Edible Landscape Clean-up: Run for the Roses

Edible Landscaping

I don’t recall when I started to search out edible landscaping as a primary source of beauty.  It might have been when I saw how pretty my purple eggplants looked, tucked between some bushes because I did not have any more room in the REAL garden.  Or maybe it was the color of Swiss Chard under my cherry trees in the summer.  Well, for whatever reason, I am an avid edible landscaper.

I have been slowly trimming my rose bushes every other day.  They are not hard to manage but you do need to cut them back if you don’t want to live in Sleeping Beauty’s rose covered castle. Or was that Snow White and Rose Red?  Anyway, I never worry about trimming the roses too much because every bit of them are used.  In the Fall I use the rose hips for syrup.  In the Winter I give the trimmed branches to our goat, Lucy.  She eats them like candy.  The roof of her mouth must be made of titanium because these branches have thorns that really hurt.  The chickens clean up anything that Lucy drops and any spider cases, etc.

So, Lucy gets a special treat and I feel like I have cleaned up without adding anything to the landfill.  It’s a win-win.

Edible landscaping benefits not only the human critters but the birds, goats, and chickens.  Try it this year!

B.A.D. is coming! OCTOBER 16th!

ARE YOU READY?

B.A.D. Blog Action Day.  A day where bloggers around the world all write about the same thing.  It is a great way to connect people and ideas.  This year the topic is FOOD.  I'll be writing!  I may do multiple posts.  So, here's the challenge.  If you eat this should be important to you.  If you blog you should get linked up and post on the day.  If you don't blog, follow along anyway (or start a blog just so you can tell your food story... its easy!)

Here's the link http://blogactionday.org/  See you there!

Pickling peppers at the end of the world...

Ok, maybe not the END of the world, but the end of the season anyway.

Thanks to my cousin Paul for inspiring us with the flavor and ease of roasted peppers.  We use them all the time.  And to Hank for the simple method of saving the summers bounty.

Here's what we did today...

Picked peppers and washed them

setup an outdoor kitchen (in the rain, 46 degrees F... nice)

Roasted peppers till they were black...

Put them in a pot to steam...

After they steamed we cleaned them, took the seeds out, cut them up and put them in jars with a bit of brine...

Then we canned them in the pressure canner for 10 min.

They will be great later when its cold out and we need a touch of summer.

Snacks - a conversation with Paul

Paul sent me an email following up on his comment about snacks. He had more to say than what he put in his comment, but he didn’t want to offend. I love the feedback. I love it when people challenge my assumptions and make me question my thinking or clarify my writing. So I’m posting Paul’s email and some of my thoughts.




Hey Alan,


thinking a lot about your recent post. I wrote a lot more than the comment I posted, but then thought it over. I don't want to seem like a detractor in the public forum. I want the discussion, because I think a lot of the ideas are important. But I don't want the discussion to be contentious. So this is my compromise.


You probably gather that I am really direct. Please, if you tire of that, let me know and I will back off or tone down.


Snacks are a mixed bag. A good snack is a great way to prevent low blood sugar. A healthy snack can actually serve to keep the calorie load down. Snacks can be very healthy and an important part of a diet. However, snack foods tend to be junk. I understand the desire for chips and crackers, but they are crap whether local or not. I think the idea of sustainable chips or crackers is doomed or flawed from the outset. We crave them in fact because of the very marketing of food products you are responding to in your sustainable farming venture.

Yes! Snacks (as we find them in the grocery store or the media) are JUNK! There is no nutritional value in Cheetos, though I still marvel at the engineering that went into them to get me to crave them. Snacks fill an emotional spot in our diet, not a survival need. That said, here at the Roost we snack a lot. Some of it is chips and crackers, but a large amount of our snacking is carrots, celery, apples, oranges, bananas, nuts, cheese, olives, etc. Part of our challenge it to find sources for or substitutes for those things that are not produced here, or are not in season, and to find seasonal sources for those things that are produced here and learn ways to store/preserve them for later use as snacks.

Another reality here at the Roost is that we start our day early. By 4:30 am the coffee pot is going, and breakfast is usually finished by 5:30. As a result, we are hungry by 9:30 or 10. It’s not lunch time. In fact, we are usually in the middle of school, writing, farm projects, or some other work. Here is where snacks fill an important nutritional niche in our lives. We need quick food that can be grabbed on the go. Crackers and cheese, crudité, fruit, chips and salsa, lunch meat, these kinds of things fill the gap. Finding or making snack food that is more nutrient dense, less burdened with artificial ingredients, and locally sustainable is our quest for this month.

When I eat crap, I want it to be very clear to myself that that food product is crap--a problem, an unjustifiable indulgence. I can't prove it, but I believe this approach has substantial epidemiological support: think of all the products that have been altered so that they are low fat or low salt. In either case, the end result for the consumer is that the low fat products make the consumer fatter, and the low salt products increase the consumers' salt intake. Is this not precisely because we take problematic food products and adjust them so that we re-categorize? This is now an acceptable choice--it is one of the good guys. So we eat it more regularly, we eat more of it. I think it is fair to interpolate relevant to the question of sustainability. We can produce and consume a certain number of junk products, but aren't we better off if we seriously limit quantity of products that are nutrition poor, made with highly refined ingredients?


