Making Do...

I've been roasting soybeans and grinding them in my food processor, the latter picked up a few years ago from a church yard sale. I've been doing this because I had run out of certified organic chick starter and the co-op was out of both starter and grower rations of the certified organic variety when I went to replenish my supply on Friday. As a result, I had to buy laying mash, which is lower in protein than starter or grower rations.....and so, in the fine tradition of farming everywhere, I've been "making do" by making my own protein-rich supplement of roasted and ground soybean and adding it in so that they will have the protein they need at this tender age. The chicks have also been enjoying lots of outdoor time (and enjoying all manner of bug catching, as they had perfected that art while still little fluffballs, under the lamp), for my son Edward came home awhile back, and built the first of two planned paddocks for the poultry flock. The chickens have also been enjoying Speerville grains and beans (wheat, barley, oats, and chickpeas). When I have leftovers or extra of these cooked they get them as wet mash feed. They also love all the pulled weeds from the garden. The plan is to reseed the paddocks and get them a decent pasture by rotating between the two paddocks.

Where to Begin?

Summer is the frenzy for the farmer....and I'm not even a full-fledged one, by most folks' standards, more of a fledgling farmer, with wings half -grown. The farm projects are behind schedule at Limestone Mountain Farm. A petition was sent protesting the PATH line that threatens many of the farms (including possibly mine, though to a lesser degree than others') on Limestone and Location. At Scrabble Hill Farm, the baby chicks are now six weeks old and the field corn is way way over my head....here, I stand beside the one patch of lonely rye (planted from some grown by Kelly Cheverie of Prince Edward Isle) that missed both the predations of the neighbour's guinea hens, and the tiller!

Animal Husbandry

My son arrives tomorrow to help finish up the planting of the CSA-ing Scrabble Hill Farm. The baby chicks arrived yesterday evening, here in Great Village, from a hatch further up the hill in Londonderry. Kevin and Heather [check out the website: http://www.activelifefarm.ca] are trying out different breeds, heritage breeds, utilizing stock obtained from the Annapolis Valley, in order to find and develop a good and hardy local bird for meat production, and also for laying. I have 16 Black Australorps and 24 of my grandma Laura Melvina's old standby, the Rhode Island Red... and, alas, as is often the case with these petit dynamos, a minor tragedy has struck. I'd noticed one Australorp seeming to be wanting to doze and being a little bit picked on and bumped over by the others...vowed to keep an eye on him/her [he looks like a 'he' so will deem it so], and thus it was during my next check on the flock that I found him in a little space in a corner, cold and shivering. He's now resting in a box on a towel beside the computer under a lamp, having taken a little sustenance. Don't know if he'll make it, but I now think I know the meaning of the word hospital...there's intervention, and some of it is painful and intrusive, and one is not always sure that the right thing's being done...but you try your best.

Getting the heifers at Limestone Mountain, and the baby chicks here, at Scrabble Hill...big step for me, after the sadness of 2007.

I need to get a digital camera.

Justice at Limestone Mountain Farm!

I cannot give adequate expression to how I felt when the lovely heifers, acquired through the efforts of Ron Gargasz, from McKean Brothers Angus, arrived from Pennsylvania. Just the day before, Bland Fencing had quickly and professionally completed the division of the lower field into three paddocks, so as to make the best use of the pasture through rotational grazing. Dad's old friend from WVU and my caretaker, Silas, had helped with the re-design of the paddock layout and it had all come together.

The heifers are four sweet-hearted animals--calm and with lovely dispositions. Collectively, they have now become known as "The Limestone Girls." In lieu of their long ID#s, they have been individually named Faith, Hope, Charity, and Justice. Faith and Charity are the most sociable of the four, and were soon eating grain from my hand...Hope's quiet and smaller, and so named because I hope she grows a bit...and, finally, Justice is magnificent.

It took four of us to guide them into the pasture on Monday, May 25th, but from then on I was able to move them singlehandedly from paddock to paddock. They are just so sensible and intelligent! Above, here, is Justice...

