Categories
Beginning Farmers

Ag Day Emphasizes Climate-Smart Strategies

2010's ARDD featured over 400 representatives from all over the farming and science industries
Courtesy CIAT/ Neil Palmer
Participants at Agriculture and Rural Development Day 2010 drafted policy recommendations to improve agricultural development and address climate-change concerns.

More than 400 policy makers, farmers, scientists, and representatives from the private and public sectors gathered in Cancún, Mexico, on Dec. 4, 2010, for this year’s Agriculture and Rural Development Day. ARDD, which gave attendees an opportunity to discuss food security and the role of climate change in agriculture, was held in parallel to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP16.

Billed as an event where climate change, food security and agricultural development intersect, ARDD 2010 showed how agricultural development can contribute to lower carbon emissions while adapting to climate change and supporting sustainable food security.

Presenters included Ignacio Rivera Rodríguez, Mexico’s vice minister for rural development; Inger Andersen, CGIAR Fund council chair and World Bank vice president of sustainable development; and Don McCabe, president of the Soil Conservation Council of Canada.

In his opening remarks, Rodríguez cited the common belief that agriculture part of both the climate-change problem and solution. He argued that climate change offers “an opportunity to change the way we produce, consume and develop, without compromising economic growth.”

According to Andersen, opportunity for agricultural development has the potential to be a triple-win that benefits the environment, farmers and food security. By using good land management and agriculture practices, including agroforestry systems, zero tillage, and improved water and fertilizer management, she said farmers could help cut carbon emissions by at least 13 percent.

While it’s farmers who implement climate-smart strategies, Rodríguez pointed out they can only do so with government support. The Mexican government, he says, is meeting this need through a concrete set of strategies and policies designed to reduce carbon emissions by 7.83 million tons over the next two years.

Offering a farmer’s perspective, McCabe noted that all farmers—regardless of their operation’s size—focus on profitability. He echoed Rodríguez’s call for governmental solutions, but emphasized the need for policy action independent of scale. All farmers can contribute to climate change mitigation, he said, and all farmers “live the cycles and impacts of policy.”

The theme of pursuing political solutions to agricultural concerns carried over into five parallel roundtable discussions that followed the plenary sessions. Participants in each roundtable discussed options for capitalizing on the intersections of rural development, agriculture and climate change. Each panel identified current knowledge gaps between the development, agriculture and climate-change agendas. Panelists also worked together to craft a set of recommendations for national and global policy makers.

Alongside the discussions ran an Ideas Marketplace, which featured more than a dozen organizations presenting their activities, policies and experiences along three themes: policies and technologies, achieving co-benefits through sustainable agriculture, and integrated approaches to agriculture and forestry.

A summary of ARDD’s presentations, roundtable discussions and policy recommendations was presented at a Dec. 6, 2010, COP16 side event titled “Enabling Agriculture and Forestry to Contribute to Climate Change Responses.” The results of Forest Day 4, held on Dec. 5, 2010, were also reported.

Categories
Urban Farming

Vertical Gardening for Accessibility

Vertical garden technique

Courtesy MSU Extension Service/ Gary Bachman

Window boxes placed on a stepladder-type stand is a verticle gardening technique that allows gardeners to water and harvest their plants without bending over.

Some gardeners depend on the popular urban farming concept of vertical gardening not only to save space but to allow greater accessibility to their plants. As the growing season winds down in many parts of the country, consider if physical limitations kept you this year from the garden tasks you once enjoyed. If so, now’s the time to make plans for next year’s garden setup. Use these ideas offered at the 2010 Fall Flower and Garden Fest in Crystal Springs, Miss., to kick off your garden planning.

Gardens for Bad Backs

Many gardeners with back pain have taken their fair share of ibuprofen and have spent considerable time with the heating pad. Gardeners with back problems can aim to eliminate pain by raising a garden off the ground using a bench with a stepladder design. Placing window boxes on the steps allows you to water and harvest crops without bending over.

Wheelchair-accessible Gardens

Gardeners using wheelchairs or scooters can implement a tabletop garden for a more accessible harvest. Grow vegetables or flowers in containers, and place the containers on a table at a height that allows you to wheel right up to your plants.

Gutter Gardens

Gutter gardens for growing leaf lettuce are designed to be accessible for gardeners at any height. Simply attach sections of plastic gutter to a wooden fence. The staff at the Fall Flower and Garden Fest adapted this garden technique from commercial hydroponic vegetable growers who need to control the amount of water to their gardens. 