That said, popcorn really works for me. If I really want or need a snack-- want the salty and want the crunch--I will pop some corn. But the fact I can't just grab makes me hesitate the perfect amount. Nuts also do it for me. Both are known to have nutritional value. I used to eat a lot more crackers and chips, and I still do once in a while. But I think simply eating less of them is the improvement.

I’d question the nutritional value of popcorn, but it is a great snack. Our problems are the time issue, and finding local sources (though we will be growing popcorn this year, so by fall that shouldn’t be a problem.) Our friends the Adlesbergers pop large quantities and bag it for use later as snacks. Haven’t gotten there yet, but we will be giving that a try.

I asked you some fairly complex questions regarding how you gage sustainability. One comment I want to make to you has to do with how I gage it: if I feel like the approach demands that I deprive myself, I conclude that that is not sustainable. I don't think we should ever deprive ourselves. The good news is that local food tastes better, so it doesn't leave me feeling deprived. There is a paradox though. I could never enjoy half the food products I eat if I didn't have exposure to people very different from myself. That exposure started with travel for me. It continues through education, travel, and technology. All of this becomes paradox because local food only means something to me because of the vocabulary afforded me through very non-local food. It in fact becomes a very important component of my approach to sustainability. I think some of the things you are seeking have to do with that kind of complexity. The resolutions are probably a hodgepodge of finding new products, learning some new cooking approaches, and as you've already indicated--preserving what you need in winter beginning in spring. I am engaging you as a part of my process of adjusting some of my habits. A huge problem for those of us urban dwellers is that we rely on labels, and generally are quite removed from production. Your point of view as a producer can really help me as I try to prioritize my choices. I am still really looking forward to your post regarding the economics we've spoken about.

I agree that sustainability can’t be built on deprivation. Giving up things to “save the world” or even to “save our selves” has never and will never work. Finding better ways to fill those needs, or other was of living that change what our needs/wants are might have a chance.

I think you are right about importing “non-local” food cooking methods, flavor combinations, and even some ingredients. That will give us a much broader pallet from which to create. Yet, the bulk of the ingredients need to be produced locally, or it can’t be sustainable. I’ll get into my version of sustainability/local/ economics/ etc. in the next post.



Thanks for the conversation. Keep pushing the buttons (just not the red one, it makes things explode.)

Building a local food system

It has been surprising to me how much local food is available, even at this time of year when food should be at it's most difficult to find.  That, all by it's self gives me hope.  BUT, it is not easy to find.  These micro-producers don't advertise.  Word of mouth is the only way to find them.  That's OK for me.  I'm finding what we need, and the information pool is growing. 

This morning I flipped on the news while the coffee was brewing (no, it's not local... it is fair trade, and I'm looking for a better local source, but I'll not give up my coffee).  The big news of the morning was Steve Jobs leaving Apple again.  Everyone thinks the company will tank again until he comes back.  My first thought was, "What a fragile company!"  Then, as my brain tends to do, my thoughts wandered into the fragility of the food system I was creating.  You see, the difference between a small (micro) farmer/food producer and a company like Apple is that even though Apple has been dependant on the inspiration and leadership of Mr. Jobs, the company will continue to exist, function, and possibly even thrive without him, while a small/micro food producer/farm usually will not survive the loss of the farmer/producer.  Often they wont even survive a year of bad weather, credit problems, sickness, etc.  Local food systems built on small producers need redundancy.  To keep all those redundant producers going requires more customers.  And then I stopped thinking...

Later in the morning (around 6:00 am) I turned on the computer to check out my virtual world.  One of the posts that popped up was about the "Transformative Power of Social Media Marketing in the Foodshed".  Eleanor made me think about my role as a producer, a consumer, and an activist in the local food movement.  It's the activist part that I shy away from.  Activist implies (in my mind at least) confronting institutions or regulations.  I have a more Akido like approach to life, bending, swaying, going around.  So, I may rant about regulations or corporations, but I rarely confront them head on.  I feel kind of guilty about that.  But, maybe this is the solution.  If I actively work on building and promoting a local food system, then I'm being and activist, and being nonconfrontational at the same time.  It is good for me and mine.  It is good for the community.  It doesn't attract too much attention from the regulators, and it makes a difference here. 

So, besides blogging (which is a very personal thing) I want to build a local producer e-network (like Local Harvest except MUCH smaller.)  ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEA HOW AN E- LUDDITE LIKE ME GOES ABOUT THAT KIND OF PROJECT?

I'm also going to get more involved in local food efforts in my community.  To start, I'll be attending a screening of FRESH tonight with a group of local producers, chefs, and concerned citizens.  More on that tomorrow.

How are you being active in building a local food system?

Why?

The other day a friend asked me that question.  After reading about our Eat Local 2011 project she called me up and ask "Why?  Why are you starting a new CRAZY project?  Can't you just enjoy your life, and maybe finish some things (like painting your house, saving your old barn, mowing your grass, making more fudge, etc)?  Why this project? Why now?  I liked your blog so much better when you wrote about your kids, your goats, Mouse Wars, gardening, remodeling, etc.  This Soapbox stuff is no fun to read."

