, and when they spray, they spray over the people because there’s no distance,” Gatica said, adding that some homes are less than five yards from where the fields start.

But thanks to the actions of this working-class mother, and the international movement she has built against Monsanto, things in Argentina are slowly changing. And, as one of this year’s recipients of the Goldman Environmental Prize, Gatica now has a chance to inspire those in farm communities around the world.

A few years ago, Gatica co-founded the Mothers of Ituzaingó, a group that started going door to door to find out more about the health problems in its community. This would become the first epidemiological study of the area and produced some shocking results: high rates of neurological and respiratory disease, birth defects and infant mortality, and cancer rates 41 times the national average.

Photo courtesy of the Goldman Environmental Prize.

Then Gatica and her fellow activists mobilized a loud and public response to these problems. “We blockaded the spraying machines. We would get into the fields to block them,” she said. “We carried out protests at the Ministry of Agriculture and the Health Ministry. We took sick people to the ministry.”

And they found researchers to study the links between the increasing health problems and the pesticide spraying. “We were able to verify that people have three to four agricultural chemicals in their blood: endosulfan, heptachlorine, hexachlorocyclohexane,” as well as others, she said.

Endosulfan has been banned in more than 80 countries because it is so toxic to the environment and human health, and it was added last May to the U.N.’s list of persistent organic pollutants to be eliminated globally — but it was permitted for use in Argentina until the Mothers of Ituzaingó’s activism ultimately led to a ban, which is expected to go into effect in 2013.

According to Gatica, a report from four months ago found that cancer kills 33 percent of Ituzaingó residents. “So they sent in more doctors to our community. But that is not the solution,” she said. “What we are proposing is not to plant, so that there’s no need to fumigate near residential areas or waterways.”

Moving soy production far from people’s homes may still be a ways off, but Gatica has plenty to show for her activism.

Over the last several years, municipal ordinances have been passed around the country creating mandatory buffer zones between aerial spraying and residential areas. In 2010, Argentina’s Supreme Court ruled that agrochemicals could not be sprayed near populated areas — and that the burden of proof would be shifted so that rather than residents having to prove chemical spraying causes health problems, the government and soy producers must prove them safe (an approach that industry lobbyists have kept from happening here in the U.S.).

But these victories have not been easy.

“To be able to get things done in the community, we’ve had to give up some rights,” she said. For example, the Ituzaingó residents had to sign a waiver agreeing not to sue an agribusiness in order to get drinking water that wasn’t contaminated with pesticides.

And then there are the more direct threats that Gatica and her family have faced.

“Somebody came inside my house with a weapon. I was told not to ‘screw around with the soybeans.’ I would get phone calls where I’d be told that I would only have two children the next day,” she said. Asked if she ever found out who was behind these personal attacks, she said, “I had the police investigate this, but I was told that the file was secret.”

None of this has stopped Gatica, who is spearheading a South America-wide resistance to Monsanto and the industrial model of agriculture it represents.

“We’ve been to Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Chile, and many places within our country where we tell of our experience and we show people how to defend their rights,” she said. Gatica and the other mothers remind people that the government’s job is to serve the public. “We are the ones paying their salaries and they have to respond to us,” she reminds activists.

Gatica plans to establish a foundation with the money from the Goldman Prize to fund more research into the presence of agrochemicals in the bodies of Ituzaingó residents. She says most studies are carried out by the government and find that agrochemical levels fall within allowable limits. But, she said, “our bodies don’t have to have any agrochemicals.”

And the larger, longer-term struggle is against Monsanto. While it’s not the only agrochemical company with a presence in the area, she said, “it’s the biggest one. Monsanto is the one that’s basically appropriated all of Argentina with no consideration.”

Gatica also hopes to see the U.S. government play a greater role in reigning in seed and pesticide-producing multinationals, so there may be less of a ripple effect elsewhere in the world. She told me she hopes “that the government itself brings to trial these multinationals, who are causing so much harm to many countries, and giving your country a bad name.”

Using Dairy to Build a Prison Reform Moovement

Picture the good old days when a network of family farms just outside a city provided food for nearby urban eaters—an early 20th-century reality that seems quaint from the perspective of someone navigating today’s globalized agricultural system. While local food activists are working hard to rebuild that economic connection, a less savory relationship between cities and their rural surroundings has largely taken the place of an agricultural one in New York State—one with more to do with drug offenses than corn subsidies.

Mass incarceration—the population explosion of American prisons as a result of stricter sentencing associated with the war on drugs—has meant new prisons and jobs for many towns that until recently had more cows than people. That’s created an often-tense relationship between rural areas and the urban centers that populate their prisons. Now, a social enterprise called Milk Not Jails is aiming to turn that tension into something much healthier.

In New York, the prison population has tripled since 1980. The Department of Corrections costs the state $2.5 billion annually and employs 31,000 workers. The ranks of prisoners are disproportionately pulled from minority communities within urban areas but support small towns across the state—75 percent of all prisoners hail from just seven different New York City neighborhoods—making it politically challenging to build a broad coalition to reform a criminal justice system with huge economic and human cost.

“Locking people up is expensive. And in a time of New York’s budgetary crisis, we think it’s an obvious place to look for […] savings,” says Brenden Beck, the co-founder, along with Lauren Melodia, of Milk Not Jails. Their idea is to refashion the urban-rural relationship into a “mutually supportive one, not a destructive one.” The strategy? Boost the dairy economy of the Hudson Valley by connecting farmers with consumers in New York City. “We want New York’s urban residents to support its rural residents by buying their milk, not going to their prisons,” says Beck.

The project’s idea comes at a time when sentencing reform for low-level drug offenders has caused a huge decline in New York’s prison population—from 72,899 prisoners in 1999 to 58,456 in 2009, according to the Sentencing Project [PDF]. And for the first time in generations, the state’s dairy industry is experiencing its own mini-boom. Dairy has long been New York’s most important agricultural product, but if you eat Greek yogurt, it’s likely you’ve helped support new manufacturing jobs in the kinds of towns upstate that Milk Not Jails is trying to support. Beck and Melodia say this perfect storm means the time is right to build on the momentum of sentencing reform and reinvestment in dairy by adding a consumer activism element to buying local milk.

The organization will market and distribute milk, yogurt, butter and half & half from two Hudson Valley farms to CSAs, institutional housing (like senior centers and halfway houses), and daycare centers throughout New York City. The first farm to join is Ronnybrook out of Ancramdale, which will maintain its traditional packaging but show its support for Milk Not Jails by hanging a branded “necklace” around the necks of its glass bottles. Proceeds from selling the dairy line will pay a former prisoner to drive a truck, the purchase of which was made possible with Kickstarter funding.

The ultimate goal of the project is to secure enough allies from across the state to affect legislative change. Milk Not Jail’s eight-point policy plan includes goals like “Legalize the sale of raw milk products” and “End racist marijuana arrests.” Of course, the project has a long way to go before it gets to that point, but it represents a useful pivot in local food activism: using food to build awareness for causes outside the environment, too.

With a shovel and pickax, West Seattle man rescues, transplants hundreds of unwanted trees

By Erik Lacitis

Using mostly a shovel and a pickax, Bernie O’Brien, of West Seattle, has dug up and rescued hundreds of trees that otherwise would have been bulldozed or simply cut down. His wife calls him “the human shovel.”

In the past five years, working by himself using mostly a shovel and a pickax, Bernie O’Brien has dug up, loaded onto his 30-year-old Ford pickup and then transplanted some 100 trees that weighed 200 pounds to more than 400 pounds each.

He’s also transplanted to acreage he and his wife own on Pierce County’s Key Peninsula another 400 trees that ranged from seedlings to six-footers.

Yes, you could call O’Brien a man with a passion.

His wife, Michelle McCormick, calls him the “the human shovel.”

This 51-year-old West Seattle guy, who talks about the trees he has transplanted as if they’re members of his family, has rescued hundreds of trees from being bulldozed or simply cut down. He has given them new homes.

As O’Brien explains, “Trees are not just a number and we can never have too many. They, too, have character.”

When a neighbor by his five-acre Key Peninsula property cut down a bunch of old-growth trees, O’Brien says, he noticed that the owls he could hear at night went away.

And O’Brien liked the privacy the old trees gave him, and wanted to replace the rampant blackberry bushes. He decided he would create his own forest on the five acres that’s mostly pastureland and used to be a holly tree farm, with the original home still on it.

O’Brien does get a little mystical-sounding when talking about trees.

O’Brien’s real job is as a senior consultant for Artech, a local firm that manages art collections, so it’s not as if he just walked in from a Rainbow Family gathering.

Since he started doing this five years ago, mostly every other weekend, O’Brien says, “I view winter and rainy months much differently.”

At this time of the year, he sees “root systems show fresh white tender vines through the soil.” He hears “frogs sing all night.” It is, “a time to slow down and observe the year’s accomplishments.”

Plant Amnesty

This nature stuff isn’t a trait that’s just part of the stereotypical Northwest character, says Cass Turnbull, a landscaper who founded Plant Amnesty in Seattle “to lead society out of the dark ages of landscape care.”

With 900 members nationwide and in four countries who believe, for example, that trees shouldn’t be topped for landscaping purposes, she says, “I get calls and emails all the time from people who say they are spiritually involved with trees. Trees have a silent, timeless grandeur. It’s a theme that runs through all cultures and places. You’ve heard references to the ’speaking tree?’ ”

On a recent Friday morning, yet another cold, rainy winter day, O’Brien has driven to a Bellevue rambler that is scheduled to be demolished.

He says the rambler’s previous owner, who had planted the property with numerous shrubs and trees, is now in a nursing home. Soon a bulldozer is set to come in.

One way that O’Brien finds out about a tree that somebody wants to give away is by scouring Craigslist, and sometimes posting on it. Dogwoods, firs, hemlocks, rhodies, mountain huckleberries.

At one point, he had an app for his smartphone that messaged him every time the word “tree” came up on Craigslist. O’Brien gave up the app when he was deluged with messages such as ones about cat trees, those carpeted things for cats to scratch on.

“If you have trees that have been planted too close to the house, planted under wires, outgrown their space in the city. … Then I have a good home for them,” he posts. “Max thickness is 5″ trunk … I dig these up myself so imagine how much one person could physically take on.”

It turns out there are plenty of people who want to find that good home for the tree they no longer can keep.

On his property, by the entrance, O’Brien planted a Douglas fir that now is around seven feet tall.

About three years ago, a 10-year-old boy answered O’Brien’s Craigslist posting and said he had a tree that he been growing in a barrel since it was a seedling in the backyard of his family home. He had gotten it at a Weyerhaeuser field trip. His parents said the tree had gotten too big and had to go.

O’Brien planted the tree, and the boy could look it up on O’Brien’s website, bernieo.smugmug.com/WoodlandGardenProject.

Then there was the pink flowering crabapple tree from a University District home. A woman had planted it in memory of her brother, but had put it too close to her house.

“She was really sad she did that,” says O’Brien. Now the tree is thriving on his property.

Taproot wrestling

On this morning in Bellevue, besides some shrubs, the main prize is a Douglas fir, about 12 to 14 feet tall.

After a couple hours of digging, the tree isn’t budging much. By now, O’Brien’s pants are coated in mud.

He says he likes digging in the rain. The soil is softer. It is only during the hot summer months, and because of the holiday time in December, that he doesn’t transplant trees.

Here in Bellevue, it’s the tap root that grows straight down that’s the problem. O’Brien already has dug a circle five feet across and two feet deep. The more he saves of the root, the better chance the transplant will hold; a fifth of the trees don’t survive a move.

He belts a fire hose around the tree and begins to swing and pull on the tree. The tap root isn’t budging.

Just watching O’Brien is tiring. Grunt. Pull. Grunt.

His wife says she has worried that he’ll keel over of a heart attack.

She distinctly remembers one day looking out the window of their farm, and seeing her husband’s legs sticking out from under a pile of weeds.

“I ran out. I was crying. I thought something had happened, that he was dead,” says McCormick. But, she adds, “He’s a lot stronger than he looks.”

Finally, O’Brien concedes to the tap root. He brings out a battery-operated saw and cuts the root at about two feet.

O’Brien says that after a day of prying root balls, and dragging trees, he aches for the next three days.

But, he tells his wife, “I keep reminding her that the exercise is keeping me alive … spirits and physical health.”

On this Friday, in the later morning, accompanied by his Pomeranian dog, Diego, O’Brien drives onto the Fauntleroy-Southworth ferry to reach the Key Peninsula.

Sometimes his wife asks O’Brien how many more trees he is going to plant. At some point, those 500 trees that were planted will grow up to be big, big trees.

O’Brien talks about maybe buying more acreage. He talks about turning his tree farm into some kind of retreat place.

He talks about knowing a 70-year-old man who still plows his farmland.