Hay Bale Gardens

Sometimes raising a garden to an accessible level is as simple as giving it something to grow upon. A popular and simple vertical gardening medium is the hay bale. Lay a round bale of hay on its side and plant vegetables, such as lettuce or tomatoes, in the vertical side. This allows you to have easy accessibility from a standing or sitting position.

Categories
Animals

Warm Water

Goat and water bucket
Photo by Sue Weaver
Dad brings us warm water in buckets twice a day during the winter.

It’s only December, but it’s really cold in the Ozarks this winter. Our water buckets keep freezing and that worries Mom a lot. That’s because us bucks and rams and wethers need to drink plenty of water year-round. Not drinking enough can lead to a deadly condition called urinary calculi. That happens when mineral stones made up of phosphate salts get lodged in our urinary tracts and we can’t pee. Does and ewes sometimes form calculi, too, but their urinary tracts are designed differently and they can pass stones—we usually can’t.  

Urinary calculi are mostly caused by poor diets. We guys need diets with a calcium-to-phosphorus ratio of at least 2:1. Grain contains a lot of phosphorus, so male sheep and goats (and llamas and alpacas, too) shouldn’t eat much grain. Nice grass hay and a balanced mineral supplement are perfect.

But we need to drink enough water, too, otherwise our urine becomes concentrated and that makes stone formation more likely. That means using a heated bucket in the winter. Or, do like our Mom and Dad who carry buckets of warm water to us at least twice a day. When it’s super-cold, Mom keeps two sets of buckets for each group of guys: When she brings out warm water, she takes the frozen buckets back to the house to thaw out. It works! We’ve never had a stone among us—and we don’t want to!

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Categories
Urban Farming

Chicken Expressions and Lessons

Photo by Audrey Pavia

My chickens have taught me the true meaning behind certain expressions.

The English language is full of references to chickens. I never really paid much attention to these expressions until I became a chicken owner. My flock as helped me understand the true meaning behind many of these terms — on a personal level.

“Don’t be a chicken.”

The true meaning of this expression didn’t really hit me until the day I walked out of the garage holding a straw broom. In old movies, farmers’ wives use straw brooms to chase the chickens off the porch. My flock must have seen all those movies because when they took a look at that straw broom, they screeched and ran in a hundred different directions.

Lesson learned: Chickens aren’t the bravest creatures on the planet.

“Henpecked”

I used to have a Sebright hen named Shiva. I had to re-home her because she was a bully. She was always beating up the other hens. She would get them in a corner of the coop and peck, peck, peck at them until the poor victim couldn’t take it anymore and would run, only to be cornered again. Shiva would follow her and continue her assault.

Lesson learned: There’s nothing worse than being henpecked.

“When the chickens come home to roost”

Not a night goes by without my flock dutifully putting themselves to sleep in their coop. As soon as the sun starts to go down, they fly one by one onto the coop roof and make their way onto their roosting poles.

Lesson learned: Chickens always come home to roost.

“Rare as a hen’s teeth”

I’ve had to give oral medication to all my hens at various points in their young lives.

Lesson learned: Teeth on a hen are very rare.

“Pecking order”

When Baby Jo came into the flock as a tiny chick, born to Betty Jo, she was safe while she was under her mother’s care. But as soon as she became a pullet, she was on her own. The other hens made it clear: She was low hen on the totem pole. They demonstrated this by pecking her good and hard if she tried to eat something they thought was only worthy of a hen of higher standing.

Lesson learned: Chickens clearly have a hierarchal order, reinforced by pecking.

“Mother hen”

No more beautiful example of motherly love can be found anywhere in the barnyard than in the hen. When Betty Jo hatched her one chick, she cared for that baby like nothing I had ever seen. She was always at her chick’s side, showing her where the food was and how to eat it. Betty Jo bravely chased off the barn cat and the poor dog whenever they innocently wandered too close to her chick. Betty Jo’s entire world revolved around her tiny ball of fluff. And when Baby Jo grew to be a pullet, nearly the same size as her mother, Betty Jo still let her sleep under her wing on the roosting poll.

Lesson learned: There is no mother like a hen. 

Categories
News

Bond Claims Information for Stock Producers

Cattle
Livestock producers who haven’t received payment from Eastern Livestock Company can file bond claims through the USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration.

The USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration is informing cattle producers who have done business with Eastern Livestock Company, LLC, of their rights under the bond provisions of the Packers and Stockyards Act. 