...thanks to my brother Jim for all his help, and the loan of his camera...more pics soon.

While going over the pastures, snipping away at those pesky multi-flora rose intruders, I found a nice surprise: patches of alfalfa, from when my father had seeded that legume way back in the '70s...persistence, eh?

Of mad cows, sick swine, and preposterous people...

I have attached here a pic, with thanks from the Zecker family, now/originally of Newark New Jersey, les Etats-Unis. This is a family with roots in the central/eastern European rural realities that I have loved in my travels.

But does this not look like the hog lot of many a farming enterprise in West Virginia in the mid-20th century? This pic, though, according to my (shall remain un-named) source, is "from the Slovakarainian side -- in which case, that's some mystery Hnat Havran Scerbak Kotlinszky Holodnak Hanisak Kopas child!"

Danke, I say, in deference to my Spessart region ancestors, for the photo is an engaging one, given the two subjects of the photo, the shadows that can be seen, the fence posts in the background, the rocky, swept-bare lot that surrounds both the curious hog and the crying child. The photo is engaging for a number of reasons. What prompted the photographer to take the photo? How long had the child been in the lot? Who put the child there--or was it a case of curiosity inducing the child to go exploring, and then someone quick grab a camera (a strange photo op)?

The interesting twist for my recent reality was seeing the landscape come to life again at the same time as I was reporting on some farm family health research connected to the BSE ("mad cow") situation, and then the whole of North America going into a tizzy over what was first named, then un-named, swine 'flu. The media frenzy appears, now, to have eased somewhat, but not before the less knowledgeable had to be reassured by those in the know that, no, one could NOT catch the swine flu by eating pork....

But as China halted imports from Alberta because one swine herd was confirmed as having the H1N1 virus, and Egypt set about a massive slaughtering campaign (setting off protests by that nation's farmers) the preposterous actions of those in positions of power had me thinking about the poor farmers who are (have already been) hurt by all this....

I examine these issues from the perspective of one who does this bit of farming, who grows some food and sells some food but also has a foot in the academic world, and so tries to understand what's happening as an intellectual and policy-shaper-through-research-efforts gal. And there seem to me to be a number of issues that could be raised with regard to this virus development.

Recent postings on the Organic Consumers Association home page [ http://www.organicconsumers.org/] made the immediate connection of "factory farming" to the strange mix of genetic material showing up as this virus. And so I ask: these claims of some connection are, as far as I have been able to determine, not acknowledged by those in the health community. Another tack, however, has been taken on the matter: The article, below, is making the rounds of "forwarding," and it provides some food for thought on the matter of how globalisation or NAFTA-ing may have unintended consequences for human health.

During my own travel to Mexico, the summer of 2001, I remembered being struck by how many people in Texcoco and also Mexico City were sick with respiratory ailments...at a time when it seemed illogical for this to be the case....and now, more and more, it seems, more and more of us are sick, and sick in stranger ways (my funny little episode of erythema nodosum is just one story).

How "The NAFTA Flu" Exploded

Smithfield Farms Fled US Environmental Laws to Open a Gigantic Pig Farm in Mexico, and All We Got Was this Lousy Swine Flu

By Al Giordano

Special to The Narco News Bulletin(http://www.narconews.com/)

April 29, 2009

US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the "swine flu" outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu symptoms in March.CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified "swine flu" in February as "patient zero," five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a survivor of the disease.By April 15 - nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all - the local daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches was "thecause of the epidemic."La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico: In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most expensive fine in history - $12.6 million - for violating the US Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped hog waste into the river.It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But "free trade" opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the tougher US regulators.The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the "Carroll Ranches" in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new subsidiary corporation, "Agroindustrias de México."Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the new Mexican facility - processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other products per year - does not have a sewage treatment plant. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated 27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about three percent of its total production.)Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield's US facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions that are more sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs­ anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move to unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy interests to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and the environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in clear and understandable human terms.The so-called "swine flu" exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.False mental constructs of borders - the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands - are taking a long overdue hit by the current "swine flu" media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.Welcome to the aftermath of "free trade." Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is "The NAFTA Flu," the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of "free trade" agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.