Why?  For me there are two main reasons, security and health.  There are lots of "green" or "save the world" reasons that could be listed, but they don't motivate me to do more than talk, write, and dabble.  This project is being done for purely selfish reasons. 

Security

We are highly dependent on a very fragile, over-stretched food system.  We have no control, no real choice, no real voice in the system.  And the system is crumbling.  Soil has been killed, diversity has been lost, and the whole thing has been propped up with oil (another fragile system...)  As I see food prices rising every day and more breakdowns in the production and delivery systems, I feel less than secure.  In fact, I'm afraid for myself and my family.  The only solution is to reclaim responsibility for our own food.  The way to do that is by creating a local food system.  That can't be done by talking or writing.  It can only be done by active commitment. We produce what we can, we get the rest from others in our community.  That supports them and provides security for each of us.  When the system crashes or crumbles, we will be OK.

Health

Fresh, natural, whole foods in season are vital to good health.  The food being produced in our industrial food system, even with all the "nutrients" added to the final product, don't promote health.  The whole system is focused on producing more, cheaper food.  There is no thought given to health except as a marketing tool.  Being part of a local fresh natural food system is an important step toward being responsible for our own health. 

I guess that under my two reasons there is a third, more important reason.  That is responsibility.  I am responsible for what I do in the world.  The only thing I can really change is what I do.  So, this project is about taking responsibility for the food aspect of my life.  I'm dragging my family along on this one, and blogging about it to encourage you. 

That's why we are doing this project now.

(the other projects, paint, barns, etc will continue and will get some blog time too...  As for Mouse Wars, it's rather like the Korean War.  It hasn't really ended, we skirmish back and forth across the DMZ every day.  There are minor losses on both sides, but it doesn't often make the news.)

A snapshot of what we eat

Here's a quick look at what we ate for breakfast and how far we have to go in the next three months.

Whole wheat pancakes for breakfast.  Simple, made from scratch, topped with local maple syrup.  This is what the kids ask for almost every day.  So where do all these ingredients come from?

Flour - King Arthur Premium Whole Wheat - At least as far away as Kansas, probably farther.  700 - 1000 miles.

Canola oil - Generic - Somewhere in Canada.  700 - 1000 miles

Baking Powder - Sodium bicarbonate from a mine somewhere and corn starch from the Nebraska (probably).  At least 1000 miles.

Sugar - Domino - Somewhere in Florida probably.  700 miles

Whole Milk - our cow - 150 feet

Free Range Eggs - our chickens - 150 feet

Maple Syrup - Adelsberger's Farm - 5 miles

Obviously we have a problem.  If it isn't from our back yard, the stuff we ate for breakfast traveled WAY TOO FAR.  More than half of the ingredients for today's breakfast traveled at least 700 miles.  That's not local.

Solutions we will start exploring. 

Local Grain Mills and Local grain producers.

Switching to local honey instead of sugar (except for fudge making... fudge doesn't set when made with honey.)

Changing what we eat.  If breakfast was scrambled eggs, yogurt, and bottled or frozen fruit, we could have been almost entirely local.

So, where did your breakfast come from?

Eat Local 2011

The past few weeks we have had some interesting conversations around the table. Many of them have been spurred by ideas and anecdotes from Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Most often, when we weren’t laughing along with the story, the conversation ran along the “we’ve done that” and “when we did that this is what happened…” The rest of the time we talked about the nature of our food, where it comes from, what cool things Barbara’s family did that we want to try, etc. At the end of CC and I reading and discussing the book we found ourselves with a wistful, empty feeling. We had done most, if not all of the local living adventures described in the book (except the trip to Italy, which is on the MUST DO list.) We talk about the importance of local food, write about it, read about it, and dabble in it. But we always backslide. The month long project ends, or we get busy, or… any of a thousand things. So, we find ourselves creeping closer, but never really fully committing.

 

So, as they say, “talk is cheap, (it’s time for us to) shut-up and dance.”

 

This week we are launching our Eat Local 2011 project. We are going to spend the year building the habit of eating local food.
I know, January is a pretty stupid time to start such a project. There is nothing growing locally. We are setting ourselves up for failure even before we start. But, we have given some thought to this. We are giving ourselves three months to put the pieces together.

 

Here’s our plan:
January

• Local Food Fridays – Our main meal on Friday will be 100% local. We will use this as an opportunity to push our awareness of what is available in the long dark season, and to build connections with local producers.
• Explore where our food comes from.
• Find sources for staples.
• Plan the new and expanded garden so that we can meet more of our food needs.

February

• Filling the gaps – What things can we not possibly get locally? What can we do without? What is the best source for those things we can’t do without?
• Snacks – Local alternatives to the processed chips, crackers, etc. that we love.
• Start the garden.
• Continue Local Food Fridays

March

• Planting, Planting, Planting
• Explore food storage options so we will be ready for the production season
• Find local cheese, and learn to make cream cheese, soft cheeses, feta, etc.
• Find processer for chickens, rabbits, etc. (Or convince the family that we can and should do our own…)
• Continue Local Food Fridays

April

• Take the plunge, 100% local.
• Continue Local Food Fridays Posts to highlight what is in season here and how we are dealing with it.