Eastern began issuing unfunded checks to producers for livestock it purchased in different markets on or around Nov. 3, 2010. Headquartered in New Albany, Ind., with operations in 11 states across the Mid-South, Midwest and West, Eastern is registered with GIPSA as a cleaning service and as a market agency that buys and sells on a dealer basis.

Livestock producers who have not received payment from Eastern are encouraged to contact the GIPSA Midwestern Regional Office, Des Moines, Iowa, at 515-323-2579 for complete information on available financial protections and for forms necessary for filing a bond claim on payments due from Eastern. 

Bond claims must be filed within 60 days from the date of the transaction on which the claim is based.

The Packers and Stockyards Act is a fair trade practice and payment protection law that promotes fair and competitive marketing environments for the livestock, meat and poultry industries.

Categories
Urban Farming

My Waterfall and My Truck

Waterfall

Photo by Rick Gush 

After years living in the desert, I delight in living next to this waterfall.

One of the things I really like about living here in Liguria, Italy, is having lots of water features near my garden. I lived in Las Vegas for 15 years before moving here, and I still get a big kick out of living on a creek and a five-minute walk from the beach.

My Waterfall

My new studio is located on another little creek, so now I’ll have one at home and one at work. The creek below our home has a great waterfall a few hundred feet down the road. During the rainy season, like now, the creek swells and the waterfall gets nice and big. When there’s a big rainstorm, the creek really fills up and the waterfall has nothing to be ashamed. We can always tell how hard it’s raining at night by listening to the changing sounds of the water in the creek.  

I don’t even know how many different creeks there are in Rapallo. There are two big ones, more than 50 feet across and several dozen smaller ones. This whole area is riddles with creeks, so much so that several centuries ago, there were many dozens of water powered mills in the area. People from Tuscany would bring their bags of wheat up to this area in boats in order to have it milled. When we go hiking in the woods we see ancient crumbling mills all over the place. 

My Truck

INSERT ALT TEXT

Photo by Rick Gush

It’s time to put my construction truck (aka my Vespa) to work.

It’s construction time again, and as usual I’m using my Italian truck to haul supplies to the job site.  My truck, in this case, is actually my Vespa. I’ve owned a lot of different cars and trucks in my lifetime, and I’m happy to report that this Vespa is my favorite vehicle among them all. It’s a tank, very seldom breaks and costs almost nothing to fix when it does break.

Liguria isn’t built for big trucks. I have a friend who volunteered to help me move, and he has a regular-sized truck. His truck isn’t so big, but the angle to turn into my driveway is so sharp that he can’t make the turn. Phooey. Now I have to find a friend with a mini truck to help me move.

My Vespa will carry two bags of concrete or 12 big bricks. I once snapped the clutch cable when I had two sacks loaded. I pushed the Vespa—still loaded—to the nearest mechanic. He changed the clutch cable and charged me 5 euros. Fifteen minutes after breaking down, I was on my way again. Things didn’t work like that with my Isuzu Trooper back in the States. 

One of the things I’m excited about with the new studio is that it has a garage up front that I can use to work on my Vespa. The Vespa is more than 30 years old, and I’m planning to take it apart, paint everything and then put it back together. I did that about five years ago, but all this use as a construction truck has sort of beat it up, so this summer I’m planning to do it all again—only better.  

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Categories
Urban Farming

Local Food Prices Indicate Value

Local food at restaurant

Slightly higher-priced local-food menu options indicate a higher valued product to restaurant patrons.

Not only are restaurant patrons willing to pay more for meals prepared with produce and meat from local providers, the proportion of customers preferring local meals actually increases when the prices increase, according to a team of international researchers.

A recent study of how customers perceive and value local food shows restaurant patrons prefer meals made with local ingredients when they are priced slightly higher than meals made with nonlocal ingredients, says Amit Sharma, assistant professor in Penn State’s School of Hospitality Management. She worked with Frode Alfnes, associate professor of economics and resource management at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, on the study. Their research was published int in the fall/winter 2010 issue of the International Journal of Revenue Management.

In the experiment, researchers first set prices at $5.50 for both nonlocal and local selections on the menu of a student-led restaurant. When the price was the same for nonlocal and local food, customers showed no significant preference for either option. However, when the local food selection was priced at $6.50, or 18 percent higher than the nonlocal option, a higher proportion of the customers picked the meal made with local foods and ingredients, says Sharma.

“This is partly good news for restaurants,” says Sharma. “It shows that customers were willing to pay slightly more for a local dish, with the emphasis on ‘slightly.'”

Customer preference for premium-priced local food has its limits, however, Sharma warns.

