It’s been a hell of a week, so here are some happy farm photos from Darby and Elliot’s place.
Tomatoes are just starting to ripen
Six pack
Happy butterflies
Goaties
I’m having unbelievable work stress lately, and while my Sundays at the farm are generally my favorite part of the week, even that didn’t really pull me out of my funk. But it’s Sunday, and tomorrow starts a whole new week. A perfect opportunity for a fresh start.
I work contract for an ISP, and my boss left the company (I’m not clear about the circumstances) last Friday. All of the permanent employees are in a meeting right now, and I can’t help but worry that my position will be terminated when they come out of it.
Really hate this feeling, but then again, I’ve been in the office since 6am and a nap wouldn’t suck.
For God’s sake, what’s wrong with this country?
Several years ago, independent testing found arsenic compounds in storebought chicken, including a certified organic brand. This is linked to a compound called roxaresone that’s added to chicken feed to — theoretically? – help keep confined poultry healthy.
Now, there’s a family in Utah with a backyard coop and two young kids with arsenic poisoning. Kids eat home grown chicken eggs (healthier, right?) and absorb arsenic.
Seriously: Ban roxarsone now. Full story at Grist.
I took the dogs out just before dawn and noticed that the squashes and cukes I seeded in the driveway garden were just starting to push through the surface of the soil. So cool to witness that.
Cucumber seedlings
Two of the winter squash varieties have also sprouted, and after a full day of soaking in the sun, all of them are a healthy green and appear to be off to a good start.
Of course now the cukes in the back garden have upped their productivity, so I may live to regret this little cucumber experiment.
The call went out a couple of hours ago — July 25 at Indian Ridge Farm in the North Georgia mountains. Capped at 50 slots, (free) tickets are going fast. Hit the Crop Mob Atlanta site to get registered.
Californians will be voting on marijuana legalization in the state in November, and the state NAACP has now endorsed the measure. Why does this matter for ag policy in the United States? I’ll tell you.
But first, because I don’t live in California and I work in corporate America, I want to be clear that I don’t use drugs. I don’t have any philosophical problem with drugs, they just don’t appeal to me. I hate that I even have to make that statement, but in America in the early part of the 21st century, I believe that I do. So that said, let’s talk about California and pot.
I spent several weeks in northern California in 2008 when I did a long spoken word tour (my spoken word promo site is here) and was startled to learn how much of the local economy out there is driven by pot growing and processing. While I’m sure the region is home to plenty of people who don’t partake, medical marijuana licensing has made growing and using pot incredibly open. It’s hard to explain this to fellow southerners, but pot is literally everywhere out there and the sanctions generally amount to a slap on the wrist, if authorities bother with that. I’ve also spent time in British Columbia, Canada, including on that tour, and it’s the only frame of reference I have, except that Canadians are even more relaxed about it because the DEA isn’t really involved in their day to day.
In Vancouver, it didn’t seem exceptional to see someone smoking a joint on the street. California is a little more discrete than that, but people (at least in the northern part of the state) routinely have a few plants growing in their gardens or in containers in their homes. And while ag work is usually thought of as laboring in fields and picking fruit all day, in that region a lot of the ag work, and a lot of well-paid seasonal employment, is teams of people sitting in rooms clipping leaves from dried bud.
You can throw all the moral arguments you want at this, but it’s reality. As long as pot is illegal in the US, this labor force will face intermittent criminal sanction while the task itself will continue unabated. If legalized, these workers would simply work (and pay taxes), and the commercial growers could operate openly (and pay taxes on their earnings), and Californians could just live their lives. The police would no longer be engaged in a perpetual conflict with the citizens they are sworn to protect, and the risk of corruption through bribery or police stealing from growers at traffic stops (both of these scenarios were described over and over again as I talked to people out there) would fade.
Feel however you want to feel about people who smoke pot. Your feelings have absolutely no impact on the untold millions of dollars generated in sales or the untold millions paid for low skill work like trimming bud. Your feelings do nothing about the millions of people who have been incarcerated in America over the years for possession of plant matter, and they certainly don’t do anything about the fact that this country — the land of the free — has the highest incarceration rate of any country on Earth.
Feel what you feel, but know that America’s stubborn insistence on waging a war against marijuana is a job killer, a career killer, a drag on the economy, a cost to every state’s prison budget, and a ridiculous waste of police resources that could be devoted to fighting real crime. Know that our obsession with pot has distorted the 4th Amendment to such a degree that citizens are never safe from state intrusion. Know that our society has used the drug war to create a public policy devoted to incarcerating minorities. Know that marijuana has never killed anyone, but the war against it has killed and caused permanent harm to many, especially young Americans, whose potential is often profoundly limited by a criminal record at what should have been the outset of their involvement in the labor market.
