Month: May 2014

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NYT – What Farm to Table Got Wrong

Worth reading is What Farm to Table Got Wrong by Dan Barber of the New York Times. Despite the movement for local food and supporting local farmers, he notes the following:

In the last five years, we’ve lost nearly 100,000 farms (mostly midsize ones). Today, 1.1 percent of farms in the United States account for nearly 45 percent of farm revenues. Despite being farm-to-table’s favorite targets, corn and soy account for more than 50 percent of our harvested acres for the first time ever. Between 2006 and 2011, over a million acres of native prairie were plowed up in the so-called Western Corn Belt to make way for these two crops, the most rapid loss of grasslands since we started using tractors to bust sod on the Great Plains in the 1920s.

In the article he visits a grain farmer growing organic emmer wheat and describes the lengthy process the farmer takes growing his wheat. Before his fields are ready to grow a crop of wheat, he rotates a series of crops through the field. He begins with a cover crop of like mustard. He follows that with a legume crop like soybeans or kidney beans. After that he grows oats or rye. Each one of these crops does its part enhancing the soil. Only after all these crops have been rotated through the field is the field ready to grow a crop of emmer wheat.

What is needed to support this intensive process is for people to buy each of these crops. As Dan Barber points out:

It’s one thing for chefs to advocate cooking with the whole farm; it’s another thing to make these uncelebrated crops staples in ordinary kitchens. Bridging that divide will require a new network of regional processors and distributors.

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An Acre To Herself

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Chickens are social birds. They like to roost together. During the day they’ll hang out together in a dirt bath and gossip and kvetch. Hens will cavort with roosters and lead them on. But they also like to get away and be by themselves. They will meander off into the woods or deep into the pasture all on their own.

I read an article in Modern Farmer by Tyler LeBlanc titled Virtual Reality for Chickens – Is this the future of free range? According to the article, Austin Stewart, a young assistant professor from Iowa State University, has designed a virtual world chickens can see by wearing a Oculus Rift headset. He’s even set up a website, Second Livestock, where he discusses his ideas of giving caged or confined animals the experience of being outdoors by wearing virtual reality headsets.

It makes me wonder if either Tyler LeBlanc or Austin Stewart have even seen a live chicken. The experience of being outdoors on pasture and in woodland, is much more than just seeing those things. It is about touching the tall grass, feeling the brush, scratching the dirt with their toes, pulling earthworms out of the ground, and hunting down a field mouse. And with headsets on, how in the world are these chickens going to preen themselves?

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Iris, Wysteria, and Babies

It’s Iris and Wysteria season, a terrific time of the year to be outdoors.

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It’s an auspicious day to be born. These chicks are just hours old, safe and snug with their mother. The clutch is due tomorrow so these two are on the early side.

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It’s a day for making a fuss. Hazel is making a fuss, but so many hens do after they’ve laid an egg. I guess if we had something as large as an egg coming out of our butt, we’d want to talk about it too.

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It’s a day for temporary art. The alcove in the entry way is a handy place to display eggs gathered this afternoon.

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Where Do Tulips Go When They Die?

Where do tulips go when they die? They fall onto their tombstones and slowly vanish.

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And these geriatric tulips are nearing their end. They are still beautiful, just like old people with all their wrinkles. At the beginning of the month, they were so fresh. Now, they are losing their shape, getting wobbly, and gracefully showing their age. But their beauty endures to the end.

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Egg Art

Every day the hens lay eggs with such beauty, they are small works of art. When you buy them in a store, they are cold and lifeless. But when you gather them throughout the day, they are warm to the touch, almost hot if the hen has just laid them and left the nest. You can tell they are living things.

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Reuse, Recycle

I needed a weeding platform for the hoop houses so I could weed the vegetable beds without stepping in them. I had ten foot alder branches, so I cut some down to five and a half feet, stripped them and ripped one in two.

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I also had a pallet lid with decent planks. I took the lid apart and used the blanks to make the platform.

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I used sections of the alder branches to make the legs for one side of the weeding platform.

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Here is how the weeding platform works. The end without the legs rests on the frame of the hoop house. The end with the legs sits out in the middle of the hoop house. And I use the platform to kneel on to weed the vegetable rows. The weeding platform is easy to move and now I can tend to the rows of vegetables without having to step on the soft dirt and compacting it or stepping on the plants.

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Egg Day – May 15

Today is Thursday, Egg Day here at a man and his hoe®. Time to pedal this week’s eggs down to Tweets Café in Edison. The subtle variety in the eggs the hens lay always impresses. You never get the idea from supermarket eggs that chicken eggs come in such a riot of shapes, sizes and colors. The relentless push to sort and standardize gives people the impression that chicken eggs are all the same, and that they only come in three sizes: small, medium, large. And that they only come in two colors: white or brown.

Reality is far more interesting than that. Not only is there a vast variety of sizes, shapes, and colors, each hen lays a slightly different egg every time. They are never identical. It almost makes you believe that they scheme about what kind of egg they want to lay the next day. The really radical hens have figured out how to squeeze two yolks inside a gigantic egg, or do they lay a double egg when they feel really lucky or are hopelessly in love?

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Harvard Study Linking Bee Colony Collapse Disorder to Neonicotinoid Pesticides

In this article of the Bulletin of Insectology, Chensheng Lu, Associate Professor of Environmental Exposure Biology at Harvard, describes a study he conducted testing the effect of neonicotinoid pesticides on bee colonies.

In the study, they compared bee colonies which were given exposure to neonicotinoid pesticides to bee colonies which were not exposed. The study started in July and after a winter, the colonies treated with neonicotinoid pesticides had significant colony collapse disorder, while the non-treated colonies did not.

Upon close examination of colonies in early April 2013, we found that the majority of bees in all neonicotinoid-treated colonies, regardless of whether they survived or not, had abandoned their hives during the course of winter. However, we observed a complete opposite phenomenon in the control colonies in which instead of abandonment, hives were repopulated quickly with new emerging bees.

Neonicotinoids are banned in Europe. Hopefully, with more studies like this, showing the dangers of these pesticides, they will be banner in the US as well.