“I have no doubts I could keep doing this until I was 70,” says O’Brien.

Leaving the ferry and turning onto the highway, O’Brien uses his truck’s turn signal.

The signal’s handle has a unique look, just like the headlight switch and windshield-wiper knob.

O’Brien has taken Giant Sequoia cones, drilled a hole in each at the bottom, filled the hole with epoxy, and attached them to use as knobs.

“For such a small thing,” he says about the cones, “they represent so much potential. I do think of that often while driving. Potential.”

Say what you will about people who find spirituality in trees.

This is one content guy who says about transplanting trees: “I sleep well.”

Heroic Endeavors: Chef Clayton Chapman of The Grey Plume

by Erin McCarthy

The Green Restaurant Association has rated the Grey Plume in Omaha, Nebraska as the most sustainable restaurant in the country. The Grey Plume excels in the areas of physical structure, water, energy, recycling, pollution and chemical reduction, and in the use of disposable materials that are biodegradable, recycled or compostable. Clayton Chapman is the Chef/Owner of The Grey Plume, who recently spoke to me about the burgeoning Omaha food scene and the comprehensive sustainability initiatives at Grey Plume, from lighting timers on their house-grown microgreens to solar-powered water faucets in their restrooms.

How did you develop your environmental consciousness? When is the first time you can remember thinking about the environment, or sustainability?

Our “environmental push” really developed with the need to know where our food was coming from.  We wanted to know the farmers, ranchers and growers who were producing the food that we were serving.  From there, stemmed the rest.  We really felt that we couldn’t serve sustainable, wholesome food, without providing the same type of dining environment.  I think I have been conscious about my/our environmental impact for quite some time now, but my active participation and significant life style change really developed when our son Hudson Grey was born.

How did you come to create such a sustainable business, from its transparency in sourcing to its building structure and operations?

We wanted to know the farmers, ranchers and growers who were producing the food that we were serving.  From there, stemmed the rest.  We really felt that we couldn’t serve sustainable, wholesome food, without providing the same type of dining environment.

As I mentioned before, it all started with the food and grew from there.  We wanted to enthrall ourselves into something that we believed in and something we were proud of.  I think authenticity is somewhat hard to find these days and being transparent in regards to business practices is somewhat of a necessity for us.   We hope that our transparency allows other restaurant owners or chefs the opportunity to learn from some of the initiatives we have instilled into our curriculum.  Our long term goal is to see this become the industry standard.  We hope to see more restaurants celebrating local food, initiating sustainability into their practices and embracing community.

Ecocentric writes extensively about the connections between food, water and energy, and the Grey Plume’s sustainability initiatives cover these three areas so well. Can you talk about some of the restaurant’s water and energy sustainability?  Why should restaurants care about sustainability?

Yes, we like to think that we are conscious on all three levels.  As far as water is concerned: we have aerators on all of our faucets in the restaurant that greatly reduce our gallon per minute usage.  We also have a low water toilet in the restrooms, which may not sound like a huge step, but in just a very conservative calculation, saves more than 3,000 gallons of water per year.  We try and do everything we can to reduce our energy usage as well.  This includes everything from occupancy sensors in our office, restrooms and storage closets to Energy Star rated equipment to LED and CFL lighting.  We utilize an EMS (Energy Management System) for our make-up air and exhaust in the kitchen.  This allows the fan to only run when it needs to.  We have lighting timers on our in-house grown micro greens to ensure we don’t forget to turn off the lights.  We utilize solar powered faucets in the restrooms.   We think it is important to recognize your footprint or the state in which you are leaving things when you are done with them.

We heard that you were invited to speak at the Xeriscape Water Conservation conference in February in Albuquerque. Did you ever expect, as a restaurateur, to be speaking to a bunch of water wonks? What insights did you share?

No, I never would have imagined.  It was really a great experience.  The entire audience, at least that I could tell, was very receptive and provided great feedback.  I discussed everything that we do, on all levels. From our recycling/composting program to how we developed the restaurant.  The focus of the talk was more about sustainability as a whole that it was just about water, but water conservation played a dynamic role.

How did you get connected to the local farmers you source from? Are there challenges involved in working with farmers?

We have spent the last four or five years developing our list of contacts.  We have been working with some of the farmers, ranchers and growing for that whole time, but most of them have been added to our network in the last two years or so.  We spent a lot of time researching our area.  We followed the Nebraska Food Co-op.  It is always amazing to me how small the degree of separation is between those involved in local agriculture.  Everyone seems to know one another or knows someone who knows someone else.  We would be working with one farmer to  grow vegetables per se and they would refer someone else who raises bison and so on.  It has been a pretty rewarding process to be part of.  There is always going to be adversity no matter who you choose to source your food from.  The small hurdles we face working with small growers are hurdles we greatly welcome, especially considering our alternative resources to sourcing food.

What has been the local reaction to the whole sustainability concept?

We have had a great local reaction to our approach to sustainability.  We really do feel privileged to be in a community that has provided so much support for a small local restaurant.

Can you tell us more about Grey Plume’s connection to local artists?

At TGP, we strive to support the local art community as much as we possibly can.  In our planning stages we partnered with the “Hot Shops”, a local art co-op in our downtown area.  There is a small group of artists we worked with to produce everything from recycled plates to wine bottles to bread boards that are hand carved out of reclaimed wood.  In addition to our serving pieces, we partnered with all local artists for the art on our walls in the dining room.  Some of which is for sale by the artist and some of which is just on display.  We partnered with a local clay sculptor to make large planters that sit outside the restaurant’s front door.  These planters are made from native Nebraska clay and also duo as rain barrels with spigots on the bottom to drain the water.

What is the local food scene in Omaha?  Are there certain environmental factors in the region that influence the cuisine?

The local food scene in Omaha is growing.  Five years ago it was pretty obsolete, but we feel that the awareness in our marketplace has boomed in the last few years.  There are a core group of restaurants here that really support local food.  The winter months here pose for difficult growing seasons.  We work with a few growers who are willing to keep things in hoop houses and green houses for us during the winter months as well as mulch root vegetables over to keep them in the ground.  Unfortunately, we are not able to produce tropical type produce.  That being said, we do source some items regionally, but purchase from sustainable, biodynamic farms.

What do you think consumers can do to support local farmers besides patronizing sustainable restaurants like The Grey Plume?

Check out your local food pantry or co-op!  Frequent farmer’s markets when they are in season.  Join a CSA (community supported agriculture)!  There are so many ways a community can support local growers, it just takes a little more planning on the consumers’ side.

Thanks again for being pioneers and supporters of this local organic food movement,

-The Avalon Gardens Family

Spiritualution - Justice to the People
Click here to check us out on Facebook

CSA Harvest List

     Sometimes we have a featured vegetable of the week and we will give you historical information, interesting facts, and delicious recipes to try.  If you click on the vegetables in the harvest list, it will bring you to the past newsletter where that vegetable was featured.  All of our past newsletters can be found on our Farm Report website.

• Rainbow Swiss Chard
• Parsley
• Red Rain Komatsuna : for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• YokkataNa: large BokChoy variety for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Lettuce-  Romaine
• Fennel bulbs, and tops
• Carrots
• Beets -Chioggia- red, with white rings

New Orleans school cultivates a generation of forward-thinking farmers

By Claire Thompson

Nat Turner, a former New York City public-school teacher, moved to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward on Thanksgiving Day, 2008. He didn’t know anything about gardening — “I could barely keep a cactus alive” — but he had a vision to start an urban farm that would be a vehicle for educating and empowering the neighborhood’s youth. He’d been making service trips to the Big Easy with students, but he wanted an opportunity to dig deeper, literally and figuratively, into the city’s revitalization.

His first goal, Turner says, “is to figure out how to make the Lower Ninth food secure.” It seems fitting, then, that in a neighborhood with no supermarket, Turner set up shop in a falling-down building that had once housed a black-owned family business called the B&G Grocery. He filled a pink bathtub in the backyard with soil and planted scallions, which floated away when the bathtub flooded in a rainstorm. That was the beginning of Our School at Blair Grocery (OSBG).

The school’s ramshackle appearance makes it look at home in the Lower Ninth, where wild plants and animals now battle residents for control of the land. I visited the school in March, and it was my second time in New Orleans. The first had been in December 2006, and my shock then at how little the hardest-hit neighborhoods had recovered since Katrina seems naïve to me now, given the fact that abandoned houses and empty lots still dominate the landscape more than five years later.

But people live in the Lower Ninth again, and that fact alone has made it less of a ghost town. Turner waves to neighbors as we drive toward the school, and I eye the sky full of thunderclouds and wonder what it felt like to watch Katrina roll in from this same spot.

After more than three years and a lot of grueling work (including picking all the glass and debris from the yard by hand so it could be planted), OSBG has become much more than a pink bathtub full of soil. Its rows of tomato plants, arugula, basil, and pole beans, framed by a background of weedy lots and some still-empty houses, present a powerful symbol of renewal. Turner and a handful of staff and interns (transplants, local teens, and three ex-offenders employed through Americorps’ Cornerstone Ministries program), as well as rotating volunteer crews, grow enough produce to sell to 10 local restaurants and the New Orleans Food Co-op. They have chickens, hoop houses, and beehives.

Turner met the urban farming pioneer and founder of Growing Power, Will Allen, in 2009, and the farm is now a Regional Outreach Training Center for the Milwaukee-based organization. Last summer, OSBG hosted a “food security academy” with around 40 kids from the neighborhood and the city’s summer youth employment program. In addition to discussing the intersections of food security, social justice, and civil rights, they calculated that it would take 1,100 tomato plants to feed the Lower Ninth Ward.

The garden has now expanded to empty lots across the street from the original site.

The garden has already expanded to the empty lot across the street, and soon the lot adjacent to that one will be planted, too. But Turner will need a lot more land, manpower, and money to scale up to the point where OSBG can indeed feed the Lower Ninth. In the meantime, the question of how to get there has often sparked controversy. Last year, he said, he fired his whole staff after internal conflict over the direction of the project reached a breaking point. Now, he’s up-front about the fact that a project like his, however noble its intentions, must become commercially viable in order to make a lasting impact.

“[This is] not gardening for fun,” Turner says. “This is urban farming.”

Gardening suggests a hobby; farming a vocation. The OSBG crew sees New Orleans struggling to move beyond the hobby phase. “There’s a lot of excitement and people having a lot of meetings and a lot of ideas,” says Sam Turner, 18, a former student of Nat Turner’s (no relation) in New York who now works at the farm. “Community gardening is great, but it’s not food justice. It’s not creating jobs.”

For an urban farm to provide food security for a neighborhood like the Lower Ninth, it has to make a profit and produce food that the community will actually eat. “Our challenge was to grow vegetables the neighbors want,” Turner explains. “Black people don’t want to eat portobello mushrooms.”

Okra, on the other hand, is a local favorite, as is mirliton. Knowing the pace at which bureaucracy moves in New Orleans, Turner is already planting up neighboring abandoned lots while waiting for the city’s approval.

“There’s nobody in Louisiana who, if they came back, would be mad if there was okra growing on their property,” he says, confidently.

Turner has garnered national attention for his approach, which combines outside-the-mainstream education with food justice work, setting OSBG apart from other more run-of-the-mill urban farming projects popping up around the Lower Ninth. As we drive past one, he points out its locked gate. There’s no gate at Blair Grocery, even though Turner says they have problems with theft. He caught one of his own employees stealing a movie projector -– a frustrating experience, to say the least, but certainly not the only one Turner’s had on the way to realizing his vision. I get the sense that, when it comes to living and working in the Lower Ninth, you have to pick your battles. Turner lets his neighbors siphon power from the school when they don’t pay their electrical bill. He turns a blind eye when the woman across the way, a friend and supporter of the project, helps herself to extra produce. He knows some of the kids who work at OSBG get up to no good in their off hours. He talks matter-of-factly about the crime, drugs, and poverty entrenched in the neighborhood, in the midst of which his urban farm and “sustainability education center” stand out as something of an oddity.

“Nobody under 50 really sees any value in any of the shit we’re doing,” he says. “Except teenagers. They’re impressionable.”

OSBG composts food scraps from several New Orleans businesses (including Whole Foods) to make their soil.

So Turner focuses on cultivating a new generation who see growing food as normal, essential, even cool. Allen Lefort, an 18-year-old from the neighborhood, is part of that. Whether or not he’ll graduate high school remains to be seen, but he works at the school just about every day, helping out with the garden and spending a lot of time on art projects: murals, paintings, and an effort to spruce up the one indoor classroom with a more colorful paint job. He got involved with the school about eight months ago, through a friend.

“I thought it was strange at first,” Lefort admits. If you’d told him last year that he’d be working at the farm, he says, “I would have been like, ‘You got me mixed up with someone else. That ain’t no job!’”