The author of the above raises some important questions along the way of the rant. But let's think about this in terms of re-localisation of our (any place's) food supply. How much pork do we need? Do we really want to eat anonymous bacon? I know that more and more folks are preferring to re-connect with the sources of their food, and this may mean the end to what most see as part of the problem facing farmers: 'cheap food' policy.

Then, there are the considerations of health to be thought about, as this pandemic-or-not unfolds over the next year. We are all, all of us, pushing ourselves too hard and expecting miracles from our doctors, our medical systems; operating with some ignorance of the need to consider each organism, from ruminant (cows and sheep, goats) to mammal (we pigs/people) to virus as part of the whole of existence. Can we focus on keeping healthy, eating healthily, getting sufficient sleep, avoiding stress as a way to ward off any nasty viruses? After my interesting episode this winter, I'm more convinced than ever of the power of these nasty creatures, viruses, but also of the power of simple things, like healthy food and outlook, to put the chase to them.

Greener Pastures....

The reports from my family and my farm caretaker in West Virginia are that the pastures are greening up and growing. Here, in Nova Scotia, the warm sunny few days we had followed by our rainy "spell" the past couple days has had the result of bringing out the glorious green of the lawns and my afore-mentioned buckwheat and weeds and remains of seeds in the growing patch.

This morning I chased the three persistent guinea fowl away from my now fenced-in field, then went on slug patrol, which means that I scouted around and squished as many of those interlopers to my place as I could find. I don't have much right now that they'd want, but I figured I needed to do what I could now to diminish the population so that when I do have more than perennials and cover crops growing they wouldn't be as high in numbers.

Slugs and snails present a lesson to me. I am frenetic, high energy, dash from pillar to post, most like piglet and Rabbit in Winnie-the-Pooh in my character, so that I have, in the past, dashed from thing to thing. I underestimated, until I saw how even just a few slugs could destroy a lettuce crop overnight, the power of the slow moving force....

Perhaps I'll learn, eventually, to move a bit more slowly. Get more done.

Le Printemps/Spring!

Well, spring has finally come to les provinces Atlantique, and farmers' markets are selling their first greens, to the delight of those "locavores" (I was called one by a stranger, last week) who've been sticking to a local diet.

I have been silent for months, due to an illness that was as mysterious as it was frightening. But, happily, have made it through to "getting better" --and credit the recovery to good food, including fresh carrot juice (most recently, carrots of last year's harvest, sold at the Charlottetown farmers' market), my "sunshine juice"--carrot, rhubarb, apple-- and lots of comforting late winter food, including soups of pumpkin, apples; snacks of roasted soybeans; and other veggies, relishes, salads of the last red cabbage and apples.

And wow--- that cabbage did last long! Likewise, the small sugar pumpkins: I still have one remaining in the upstairs closet, and it looks, still, wonderful. I'm thinking I should serve it for something, or someone, special...

Today's rainy day was perfect for the fields. My cover crop/green manure of rye, sown in the fall, had been decimated by a neighbour's abundant flock of guinea hens (soon to find new homes!) but this spring I'd replaced it with a rye/buckwheat mix, plus a fence, and the buckwheat is now emerging (those birds love rye!), as have the first salad greens, garlic, and perennial herbs.

I worked on a book chapter beside the glowing woodstove today; and simmered atop that stove a chowder of PEI parsnips and carrots (provisioned during a trip to the Island), NS potatoes and onions, and dandelions gathered by me as I prepare the various beds in the garden for first crops.

WHAT CAN YOU LIVE WITH.../ WITHOUT?