Once researchers raised the price of the local option to $7.50, or 36 percent higher than the nonlocal alternative, a higher proportion of customers chose the regular menu.

Value cues—signals that attract increased attention from consumers—may influence the customers’ preference for the higher-priced local food option. The results indicate that the main value cue of local food for customers is its freshness.

“The higher price of the local dish was an indicator of higher value,” says Sharma. “So customers were comfortable with a slightly higher price for the local food.”

She says the research could help restaurant owners decide how to set prices for local foods and estimate whether the potential to charge higher prices will compensate for the additional costs associated with adding local food to the menu.

“The study helps restaurants make decisions on whether it makes sense to offer local foods,” says Sharma. “If local foods are a natural fit for some of these restaurants, then it would definitely be a good strategy to price the food higher, because there is an indication of value with fresh food.”

Sharma says another important finding of the research was that customers indicated they had no preference between restaurants that offered local foods and ones that did not.

The study of 322 customers was conducted at a training restaurant on a Midwest university that serves between 45 and 85 customers each day.

Researchers designed a real-time choice experiment to meet several challenges they anticipated from conducting an in-restaurant experiment. Customers who dine at a restaurant are less inclined to fill out long questionnaires. To avoid bias, the researchers asked questions only after the customers chose their food.

“We literally put the customers in the situation and let them choose,” says Sharma. “Then we asked them why they made the choices they did.”

The project was funded by the Leopold Centre for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.

Categories
Crops & Gardening

Black Friday Garden Shopping

I hope that everyone had a blessed Thanksgiving! Hard to believe it is December already, but because we awoke to a half-inch of snow this morning and it stuck around all day, it’s sinking in pretty quickly. Nothing like a little snow to put you in the mood for the holidays!

While my folks were here for the turkey celebration, we hit up a few of our favorite local garden centers in hopes of finding some good holiday bargains. The first store (Sewickley Creek Greenhouses) has been a relatively new find of mine even though it’s super-close to my house. They have beautiful annuals and perennials during the growing season and when I saw an ad (with several holiday coupons included!) in our local paper, I decided we had to make a trip. So glad we did! The place was filled with decorated trees, ornaments, classic kids’ toys, greens, wreaths, candles and lots of terrific hostess gifts. I bought some garden-related ornaments for a gift exchange I have in a few weeks and some toys for my nieces.

Our second stop (Quality Gardens) is another new find of mine. In late summer, I was at the paint store to pick up some wallpaper border for my son’s room when I saw a pick-up truck in the parking lot with some gorgeous, old, wrought-iron fencing in the back. I was a bit worried that it was headed off to the dump, so I waited for the guy to come out of the store in hopes of convincing him to let me have the fencing rather than taking it to the scrap yard or worse! When I asked him about it he told me he was taking it to this nursery that uses unusual salvaged building materials in their displays and about all the interesting plant material they have, as well. 

I visited once this fall and got some terrific end-of-the-season garden bargains. My mom and I were excited to go back and see what they had for the holidays. While they didn’t have a ton of ornaments and decorations, they did have an entire greenhouse filled with poinsettias, cyclamen, succulents, kalanchoe, houseplants and bonsai trees. So beautiful! And, to make the day really shine, all their glazed terra-cotta pots were half off! I ended up getting two new square, brown pots for our back patio and a lovely celadon-green planter for a friend’s Christmas present.

Spending Black Friday at these two garden shops was way, way better than heading to the mall. It really put me in the holiday spirit without breaking the bank. If you haven’t seen what your local nursery has for the holidays, head on over. Even if you don’t buy, I guarantee you’ll leave with a sense of peace that can only come from being in a glasshouse surrounded by green (and a little red, too!).   

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Categories
News

Food Safety Bill Harvests Senate Victory

Food Safety Bill Harvests Senate Victory Senate passes food safety bill S.B. 510, including language to benefit small-scale farmers. Senate passes food safety bill S.B. 510, including language to benefit small-scale farmers. food safety bill, food safety modernization act, senate, small-scale farmers, small farms, sustainable agriculture, food safety legislation. The approved version of the food safety bill provides clear directives to improve food safety without compromising resource conservation and environmental stewardship goals.news, lkiviristBy Lisa KiviristDecember 1, 2010

Capitol
The U.S. Senate passed the food safety bill during the 2010 lame duck session.

