December 2011
28 posts
6 tags
Food and Farming News Update...
Here is a menagerie of news stories with varying perspectives of the current cultural shifts of viewpoint toward the food system. What is successfully being changed? What issues still prevail? Is local really better? Feel free to share your own opinions of these articles. In this post I am not trying to promote a particular perspective, but share some of what is being written, particularly as the...
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Young People See Opportunity in Farming →
This is yet another article in which the media is amazed by those of us young people choosing farming as our profession. Much of the general data is the same as usual, yet highlighting the stories of more new farmers. Inspiring. Also, one story is about farmers who supply to the Twin Cities, one of the many places I call home. If you are in the Midwest and farming organically or interested in...
The garden.
But not one, not just a simple garden but almost a separate farm, a separate life. There are four gardens, four completely different plots. The potato garden, the corn garden, the kitchen garden, and the garden garden.
They are life. More than the farm, more than the crops and the animals, the gardens are life—all food. There is never money, not ever, not even...
Holiday Cookie Baking
I was raised baking Christmas cookies with my mom and siblings, or at least taste testing each variety at all stages of its production. My mom would create a number of the classics often with recipes passed down from one or the other of my grandmothers or hailing from her high school cookbook, a compilation of recipes from classmates that she has carried since school and now must be kept in a...
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Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture's 2011...
It has been ten days since Fred Kirschenmann’s closing remarks for the 2011 Young Farmers Conference (YFC) in the Hay Loft of the Stone Barns Center in Pocantico Hills, New York. Throughout this time period I have been settling into the next chapter of my farming career at Hawthorne Valley Farm* as a Full Farm Apprentice, yet all the while wanting to provide a synopsis of this inspirational...
Food education from the kitchen table and toilet...
Today is my day off. Seeing that I am new to the farm and the area and without my own car I have chosen to spend the day at home, catching up on laundry, possibly cooking, maybe later traipsing through the snow, but currently reading and researching.
I quick look around the house, particularly on the kitchen table (for individual meal time browsing) and the toilet tank (for longer sittings)...
First Day on the Job
I started work today at 7:30am as a barn assistant. It’s one of the first days in which the overwhelming list of tasks to be done has finally dwindled to a reasonable handful. At the same time, the cows have gotten used to the loafing barn and understand which stanchion is their own in the line up. Therefore my first task of helping move the cows from the milking stanchion barn to the...
Settling In
For the past two weeks I have been in transit. I traveled by train, automobile, public transit, foot, and aeroplane and slept in eight different beds as well as the train and plane seats throughout my journey visiting friends and family in the Midwest and attending the Stone Barns 2011 Young Farmer Conference before arriving at my final destination of Hawthorne Valley Farm in Harlemville (address:...