This week, I was processing some of the pumpkin beginning to look a little tired in the upstairs closet into curried apple pumpkin soup, staring down nearly the last of my sweet potatoes, grown in this chilly summer, and figuring how to honour the last of the last head of my purple cabbage. For the latter, I made a salad of (peeled, sliced) Cortland apples, and thinly sliced purple cabbage, and then a last blaze of colour to accent the purple and white: a mandarin orange sesame dressing (this not homemade). A quarter head remains, after a stir-fry and szechuan peanut sauce rescued some leftover spaghetti from oblivion.

I’ve cut down considerably on my consumption of out-of-region foods, but it was interesting when I stopped completely last winter, and discovered where we as a region were hurting: the fat. Now, fat has gotten such a beating in some quarters. Or, it’s been held up, along with protein, in some of the weirdest (in my view) rationales for dieting. But now, happily, most people are taking a more balanced approach to fat. We need some of this stuff. We don't need ultra-processed industrial forms of this stuff.

The kicker was, in this region, as far as I knew, there was very little going on in the way of processing of the type of oils that most of us take for granted as we salad-prepare, bake, fry etc. [There is a bit more going on, as far as efforts to get oil processing happening: check out Speerville Mill website at http://www.speervilleflourmill.ca/, and also
http://www.organicagcentre.ca/Docs/Foxmill_Seed_Oils_cbc.pdf. ]


So, when I ran out of sunflower oil and olive oil, and couldn’t source anything locally, I did what my ancestors did: rendered lard, on the woodstove, obtained from hogs raised locally.

Now, funnily enough, I didn’t gain any weight, I lost weight during this period. But I wouldn’t recommend that everyone start rendering lard because I think that unless one is working very hard physically, every day, these saturated fats are clearly not the best of news for a body. Still, they appeared to be better for me than the transfats I had previously been thoughtlessly consuming in all the processed foods....processed foods that went the way of olive oil and orange juice and all else, when I began to eat locally. So while the first thing to go from the pantry shelves, so to speak, was the fat—to be replaced for several months by a diet of butter and/or lard—the funny thing was, at the same time what also went was most of the extra fat on my body.

What can we live without?

What can we not live without?

As I began to crave and do without bananas, olive oil, and the like, I began to compile for myself an “Exclusions” list. Of course, this would be different depending on where one was on the planet...but somehow, I don’t imagine folks in the Caribbean pining over blueberries the way we do over the wonderful tropical fruits that they have, and that we love to see in the winter...

WHAT I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT (Exclusions list of my local diet)
Fair Trade and organic if at all possible (and so far it’s possible)

tahini, or sesame seeds
olive oil
bananas
almonds and other nuts & seeds (some are sourced within Canada, but not regionally)
a bottle of lime juice
a bottle of lemon juice
peanut and almond or other nut butters
coffee and cocoa; chocolate
tea (I grow some herbal types, but there is a local fair trade co-op for these; yay!)
my local co-op’s brand pastas


Thus far, this winter, I’ve bought few of the above items, and not purchased an avocado or mango. But I broke down and bought organic coconut, and I’m close to the breaking point for avocado, as I ponder using up locally produced salsa and the peppers I and others grew here, which would be lovely in nachos....so these things fall into the category of what I do not wish to do without.

Dear Mr. President

First a word of congratulation--Mr. President, it is so good to have you and your team at the helm of the United States at this most difficult time.

Second, a word of welcome: you're coming to Canada, my adopted country, though happily these days one can hold dual citizenship and that is the case with me. I live a life so many from Appalachia live, Mr. President, and have lived, historically, where my roots are deep in those Allegheny Hills, but I've gone elsewhere and in my case found a wonderful living and life here in Atlantic Canada, specifically Nova Scotia: a place, ironically enough, I first heard about in childhood through that song by Carly Simon, "You're So Vain"--in which there is of course that line "...flew your Lear Jet up to Nova Scotia, to see the total eclipse of the sun"...Nova Scotia, indeed, Atlantic Canada is quite different from Ottawa--one might say there is at times a bit of a tension filled relationship between the two--but I hope that while you're in Canada, that perhaps you could fly by here, and come visit a place that is, like Appalachia, making do and doing without, and while suffering under the current global economic stresses, is nonetheless a place to know and understand if one wants to get to the heart of the matter of healing le corps economique....