Talk about a late fall bumper crop: On Nov. 30, 2010, the Senate passed the Food Safety Modernization Act (S.B. 510)with a broad bipartisan majority of 73 to 25, the first major bill in 70 years that significantly strengthens food safety precautions. This surprise yield comes during Congress’ traditional “lame duck” session, the post-election time period when Capitol Hill often checks out on passing such historic legislation.

This food safety legislation has been stewing on the Senate back burner since the House passed its version more than a year ago and thereby cultivated priority status during this last legislative session of the year.

Key elements of the food safety legislation would empower the Food and Drug Administration to recall tainted food and require larger food manufacturers to have food-safety plans and be subject to more frequent inspections. Increased stricter standards would also be set for inspecting imported food.

Additionally, thanks to strong, fruitful organizing among small-farm and sustainable-agriculture advocacy groups, such as the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the approved version of food safety bill includes language that gives specific direction to the FDA to prioritize the needs of small farms and producers. This means developing rules that improve food safety but not creating blanket one-size-fits-all regulations for all operations, which would create undue regulations and barriers to the small-scale farmers focused on local, community-based agriculture.

The approved version of the food safety bill also provides clear directives to improve food safety without compromising resource conservation and environmental stewardship goals.

The food safety bill will continue to the House, where it needs to pass (or be reconciled with the House’s version of the bill, H.R. 2749, passed in 2009), before going to the President to be signed into law.

Sustainable-agriculture and small-farm advocacy groups will continue to urgently work to pass a final version of the food safety bill by the end of the year. If S.B. 510 doesn’t become law by then, it will be forced to take on an undoubtedly tougher audience with the new faces in Congress starting in January. Small-scale farmers are encouraged to continue voicing opinions about the legislation to their elected representatives throughout the process.

 

Categories
Homesteading

A Different Turkey

Royal Palm turkey
Photo by Cherie Langlois
This year it was a little easier to say good-bye to our turkeys at Thanksgiving.

Now that you’ve hopefully had time to finish your Thanksgiving turkey leftovers (our turkey soup was fabulous, by the way), I thought it might be OK to share a few last pics of my turkeys taken before they were … well … you know. Maybe because I tried not to baby this flock quite so much, I found that saying good-bye to them felt somewhat easier than last year. Easier, but not easy, and I’m now convinced that it will never be easy for me to raise an animal with love and care and then take its life away (even when I don’t actually dispatch it myself)—and that this is the way it should be.

Speaking of easy, wandering through the supermarket before Thanksgiving, I marveled at all of the anonymous, inexpensive and ready-to-go industrial turkey giants laid to rest in bins there. Specifically, how very different they were from the svelte heritage birds that had taken a goodly chunk of our time to raise and devoured a small fortune in feed on our farm. But I felt thankful for that difference, and for my turkeys, and here’s why:

Bourbon Red turkey and Royal Palm turkey
Photo by Cherie Langlois
This year, we reared Bourbon Red turkeys (left) and Royal Palm turkeys (right).

According to the National Turkey Federation, 88 percent of Americans say they eat turkey at Thanksgiving, and this adds up to about 46 million turkeys devoured just at this time of year. The majority are Broad Breasted White turkeys selected during the 1950s to grow fast and produce ample white muscle meat on a grain diet while living their short, sad lives packed into temperature-controlled confinement buildings. That means no trotting about to forage for bugs and weeds and no basking in the sunshine, as my happy turkeys loved to do. Unlike the colorful heritage birds that provided meat, eggs and bug control on family farms before the advent of industrial farming, commercial turkeys have lost the ability to reproduce without the aid of artificial insemination. The short-legged toms can’t fly or walk properly, and their out-of-proportion muscle mass puts tremendous strain on their skeletons and organs, often causing lameness and heart attacks. 

It was this guilt-inducing—and unappetizing—knowledge that led my family and me to try pasture-raising our own turkeys to eat. Rather than go with BB’s, we opted for hardier, slower-growing Bourbon Reds, a lovely heritage turkey variety developed during the 1800s in Bourbon County, Ky. Roasted to perfection, our first heritage Thanksgiving turkey blew us away with its intense flavor, firm texture and far less salty taste. Add to this how much we’d enjoyed raising these personable birds (pecking habit and all)—and we were hooked. 

This year we reared Bourbon Reds again, and added two Royal Palms, a striking, smaller variety often used for exhibition developed in the 1920s. Next year, I think I’d like to try wild-turkey-looking Bronze. My ultimate turkey dream? Settle on a favorite heritage variety and keep a breeding pair or two that I can name, spoil to my heart’s content and let live to a ripe old turkey age.   
          
~  Cherie