The day I was there, Lefort lingered past the time for him to go home, giving Jamie Katz, one of the full-time staff, a haircut, and eventually heading out with a pot of jambalaya to take home to his family.

“Because of the responsibilities they give you to do on the farm, I think my thoughts be maturing,” he says. “I ain’t got nothing to do, so I might as well do something that’ll help my future.”

While urban gardening is an eye-opening experience for Lefort and Our School’s other young farmers, their future-minded work carries on a tradition familiar to older generations in the Lower Ninth. “The young people we work with have never grown food, but people have been growing food in this neighborhood for a long time,” Katz said. “It’s not new. What’s new is seeing the potential in it.”

Gleaning for Good: An Old Idea Is New Again

By Sarah Henry

Foraging for food — whether it’s ferreting rare mushrooms in the woods, picking abundant lemons from an overlooked tree, or gathering berries from an abandoned lot — is all the rage among the culinary crowd and the D.I.Y. set, who share their finds with fellow food lovers in fancy restaurant meals or humble home suppers.

But an old-fashioned concept — gleaning for the greater good by harvesting unwanted or leftover produce from farms or family gardens — is also making a comeback during these continued lean economic times.

In cities, rural communities, and suburbs across the country, volunteer pickers join forces to collect bags and boxes of fruits and vegetables that find their way to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries, as well as senior centers, low-income homes, and school lunch programs.

Where some may see excess, others see opportunity — the chance to make a difference, feed the hungry, and avoid waste. It’s a win-win-win all round: Growers who have surplus or seconds find a good home for these edibles beyond the compost pile; financially strapped aid organizations get much-needed fresh food for free for their patrons; and the gleaners get to give back in their communities. “I’ve been surprised at how emotionally rewarding this is,” says Andrew Sigal, an avid gardener in Oakland, California, who started Food Pool last summer to share the abundance from his prolific 800-square-foot garden with local food pantries. “It’s one thing to give someone in need a dollar or a donation, but seeing someone get excited about beans from my backyard has been deeply fulfilling.”

Lemon trees often produce far more fruit than a single family can use. Photo credit: Marco Chiesa. Used under Creative Commons license.

Some gleaners have even made a national name for themselves. Take The Lemon Lady, aka Anna Chan, a stay-at-home mom who began collecting excess fruit in suburban Clayton, California, while driving her then-baby daughter around to nap. Chan, who knew hunger as a child and how it felt to wait in food lines for canned goods, was shocked to see so much fresh fruit — such as oranges, apricots, and apples — left rotting in her neighbors’ front yards. so she started a single-handed campaign to do something about it.

Three years on and hundreds of tons of produce later, Chan, who is now a regular fixture at local farmers’ markets where she collects unsold fruits and vegetables that she hauls to a local food pantry and Salvation Army site, has been featured in People, The Huffington Post, and Civil Eats. While the press attention has helped her cause, she keeps a laser-like focus on her mission to feed those in need. “Many people don’t know where their local food pantry is located and don’t realize that food banks will gladly take fresh produce,” says Chan, who encourages people to get started by picking excess fruits and veggies in their immediate area and passing it on.

From California to New York and places in between, communities are finding creative, local ways to get fresh food to the residents who have the most challenges accessing such food. Glean for the City in Washington, D.C., for example, has a three-pronged approach: picking surplus produce from regional farms, gathering leftover greens from farmers’ markets, and harvesting excess residential edibles.

Since 1988, Friendship Donations Network in Ithaca, New York, has worked with local farmers to “rescue” thousands of pounds of produce that would otherwise go to waste and distribute it to low-wage workers, the elderly, and the young. Gleaned produce donated by the organization serves 24 programs that feed more than 2,000 people a week. The model just makes sense, says FDN program coordinator Meaghan Sheehan Rosen, who points out that there’s no reason perfectly good food should go uneaten if farmers are willing and people are needy.

Blackberries grow wild all over rural and, often, suburban areas. Photo credit: Alex Brown. Used under Creative Commons license.

Some gleaning efforts have grown out of religious organizations — not surprising, since the term has Biblical origins. In the Book of Ruth, for instance, the poor are permitted to pick grain leftover from the harvest. The Society of St. Andrews, based in Virginia, has gleaning groups in several states including Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that have collectively gleaned millions of pounds of produce. Faith Feeds, a Lexington, Kentucky, gleaning group that grew out of a church meeting, has picked up more than 111,000 pounds of produce since the summer of 2010, from farmers’ markets, farms, and private residences. “It is not hard to feed the hungry,” says Jennifer Erena of Faith Feeds, an interfaith group not affiliated with any particular religion or church. “The word is spreading and there’s a wonderful energy among different people and organizations that is both collaborative and community oriented.”

There are gleaning programs that connect homeowners overwhelmed by an abundant harvest with volunteers willing to pick produce and take it to local food banks, such as Portland Fruit in Oregon. But many gleaning efforts are simply started by an individual who sees a need and wants to fill it. “I particularly like picking fruit for seniors, many of whom can no longer climb a ladder or aren’t able to do physical labor anymore,” says North Berkeley Harvest founder Natasha Boissier, who started solo but now works with a group of volunteers. “They come out and talk with me while I work, and I appreciate and respect their wisdom and experience, and hearing about the ups and downs of having lived life. These moments of connection have brought me — and I hope them — a great deal of unexpected joy.”

Bossier’s first stop with fresh food is often the local men’s shelter. “These men are often blamed for what’s wrong with them,” says the clinical social worker. “I see them early in the morning standing out in the cold after enduring a night of who knows what and I want to give them a piece of fruit to offer a moment’s respite from their pain and suffering. That’s my hope: To provide something tangible, simple, and sweet in their lives.”

Some gleaning programs have become an integral part of their community. Take the Novato Unified School District Gleaning Program. Every week for the past six years, parents, students, and members of this Marin County, California, community glean excess organic produce from a participating local farm. (There are about 15 in the program.) Through a partnership with Marin Organic, a cooperative association of local growers, that fresh chard picked by a volunteer on Monday finds it way into school pasta sauce later in the week. The gleaned fruits and vegetables now offsets up to 25 percent of the district’s weekly produce, according to Miguel Villarreal, the director of food and nutrition services for the small school district, where some 4,000 meals a day are dished up at 13 schools.

One of several varieties of kale, lacinato kale grows abundantly and can be used in numerous healthy dishes. Photo credit: Oriana Papadopulos. Used under Creative Commons license.

For Villarreal, who has worked in school food for 30 years and grew up helping pick crops with his parents in the fields, the program is a no-brainer. “There is so much beautiful abundance in this area and our school food program can use all the help it can get,” says Villarreal, who sees educational and community-building benefits to the program, as well.

Others raise some unexpected benefits of gleaning. Melita Love, of Farm to Pantry in Healdsburg, California, found a community of people in her new hometown when she started gleaning. Love has collaborated with local preservers to extend the shelf life of the bounty she and her crew harvest in such staples as applesauce and tomato sauce — think canning for a cause — that food pantry patrons can pick up along with gleaned fresh goods. She’s also worked with local groups to explain to patrons how to use produce that may be unfamiliar. “The first time we dropped off kale to a food pantry nobody took it because they didn’t know what to do with it,” says Love. “So we did cooking demos for kale salad, kale chips, and a winter soup with kale, and we handed out recipes, too. Education is an important part of any gleaning effort.”

Food Pool’s Sigal points out that a group of gardeners who share their backyard bounty with less fortunate folk in his community have gone a step further, funding and constructing a community garden at a local food pantry where there was once an unused piece of land. “A year ago, most of these people didn’t even know there was a food pantry there,” he says. “There’s this incredible value in creating community that goes beyond just sharing surplus fresh food.”

Thanks again for being pioneers and supporters of this local organic food movement,

-The Avalon Gardens Family

Spiritualution - Justice to the People
Click here to check us out on Facebook

CSA Harvest List

     Sometimes we have a featured vegetable of the week and we will give you historical information, interesting facts, and delicious recipes to try.  If you click on the vegetables in the harvest list, it will bring you to the past newsletter where that vegetable was featured.  All of our past newsletters can be found on our Farm Report website.

• Rainbow Swiss Chard
• Parsley
• Spinach
• Red Rain Komatsuna : for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Lettuce-  Romaine
• BACK: Fennel bulbs, and tops
• Carrots
• Beets -Chioggia- red, with white rings

The woman who took on Koch Industries to save her farm

By Twilight Greenaway

Books written by farmers are rare — and for good reason. Growing food takes a lot out of you, and most farmers have little or no time to reflect on their lives or package them up for an audience.

But the fact that it’s written by a veteran organic farmer is only part of what makes Atina Diffley’s book Turn Here Sweet Corn unique. Part memoir, part chronicle of the evolution of the upper Midwest organic movement and the corporate forces exerting pressure against it, the book also allows new farmers to hear from someone who has spent time in the trenches. Diffley, who co-founded the Gardens of Eagan, a successful Minnesota organic farm which has served the Twin Cities region for nearly three decades, comes across first and foremost as a survivor. She writes passionately about the years she and her husband Martin spent farming and raising a family, in the face of a seeming avalanche of challenges. Diffley takes readers along as they faced devastating droughts and hailstorms (with hailstones “as big as size-B potatoes”), razor-thin margins and near bankruptcy, and an unexpected eminent domain eviction from their first farm.

Then, near the end of the book, the couple hit against the biggest challenge of all: the threat of a Koch Industries pipeline tearing through the middle of their second farm. And rather than take it lying down (and losing the soil they’ve been building for years), Diffley takes on one of the biggest oil companies in the world, organizes the Twin Cities community, and succeeds at not only protecting her own farm, but convincing the area’s public utilities commission to protect and value all organic farmland in the area.

We spoke to her recently about farming, writing, and the struggle to protect organic land.

Q. Who did you want to reach with this book?

A. I wanted to write a book that would bring in new audiences, not just people who were already engaged. Because whether you farm or not, everyone has a relationship with land through their food. So many people don’t realize the food choices they make have a big impact on land somewhere. And by impacting land, they’re impacting the species that live on that land or in that community. And once they understand that, there’s so much they can do.

We hear a lot of people talk about protecting wilderness, but most people don’t realize that there isn’t much actual wilderness anymore; most land is in use. Their choices, and largely their food choices, have huge impacts on the environment. It’s not that complicated. I see three main areas of responsibilities: eating to protect the earth, educating others, and then engaging in policy.

Q. That third part is the hardest for most people.

A. Yeah, that policy piece is so crucial. Look at Europe, where they have always had strong policies to support and promote and transition land to organic. Well, there are many countries in Europe where more than 20 percent of their land in agriculture is organic. In the U.S. we’ve had a marketing approach, and the USDA isn’t willing to say that organic is any better; they say it’s just a different marketing option, so more like 4 percent of our food is organic and less than 1 percent of land is.

One thing I learned while we were fighting the pipeline is that it’s your legislator’s job to listen to their constituents. So they absolutely have the right to go in and speak with them at any point.

I learned about informed citizen input versus public clamor. In our pipeline case, 4,800 people wrote letters to a judge. They didn’t just yell and stomp their feet; they politely and respectfully explained to the judge how organic farming systems are different, and how they would be lost [if a pipeline was dug].

Th Diffleys watch a bulldozer tear up their first plot of land. (Photo by T. L. Gettings for Rodale Institute.)

Q. You write about losing your first farm to development — what did that teach you that prepared you to fight the pipeline?

A. The development of the 120-acre farm [had] happened in sections over a period of five years. Then all life — the trees and grasses, the flowers and forbs, the fruit and bushes — was torn out, and burned or buried. Even the living topsoil was scrapped into a pile and sold off. The remaining subsoil was flattened and reshaped.

We continued to farm on the land that had not yet been developed, immediately adjacent to land that had been stripped of all life, but it was an ecological disaster. Rain could not soak into the adjoining land; there was no life to hold water, and it ran off into our fields. After a heavy summer storm our potato field was covered with 14 inches of silt and gravel. Pests and disease — previously a non-issue — became a losing battle.

After the development experience I was not willing to allow a pipeline through here. But it was pretty scary to think of taking on the largest privately owned company in the world, and everyone said, “You cannot move a pipeline.”

Shortly after receiving the letter informing us of the pipeline route I went online and found the Agricultural Impact Mitigation Plan [for the pipeline]. When I came to the part where it read: will not knowingly allow the amount of top cover to erode more than 12 inches from its original level — I no longer had any option.

Nature should have legal rights of its own, but it doesn’t. To protect nature in our courts of law it is required to show a loss to humans, so humans have to stand up and speak for it.