For small-scale solutions will help us to rebuild an economy in North America, indeed, globally, if we abide by a few basic principles. I'll send a letter or email, when I've time, between all the tasks of my daily life, which will outline those basics. But for now, I say congratulations, welcome to Canada which has national health care and SOME farmers (because of supply management) who aren't struggling quite so much, and, here in this region, in some places, some real attention paid to re-localising the food supply such that real, and sustainable economic growth is occurring. It's not flashy or big: just effective and long-term.

Mr. President, prior to your getting to the White House, there were eight years of shoddy bookkeeping, large-scale fiscal irresponsibility, out and out wealth creation by the already-wealthy in their bonuses and privatisation policies of greed, their security companies and warmaking. It cannot, as you know, be fixed overnight. But I agree with your aim to provide some "stimulus" to the economy, through the only means left--the power inherent in the U.S. government. But as you work to do the work that thank the stars you are able to do, consider: a stimulus is needed to get the body going. But administered too frequently, too randomly, too indiscriminately, or too often, and a stimulus becomes a series of shock treatments from which the body economic will not recover...

Provisioning and Protectionism

My father loved farming. After his death I learned how torn he was about leaving the farm, and going on to university. But could a living be made as a farmer? He was, as you can see from this picture, a member of the Future Farmers of America at his high school, in the 1940s. In the late 1970s, I was the first female member of that same high school's FFA. Though he worked with agriculture, in some ways the education Dad got at this time--and the one that I, in some fashion, rejected, ultimately, by becoming a poet-- was an education that helped along the consumer economy (teaching farmers how "produce, more and more" without paying attention to the external costs of that over-mechanization, over-fertilization, and all else)...the consumer economy we're now desperately trying to heal ourselves of....


In West Virginia there are a handful of folks trying to re-orient the food system. But the mid-Atlantic state, like elsewhere in the nation, is going to face an uphill battle doing so, now that fuel prices have plummeted. It’s going to be difficult to get people to re-think a food system that went national in another time period, another period of low fuel prices.

If I had the opportunity to speak with the new President of the United States, I would tell him to re-think the fear-mongering about protectionism that has been accompanying his valiant efforts to heal the ailing economy. I would tell him that protecting one’s national interests is not necessarily a bad thing.

Too, I’d tell him that not all Canadians are in favour of “free trade” – because it’s not free and it’s not fair, in most instances. And, although it helps a few businesses here and there who have learned to do well across a border, by and large it helps those at the top of the economic "heap," not the majority of us here just trying to get by. That's not to say to throw all international agreements out the window; but....we need to recognize each nation's, each locality's need to feed and otherwise provide for itself, to create a healthier whole nation and planet.

We in Canada are a part of a resource economy, and if we focused on provisioning ourselves first, in all dimensions (primary, secondary, tertiary), and then went outside of our borders to do some business, we would survive the current storms. We might be labeled protectionist but we would, if we focused region by region, build in the end a healthier economy, one less prone to the kinds of catastrophic fluctuations we’ve been seeing in the last six months. By the same token, it should be recognized that the Americans are going to do what is in the best interest of their country (and so they should). And so, if we look after re-orienting the Canadian economy, and making it more self sufficient instead of hoping that the Americans don’t enact a domestic procurement policy, then we as Canadians would be better off in the short term and the long term, regardless of what the Americans do.

There is an irony to the fact that I fought against NAFTA, and yet I owe my being in Canada to its skilled labour provisions....a story for another day...