Beyond that, we will see what happens.

 

This week I will be adding a page explaining the project. I’ll include a button you can get to link back to the project information. I’ll also include a link to anyone who wants to dance with us.

Some thoughts from Jamie Oliver about food, health, and our future.

John, over at Will Bike For Food clued me in to this great vid on TED.com.  It's AWESOME! 
I'll let Jamie speak for himself.

Enjoy!

Agriculture and a new mind

What would agriculture look like if was governed by the same fundamental rules that govern the rest of the living things on this planet?
• The process of growing food would build topsoil.
• Everything needed to produce food would come from that place – nutrients, water, energy, etc.
• Everything would be returned to that place – all the “waste” from producing the food, and all the “waste” from consuming the food would be returned in a way that it continued the soil building/life building process.
It seems pretty simple, until you test current agriculture/food production/waste management systems against these rules. Then it’s not so simple.

My neighbor farms. I farm. When I look out the window I can see bits of both as well as the wooded hillside on the other side of the neighbor’s field. For my part of the world this pretty much sums up the current agricultural practices.

Neighbor farms about 1000 acres. He grows corn and soy beans in rotation. He produces about 150 tons of corn per acre (that’s 150000 tons of corn) or about 47 tons of soybeans per acre (47000 tons of soy). Right now his farm looks like this…


acres of desolation



My farm is 5 acres. We have about 3 ½ acres in production. Each year we produce about 6400 lbs of milk, 1000 dozen eggs, 825 lbs of meat, and 780 lbs of salad greens, and enough fruit and vegetables for our family and to give away to our friends. We produce no grain. Right now our farm looks like this…

 

NOW THE TEST…

                                       Our Farm %    Neighbor Farm %

Build topsoil                        90 %                        2%

Own Nutrients                    80%                          0

Own Water                        70%                         100%

Own Energy                       20%                          0

Production Waste               90%                         90%

Utilization Waste                50%                           0

So, my farm's sustainable and the neighbor’s farm is not? Could be, but 10% of the things I do don’t build topsoil (that means they destroy topsoil…) and 20% of our nutrients are imported from somewhere else, and 30% of our water and 80% of our energy are also imported, and 60% of the resources tied up in waste walk away every year. We are MORE sustainable than a conventional farm, but still losing ground.

There are things I know I can do to improve what I am doing, especially in the water, energy, and waste areas. (Exploring those will take more than one post…) What I'm doing kind of works here.  I'll be exploring why and how addaptable some of these ideas might be.  Also, there are a bunch of things I haven't got figured out for my little farm.  I'll be exploring them too.

Here’s another thing…

Right now the American diet is more than 70% grain based. We produce no grain, ZERO. That means that we are not touching 70% of what we currently eat. You’d get a bit hungry if I cut your diet by 70%.

I can’t find a way to make annual grain production fit any kind of naturally sustainable model. That means we need to change what we eat. Radically!

Next post - Farming that builds soil.
Another post- Diet for a dying planet.

Learning to fly – part 2

For the past 30 years or so I’ve been looking for an ecologically sustainable way to live. I’ve explored Organic Farming, Permaculture, Biodynamic Methods, Indigenous Lifestyles, Holistic Living, and farming/gardening in various places around the world. I’ve read about, poked at, tried, and experimented with these methods on various scales in different parts of the world, and talked with people from all over who have done the same. So far I’ve found a boat load of great techniques for doing less damage and no model of sustainability.

There is a feeling among people searching for a way to survive what we are doing to the planet that if we all would just adopt (vegetarianism, or permaculture, or organics, or green living, or Gaia worship, becoming hunter-gatherers, or whatever) that everything will be OK. There is another group that thinks that if we can just overthrow our oppressors (the government, the corporations, the CEO’s, civilization, technology, etc.), if we can crash the system we will be able to rise from the ashes and live better.

They are all wrong.

Our lives are an expression of a set of fundamental rules/default ways of acting. They get cluttered up with culture, beliefs, education, etc., but we act in ways that stay true to those fundamental rules. Acting differently takes great conscious effort. Gravity is one of those rules we accept at a fundamental level. Even before Newton and company started defining the “Law of Gravity”, we didn’t act in opposition to it. We may not have understood the math, or the mechanics of gravity (not sure we do now…) but we didn’t willingly fling ourselves from high places, and we when we did that with other things or people we expected them to crash to the ground, not float off into space. We don’t think about gravity. We have no committees to explore how we live in a more gravity acknowledging way. We just live in ways that accept gravity as a constant. We also live in ways that produce the results we now see. The fundamental rules exist below the surface of conscious thought and shape our every action are what has given rise to the problems we now blame on technology, civilization, over population, greedy corporations, etc. They are not the cause. They are just expressions of the rules we live by.

I’ll not attempt to list all the fundamental rules that shape us. I won’t even pretend to know them all. But there are a few I keep running into as I explore sustainable ways of living.