Q. I know you and your husband now do organic consulting and education. Are you still farming?

A. The farm is being managed by Wedge Community Co-op, who purchased our name in 2008. They have a farm manager. After this season they’ll be moving to a new plot of land and Martin and I will have our land back to farm again. We’ve had a five-year break. We’re going to move the farm into a more permaculture-type setting, with grasses, fruits, and perennial crops. It’ll be less demanding and less taxing — for us and the land.

Q. Do you want to talk about your process of writing the book?

Atina and Martin Diffley today. (Photo by Greg Thompson).

A. It was one of the healthiest things I’ve ever done for myself. We had never really had time to go back and deal with the emotions around [losing our first farm to] development. At the time we had a new farm to start, and children to raise.

Before I started writing it I would have described myself as having anger management issues. Now it’s completely gone. I reevaluated everything while I was writing and most of the anger just disappeared.

A lot of writing romanticizes farming and a lot of writing is cynical about it. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Seventy-five percent of Midwestern farmland is going to change hands in the next 15 years. And I heard someone say recently — when talking about beginning farmers — that we “have to romance them.” At the time I thought, “It’s not romantic. It’s hard work! Why trick them into thinking it’s romantic?” But then when I was writing the book I suddenly saw what was really romantic about farming. And I could see so clearly that there is really no other life I would have ever wanted to live. It’s incredibly romantic to be able to choose the life that you want.

Indian Man Single-Handedly Plants a 1,360 Acre Forest

By Stephen Messenger

A little over 30 years ago, a teenager named Jadav “Molai” Payeng began burying seeds along a barren sandbar near his birthplace in northern India’s Assam region to grow a refuge for wildlife. Not long after, he decided to dedicate his life to this endeavor, so he moved to the site where he could work full-time creating a lush new forest ecosystem. Incredibly, the spot today hosts a sprawling 1,360 acre of jungle that Payeng planted single-handedly.

The Times of India recently caught up with Payeng in his remote forest lodge to learn more about how he came to leave such an indelible mark on the landscape:

It all started way back in 1979 when floods washed a large number of snakes ashore on the sandbar. One day, after the waters had receded, Payeng , only 16 then, found the place dotted with the dead reptiles. That was the turning point of his life.

“The snakes died in the heat, without any tree cover. I sat down and wept over their lifeless forms. It was carnage . I alerted the forest department and asked them if they could grow trees there. They said nothing would grow there. Instead, they asked me to try growing bamboo. It was painful, but I did it. There was nobody to help me. Nobody was interested,” says Payeng, now 47.

While it’s taken years for Payeng’s remarkable dedication to planting to receive some well-deserved recognition internationally, it didn’t take long for wildlife in the region to benefit from the manufactured forest. Demonstrating a keen understanding of ecological balance, Payeng even transplanted ants to his burgeoning ecosystem to bolster its natural harmony. Soon the shadeless sandbar was transformed into a self-functioning environment where a menagerie of creatures could dwell. The forest, called the Molai woods, now serves as a safe haven for numerous birds, deers, rhinos, tigers, and elephants — species increasingly at risk from habitat loss elsewhere.

Despite the conspicuousness of Payeng’s project, Forestry officials in the region first learned of this new forest in 2008 — and since then they’ve come to recognize his efforts as truly remarkable, but perhaps not enough.

“We’re amazed at Payeng,” says Assistant Conservator of Forests, Gunin Saikia. “He has been at it for 30 years. Had he been in any other country, he would have been made a hero.”

Front-yard-garden advocate offers food for thought

By  Jim Weiker

Fritz Haeg has been profiled by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, ABC News and others for doing what millions of Americans do every year: planting vegetable gardens.

The difference: Haeg’s gardens are in front yards.

Starting in 2005 with a Kansas garden, he has been on an art-meets-horticulture mission to replace the “wasted” expanse of grass in front lawns.

The 42-year-old Minneapolis native has planted 11 such gardens, typically commissioned by local arts groups. He launched a similar campaign in 2008 to attract animals back to urban areas.

Both efforts have been documented in books: Edible Estates and Animal Estates.

Haeg, who runs Fritz Haeg Studio from his southern California home, recently spoke with The Dispatch in anticipation of his Wednesday speech at the Columbus College of Art & Design.

He will appear from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the Canzani Center, 60 Cleveland Ave. The event is free.

Q: What prompted you to begin planting edible front yards?

A: It grew out of a great pleasure in gardening and growing my own food.

There was also a real disconnect between what was happening in the art and design world and in the real world. I wanted to do something that really connected to the way we live today.

The front yard is a very charged space; it’s private property, but nothing is more visible. It illustrates what you think about nature and your connection to it.

Q: Vegetable gardens are common here, but in backyards. Does it make any difference if they’re in the front yard?

A: When you’re growing food, you’re out there every day. It becomes a very social activity; you connect with your neighbors.

There’s that part of it, but also, if you’re growing food in your front yard, even if no other neighbors are doing it, they’re watching it, and that’s important.

This isn’t intended as a panacea, save-the-world, feed-the-planet sort of thing. That’s not reasonable at this scale, but watching food grow is an important daily reminder of where food comes from.

Q: In your book, you call grass-covered front lawns “a defensive ring between the family unit and everything beyond.” Should homeowners feel guilty about enjoying a nice green front lawn?

A: Not at all. There’s nothing wrong with a well-placed lawn.

I’m not interested in changing behavior through guilt. But I am interested in promoting sources of pleasure in different ways of doing things, different ways of living.

Q: Is your goal a nation full of front-yard gardens?

A: That’s sort of the fantasy, I suppose, but a lot of art functions as a way to make visible what is invisible, to capture people’s imaginations and allow us to collectively consider how we live and how we should live — not a project that says lawns are evil and everyone has to rip out their lawn.

Q: You live in a dome house in East Los Angeles. Can you describe your yard?

A: I live in the hills, so I don’t have a flat property with the house. I conveniently avoid a front lawn because my house is right on the street.

But I have a sizable terrace where I grow fruit, and I have a vegetable garden on my roof.

Q: Do you have any favorite items from your garden?

A: I’m just crazy about kale. I eat it every day.

Q: You’ve been profiled in several major media outlets. Are you surprised by the response your work has received?

A: Yes, I guess. I didn’t have any expectations since I work so far away from any conventional way of working. There isn’t any obvious road map.

But I have to say that, in 2005, when I started, I had one very strong motivating impulse, which was to engage a broad cross-section of the American community instead of people who just follow art in New York and L.A.

Q: What should people who attend your Columbus appearance expect?

A: Basically a survey of my recent work with a lot of images and video clips of the gardens . . . and a discussion of this larger idea of how are we living, how do we want to live, what do we want to live for.

Last week we had lots of fun with potato planting, as well transplanting more onions and leeks during our “Hands In the Soil Day”.  We are also focusing on improving all of our soils with well broken down compost and mulches. The Effective Microorganism (EM) application shows its success with improved soil condition. It holds the water better and the plants are more “alive “. Every year we can see the changes in the areas that we are gardening.

When we first came the soils were not used organically nor were they fed compost or EM. We could say the soil was stuck and couldn’t absorb much at all. Some areas were hardened sand like lime/cement. The difference of holding, feeling and smelling our soil now brings a big smile to our faces. It was similar when we gardened in Sedona, where red clay and rock was all there was to be found. We transformed it as well but it took us twice as long or longer.

If you are struggling with poor soil conditions, never give up, but learn and apply these organic &”biodynamic” techniques. Come and visit for a tour or participate in one of our workshops coming up.

Thanks again for being pioneers and supporters of this local organic food movement,

-The Avalon Gardens Family

Spiritualution - Justice to the People
Click here to check us out on Facebook

CSA Harvest List

Sometimes we have a featured vegetable of the week and we will give you historical information, interesting facts, and delicious recipes to try.  If you click on the vegetables in the harvest list, it will bring you to the past newsletter where that vegetable was featured.  All of our past newsletters can be found on our Farm Report website.

• Rainbow Swiss Chard
• Back: Parsley
• NEW: Spinach (red stem, red veined)
• Ruby Streaks: Finely serrated Mizuna style; mild maroon colored Mustard Greens; for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Red Bok Choy : for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Red Rain Komatsuna : for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• NEW: Lettuce-  Iceberg
  
• Carrots
• Back:  Beets

TYLO: Developing a Barrio Culture of Food Justice

by Alison Cohen, Why Hunger

WhyHunger staff members Brooke Smith and Alison Cohen were in southern Arizona in February to work with the regional network called Somos la Semilla, formed as a response to the need to work across sectors, counties and communities in order to build capacity to see the food desert that this rural part of the state has become, bloom again with robust local food and farming economies and access to fresh, healthy food.

 February 18, 2012 – Tierra y Libertad Organization (TYLO), a Tucson-based grassroots neighborhood organization, is one of five recipients of the 2012 Harry Chapin Self-Reliance award to be honored at WhyHunger’s annual dinner on June 13, 2012.  We met Cesar Lopez on a chilly Arizona morning last week outside of a small house in a barrio on the south central side of Tucson.

The house is known simply as “el centro” to the residents of this low-income neighborhood who come here to gather, support one another, and make plans for “developing a barrio culture of food justice.” Cesar, an energetic and driven community organizer with TYLO, greeted us outside of the house in front of a vibrant tile mural paying homage to the Mexican heritage of the majority of the barrio’s residents.

Tierra y Libertad’s home base “el centro” in Barrio Wakefield.

We spent the next few hours with Cesar as he toured us through the alleyways, backyards and school grounds that had been transformed by TYLO’s work to organize the community to envision and create the kinds of public spaces, social networks and entrepreneurial activities that make a community healthy, safe, beautiful, robust and full of possibilities.  Cesar – who talks as fast as any New Yorker – walked us through the demonstration permaculture garden that was beginning to grow out of every crevice of the property.  In imagining the future of the completed permaculture garden and those that would be replicated throughout the neighborhood, Cesar described the “food forest” that a barrio resident would come home to after a long day at work.

A trellis of grapes would serve as the garage; cilantro, thyme and mint would waft in the slight breeze along the walkway towards the front door; chickens or ducks would noisily greet you from their pens; hummingbirds would abound; and a bountiful garden with a diversity of fruit trees and vegetables would fill your senses as you made your way to the backyard; you were home. While gardens, fresh food, safe alleyways and micro-businesses defined some of the outcomes of TYLO’s work, the backbone of every project and success story is the model of community organizing and distributive democratic leadership that TYLO embraces.

Cesar Lopez describes the future “food forest.”

Cesar introduced us to two community organizers like himself – two women: Sharayah, a recent graduate with a degree in architecture and landscape design who represents the third generation of women to grow up in the neighborhood; and Rosalva, a first generation Mexican immigrant who came into the country without documentation some years ago, attained citizenship after years of struggle and is raising her children in Tucson.

Rosalva described her own fear as she went about her daily business – whether taking her kids to school or going to the grocery store – of being discovered without papers and immediately separated from her children.  Her experience led her, with the support of TYLO, to put in place a “red de proteccion” or a support network specifically designed to deal with the crisis that ensues if an undocumented member of the community is detained by the border patrol. A typical scenario is that the adult who is stopped is taken to a holding center and often deported before they have the chance to gather their things, tie up loose ends or – most disconcerting — contact family members.

The “red” operates like a phone tree of sorts.  Once a member of TYLO is notified about a detainment, the phone calls ripple throughout the community and within hours neighbors jump into action – one picks up the children from school and makes sure they’re cared for, another contacts the person’s employer, still another begins the legal process enlisting the immigration lawyer on call.  This structured support network is a vital service in a community where the circumstances of a person’s life – often a parent – can turn on a dime without recourse.  And it gives individuals the courage to organize with their neighbors and participate in community life despite documentation status.

TYLO Community Organizers: Sharayah, Rosalva and Cesar

TYLO is a force for change in its own community.  From the establishment of gardens and access to healthy food, to micro-businesses, to a strong and ever-growing self-governed corps of youth, to training and education, to resource development, to weekly community meetings that include children and elderly grandmothers making plans to bring justice to their neighborhood – it would seem that TYLO is doing it all.  I had to ask – on an annual operating budget of no more than $40,000, how do you make it happen?  “We have amazing capacity,” Sharayah said. Rosalva chimed in:  “We are a part of this community.  We are working and learning together.  It comes down to the fact that we all have relationships with each other.  We trust each other.”  Cesar summed it up: “We get paid by watching people grow in self-reliance.”

Record-breaking One Million Americans Tell FDA: We Have a Right to Know What’s in Our Food

By Naomi Starkman

The Just Label It (JLI) Campaign announced today that a record-breaking one million Americans of all political persuasions have called on the FDA to label genetically engineered (GE) foods. Today, March 27, is the date that the FDA is required to respond to the petition. It took JLI and its more than 500 partner organizations less than 180 days to accumulate an historic number of public comments—a testament to the power of collective voices to demand our right to know what’s in our food. (I’ve written about the campaign before here, here, and here.)

