The Farm. Peach Trees. I wish my bees were here.

YAHHH

"Ms. Kessler’s pupils study factory farming and corn subsidies, read articles by Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry and watch documentaries like “Food, Inc.,” a dark look at the nation’s industrialized food system. " From NYT 


READ HERE

As We Sow

"This is basically the heart of Iowa.
It’s all farms here, but you’re not going
to see any farmers. That’s the amazing
thing, they’ve just disappeared."

Dwight Rutter, Grain Farmer

Farming must be hot.

My mom showed me this in the NYT magazine section. Farming must be hot.

Published: August 27, 2009

Losing the family farm is a familiar story. Getting it back less so.

Once Marty Travis’s family was finally able to piece together its 179-year-old farm, buying back the homestead and its parcel of land that was sold by his grandmother and slated for developers, the intention was to rebuild the dilapidated buildings. But over the last decade, Marty and his wife, Kris, have restored not only the farmhouse but the farming community in Fairbury, Ill., as well.

Though the Travises never set out to be farmers, in the five years since they started gathering wild ramps from a cousin’s woods — he had asked them to help get rid of the invasive weed — their Spence Farm has come to sell produce that is obscure or nearly extinct to Chicago’s best restaurants. In saving their central Illinois farm, they’ve managed to save some American crops too.

They sold more than 4,000 pounds of ramps that first spring. The next year they were selling to chefs whom they met through a farming nonprofit. Then Rick Bayless and Brian Enyart of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, respectively, began asking what else they had. “We slowly went from gardening into full-scale farming, which is a whole different issue,” Kris, a trim, bright-eyed woman with cropped hair, told me. “When you start doing 1,500 squash blossoms a week, you’re not talking 10 plants.” In the past year, they have been able to supply restaurants like Paul Kahan’s Blackbird, Avec and the Publican, plus dozens of others from their 10-acre vegetable plot.

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Time Magazine Article - REALLY GOOD

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

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A Farmer, His 'Tribe' And The Web That Brings Them Together

From NPR
By Krishnadev Calamur

In my moments of grandeur, I wish I had my own farm where I could connect with Mother Nature. I suspect many people feel the same way, but few have the courage to do it.

Two people who did are Tim and Liz Young, who run Nature's Harmony , a pasture-based, local-market sustainable farm, in Georgia.

After reading about them in The New York Times, I wondered how a farm in rural Georgia connects with a customer base. Sure, Michael Pollan has made farmers markets and community-supported agriculture popular, but what does a business -- and a farm is a business, after all -- do to keep it customers coming back.

So I e-mailed (old-fashioned, I know) Tim Young and asked him.

"While farm life is thought of as rural, remote and antiquated, technology makes it easy to reach out and connect with like-minded people," Young replied.

He says social media makes it easy for people to find their "tribes."

He says his "tribe" comprises people interested in safe, local food. The farm uses blogging extensively to reach out to the group.

"Doing so allows customers, other farmers and interested parties to comment, criticize, question and share their own experiences in ways that stimulate conversation, learning and passion," Young writes.

He says the farm's blog draws more than 12,000 unique visitors per month and helps them not only build a following of products, but also the Youngs' beliefs and values.

They may be using sustainable methods to farm, but old-fashioned they are not.

"The agricultural scene is a changing," Young writes, "as I have spent many a day on my tractor, iPhone in hand, responding to emails or blog comments."