One big one is -

WE ARE SEPARATE FROM NATURE. We may have started life there, as part of nature, but we have moved beyond that now. This means we are not subject to the “laws of nature”. Laws like natural selection, death, resource limitations, natural population controls, etc. You see this in the way we fight to extend life, the way we don’t even consider the relationship between food and population growth (a population will increase to the limits of its food supply. EVERY TIME. Increase food, the population increases. This rush to grow more because the population is going to expand only results in the population expanding…) as we try to solve the overpopulation problem. We see this in our linier thinking about the food chain, in the way we deal with waste, etc. It permeates our language, our religions, and science. And it is FALSE. It is fundamental to how we live right now, and it is completely false.

Another big one is –

GROWTH IS THE ONLY REAL MEASURE OF SUCCESS. This only applies to human endeavors. When we see unending growth anywhere else we recognize it as unsustainable, life threatening, dangerous, etc. We call it cancer, disease, system breakdown. We try to eliminate it, slow it, and prevent it, to restore equilibrium and balance. But in the human realm (separate from Nature…) it is the thing we strive for; more business, more dollars, more stuff, bigger house, better car, more growth.

These two fundamental rules are why we keep doing the same stupid things over and over. They are why we instantly set out to rebuild civilization when it crashes and make the exact same mistakes that caused the crash in the first place. They are why, despite years of effort and billions of dollars, we have not solved even one of the problems of civilization. We haven’t conquered disease, eliminated hunger, or controlled the population growth.

All other living things on this planet live by a different set of rules, and they only run into major problems when some catastrophic event occurs (like a giant meteor crashing into the planet), or when we muck up the system.

The difference between how we live and how the rest of the living things on the planet live is simple. They live locally. They draw everything they need for their life from their local resource pool, and return everything to that pool. Growth is limited by the local resources. Equilibrium is the measure of success.
For example, a tree draws all it needs from its local and sheds its leaves, bark, branches and eventually it whole self in that place, returning everything. Same with a mouse (its local range is bigger than the tree, but it lives, poops, eats, dies in that range. Taking in resources for a while and then returning them. There is only a finite amount of mouse food available, so there are only a finite number of mice in the area. Same with the tree. There is only a finite amount of tree food and water available to the tree. That limits how many trees can exist in that space. This is how all the living things on the planet live. The size of the local range varies, the pool of resources varies, but the rule doesn’t change. There is no organization to prevent any living thing from expanding outside it’s local range. Such an organization is not needed. Those creatures are quickly eliminated. Drawing resources from outside the local pool changes the population, and that results in less food, or more predation, and balance is restored.

WE DO NOT LIVE THIS WAY. We take resources from one place to fuel growth in another place. We ship the waste from living, and from production to yet another place. All these actions break the balance. The result of living this way is what you see around you, environmental destruction, pollution, over population, hunger, disease.

We can’t hope to find a sustainable way of living without changing the fundamental rules we live by.

"If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all."
— Daniel Quinn (The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit)

This is why permaculture, or organics, or even crashing the system and becoming hunter/gatherers won’t work. If we still operate by the same flawed rules, we will just produce the same flawed results.

Next post – Agriculture and a new mind.

Learning To Fly

In the comments to my last post I found some interesting thoughts from Leon. He said, “I more and more think that our weird desire "to feed the world" is actually part of the problem.” And I have to agree. “Feeding the world” is and always has been a nice front for economic/political expansion and control. I feel no need to “feed the world”, but I know I must find a way to feed myself, my family, and help feed my community that doesn’t destroy the place I depend on for life. If I find a way that works here, I also feel obligated to share that with others around the world so that they might adapt it to their own place. That way the world feeds itself.
In her book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, Lierre Keith says, “Agriculture (as we have been practicing it for the past 10000 years) is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems.”

Allan Savory once said that Organic Agriculture was responsible for the downfall of more civilizations than all the wars combined.

Agriculture, as we have been doing it for the past 10000 years is built on the idea that we MUST produce more. Having more keeps us safe. It gives us power. It has become our one measure of success and worth. (Imagine a CEO saying, “Let’s just produce as much this year as we did last year…” That business would be thought of as stagnant, and if the trend continued… failing. Even though that level of production might provide a comfortable living for all the people involved and keep the business functioning indefinitely, WITHOUT CONSTANT GROWTH WE ARE FAILURES!) Continual growth requires continual increases in resources. Initially we found those resources by eliminating other things that were using them. (Take a good look at a farm field. The only thing that lives there is what the farmer wants there, the crop. Everything else has been displaced or killed.) We quickly used up those resources. So we started taking resources from elsewhere. First we expanded so we had more area to use. Then we conquered, so we could make others produce for us. Then we pushed back in time to take resources that were removed from the system millions of years ago (coal, oil, natural gas…), Now we are out of places to find more resources to continue our growth so we alter what we grow so it will produce more from less. We modify the very structure of life to get more production.
Along the way we have hit limits. When that happens civilization crashes. Those who survive, regroup and try again. They try harder and smarter, develop new methods and new technologies, and get bigger. They crash again and again. The Anasazi, the Maya, the Mesopotamians, the Romans, etc… Every time we rise from the dust of the crash and learn to reach farther, dig deeper, make more from what we take.
We BELIEVE a story where this works. It defines our style of civilization. Kind of like those folks who didn’t believe in gravity. Or, more like the folks who believed they were exempt from or above the limits of gravity. They spent their lives in the sure knowledge that if they walked off a cliff they would not fall. Right up to the day they walked off the edge. CRASH! We are not walking, we are running full tilt, and we will crash yet again. We’ve been doing this for the last 10000 years, running at the edge of the cliff as fast as we can with as much as we can and believing we can fly. We crash and die. Somewhere else someone picks up the bits and does it again, bigger and better. Civilization! CRASH! AGAIN! CRASH! AGAIN! THIS TIME WE’VE GATHERED THE WHOLE GLOBE, EVERY LIVING PERSON, AND EVERY LIVING CREATURE (BY DEFAULT…) WE ARE RUNNING FULL TILT TOWARD THE EDGE….