The campaign also announced today a new national survey revealing that more than nine out of 10 Americans across the political spectrum supports labeling food that has been genetically engineered. This new infographic is a compelling visual that shares the results of the survey.

New Survey Results: Motherhood, Apple Pie and GE Food Labeling

Voter support for GE-foods labeling in the U.S. is nearly unanimous, according to the political opinion survey on GE food labeling conducted by The Mellman Group on behalf of JLI. Explained pollster Mark Mellman, “Few topics other than motherhood and apple pie can muster over 90 percent support, but labeling GE-foods is one of those few views held almost unanimously.” The survey found nearly all Democrats (93% favor, 2% oppose), Independents (90% favor, 5% oppose) and Republicans (89% favor, 5% oppose) in favor of labeling. The study also revealed that support for labeling is robust and arguments against it have little sway.

In the era of pink slime, BPA in our soup and deadly melons, we have a right more than ever to know about what’s in our food. The FDA needs to restore confidence in our food and our right to know about the food we eat and feed our families. It’s time for the FDA to give Americans the same rights held by citizens in over 40 nations, including all of our major trade partners, to know whether our foods have been genetically modified.

Stay tuned as the campaign now works to make sure that the FDA and Washington knows that one million Americans are watching to make sure they deliver.

‘Cafeteria Man’ comes out swinging for better school lunches

By Claire Thompson

School districts across the country are finding out that improving cafeteria food is never as simple as planting a garden. The bigger and poorer the district, the longer it takes to get anything done, and even smaller, well-funded districts struggle to make real change. That’s why, when Baltimore City Public Schools hired a new director of food and nutrition in 2008, food advocates watched eagerly to see how reform would play out there. Even Michael Pollan was quoted saying, “If Baltimore can pull this off, it will be a sign that the effort is worth making.”

Tony Geraci, Baltimore’s new “cafeteria man,” had his work cut out for him, and the gung-ho way he dove into the job caused no small amount of controversy in this city of 82,000 public-school students. When he stepped down from his position two years later, Geraci was accused of failing to live up to expectations, while he and his supporters blamed the slow progress on school-system bureaucracy.

Cafeteria Man, a documentary from Baltimore cinematographer Richard Chisolm, is a whirlwind look at Geraci’s tenure with the city’s schools. The film shows us snippets of the many ambitious projects the Cafeteria Man took on — from “breakfast boxes” that mask nutritious food with Happy Meal-like packaging, to class tours and student apprenticeships at a local farm, to Geraci’s frustrated attempt to find funding for a central kitchen. The chaos of working within a large public school district like Baltimore’s certainly comes clear, and a scene of horrified high schoolers tasting raw oysters for the first time illustrates the disconnect so many of the students have from real food. But seeing first graders at the farm munching with fascination on clover and radishes shows how this kind of hands-on approach can begin to bridge that divide — maybe just at a slower pace than eager advocates would prefer.

We caught up with Chisolm to talk more about Geraci, his legacy, and the challenges of achieving such ambitious reform.

A still from the film.

Q. Why did you want to make a film about Tony Geraci’s efforts in Baltimore?

A. I’m not a foodie by trade. I am a parent. What attracted me most was more the issue of how to make social change in America in institutions that are stagnant and bureaucratic and deadlocked, and school food to me was a great petri dish. Obama had just come to the White House at the same time Tony had come to Baltimore. The same thing happened to Tony that happened to Obama. He was brought in as sort of a messiah. Six months or a year later people say, “Why haven’t you fixed it?” I was much more interested in the portrait of a change agent than I was [in] calories and nutrition and obesity.

Q. Since you weren’t immersed in food issues before making this film, what surprised you the most about school food?

A. The way the food looked and tasted and smelled didn’t surprise me as much as the level of corruption and lethargy and cronyism that was governing the system. I didn’t know how this collusion between government and corporations was playing out for cafeteria food in schools in America. That was shocking to me, this system of bad food being profited on.

Q. After following Geraci’s efforts at school-food reform, what do you think it takes to make this kind of change? What can other cities learn from Baltimore?

A. We did not want to make a film [that was] one-size-fits-all. Baltimore in particular is a very difficult environment to make change in because it’s an undercapitalized city. There’s a lot of poverty, a lot of institutional lethargy.

I’m now convinced of the value of a visionary leader who is unafraid to audaciously challenge things that are wrong, and the value of that person to have contagious optimism so that people he’s talking to don’t feel threatened or bad about what they’re doing, but feel invited to participate in something wonderful. I’m cynical and jaded about my city of Baltimore, and I was intoxicated with [Geraci’s] optimism. I was driving down the road looking at drug corners in Tony’s car, and Tony says, “See those kids over there? Imagine them working in a restaurant.”

The cafeteria system was run into the ground slowly. Right after [World War II] it was great, they had silverware and people were cooking in every school in the country. It was fresh and fairly local and smelled good and tasted good. It took 50 years to f— up school food — why would it take two years or five years to fix it? It’s going to take a long time and a lot of money and a lot of creative thinking to make it work.

Q. What about kids’ tastes? That seemed to be a problem in Baltimore, where kids, parents, and especially the meat industry were upset about the vegetarian food served on Meatless Mondays (“You wouldn’t believe the number of calls I get from parents on Mondays who are angry because their kids can’t get a chicken box,” Geraci told Baltimore’s Urbanite magazine.) Even if you can get healthy, fresh food into schools, will kids eat it?

A. The fast food companies have been working for decades with science to find out the fats and sugars and salts that our brain chemistry is evolutionarily wired for. It’s irresistible, because they know exactly what works and what doesn’t. Most of us are addicted to bad food.

What we tried to do in the film is symbolize [that] with the little first graders, taking them to the farm and having them taste fresh food for the first time. It animated their experience with food. Even if they’re still eating at McDonald’s they at least got exposure.

The other thing you do with kids is tell them how we’re being fucked over by corporations. If you go to a fast food place, you’re giving money to the wrong man. There’s this other place down the street called a farmers market. These people care about you.

Q. What’s the status of Baltimore school food today? What do you think of criticisms that Geraci’s efforts failed?

A. The [school] farm didn’t exist at all [before he arrived]; he invented that. Now it’s got a teaching kitchen, and there are constant rotating field trips, more arable land, worm space, mulch space, constant training for city kids. Most of the food is locally sourced now. The after-school supper [program], which was a pilot in the film — now there’s 20 or 30 schools doing it. Those kids now have a second meal, and their parents can come and have it for $2 or $3. There are things like the central kitchen that are still caught up in bureaucracy, but they are being dealt with, just in slow motion. Some of the things he succeeded in are invisible — people aren’t jumping up and down [because] the procurement contracts are less corrupt.

There are people who resented the hell out of Tony because they were happy signing two documents and not doing anything else in a day. He came along and said, “OK, now we have to work harder.”

It’s time for potato planting. This Saturday we will start the first round of early and main season varieties: Yukon Gold, Purple Viking, Red Pontiac, and Kennebec. Students of the Cochise College “Sustainability Course” will be volunteering at Avalon Gardens as part of their field studies. They come out every semester. They will watch our PowerPoint presentation of Sustainable Agriculture developed here, with a Q&A session afterwards.
The tour will include the organic vegetable gardens, animal pastures and care, the various greenhouses, shade structures, learning to evaluate different irrigation techniques, compost applications, and the CSA program. The week after they will experience the dairy processing, the alternative building models, and Food forest development; they will finish by working in our evolving Food Forest project by either planting and/or mulching/grooming. Everyone benefits by learning theory as well as putting their hands in the soil.  There are many workshops planned this spring and we invite all of you to learn and participate in the intensive courses offered.  Look through our website and sign up soon. We hope you enjoy the first cabbage of the season.

Thanks again for being pioneers and supporters of this local organic food movement,

-The Avalon Gardens Family

Spiritualution - Justice to the People
Click here to check us out on Facebook

CSA Harvest List

Sometimes we have a featured vegetable of the week and we will give you historical information, interesting facts, and delicious recipes to try.  If you click on the vegetables in the harvest list, it will bring you to the past newsletter where that vegetable was featured.  All of our past newsletters can be found on our Farm Report website.

• Winter Squash - Spaghetti Squash
• NEW: Cabbage
• NEW: Rainbow Swiss Chard
• Yokatta-Na: Asian Greens, similar to Bok Choy but milder in flavor; for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Ruby Streaks: Finely serrated Mizuna style; mild maroon colored Mustard Greens; for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Red Bok Choy : for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Red Rain Komatsuna : for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Lettuce-  varieties of green or red
  
• Baby Carrots

Permaculture in Perak, Malaysia

Initially established as a permaculture project in 2008, we are now growing to be an educational center that teaches people about ways they can incorporate sustainability into their everyday lives wherever they live.  Our farm has become the playground and laboratory where we experiment with new techniques, learn from our mistakes, and try until we succeed.  Along the path of mistakes and subsequent successes, our passion lies in sharing our knowledge and experience with everyone we encounter, from urban folks to local farmers.   Beyond farming, we greatly emphasize living well—from the collection of indigenous tropical medicinal herbs to the principles of eating well and fostering an intentional community with common values towards the aim of living more harmoniously on earth.  After all, we are made from the dust of the earth.

The land is situated on a hill, 500m above sea level, and is surrounded by dense primary forest.  Being next to the rainforest provides us with ample mountain water for our crops, livestock, and daily living.  As the land is located 6kms from the nearest town, which is only populated by 2000 people, the environment is clean with unpolluted air and minimal urban disturbances.  Being in a rainforest surrounding provides strong biodiversity in the area, which keeps the soil fertile and natural.   Despite occasional visits from the wild boars that can be destructive to crops, our neighbors include a rich variety of wildlife such as gibbons, wild elephants, eagles, hornbills, and snakes.

One example of the ways we are building soil fertility is planting sorghum.  It is a fast-growing crop and is the grain we feed our livestock.  Sorghum byproduct constitutes a large volume of biomass that is returned to the soil.  As it decomposes, sorghum becomes organic matter that conditions and enriches the soil.  The soil on our land has high clay content and doesn’t hold moisture well, so organic matter improves the soil structure, moisture holding capacity, and aeration.

Our farming principle is to grow with zero negative effects to the soil and environment.  Because of our unique location in the rainforest, it is extremely crucial not to disturb the complex natural biodiversity and ecosystem that has been established for hundreds of thousands of years.  Instead of planting using monoculture methods, we mix our crops and create forest gardens where a variety of vegetables, herbs, and fruits can coexist and assist each other.  The farm’s policy is to remain 100% chemical free.  By creating a network of relationships, we are able to effectively stay away from using pesticides and chemicals.  Our livestock of goats, chickens, and ducks are not kept for their meat, but as part of the sustainable system.  The grazing goats become our assistants in preventing the dense jungle from aggressively growing and creeping into our land.  Their manure becomes the main ingredient for composting and later turns into fertilizer for our crops.  Our livestock is fed with purely organic food such as organic kitchen waste and desiccated coconut thrown away as waste at the local market.  The grain we feed to the livestock is also grown on the land using the same principles.  On our farm, plants, animals, and humans are of equal importance and we feed others as well as we would like to feed ourselves.   Attention to this constant cycle is key to our chemical-free concept.

With the lack of organic seeds in Malaysia, we have begun an organic seed bank in hopes to supply local farmers with organic seeds to reduce their reliance on genetically-modified seeds for their crops.

As our land is located on a 25 degree hill slope, we create terraces to minimize any exposed soil for vegetable-growing and in between planted ground creepers such as pumpkins, squash, and winter melons.  In our tropical climate, rain showers are frequent and the fertile topsoil can be easily washed off with one big rain, not only affecting the soil fertility but exposing the land gradient to possible erosion.

Our biggest challenge is keeping the surrounding environment pristine and preventing the loss of rainforest through logging and commercial planting developments.  The local authorities do not provide any form of support for sustainable agriculture.  Our neighboring land and hills, which had been secondary rainforest, were completely cleared and logged by timber companies who were doing joint-venture projects with the local governmental economic development agency.  Up to 300 acres of forest were planted with hybrid eucalyptus as a source of fast-growing timber.   We encounter a daily struggle, attempting to prevent our crops from being cleared and sprayed with herbicide, and constantly monitor our water source to ensure no chemical wastes are diverted into the streams.

Sustainably grown crops fetch lower than market prices in the local wholesalers, as they are judged on their shape and size irregularities.   Thus, our income is irregular and uncertain, making it necessary to rely on guests to keep afloat.   Local community awareness of the importance of sustainable agriculture is poor.   Our activities are seen as too labor intensive.  For our neighbors, it is easier to buy ready-made chemical fertilizers to obtain a decent harvest despite its higher costs.

