GroovyGreen.com – Start Today :: Save Tomorrow

The idea of purchasing “organic” foods depends a great deal on trust.  I trust the farmer has taken numerous steps to grow food without artificial or chemical products, uses natural pest control versus pesticides, etc.  He in turn trusts that the products that he is buying to fertilize his fields are based on organic standards.  Without that trust, an “organic apple” is just an apple, a head of “organic lettuce”, is just lettuce, and so on.

Some argue that the government should set standards so that those farmers practicing organic methods of farming and husbandry can be monitored and those standards enforced.  Others (myself included) would like the government to stay out of it (mostly).

A recent article brings to light a breach of that trust.  It reveals that several seasons worth of organic food were grown using a fertilizer that included ammonium sulfate – which is made from fossil fuels.

Sacramento Bee:

For up to seven years, California Liquid Fertilizer sold what seemed to be an organic farmer’s dream, brewed from fish and chicken feathers.

The company’s fertilizer was effective, inexpensive and approved by organic regulators. By 2006, it held as much as a third of the market in California.

But a state investigation caught the Salinas-area company spiking its product with ammonium sulfate, a synthetic fertilizer banned from organic farms.

As a result, some of California’s 2006 harvest of organic fruits, nuts and vegetables – including crops from giants like Earthbound Farm – wasn’t really organic.

It goes on…

State officials knew some of California’s largest organic farms had been using the fertilizer, the documents show, but they kept their findings confidential until nearly a year and a half after it was removed from the market. No farms lost their organic certification.

To me the best way of insuring that you have fresh healthy food that is grown with care for the environment and for the consumer is to know your farmer.  Nevertheless, one should realize that even Farmer John can get duped.  Another reason to start up a compost pile, and start growing your fruits and veggies in the back yard.

I think that Joel Satalin can add another chapter to his book Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal after reading this story.  I mean, really, a child’s veggie stand shut down for lack of permits?  What’s next, no lemonade stands or car wash fundraisers?

ABC News via ABA Journal:

Call it a rite of passage: children by the roadside peddling their homemade goodies to adults who are more than eager to drop a few cents into a makeshift cashbox.

But Katie and Sabrina Lewis’ veggie stand, in the town of Clayton, Calif., where they sold homegrown watermelons for $1, has been shuttered by town officials who told the girls’ parents that their daughters’ venture violated local zoning ordinances.

“I think that they’re wrong,” dad Mike Lewis said of the town officials. “Kids should be able to be kids.”

Of course kids should be able to be kids!  I think that this touches on a separate issue as well, one not mentioned in the article.  Shouldn’t people have the right to sell the food that they produced on their (albeit small) piece of land?  How does a roadside veggie stand devalue our neighborhoods?  Especially when it is selling organic food much cheaper than one can find in the “super” grocery store.  The last question is, what kind of ultra-conformist calls the mayor to complain about an “illegal” activity like this?

But Clayton Mayor Gregory Manning said he first heard of the girls’ operation this past April, after two residents called to ask if it was legal. Two months later, a police officer was sent to the stand to tell the Lewises that the girls were violating zoning regulations that prohibit commercial activities in a residential area.

The stand also violates health regulations, he said, which state that food can’t be sold without a permit.

Please check out the full ABC News article (video too).  If you feel compelled, here is the phone number for the City of Clayton government office - (925) 673-7300.  Be civil and constructive if you call.

I had to pass this video along.  It is the story of one man’s effort to get the president to plant a victory garden on the lawn of the white house.  Worth a watch.

Eat The View, via Home Is…

Hello! Welcome to the first of many installments in my adventure of chicken raising. I recently just introduced 2 chickens to my urban palace and I thought it would be interesting to follow along with my trials and tribulations. Hopefully if I make mistakes it will help you avoid them if you decide to embark on this sort of thing on your own.

I was helped along in my chicken adventures by talking with many other chicken owners about what they’ve done, as well as the great website City Chicken. I read two great books which I would recommend, Chicken Tractor by Andy Lee and Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens. I thought both of these books were great, and while I didn’t think one book covered all the information I wanted, together they did cover a lot of what I was concerned about.

Let me say, I wasn’t born on a farm or really around animals. We had a cat and a dog at various times when I was growing up, but we didn’t have a steady menagerie of animals at my house. What I’ve learned has been from reading books and talking to others. I guess I tell you this to encourage you. Just because you don’t have the background in raising animals doesn’t mean you can’t do it. I’m just at the beginning of my adventure, as I write this, and I’m still nervous and scared as heck. Especially when they sort of dart around. It freaks me out, but I know there is plenty of information and help online and with people I know. I hope Groovy Green can be a resource for you if you are starting out on an eggcellent adventure!

* Future installments of this series will discuss coops. Can you scavenge materials? Are they hard to build? Are you happy that there aren’t code enforcers for chicken houses? I think perhaps a discussion about a few coops I know of would be helpful as well.
* Feeding chickens. Tips, tricks and things you can do to make them cheaper and easier to raise.
* Keeping chickens warm in the winter. (Or cool in the summer)
* Are chickens legal in your area? How to find out.

Stay turned for more information in the future.

The kind gentleman promoting King Corn (now out on DVD and iTunes) gave Groovy Green a complementary download of the movie via iTunes to review.  I hadn’t seen the movie yet so it was a good opportunity to view the film and to try out watching a video via downloading.