Time to learn to fly…

Flight only happens when you understand gravity and the rest of the laws that, by limiting, make flight possible.

Let’s learn to fly… or better yet, lets learn to farm in a way that doesn’t lead yet again to a massive crash.

Joel Salatin – So right and yet so VERY, VERY WRONG

I’m finally catching up on my reading. The other day I picked up the September issue of one of my magazines, Acres USA, and found Joel Salatin had written the feature article.

I like reading Joel’s books and articles. He has tons of great ideas, and I usually find something I can adapt to our little farm. His Polyface Farm, and his work as an advocate for ‘eco-agriculture’ are inspiring. So I was excited to see what Joel had written for ACRES. Wow, was I disappointed. He’s gotten so much right, how could he be so wrong about feeding the world.

Doing it right.

At Polyface farm (and many other small eco-farms around the world including mine) farming is based on well managed animals on perennial pasture. Those animals, or products from those animals go to feed people locally. Almost all the resources (minerals , water, energy, etc.) stay on the farm and support more diverse life. The small amounts that leave the farm stay in the local area, and can be easily returned to the local resource pool to support life in that area. Well managed, multi-species rotational grazing builds topsoil faster than any other method, so the farm becomes more productive over time without needing imported resources. This kind of farming can produce food for people in that area forever. It can also be adapted to almost any climate. There are a few issues that still need some fine tuning, but it’s pretty close to a perfect system. This is the content I expected to find in Joel’s article.

What I found was an article about how unfair the comparisons between eco-ag and conventional ag have been, how under-funded eco-ag research has been, and how we are as good as conventional ag because we have developed techniques and products that produce the same kind of harvest results. All of this is true, but it leaves out one important thing. Feeding the world, at least feeding the people of the world the type of food they now eat, requires a lot of grain. Grain is an annual and it requires a different production system than multi-species pasture farming. Nothing about annual grain production builds soil, even using organic fertilizer inputs. To grow grain efficiently, you have to eliminate the other things living in that space. All other plants have to be eliminated. Eliminating those plants removes the structure that holds the soil together. It breaks the symbiotic relationships that exist between microbes and plants that create humus. The animals, insects, microbes etc. that lived on those plants, on the plant waste, or on the waste of other creatures living in that space are also eliminated. They either die or go away because there is no longer a food source in that place or we kill them because they use the grain as a food source. This further depletes the resource pool in that area. This kind of farming quickly requires inputs from elsewhere. This depletes the resource pool in another place and doesn’t replenish the resources on the farm. There are a few places in the world where soil type, precipitation, and temperature combine in a way that might make it possible to grow annual grains in rotation with long term perennial pasture and animals. These places are very small niches around the globe, and even there the best you can hope is to maintain the topsoil, not build it.

Joel says, “The advertisers in Acres U.S.A. and kindred publications have already solved the pathogen, erosion and fertility problems that the chemical Neanderthals (to use the late iconic Charles Walters’ term) are still scratching their heads about.” I’ve looked at the products advertised in Acres and other publications. They are great. They let you grow your annual grains and do less harm to the environment. But they don’t solve the fundamental problem. Growing annuals destroys the system that builds soil and maintains the local resource pool. Using these products is a way to slow one kind of environmental damage and to produce better quality food, but it isn’t ecologically sustainable.

Joel is right, eco-agriculture can feed the world. But to do that we will have to radically change what we eat, more animal protein and fat, more perennial fruits, and little or no grain. We will also have to change how food and waste are distributed. Ecologically sustainable food is local food. It maintains a local, diverse population, and all the “waste” from the production and use of that food is returned to the local resource pool to continue to grow food. It is a closed loop. That’s the only way eco-agriculture can feed the world.

Crackers

So here's the cracker making process. The recipe is here so I won't repeat it. We changed a couple of things. We used regular sesame seeds because that's what we had. We also didn't put them on parchment paper. It would have been faster, especially if you cut them into small crackers, but we didn't have any parchment paper in the house. (Someone must have eaten it...)

Here's what we did...

Mix

Mix

Knead twice

Divide into 12 parts

Roll

Roll some more

Season



Bake

Eat

The pasta roller is key. I never could have gotten them this thin. I don't have the time. We learned that you have to start on the widest setting and step down in small steps. Flattening first helps. The crackers currently have a 2.75 out of 3 rating at our house. CC didn't vote, she isn't here right now. JJ thought they tasted kind of like crackers. RR said OH YEAH! Can I have a whole stick! And I liked them and can see some potential for other flavor combos. Over all a success on a project we have been struggling with.