Our long-term goal is to be fully self-sufficient in respect to both food and energy.  More importantly, we want to be living proof that it is possible to practice natural farming with zero chemicals, even in a dense rainforest. We hope to share our knowledge and experience with anyone who wishes to follow a similar path.  We also aim to expand to a community-supported system in which our farm can provide food for a limited number of families.

Our farming and agriculture techniques are developed and designed through prioritizing the constant observation of nature.  We keep things simple to find the easiest solutions. If we allow ourselves to observe and learn from plants, animals, and nature, the answers are often given to us.  Therefore, in the systems that we design, we are mostly replicating natural occurrences and behavior.  As these systems are implemented, they are highly effective, low in cost, and extremely simple. You can almost say that it is just common sense.

As long as we keep everyone and everything happy and well fed, they feed us well in return.

Food hubs: How small farmers get to market

By Claire Thompson

Ask most small and mid-sized farmers who sell food to a local audience what they like least about their job and they will probably say marketing and distribution. Driving long hours to sit at farmers markets (or managing someone else who does) is always a risk that can result in unsold leftovers. And even when you have a guaranteed market — like in the case of community-supported agriculture (CSA) and restaurant sales — the effort involved diverts time and energy from the actual work of farming.

Enter food hubs. A key component of the USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, food hubs operate on the simple principle that farmers, like everyone else, are stronger when they work together. Food hubs are networks that allow regional growers to collaborate on marketing and distribution. The term applies to a broad range of operations, from multi-farm CSAs to Craigslist-like virtual markets where buyers and producers can connect. But each model is motivated by the belief that individual farms can’t survive in a vacuum.

“When everybody was a farmer, there was all sorts of infrastructure to support family-scale farming, and that’s all gone,” said Amanda Oborne, director of FoodHub, an online resource that connects growers, buyers, and distributors in the western U.S. “Food hubs are a huge part of the answer to rebuilding that infrastructure.”

“Talking, getting together — that in and of itself is a new thing for a lot of growers,” said Dru Rivers, whose Full Belly Farm in California’s Capay Valley is part of the Capay Valley Farm Shop. “The food hub brings together this region, rather than [us farmers] competing against each other.”

Employees at the Local Food Hub. (Photo by USDA.)

Capay Valley Farm Shop partners with 26 institutions around the Bay Area (about 100 miles away from the valley), from schools to cafes to companies like Ideo and Adobe, to offer “farmshares,” CSA boxes containing not just one farm’s produce but an assortment of the best offerings from the shop’s network of 35 farms. Last year the farm shop started offering wholesale produce as well, selling to company kitchens and neighborhood markets.

“The collaboration allows everyone to market together, so there’s one truck that goes to the city, and one delivery route,” Rivers said. “Some of us are much better farmers than we are marketers, so [it’s] a tremendous help, and allows the farmers to focus on what they’re good at.”

Local Food Hub, in the Charlottesville, Va., area, concentrates solely on distributing wholesale produce to its 150 buyers, which include public schools, hospitals, and nursing homes, as well as restaurants and grocery stores. “We really try to focus on those big institutional markets that small farmers have been traditionally locked out of,” explained Emily Manley, Local Food Hub’s director of outreach and development.

Many of those institutions feel the customer demand for local food but don’t know how best to meet it. “If the purchasing manager [at a hospital] can call up Sysco and get all the tomatoes he needs, he doesn’t want to call up a bunch of different farmers and coordinate with each,” Manley explained. “We do all the logistics.”

Farmers tend to be risk-averse by necessity, and Manley likes being able to offer them a solid commitment. “We say, here’s where there’s opportunity; we’ll commit to buying this amount of squash from you every week. Just having that information is key to being more efficient and growing more food.”

By making regional distribution easier for farmers who usually have to compete with cheap produce trucked and shipped from afar, food hubs also pump dollars back into the local economy. Local Food Hub has invested over $1 million in direct farm purchases in its two and a half years of existence.

Beyond the direct economic benefits, connecting eaters with local growers helps cultivate a sense of regional pride and solidarity. “We have a real attachment to making sure our valley continues to have its rural, agricultural heritage,” Rivers said. “We want food to be recognized from a region, not just one farm.”

Bruce Johnson at Dragonfly Farm sells his pastured meat through the Fall Line Farms food hub. (Photo by USDA.)

Virtual hubs, like FoodHub, FarmsReach, and Local Dirt, offer a more interactive way for growers and eaters to connect, allowing them to specify exactly what they’re looking for, the same way apartment hunters can filter their Craigslist results by neighborhood, price, or number of bedrooms. “Our point really is to make it all transparent,” Oborne said.

Food hubs maintain the transparency that draws eaters to farmers markets and CSA programs, while ramping up the efficiency necessary to get fresh, local food to a wider audience. Thomas Nelson, one of the community members who founded the Capay Valley Farm Shop, describes food hubs as “the center of the new rural economy. Once you begin to put that infrastructure in place,” he adds, “it gives new farmers more confidence that they have the support they need to succeed.”

Which is why it’s great to see the USDA taking food hubs seriously, offering funding [PDF], doing research, and collaborating with groups like the National Good Food Network to provide webinars and other resources to help food hubs get off the ground. The local food supply won’t keep pace with demand unless new, young farmers feel that encouragement. Even veteran growers sense the tide turning.

“I’ve been farming here for 28 years,” Rivers said. “Having this new venture makes it exciting again.”

Imposed Austerity vs Chosen Simplicity: Who Will Pay For Which Adjustments?

By Vandana Shiva

The world is in ecological and economic meltdown. Ecological limits and limits set by human dignity and human equality are being ruthlessly violated. Adjustment is an imperative. However, there are vital ways that differentiate the adjustment by the rich and powerful and the processes of adjustment demanded by the popular will of people everywhere. The rich would like to make the poor and working people pay for adjustment. People want the rich to pay through higher taxes, including the Tobin Tax on financial transactions, and through regulation for stopping the robbery of natural resources and public goods.

The dominant economic model based on limitless growth on a limited planet is leading to an overshoot of the human use of the earth’s resources. This is leading to an ecological catastrophe. It is also leading to intense and violent resource grab of the remaining resources of the earth by the rich from the poor. The resource grab is an adjustment by the rich and powerful to a shrinking resource base – land, biodiversity, water – without adjusting the old resource intensive, limitless growth paradigm to the new reality. Its only outcome can be ecological scarcity for the poor in the short term, with deepening poverty and deprivation. In the long run it means the extinction of our species, as climate catastrophe and extinction of other species makes the planet un-inhabitable for human societies. Failure to make an ecological adjustment to planetary limits and ecological justice is a threat to human survival. The Green Economy being pushed at Rio +20 could well become the biggest resource grabs in human history with corporations appropriating the planet’s green wealth, the biodiversity, to become the green oil to make bio-fuel, energy plastics, chemicals – everything that the petrochemical era based on fossil fuels gave us. Movements worldwide have started to say “No to the Green Economy of the 1%”.

But an ecological adjustment is possible, and is happening. This ecological adjustment involves seeing ourselves as a part of the fragile ecological web, not outside and above it, immune from the ecological consequences of our actions. Ecological adjustment also implies that we see ourselves as members of the earth community, sharing the earth’s resources equitably with all species and within the human community. Ecological adjustment requires an end to resource grab, and the privatization of our land, bio diversity and seeds, water and atmosphere. Ecological adjustment is based on the recovery of the commons and the creation of Earth Democracy.

The dominant economic model based on resource monopolies and the rule of an oligarchy is not just in conflict with ecological limits of the planet. It is in conflict with the principles of democracy, and governance by the people, of the people, for the people. The adjustment from the oligarchy is to further strangle democracy and crush civil liberties and people’s freedom. Bharti Mittal’s statement that politics should not interfere with the economy reflects the mindset of the oligarchy that democracy can be done away with. This anti-democratic adjustment includes laws like homeland security in U.S., and multiple security laws in India.

The calls for a democratic adjustment from below are witnessed worldwide in the rise of non-violent protests, from the Arab spring to the American autumn of “Occupy” and the Russian winter challenging the hijack of elections and electoral democracy.

And these movements for democratic adjustment are also rising everywhere in response to the “austerity” programmes imposed by IMF, World Bank and financial institutions which created the financial crisis. The Third World had its structural Adjustment and Forced Austerity, through the 1980s and 1990s, leading to IMF riots. India’s structural adjustment of 1991 has given us the agrarian crisis with quarter million farmer suicides and food crisis pushing every 4th Indian to hunger and every 2nd Indian child to severe malnutrition; people are paying with their very lives for adjustment imposed by the World Bank/IMF. The trade liberalization reforms dismantled our food security system, based on universal PDS. It opened up the seed sector to seed MNCs. And now an attempt is being made through the Food Security Act to make our public feeding programmes a market for food MNCs. The forced austerity continues through imposition of so called reforms, such as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in retail, which would rob 50 million of their livelihoods in retail and millions more by changing the production system. Europe started having its forced austerity in 2010. And everywhere there are anti-austerity protests from U.K., to Italy, Greece, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, and Portugal. The banks which have created the crisis want society to adjust by destroying jobs and livelihoods, pensions and social security, public services and the commons. The people want financial systems to adjust to the limits set by nature, social justice and democracy. And the precariousness of the living conditions of the 99% has created a new class which Guy Standing calls the “Precariate”. If the Industrial Revolution gave us the industrial working class, the proletariat, globalization and the “free market” which is destroying the livelihoods of peasants in India and China through land grabs, or the chances of economic security for the young in what were the rich industrialized countries, has created a global class of the precarious. As Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich have written in “The making of the American 99%”, this new class of the dispossessed and excluded include “middle class professional, factory workers, truck drivers, and nurses as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails, and maintain the lawn of the affluent”.

Forced austerity based on the old paradigm allows the 1% super rich, the oligarchs, to grab the planets resources while pushing out the 99% from access to resources, livelihoods, jobs and any form of freedom, democracy and economic security. It is often said that with increasing growth, India and China are replicating the resource intensive and wasteful lifestyles of the Western countries. The reality is that while a small 3 to 4% of India is joining the mad race for consuming the earth with more and more automobiles and air conditioners, the large majority of India is being pushed into “de-consumption” – losing their entitlements to basic needs of food and water because of resource and land grab, market grab, and destruction of livelihoods. The hunger and malnutrition crisis in India is an example of the “de-consumption” forced on the poor by the rich, through the imposed austerity built into the trade liberalization and “economic reform” policies.

There is another paradigm emerging which is shared by Gandhi and the new movements of the 99%, the paradigm of voluntary simplicity of reducing one ecological foot print while increasing human well being for all. Instead of forced austerity that helps the rich become super rich, the powerful become totalitarian, chosen simplicity enables us all to adjust ecologically, to reduce over  consumption of the planets resources, it allows us to adjust socially to enhance democracy and it creates a path for economic adjustment based on justice and equity.

Forced austerity makes the poor and working families pay for the excesses of limitless greed and accumulation by the super rich. Chosen simplicity stops these excesses and allow us to flower into an Earth Democracy where the rights and freedoms of all species and all people are protected and respected.

FarmHack: DIY Farmer Collaboration

By Amber Turpin

I have a weird fascination with inventions, and often wonder what the beginning of something was. What led to someone coming up with stained glass? Or what about an alarm clock? These are simple creations that pale in comparison with even more complex items that we also use without much thought…dishwashers? Copy machines? This computer? Maybe I should have pursued a career in engineering, but more likely my preoccupation with these inventions is due to the fact that I have little understanding of them. It seems that that disconnect between the things we use and depend on and how they function leads to a pretty common level of frustration. The rise in DIY projects and interest that we are seeing these days surely has to do with that frustration leading to a push for self-reliance.

I think it also has to do with a larger disconnect, one that has moved us away from community minded information sharing and collaboration. We have less and less opportunity in this modern world to wave down a neighbor with a question about chicken husbandry or how to fix a broken well pump. Instead, we jump on the Internet and Google the answer, hoping that the source we choose to trust is reputable and fact-based. The National Young Farmers’ Coalition (NYFC) has launched a project for the today’s sustainable farming community that brings the best of both worlds together. FarmHack taps the same age-old premise of learning directly from others in a similar community while creating innovative open source sharing technologies to reach small farmers around the globe.

The main premise is to learn from each other, specifically about the tools of the trade, done via an online blog, forum, events, and even the new FarmHack Tools Wiki. The reasoning is that, “Mainstream agricultural research and development tries to solve farmers’ problems with top-down, chemical and energy-intensive inventions. FarmHack seeks to solve problems by helping our community of farmers to be better inventors, developing tools that fit the scale and their ethics of our sustainable family farms.”