First of all, downloading the film was fast and easy.  I had iTunes downloading in the background while I caught up on my RSS feed, and was surprised by the speed in which the nearly 1 GB file was transferred.  (For tech savvy readers:  I have a high-speed cable connection, and run OS X 10.4.11 on a MacBook 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM).  iTunes provides a quick and easy way to watch a movie.  I think that this would be especially worth it on a long flight or trip.  However I think that that is about the only way that it beats owning the actual DVD.  There is no (legitimate) way to burn a iTunes download to a DVD to watch on your TV.  Bummer.  The $14.99 iTunes price did beat out the lowest DVD price that I could find at $17.99.  One last benefit of downloading rather than purchasing the DVD is that is a much “greener” option.  No energy or materials used to produce the media, nor fuel or effort to ship it.  I imagine the trend will continue until DVD’s are things of the past.

Enough about iTunes movies, what did I think about the flick?  I liked it.  For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, here’s the summary:

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-and how we farm

I like the personalized interviews with farmers, the rich history of the corn belt, and description about how times have changed.  For those of you that have read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan (who inspired this movie), King Corn gives a stunning visual of description of the corn industry as described in the first part of Pollan’s book.  Literal mountains of corn appear large enough to body-surf on.  Multi-story grain elevators dwarfed only by the landing strip sized overflow section tarped off from the elements.

The premise of the movie – two east coast post-grads head out west to plant their own acre of corn – is anti-climatic.  The work needed to plant, spray herbicide, and harvest their 1 acre section takes mere minutes of their year long stay in Iowa.  I guess that only reinforces the massive size of the farm needed to make a living as a farmer since the end of the 20th century – when Earl Butz famously told farmers to “Get big… or get out.”

I felt the film glossed over the whole genetically modified food issue, as the two writers and stars munched on burgers and fast food throughout the film.  Reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” changed the way my family eats, I can’t imagine producing a film like King Corn and ever eating at a Mickey D’s again.  The most effective and shocking part of the film was the visit to Colorado’s CAFO cattle operations, and a trip to a agriculture university to find out how eating a diet of corn can affect a cow’s stomach.

There is clever use of stop-motion animation through out the movie to convey the changing nature of corn farming using corn kernels and an old Fisher-Price farm set (which I nostalgically longed to search for in the attic).

King Corn captured the struggle of the American Farmer, and their reliance on subsidies from the US government to make a living.  I couldn’t help but wonder how rapidly rising corn prices would affect those same farmers who struggled to make ends meet at $1.65 per bushel.  A recent record price for corn was reached last week at $7.37 per bushel – nearly 4 1/2 times the amount paid just 2 years ago.  I know for sure that it is going to make the products that come out of the other end of the industrial corn process.  The moral of that story?  Seems to be a good thing for us American fatties (less processed food), and not so good for the starving poor in developing nations (less emergency grain aid).

I recommend this movie to both food novices to help them understand where are food really comes from (and is made of), and to deeper greens that may need a topping off of the angst, enough to bypass the meat counter and rows of processed corn products.

Buy King Corn today.

Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows is one of my heroes.  She is a local food advocate and works for social justice.  She blogs at Cookin’ in the ‘Cuse, and is an Episcopal priest at a city church.  Take a few moments (1 min 41 sec) to watch her photomontage and interview on MSNBC about her and others efforts to grow healthy organic food for the food pantry patrons.

Keep up the good work!

Video can be found here.

Click through for story.

Really not that funny if you think about it.

From the article:

Cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, tomatoes sold with the vine still attached and home-grown tomatoes are not associated with the outbreak, Acheson says.

Moral of the story: Grow your own.

Second moral of the story: “Salmonella outbreak” is a nice way of saying, there’s poop on your food. You’re literally eating sh*t.

If anyone wanted to stop over for a look.

Baloghblog: Garden 2008 Pics

Another successful planting at Balogh and Son Gardens

I imagine you’ve seen this floating around the internets, but if you haven’t go to hulu.com for the full episode. (Via Ethicurean)

Here’s a snippet:

Olivia Grange, the Minister of Information, Youth, Culture, and Sports, announced that this year’s Labor Day focus would be on increasing Jamaican food security. The cost of fuel and food has risen rapidly, leading to an unstable market in Jamaica. Ms. Grange urged citizens to plant backyard gardens to supplement their diet.

Beyond speeches and education, the government is distributing 200,000 packets of vegetable seeds to local schools.

Jamaican Gleaner News:

[Ms. Grange] said individuals living in urban communities affected by insufficient land space should instead look towards container gardening.
“Convert old drums into con-tainer gardens, planting vegetables like sweet peppers and tomatoes for your own use,” she said.
“Let us get our children and young people involved so they can experience the joy of watching a seed that they have planted grow.
“Grange said adults should also encourage youth to consider agricultural pursuits from an early age to ensure food security for years to come.
“This Labour Day, we want our schools to become involved in establishing school gardens, nurseries and greenhouses. As adults, let us work side by side with our children and help them to invest their energy and drive in laying a foundation for a pros-perous country,” said Grange.

Sharon Astyk, Aaron Newton, The Community Solution, and others have been pushing for this type of action to improve food security. The Cubans were forced to do so during the “Special Period” and showed surprising flexibility and growth in the local food supply. The Dervaes family at Path to Freedom is an exemplary example of what can be grown on a small plot of land.

It is my belief that this will be repeated in developing nations around the world, as the high cost of oil and food begins to threaten food security. Eventually, we’ll even see it in our neck of the woods. Kudos to Jamaican officials who have acted proactively. It will be interesting to monitor their progress.