Breaking the Cracker Barrier

Today we are going to make another attempt at making great crackers. They are the one elusive snack item left for us to master. We are going to attempt these Crispy Sesame -Semolina Flatbread Crackers. I'll post the process and the results later this afternoon.

Wish us luck!

Tomorrow we are going over to our friends the Adelsbergers to help with their syrup making. They started last week. The kids are excited to see how it's all done. More on that tomorrow.

We are doing the Real Food Challenge - Friday Wrap-up over at NDiN today. Check out how we did and share what worked for you and what didn't. (I know you are all part of the challenge...)

Real Food and A Box Full of Kids

This is the first day of the NDiN Real Food Challenge. I had a post about our first day and the instant challenges we (I) found feeding everyone "Real Food". But I'm posting this instead.

A Box Full of Kids

If you read this blog regularly you know we have been struggling with a kid who couldn't stand when she was born. She is the black and white one on the right. Her name is Patty. It took us some time (and some suggestions from a few helpful readers) to pin down the problem. She had White Muscle Disease. That's a vitamin E/selenium deficiency. She seems to be doing pretty well now, but her sister (who appeared strong when she was born) died today. Her heart just stopped. (That is another effect of selenium/vitamin E deficiency.) As I looked more closely at the whole herd it became apparent that everyone was suffering some of the effects of this deficiency. I've dosed everyone up with cod liver oil, extra kelp meal, and a selenium rich mineral supplement. Should solve the problem for the goats.

So, you are probably wondering what this has to do with Real Food and the Real Food Challenge. Well, here are my thoughts for the day. What I discovered was the deficiency in my goats came from their feed. They have been on hay for a couple of months now, and confined to the barn for about a month (the snow is so deep there is nothing for them to nibble on and no reason for them to go out to pasture. It would be pointless for them and more work for me.) The 'organic' hay I bought this year is from a new source. They are new to the organic game, and their fields have just 'transitioned'. Before they changed the fields had been farmed traditionally. In researching White Muscle Disease and ways to deal with it I found that selenium was depressed in plants grown on soils with low pH and on soils subjected to chemical fertilizers. It had not been a problem in the US until after the wide spread use of chemical fertilizers began. Vitamin E deteriorates in plants that are stored for long periods of time. This year we used first cut hay from a farm where the fields had just recently switched to 'organic' practices. The food caused the problem.

These kinds of studies are readily available for animals and animal feed. BUT, no one talks about it in relation to human food and human health.

Today has made me rethink this challenge and what I'm doing. I'm a farmer. My business is food. Producing fresh, nutrient dense, balanced food for my family and my community is my responsibility. That's an idea I intend to explore more this month. The how and the why of Real Food.

I am just finishing my garden planning for the spring (I shouldn't say finishing, the details change as the plan gets implemented, but without a plan to work from it's just CHAOS.) I'm also finishing Eliot Colman's The Winter Harvest Handbook. (I like it a lot better than his earlier book The Four Season Harvest. ) It has made me think a lot about what I can do here to ensure we have fresh food year round. I have plans, BIG PLANS.




Starting this week our existing green house goes into production mode. Today will be spent cleaning and prepping. Tomorrow we plant. As you can see from the photos below, we have a bit to do.

In the greenhouse today

Outside the greenhouse

It has warmed up to 36 degrees today. The days are getting longer. We should be eating well rather than just dreaming. I know it can be done, not just from Mr. Coleman's book (he does the impossible all the time, it's a bit intimidating) but because my friends, the Adelsbergers, who live just over the hill from our farm, are doing it. Check out their cold house produce.

Food Inc - some thoughts after viewing.

Depressing. The movie left me feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. Angry. Sad. Wanting to DO SOMETHING!

Talking with friends about the movie I found they had similar reactions. But, a week later it had settled into a dull itch, an empty ache in the heart. Guilt at inaction, frustration at not knowing quite what to do.

For me the movie told a story I already knew. It was well presented. It tugged at my emotions, put images to ideas I already had explored, made me feel, made me want to act.

What it didn’t do was give direction.

Oh, there were suggestions…

Buy local
Shop at your Farmer’s Market
Eat Organic
Eat less Meat, less processed food, be more conscious of what you buy.
Vote with your dollars
Support stricter regulations
Support traceability
Have the government shut down big food like they did the tobacco industry
ETC.

It all sounds great… EXCEPT…

Where I live, at the edge of a small town, surrounded by corn and soy bean farm and unemployed factory workers, there isn’t a farmers market until May. There are very few choices for locally produced food. This time of year (from October through the beginning of May) there are really none. You can get “organic” food at Wal-Mart if you can afford it. You can vote with your dollars, but there aren’t any real “candidates for change” out there in the food world. The vote in my area would be more about supporting locally owned, small businesses rather than the big box corporations. (The food isn’t local in either store.) The government can’t shut down Big Food the way it did with Big Tobacco. People can live (however unhappily) without tobacco, but not without food, and the alternative to Big Food doesn’t exist in most of this country anymore. And regulations… WE ALREADY HAVE ENOUGH. They are not protecting us, but MORE won’t fix that. What regulations are very effectively doing is exterminating the alternative. Just try becoming a small food producer and see how fast the “safety” regulations come slamming down on you.