Co-Founder of FarmHack, Severine von Tscharner Flemming (and Founder of The Greenhorns), says that the idea “grew out of a frustration of using 1940’s tractors that were busted” and then finding that the new technology available to fix or replace them was based on chemical and energy dependent industries, not ecological stewardship. “FarmHack is a core complement to reclaiming a more bio-intensive, resilient, prosperous, locally oriented, appropriate scale to farming,” she says, and it is driven by the needs of farmers but built by reciprocal relationships among people with various applicable skill sets. That means, not only farmers but hackers, makers, engineers, even robot builders; all becoming allies in developing opportunities to monetize ideas, create commerce, and to share blueprints for the future.

This Tools Repository on the newly revamped website features clear descriptions, plans and instruction on creating or fixing a variety of implements. It can be utilized and contributed to by anyone who may have more information about any particular item. Although it is still in Beta mode, this development offers tons of potential in assisting folks trying to fix, make or find certain farm tools and innovations. What started with solar tractors moved into wool and chicken processing equipment, then led to securing a grant that will create technology for text messages to be sent when your greenhouse gets too hot. One of the newest inventions shared a recent FarmHack event was a bike powered root washer.

Mainly, though, the key issue to what NYFC and FarmHack are working towards is that a new generation of farmers step up to the plate. It is essential that we have capable, viable, passionate people growing our food who in turn, encapsulate those very same traits into what we eat. There are so many hurdles in the way, from funding to policy to access, that make these kind of collaborative sharing networks that much more important as we look ahead. In essence, as Severine points out, FarmHack “is also a cultural project of re-evaluating what is valuable…to rebuild our economy.”

The onion and leek seedling-shoots are getting planted and we are having lots of fun doing so. We started them all from seed in our small propagation hoophouse around mid to end of January. We chose about a dozen varieties of onions and several kinds of leeks to see which one does best with the extreme Sonoran desert weather in the spring and summer. We are expecting warmer days now and less hard frosts so these transplants should be doing well. Sometime by end of May we should be able to harvest the first ones of either kind. Some varieties stay longer in the ground and are able to grow bigger, so we will see what will happen this year.
The seedlings in our propagation hoophouse getting larger so we have started to divide them or transplant them in bigger pots. Currently we are growing about 50 varieties of tomatoes, 50 varieties of hot peppers, 40 varieties of sweet peppers, a dozen kind of eggplants, lots of celery, lettuce, greens, and a myriad varieties of herbs (medicinal and culinary) and flowers. Some have been moved to a larger hoophouse to “harden off”. The small hoophouses are advantageous for seedlings and starts because they get warmer quicker, keep the humidity higher and have a better protection during the cold snaps because the radiant heat from the soil is less diluted and the ceiling isn’t very high which keeps the warmth in longer. All our seedling pots are on heating mats which keeps the soil and roots warm. It’s a micro-climate where most seeds can flourish. It’s always fun and amazing to watch how seeds emerge and establish themselves as little plants; and eventually get planted in the gardens to mature.

Thanks again for being pioneers and supporters of this local organic food movement,

-The Avalon Gardens Family

Spiritualution - Justice to the People
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CSA Harvest List

Sometimes we have a featured vegetable of the week and we will give you historical information, interesting facts, and delicious recipes to try.  If you click on the vegetables in the harvest list, it will bring you to the past newsletter where that vegetable was featured.  All of our past newsletters can be found on our Farm Report website.

• Winter Squash - Mayo Kama (Sonoran Desert heirloom, butternut quality)
• NEW: Fennel (Finocchio) Bulbs
• NEW: Parsley
• Fun Jen:  looseleaf chinese cabbage, very mild; for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Yokatta-Na: Asian Greens, similar to Bok Choy but milder in flavor; for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Ruby Streaks: Finely serrated Mizuna style; mild maroon colored Mustard Greens; for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Red Bok Choy : for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Red Rain Komatsuna : for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Shingiku Chrysanthemum: frilly green look; for salads, steamed, stirfried etc..
• Lettuce-  varieties of green or red
  
• Baby Carrots

The Lord’s Acre - a not for profit garden in Western North Carolina

The Lord’s Acre is a not for profit 501(c)3 garden in western North Carolina. All the organic produce grown is given away to our local food pantries, Welcome Table, and individuals in need. Last year we grew 8 tons of produce on 1/2 acre using a combination of raised beds, field cropping, wide rows and by demonstrating various methods that can be used by backyard gardeners. We are currently in three-season production of a wide variety of mixed vegetables with cover cropping used as a crop rotation as well as being standard winter practice. This year, 2012, will be our fourth growing season and the progress we’ve made in such a short time is a testament to the community’s involvement. Along with volunteering in the garden, the community has provided such things as a tractor trailer load of compost, an irrigation pump, a site plan by civil engineers, a used barn, construction of a shed, financial support and so much more. During the growing season, there are regular volunteer work times as well as group volunteer times. We also house and train up to three interns per growing season. The garden manager is keen to eventually move away from actually cultivating or turning the soil by using deep mulch, hugelculture, the cutting and laying down of cover crops, etc. We are experimenting with these each year. This will take some time but she is convinced it is the solution to many issues that challenge growers, both organic and non organic while also making the growing of food more affordable and accessible.

Last year the property owner wished to sell the land we were on and we were unable to find similar, affordable property anywhere nearby. That is when we agreed to take out a 3-year mortgage on the property. Many have been generous in helping us toward the goal of land security but we still have a way to go. As we slowly expand onto the acreage we’re purchasing, we intend to add small livestock, fruit and nut trees and small fruits, the goal being to provide a variety of food and educational experiences. We see this property as public space where neighbors can enjoy learning about ways to take more control of their own food production while getting to know each other and building community ties.

We see the garden as a hub for the community that just happens to revolve around agriculture and food. It’s our goal to use the strengths we have in this community to create and share models that can work for other small towns similar to ours. The goals are to build real community, using the garden as a vehicle. We provide garden and food skills training to anyone and everyone, raise awareness of both local and global food-related issues and inspire by as much beauty as we can possibly create. The organization is run by a board of thirteen committed folks with one paid garden manager position — the garden manager also being the executive director and visionary. The goals of the garden go way beyond food issues, however. We realize there are many types of hunger and that the model of those that ‘have’ giving to those that ‘do not’ is a false model. Yes, hunger for food exists but hunger for knowledge, community, and friendship also exist and are no respecter of socio-economic status. Perhaps our truest goal is to find and connect every person’s abundance with the hunger that exists in others and we believe a garden, with all its beauty and common ground, is one of the best places to do that.

To this end The Lord’s Acre is now part of a unique triad consisting of our local food pantries, the garden and our Welcome Table. Welcome Tables are a concept where all people in a community are welcome to come once a week for a fresh, home cooked meal on a “pay as you can, if you can” basis. This brings together people from all ages and walks of life to get to know one another over a meal. This garden, Welcome Table, and pantry triad creates a unique relationship whereby the very best produce from the garden is donated to the pantries while ‘seconds’ can be used to prepare wholesome food at the The Welcome Table. In addition, the Welcome Table allows people the opportunity to taste vegetables they would not otherwise try, thus expanding people’s taste for a variety of fresh foods.

This year we are also conducting a community food survey to better understand where our community is when it comes to liking, using, understanding, growing, purchasing and eating fresh foods. This knowledge not only shows us how to grow our organization, it shows the entire community how we can bring together our strengths to put healthy food on everyone’s table. It tells us what will inspire our community to grow as much of its food as possible and to get to know our farmers and their needs in the process.

Bloomington’s Ecovillage Raises Hopes And Concerns

By Gretchen Frazee

Photo: Gretchen Frazee/WFIU News

Daniel Weddle and other members of Dandelion Village sit and talk about their future plans for the property after a day of clearing trees for future construction.

Dandelion Village recently received city approval to rezone land for a cooperative village and is scheduled to begin construction later this year. The village would house individuals and possibly even families who want to live together in a cooperative setting. Members all contribute their time and money to pay for food, transportation, housing and general upkeep of the land.

The Dandelion Village is still vacant land. But in about a year, the two-acre tract will house a small village with a few houses, a barn, an orchard, and a garden – all on a piece of land about the size of a large backyard.

Co-op organizer Danny Weddle and other members work each weekend to clear ground on the property on the west side of Bloomington.

The eco-village, as it has come to be known, is Weddle’s brainchild. He says it has been part of his dream to get away from the consumer society and immerse himself in something more sustainable.

“One of my goals is how do you make shoes for a community of 30 in 8 hours,” he says. “So those are the sorts of things that roll around in my brain. How do we reclaim mid-level production? And the technology is there to do it. We just need the people to come together.”

The village will not be completely self-sustaining though. Weddle says he understands it is nearly impossible to make everything you need to live on, and shoe production is just one example.

“It’s so hard to make your own shoes, your own cell phone,” he says. “This land is enough to grow vegetables for about 7 people-ish.”

The group also plans to have chickens and is looking into the possibility of other livestock.

“I am concerned about noise from construction, from people gatherings and from the farm animals, including big chickens and the goats or whatever they manage to get through the city,” says Deneise Self, whose home is adjacent to the property.

Self has been an outspoken critic of the ecovillage and on numerous occasions has appealed to the city’s planning department to closely monitor the group’s plans.

In addition to Self other neighbors have raised concerns about the impact of water runoff, parking on the area’s narrow streets and an increased number of bicyclists. Bloomington Planning Director Tom Micuda says the city has been working closely with Weddle to make sure the ecovillage members don’t have a negative impact on the community.

“Danny Weddle’s group Cooperative Plots have really bent over backward to answer questions that came up with our boards and commissions and also the neighbors,” Micuda says.

But he says many questions still need to be addressed because the Bloomington zoning code does not have established rules for ecovillages or cooperative living. He says zoning exceptions for these types of situations have become more frequent and the city will soon have to rewrite its code to include that type of housing. How that code is rewritten will be determined by what happens with Cooperative Plots.

“Will it be a model project and a demonstration project both locally and nationally for a great housing coop in an ecovillage format?” Micuda says. “And if it is it will build a lot more momentum. If for some reason there are problems in implementation, that will be a lesson learned we have to think about.”

Weddle says he sees the ecovillage prospering for a long time. Unlike other cooperative living situations comprised mostly of single adults, Weddle says Dandelion Village should be a place where he and other members can establish a home and a family.

International Women’s Day: 12 Innovations that are Helping Women Nourish the Planet

By Danielle Nierenberg

Women have proven to be a powerful force in the fight against global hunger and poverty, especially in agriculture. Worldwide roughly 1.6 billion women rely on farming for their livelihoods, and female farmers produce more than half of the world’s food. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, women account for 75 percent of all the agricultural producers. Today we observe International Women’s Day, a global celebration and recognition of women’s achievements.

Women farmers face a variety of obstacles, including a lack of access to information technology, agricultural training, financial services, and support networks like co-operatives or trade unions. Without these services, women cannot develop resilience to political, economic, social, or environmental upheaval, and they remain dependent on their male family members.

The good news is that women worldwide are developing and utilizing agricultural innovations to sustainably nourish their families and communities. Today we celebrate 12 innovations that are helping women get access to credit, improve their incomes, feed their families, introduce sustainable crops to markets, and reduce rural poverty:

• Co-ops. Co-operatives, or co-ops, are a type of business characterized by democratic ownership and governance. In the war-torn country of Côte d’Ivoire, Marium Gnire partnered with Slow Foods International to organize a women’s farming cooperative that would provide quality local food for school meals in her village of N’Ganon, increasing both the women’s income and the health of the community.

• Creating Links Between Women Producers and Markets. In Africa’s Western Sahel, the production of shea butter is boosting women’s entry into global markets. Women-run cooperatives across the region are tapping into the global demand for fair trade and organic beauty products by selling the skin-care cream they produce from the shea nut crop to cosmetics firms such as Origins and L’Oréal. These companies in turn pay a fair price for the products and invest in the women’s communities.

• Educating Girls on Family Planning. The United Nations Foundation sponsors Girl Up, an organization that encourages a world where young girls can avoid the pitfalls of too-early marriage and childbearing and can instead go to school, enjoy health and safety, and grow into the next generation of leaders. In the Amhara region of Ethiopia, where half of adolescent girls are married, Girl Up is helping to promote education for young girls. The project offers basic literacy classes, family-planning information, and agricultural training. In delaying motherhood, even for a few years, girls can gain critical years of education, where they often gain knowledge about successful agricultural practices.

• Empowering Young Girls Through Agriculture. When young girls learn valuable agricultural skills, they gain the power to avoid dependence on men for food and financial security. In Rwanda, the Farmers of the Future Initiative helps to empower young girls and other students by integrating school gardens and agricultural training into primary school curriculums. Over 60 percent of students in Rwanda will return to rural areas to farm for a living after graduating instead of going on to secondary school or university. As young girls learn these skills, they become self-sufficient and empowered.