This morning’s CBC radio news report out of Halifax was astounding—interviewing shoppers at a local mall, it appeared the majority of people don’t pay any attention to where what they’re buying comes from, or bother to make the effort to buy locally or Canadian! I am within walking/biking distance of an abattoir that offers locally processed meats, those animals grown locally as well. There are farmers in my village, and a mom and pop business just up the road that sells the catch from Arichat. I think, with gratitude, of the true wealth they are creating by their efforts. But more needs to be done to support them.

When I did my little 96 k way experiment and, after a modest Christmas shop (still all local foods) stopped buying—meaning that, other than butter and milk or what’s called half-n-half or “blend” I pretty much stopped going to the store—all of a sudden I realized what was right by my doorstep, practically. And I didn’t wonder, either, about what was in the package that I’d purchased: I knew. And I knew that, if I was unhappy with the quality or if something was not quite right, I knew exactly where to go to deal with it....not to a bunch of UPC codes on a website, frantic about food safety. No, I have been eating well, and healthily, and deliciously. A fact for which I remain grateful...

The local food realities, such as they are and such as they could be developed, could also be incorporated into a regional food system, which would have, of course, consequences for big-scale agri-business in Florida or California. But this in fact might be a bit-more-do-able, in terms of keeping costs down and lessening the impacts of truck transportation on roads, the climate, our wallets....if less food, and only those items that some Northerners cannot live without (mangoes! almonds!) which will not grow but in these places....And, next time, I’ll be putting up my “Exclusions” list...my own personal list of what I figured I couldn’t live without (completely) which meant thinking long and hard about the fair trade and organic options from “away”....

Provisioning...and Eating Seasonally

Part of the challenge to consumers is finding foods and other goods produced within a reasonable distance of their homes and workplaces. In a word: provisioning. We all know the middle-class North American chant: I’m too busy, I don’t have time, and thus the excuse to ‘just grab something’

When I lived for a year back in West Virginia, away from Atlantic Canada where seasonality and provisioning is expressed in “fiddleheads!” (spring) “strawberry season!”(mid-summer) “blueberries!” (late summer), etc. etc., I had to figure out how to provision for the kind of eating I was used to doing: seasonal, lots of fresh vegetables in summer and fall, lots of frozen and canned in the winter and early spring (until the fiddleheads were announced, the rhubarb was ready, the first greens emerged...)

It was then that I realized how good I had it in Atlantic Canada. But I’m curious to know how many people out there are provisioning in this way...eating seasonally, putting foods aside for winter. Judging by the size of the crowds in the big store parking lots, sometimes I think people think it’s too hard to do this kind of shopping. And, naturally, the big stores know this, and that’s why the super-chains have managed to thrive. But think: how many people are getting a decent job out of the super stores? And would those people be happier doing something else if those big stores got scaled down, and part of their current business went to more local and small scale producers?

In the past, I have raised poultry and lamb, and before the nightmare of 2007 was involved with an operation that was dairy and beef oriented, with some grain and forage production. I’ve tried the Community Shared (or Supported) Agriculture system of selling subscriptions to folks who then get a share of the garden produce, and as a kid on the farm that you see here, my father raised corn on leased ground (as well as did custom work) and we had a little bit of everything, although, because of the steepness of this hill farm, it was always more about livestock and forage than market crops...i.e., cattle, sheep, hogs, broilers, layers. My grandfather, his father, had raised strawberries, eggs, had tried going commercial with both poultry and horticulture, I believe, but for a number of reasons he did not make much of a go of it. Topography and distance to markets was part of the problem, as was the cheap food policy that had begun to change eating habits in the 1950s and ‘60s; this had begun to make it impossible for smaller farmers to compete, price-wise, with what food was coming out of the South, California, and the Midwest. My father got into agriculture, as did I, in sort of a backhand fashion, through the university....but that’s another story, for another day. I had to post again this old instant photo of the farm, again, the year my grandfather bought it.....

Earth, Wind...