Grow a garden was one of the suggestions. I love it, except at my house right now the ground is frozen solid, the high temp has been around 20° F, and it’s all buried under an ever increasing pile of snow. Kind of tough for gardening. Even if the season was right, it still takes skills which have been lost by a great portion of the population, space, which many people don’t have, equipment and seeds which cost money, and time, also a scarce resource for most people. AND, it takes YEARS to build a productive garden system. It is a good start at an answer, but home gardens alone won’t solve the problem.

The movie held out a couple of folks as examples of an alternative, Joel Salatin and the organic yogurt guy (I don’t remember his name.) They did provide a glimpse at a possible alternative, and they did represent some positive changes that could be made. BUT, they weren’t that different. They weren’t that many steps from Big Food. Joel Salatin captured it best for me. He said “ I have no desire to scale up and get bigger… but if more people come to our corner and want stuff, then heaven help me figure out how to meet the need without compromising the integrity.” That’s exactly what the organic yogurt guy did (now he is a supplier for Wal-Mart.) That’s what most of the organic food you find has done. That’s the same model that created Kraft Foods, Tyson, Monsanto. Meet the need. I really like Joel and what he does. He is a great inspiration to small farmers who want to try different methods. BUT, underlying what he does is the same mechanism that created all the mega-corps we have today. Swapping Monsanto for Mega Joel doesn’t really solve the problem.

Food Inc. also brushed by some other issues that are closely tied to the food problem, operate on the same model, and are crushing us as people and destroying the world in the process. ENERGY. WATER. HEALTH. All linked inextricably with food. All being controlled by bigger and bigger companies. All guilty of the same abuses, safety problems, environmental damaging methods, all dangerously vulnerable to collapse, and all critical for our survival. These things are so interlinked that you can’t solve them in isolation.

So, what do we DO?

In the Kitchen - Can you live without Processed Food for a month?

Kim, The Inadvertent Farmer, was musing on Twitter last night and posed a question. “Can a person go without eating processed foods for a whole month? Could I?” That got me thinking. Could we do it here? Then I spent a sleepless night grappling with What Is Processed Food?

Webster defines processed (at least where it is most applicable to food) as, “to prepare or modify by a special series of actions directed to some end.”

Under that broad of a definition, nearly every food we eat is processed. However, most of us tend to define processed food in a much narrower sense. For us, “processed food” is food which has been chemically altered through additives such as flavors, flavor enhancers, binders, colors, fillers, preservatives, stabilizers, emulsifiers, etc., or which has been manufactured through combination or other methods. Generally speaking, if the ingredients aren’t “natural”, then we consider it to be processed.

So, using the second definition, could we live for a month without using processed food? I’m going to the cupboard to look at what we have and what would be considered processed.

This is not a comprehensive pile by any means, but it does show a bit of what we use regularly that fall in the "processed" category. Some of them would be fairly easy to give up or replace. Some of them would be a bit harder. The flour, yeast, and salt surprised me. Life at our house would be difficult without them. The tomato and apple are not in season here and are only available to us through special storage, waxing, and ripening processes. I'm not sure I'm ready to try a month without processed food, but I'm really thinking about it.

What would life be like for you without processed food?

In the Kitchen - Meals Ready to Eat

This week we have several nights where we have very little time for dinner. Two of the nights have only a 30 minute window between people getting home and having to leave again for some other activity. Having a good, homemade, sit down together dinner is something of a challenge on such days. Sounds like the perfect time for stew or some kind of crock-pot meal. Except half the people at our house wont eat most of those kind of meals. Some of that is because they are kids (we are working on it but that's not a battle one wants to engage in on a day when everyone is already stressed, rushed, and tired.) We also have some people with dietary constraints because of allergies or personal philosophies. Some days I feel like a short order cook at some crusty old diner. Trying to get four custom meals on the table at the same time, takes more than two hands and one small stove top. So on days like today we rely on MREs. (We used to call them Meals Refused by Ethiopia when I worked for Uncle's Airline.) Meals Ready to Eat are meals we have prepared in advance, frozen in family meal sizes with all the freezable bits together in one bag. We pull them out in the morning to thaw. Then when it's meal time it usually only takes 15 minutes in the oven or on the stove top to have things ready. (Sounds a bit like the traditional casserole in the freezer, or TV dinners, but ours are better.) For example, tonight we are having our version of sushi. It's not really sushi, but it works on the same idea. The rice was precooked so it will be fast to warm back up. The fillings are various pickled veggies from the pantry, sliced carrots and peppers (or what ever fresh crunchy things we have available), thinly sliced marinaded flank steak, and marinated sliced tofu. Everything was marinaded and cooked before it was frozen. All we have to do is quickly warm a few things, and put them out on the table. Everyone makes their own version using what ever bits they like. It's fast to put on the table, it's lots of fun to eat, everyone likes it because there are lots of different choices, and we eat well. If we get things out of the freezer in the morning then it only takes about 10 minutes to have everything on the table for a very nice dinner.

We usually have one "Big Cooking Day" each month where we spend the day cooking up large quantities of ingredients for our MREs. That one day of cooking and packaging makes it so we can have nice family dinners even on days we are really pushed for time.

How do you deal with dinner on you busy days?