• Extension Services. Extension services are an important way of disseminating agricultural knowledge to farmers, but unfortunately, women have been excluded from many extension programs, whether as service providers or recipients. When women are included in extension programs, they receive an education, raise their agricultural yields, increase their incomes, raise the nutritional status of their household, and contribute to the improvement of their communities. To improve female inclusion in extension programs, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture’s Sustainable Tree Crops Program created videos that women could watch in their homes or in groups, without disrupting their childcare or fuel-gathering obligations. Since 2006, nearly 1,600 farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana have received cocoa-production training directly through Video Viewing Clubs.

• Female Trade Unions. In developing countries, women are commonly disenfranchised and not offered the same opportunities and rights as men, such as access to credit and land ownership. The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a female trade union in India that began in 1992, works with poor, self-employed women by helping them achieve full employment and self reliance. SEWA is a network of cooperatives, self-help groups, and programs that empower women. Small-scale women farmers in India have particularly benefited from this network that links farmers to inputs and markets.

• Increasing Access to Water. In sub-Saharan Africa, improved access to water means the difference between barely scraping by and eating balanced meals, affording education, and owning a home. In Zambia, Veronica Sianchenga, a farmer living in Kabuyu Village, saw improvements in her family’s quality of life when she began irrigating her farm with the “Mosi-o-Tunya” (Pump that Thunders), a pressure pump that she purchased from International Development Enterprises. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the task of gathering water can take up to eight hours of labor per day and usually falls to women. Because of the pump, her children are eating healthier and she is enjoying increased independence.

• Microfinance Credit. Globally, women fall well short of receiving the same financial benefits and opportunities as men. Only 10 percent of the credit services available in sub-Saharan Africa, including small “microfinance” loans, are extended to women. The New York-based nonprofit Women’s World Banking is the only microfinance network focused explicitly on women, providing loans of as little as US$100 to help women start businesses. Microfinance institutions from 27 countries provide the loans to women who in many cases have no other way to access credit.

• Vertical Farming. Over 800 million people globally depend on food grown in cities for their main food source. Considering that women in Africa own only 1 percent of the land, a practice called vertical farming gives these women the opportunity to raise vegetables without having to own land. Female farmers in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum, have been practicing vertical farming using seeds provided by the French NGOSolidarites. This innovative technique involves growing crops in dirt sacks, allowing women farmers to grow vegetables in otherwise unproductive urban spaces. More than 1,000 women are growing food in this way, effectively allowing them to be self-sufficient in food production and to increase their household income. Following the launch of this initiative, each household has increased its weekly income by 380 shillings (equivalent to US$4.33).

• Urban Farming. In Kenya, about 20 urban farmers grow fruits and vegetables on a small strip of land in Kibera, an urban slum in Nairobi with nearly 1 million people. These farmers do not formally own this land and farm through an informal arrangement. More than once, they have been forced to stop farming, and they often see their water supply cut. However, the farmers are continuing to come up with innovative ways of raising food-and incomes-on the farm. With the help of the farmers’ advocacy group Urban Harvest, the farmers are not only growing food to eat and sell, but, perhaps surprisingly, becoming a source of seed for rural farmers.

• Women’s Collectives. In many countries, women’s subordinate position in society makes them easy targets for domestic and sexual violence when working in the agricultural sector, which greatly inhibits their ability to work to their full potential. In India, the Tamil Nadu Women’s Collective focuses on advocating for women’s rights and improving food and water security. The collective reaches over 1,500 villages spread across 18 districts in India’s Tamil Nadu state and has helped many women see an increase in crop yields. The collective provides counseling and support for female victims of domestic violence, promotes women’s participation in local government, and helps women strengthen local food systems, through education on natural farming techniques.

• Women-Run Community Seed Banks. Studies have shown that women farmers typically have lower crop yields than their male counterparts. Rural women farmers’ lower productivity compared to male farmers may be due to women lacking access to high-quality seeds and agricultural inputs. The GREEN Foundation has partnered with NGOs including Seed Savers Network and The Development Fund to create community seed banks in India’s Karnataka state. Women run these seed banks, gaining leadership skills and acquiring quality organic seeds that yield profitable crops and their food security and incomes.

Although these innovations inevitably help men as well as women, it is important that policymakers, scientists, farmers’ groups, and the funding and donor communities focus on ensuring that these women harness the power of these innovations so we can create a more equitable and nourished planet.

Worldwatch’s Nourishing the Planet project recently traveled to 25 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, unearthing innovations in agriculture that can help alleviate hunger and poverty while also protecting the environment. These innovations are elaborated in the recently released report State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet.

Farming Communities Facing Crisis Over Nitrate Pollution, Study Says

by Stett Holbrook

Nitrate contamination in groundwater from fertilizer and animal manure is severe and getting worse for hundreds of thousands of residents in California’s farming communities, according to a study released today by researchers at UC Davis.

Nearly 10 percent of the 2.6 million people living in the Tulare Lake Basin and Salinas Valley might be drinking nitrate-contaminated water, researchers found. If nothing is done to stem the problem, the report warns, those at risk for health and financial problems may number nearly 80 percent by 2050.

The report is the most comprehensive assessment so far of nitrate contamination in California’s agricultural areas.

“The problem is much, much, much worse than we thought,” said Angela Schroeter, agricultural regulatory program manager for the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, a state water agency.

High nitrate levels in drinking water are known to cause skin rashes, hair loss, birth defects and “blue baby syndrome,” a potentially fatal blood disorder in infants. A recent National Institutes of Health study linked increased risk of thyroid cancer with high nitrate levels in public water supplies.

Nitrate-contaminated water is a well-documented fact in many of California’s farming communities. The agricultural industry, however, has maintained that it is not solely responsible because nitrates come from many sources.

But according to the UC Davis report, 96 percent of nitrate contamination comes from agriculture, while only 4 percent can be traced to water treatment plants, septic systems, food processing, landscaping and other sources.

San Jerardo resident Horacio Amezquita stands near the cooperative’s water source near Salinas, CA. The water is piped in from a clean well some distance away.

In addition to health risks, tainted water will exact a growing financial toll, the report said. The researchers project that utilities and citizens in the two regions will pay $20 million to $36 million per year for water treatment and alternative supplies.

According to the study, more than 1.3 million people in the two areas currently face increased costs as residents seek alternative sources of water and providers pass on the costs of treatment to ratepayers.

The five counties in the study area – among the top 10 agricultural producing counties in the United States – include about 40 percent of California’s irrigated cropland and more than half of its dairy herds, representing a $13.7 billion slice of the state’s economy.

The Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board has produced several reports of its own that show “large-scale degradation” of drinking water aquifers due to nitrates from fertilizer.

“If we don’t address this, we’re going to have a very serious issue in California,” Schroeter said.

Nitrates are odorless, tasteless compounds that form when nitrogen from ammonia and other sources mix with water. While nitrogen and nitrates occur naturally, the advent of synthetic fertilizer has coincided with a dramatic increase in nitrates in drinking water.

Rural residents are at greater risk because they depend on private wells, which are often shallower and not monitored to the same degree as public water sources. Current contamination likely came from nitrates introduced into the soil decades ago. That means even if nitrates were dramatically reduced today, groundwater would still suffer for decades to come.

According to the report, removing nitrates from large groundwater basins is extremely costly and not technically feasible. One relatively low-cost alternative is called “pump and fertilize:” pulling nitrate-saturated water out of the ground and applying it to crops at the right time to ensure more complete nitrate uptake.

Representatives of the California Farm Bureau Federation, the state’s largest agricultural association, would not comment on the report until it was released. But in a written statement, spokesman Dave Kranz said farmers and ranchers have worked on better nitrate management for years.

“Clean drinking water is a high priority for everyone, especially people who live in rural areas,” Kranz said. “Most farmers live where they work and want to be certain that they, their families, their employees, and their neighbors have access to safe water.”

Farmers and ranchers will continue to adapt to new information, technology and science to address nitrate problems, he said. But he said it’s important to “make sure nitrate management programs look at all possible sources to achieve the goal of safe drinking water.”

The safety of groundwater, which is the largest source of drinking water, is managed through the state’s Clean Water Act. But each source of contamination is handled differently, says Schroeter of the Central Coast water board, and agriculture is more lightly regulated than other industries.

Sonja Lopez and her son Leonardo at their home at the San Jerardo Cooperative in Salinas, CA. Sonja moved to the cooperative to be assured of clean drinking water for her self and her family.

For the 250 people living in San Jerardo, a farm-worker cooperative southeast of Salinas, the threat posed by nitrates is all too familiar. San Jerardo residents live in refurbished old barracks that have been converted into tidy homes.

Sonia Lopez moved into San Jerardo with her parents and five siblings in 1987. The four-bedroom, four-bathroom house was a big improvement over the two-bedroom apartment they once shared. “This was our American dream,” she said.

But something went wrong about nine years ago. Her skin became red and itchy. Her eyes burned. Her hair started falling out. Her family had the same symptoms, and she learned other San Jerardo residents were afflicted, too.

“I got very concerned because some of the residents started passing away from cancers,” she said. “People were dying, and we didn’t know who was going to be next.”

While they did not find a cause for the cancers, Lopez and fellow resident Horacio Amezquita learned from health officials that nitrates in their well water had made their eyes red and their hair fall out.

The community also learned that its water had been contaminated with nitrates since at least 1990; over the years, three wells had been drilled and eventually were found to be tainted. Drinking water regulations limit nitrates to less than 45 parts per million. One well measured 106 ppm, more than double the limit.

After repeatedly asking Monterey County officials to help, Lopez and Amezquita finally got a filtration system in 2006, and in 2010, the community connected to a new well two miles away that doesn’t need to be purified. The cost to Monterey County was about $5 million. San Jerardo residents used to pay about $25 a month for water; now, they pay as much as $130 a month.

Lopez still worries about her health, and like the UC Davis researchers, she warns the nitrate problem will only get worse.

“Our problem is going to be your problem,” she said. “It’s everyone’s problem. There are solutions, but we need the people in charge of our communities to do something about it.”

UC Davis hydrologist Thomas Harter led the team of researchers from the Center for Watershed Sciences that prepared the report, which took 20 months to complete and involved 26 scientists. The report had been requested by the Legislature in 2008.

Water-quality experts said the study provides a new and comprehensive look into the sources of the contamination, the chemicals in the water and the people affected.

Click the image to see the entire graphic.

Laurel Firestone, co-executive director of Tulare County’s Community Water Center, a nonprofit that helps communities with poor drinking water, said not only does the study show that the nitrate problem isn’t limited to a few isolated rural communities, but it also places responsibility squarely on agriculture’s shoulders. Firestone hopes there will now be the political will to tackle the issue.

“This isn’t a new problem,” she said. “We’ve known it for decades, but we’ve failed to do anything about it.”

The report lists a few solution to help pay for the cleanup of contaminated water, including a fee on fertilizer sales and greater “mill fees” on the production of fertilizer. In California, farmers do not pay sales tax on fertilizer, while water districts and communities bear the cost of cleaning up tainted wells.

Firestone said a fertilizer fee could be a powerful tool because there’s currently no disincentive to use fertilizer and few incentives to switch to safer agricultural practices.

“I think it’s clear that to address this problem, we need agriculture to lead the way,” she said.

Because of the might of the state’s agricultural industry, there has been little political will to tackle the nitrate problem. It will be up to the Legislature to decide how to respond to Harter’s report, but regulatory change might be coming as soon as this week.

The Central Coast water board, one of several regional water agencies that enforce the state’s Clean Water Act, will hold a highly anticipated meeting tomorrow to decide on new agricultural regulations aimed at reducing the release of nitrates, pesticides and other chemicals into aquifers, as well as creeks, rivers, lakes and the Pacific Ocean.

“We justify these regulations based on very severe threats to water quality,” said Schroeter, agricultural regulatory program manager for the water board.  “We have the most toxic water in the state.”

Despite the report’s grim news, water policy expert Jennifer Clary said she believes change is coming. She is a program manager for Clean Water Action, a national environmental advocacy group. She said the Central Coast water board’s plan would be a first step toward regulating groundwater contamination.

While she said the proposed rules aren’t perfect, “it’s going to be better than nothing. You can’t continue with nothing.”

Harter, the UC Davis researcher, said the study’s long-term projections for nitrate contamination reveal “just how extensive and interconnected these impacts are.” While his report outlined a number of policy choices, he doesn’t recommend one particular course of action.

“We can certainly do better, but it’s going to take an investment that we will all have to share. … That’s a discussion I hope we have.”

This story was distributed in conjunction with California Watch, a nonprofit investigative news group founded by the Center for Investigative Reporting. It first appeared on msnbc.com.