While the image here is striking and beautiful, in a way (posted a third time—it is so beautiful! photo credit, again, to Lori Stiles, for this sight of the windmills in Tucker County, West Virginia), I must confess I was unhappy when I first saw the windmills. It was as though they’d chopped off part of the mountain top to put them there. And, just as mountain-top removal is damaging the aquifers and livelihoods of people in southern West Virginia, I viewed this installation as damaging of the aesthetic value of the view. It was a different aesthetic, at the very least. Can those nearby, in sight of, handle it? Accept it?

These are questions that need to be asked as we begin to “re-localise”—if that is what we as a society choose to do. Some thoughts on the implications of this process in terms of food can be had by reading Elisabeth Barham’s 2003 article, “Translating terroir: the global challenge of French AOC labeling,” in the Journal of Rural Studies 19:127-138.

In my most recent trip to Europe, in the Netherlands, I caught another glimpse of the changing landscape of climate change, frugality in the realm of energy savings: huge, and I do mean HUGE, wind turbines lining the bus route from the ferry terminal to the train station. All a sudden my eye was taken upward, skyward, and I no longer was seeing the landscape of the dykelands, the reminders of sea and human ingenuity, of Holland, but instead simply the work of humans. It was a humbling sight.

Now, these huge wind machines had been put in an industrial “zone,” a place that already has been “industrialised” to the extent that it would appear no one would object to power being gathered from these sites and being used to help supply the (perhaps larger, more than local) grid.

But it was a significant alteration; and as battles rage at present in Atlantic Canada over the placement of these not-your-historical-little-Dutch-wooden windmill structures, it behooves us all to think about the intangible, psychic costs to putting these human-made structures in places where, previously, they had not been, and where there is not the industrial-scape already being accommodated. These discussions need to be had, most especially in North America, where efforts to first cut down on energy use need really to be made more a part of the discourse, and policy, before people are asked to give up the health benefits of natural landscapes, or seascapes, view unimpeded.

There is another issue, here, too, connected to the history of the expropriation of natural resources. Most of us know the story of the New England and New York capitalists who came “from away” and made a lot of money in a previous century off the use and abuse of both human and natural capital. There, the “local” was subsumed to the “national” and we had the growth of particular areas (cities like Montreal, Boston) at the cost of the people and places of the marginalized places, and, to a large degree, of rural peoples. We need to be sure that this doesn’t happen again with green energy. I was dismayed when I learned from a reputable source that the “locals”—the people of Tucker County, whose winds were being employed to work this turbine—were not benefiting very much economically at all from these windmills (Florida company). Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, West Virginia, and other places where coal mining and timbering have been allowed to work their damage historically, have lost natural beauty in exchange for providing resources to a population outside of the region, for the most part. It is this population “from away” who in turn insist on certain natural places being preserved for use by them as “playground”... This is an unhealthy dynamic, an unhealthy polarization, and it needs to be challenged at all levels.

By buying local, though....by consciously looking at where the goods and foods were produced that one buys (from start to finish!)-- especially those entrepreneurs who, like my jam-makers and bread-bakers, are doing small-scale things as a labour of love for the most part... we will be, to use a cliché, part of the solution, and not part of the problem.

Ensemble.....

Everybody’s writing a letter to President-Elect (president this week! Yay!) Obama. Here is “food guru” Michael Pollan’s letter:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_15101.cfm

Check out: canadiansforobama.ca!


If I get time, between the shoveling of snow/chipping of ice, cross country skiing and the making of soups, stews and comforting cookies to contend with the mighty cold we’re enduring (ok, ok, I know we’re not Winnipeg or Churchill, but still!!!!) I’ll be writing my own letter to this person who’s inspired us all.

Blog that is connected to eating well –local food, and commentary on Vilsack as Ag Sec’y appointee:

http://blog.eatwellguide.org/2008/12/what-does-vilsacks-appointment-mean-for-the-future-of-organic-food-and-public-lands/

Charlie Parker - MSN Encarta

Charlie Parker - MSN Encarta

Chasing the Bird (with a bow to Charlie Parker)

Acknowledgment: audio clip and photo courtesy of:
http://ca.encarta.msn.com/media_461519515_761563779_-1_1/jazz_saxophonist_charlie_parker.html)

Good food is like good music--and jazz, such as the inspired Charlie Parker played, is one prime example of the magic found in good (well, in his case, great!) music. As I pull out from the oven a homemade calzone, stuffed with (among other things) eggplant I'd grown this summer, encircled in a crust made with Speerville grains grown by farmers from this region and processed just over in New Brunswick, well..."I am counting my blessings," as that old hymn goes (to invoke yet another inspiring musical tradition)....

Anyone who read the Boxing Day (Dec 26th for those American readers! : - ) somewhat humourous entry about my Christmas Eve cross country ski with the 15 pound turkey in tow, will be interested to know two things:

1. It was yummy then (roasted turkey, not awkward skiing), and it’s yummy now;

[Recipes for turkey taken out of the freezer in mid-January:

Turkey alfredo, with snowpeas, on homemade fettucine (garnish: homemade french-fried onions, and quick-baked slices of George Washington Carver [love that agriculturalist!] variety sweet potatoes)

Turkey-basmati rice soup (yep, basmati rice is on my “Exclusions” list—though I’ve not bought any since I started my 96k way living, I am getting close to the end of that 10 kg bag and may be heading to one of those import shops in Halifax.....)

Turkey pot pie, with carrots, peas, onions and celery (all frozen or fresh stored, local)

Turkey Caesar sandwiches, on 12-grain bread

(yep, didn’t make muffins from the leftover porridge this week—see entry from December 26th—made yeast bread....and it was actually made from one bit of leftover porridge frozen over the holidays, and that bread-making morning’s production of old fashioned Speerville Newfound oats, cooked and served with cream and brown sugar...YUM! Well, I still had made too much, so with starter of these porridge leftovers made European style baguette, loaf and round loaf, which I’m enjoying very much this week. While there are wonderful bread bakers in the area, who meet my needs for white and brown bread (I cannot figure out how to do brown bread right; must be a Maritime-New England thing), I also love the more dense and multiple grain loaves of Eastern Europe (the Germans almost have it as good, too, but again I’m biased—nothing like the breads, for example, of Poland, and Romania...). ]



2. Marguerite Fortune-Phillips and Frank Phillips of NATURE'S SCRIPT FARM (902-668-2822) HAVE EIGHT MORE OF THESE LUSCIOUS TURKEYS LEFT IN THEIR FREEZER! I’m calling them this weekend to get one....soon as I re-organize the freezer, so I can fit it in....Easter’s only a few months away, and it wasn’t cost effective for Nature’s Script to be raising turkeys over the winter, so provisioning is called for.

Provisioning....
I’ll be writing more about provisioning in coming posts. While planning ahead used to be something every (rural at least) household did, it’s become way too easy for consumerism to lead us to not think ahead, and not buy, but rather to think we “must stop by and pick up something...” Think of the help it would be to farmers selling at the farmers’ markets if they knew that we were all going to “stock up” for the winter, and that they were going to not be hauling back product from the market because 50% of whatever didn’t sell was going to be picked up and bought (at a fair price, though less than retail) for distribution through the food banks???? Just an idea...but wouldn’t that get some local economies...and entrepreneurs...moving along?

New Year---New Energies!

I’ve posted—twice—this beautiful photo taken by photographer Lori Stiles. Lori graciously gave me permission to use this image. But I would ask, if others wish to, that they email me, and I’ll put them in contact with the photographer for appropriate permissions, etc....

Married to my brother Michael, my sister Lori (in-law, only in name; a true sister!) is an accomplished photographer as well as educator.

In this image of windmills in Tucker County, West Virginia—not too far, as the crow flies, from my Limestone Mountain Farm—Lori has captured the grace, the beauty, and also the different reality we’re embarking on these days, with regard to nature and the environment. And of course, this connects via the reality of energy to food, to farms, and to the need for frugality as we accept the limits of this planet we call home.