Feel whatever you feel, but the NAACP is right. Marijuana prohibition is a stupid and wasteful policy, and Californians would be wise to vote for repeal of an idiotic, misguided, and mean-spirited program of human suffering.
This is likely to be a regular feature, since most Sundays I’m lucky enough to have people who indulge a deeply held fascination of mine — farming.
I met Darby and Elliot of Sun Dog Farmers a few months back through Crop Mob. They seemed like cool folks and their place isn’t too far from me, so I asked if they had any internship opportunities. It’s their first year on this land, and Darby said she needed to think about how to structure that so as to not work me to death, which I considered thoughtful.
Anyway, they figured out to leave the easy stuff for Sundays and offered to let me come out in the mornings and help them feed their growing flock of goats and sheep and chickens and then weed or mulch or lay black plastic or pop new seedlings into the ground when the old one isn’t thriving — you know, farm stuff. I usually bring a few bottles of beer I’ve made, and around noon we break and have a home cooked lunch on their porch and, assuming I’m not suffering heat exhaustion, chat and hang out. I find the labor to be centering, the animals fascinating, and the company first rate. Plus, the weather today was perfect — sunny, breezy, warm but not enough to do me harm. Here’s some Sun Dog Farmers Livestock Porn:
Goats: Ruminants or Just Gangly, Weird-Eyed Dogs?
These guys (actually, one guy and three lady goats) just race over to say hello, shouting their happy greetings and wagging their little tails. The fencing is new and wasn’t up when I was last there. I guessed it was electrified when the goats stopped just short of touching it. Later in the morning when we were over feeding them, Darby couldn’t hear the soft clicking noise the solar-powered generator makes as it sends a pulse through, so I touched it. For a fraction of a second, everything was fine. And then a strange and hugely unpleasant sensation overtook me.
Some time later, the male goat Giles forgot himself in trying to play with me and jumped full body into the fencing. He steered clear of me for a while after that.
Hens in the Eggloos
Here are the laying hens (and one rooster) in the Eggloos. They’ve got a larger, custom built tractor coming this week which will give them more space and be an easier move. The Eggloos are moved at least once a day, giving the chickens fresh grass and bugs to eat and a clean floor. The soil, meanwhile, is aerated by their scratching and fertilized by their droppings.
The idea with migration intensive grazing is to move ruminants across a given section of pasture for a period of time adequate for them to graze back the grass and leave lots of rich droppings behind. Then they’re moved into another section of pasture (by moving their fencing in this case) and the chicken tractor is moved onto that piece of pasture. The chickens scratch to break up and scatter the dung and eat insects they find, effectively cleaning that section of pasture. It takes a few days for the tractor to cover the full length of the area, and by the time that section of pasture is cleaned, the goats and sheep are ready to be moved to a third piece of pasture, and the chickens follow to clean up their second spot.
By the time the ruminants return to the first position, the pasture has been fertilized and the grass has had time to grow back more lushly than before. Employed over a span of years, this grazing technique produces lush, healthy forage and rich new soil.
Bantam free range dude
This Bantam rooster is a cross between a flighty guard dog and the farm mascot. He’s gorgeous and just roams free. I’ve seen him every time I’ve been there, and while he displays no overt interest in me, I always get the feeling that he’s paying very close attention. There’s a little bit of rottweiler in that one, I’m sure. Today he spent the day flirting with the hens in the Eggloos because his free range lady partner just hatched five chicks and they’re all stuck in an enclosure down the hill. Daddy-o here wouldn’t win any parenting awards.
Like Pop Tarts for Goats
Lady sheep chowing down
This was actually the second breakfast for the critters, who were “hayed” before I arrived. Here they’re getting small grain rations, which they love but which are something like junk food. The rumen isn’t designed to digest large amounts of grain, and sheep feed is specially formulated because they are susceptible to copper toxicity.
There was more to the day, like weeding the incredible squash beds. Being a farm, the lighting and soil conditions are ideal, and it always blows me away how much bigger and fuller their plants are than what I manage in the kingdom of clay in my back yard. Darby identified the apparently endless number of squash-devouring insects that we encountered, and I smashed a lot of squash beetle seeds as I reached through to pull grasses and pigweed free. I had no idea that nature had directed so much energy to the destruction of squash plants.
But that’s what happens on a day at the farm — you do stuff, you learn stuff, and goats race up to say hello everytime you clear the treeline. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday, but I’m not sure there are many better ones.
Happy Independence Day! On Sundays I like to head out west of the city and spend time helping out on a farm. I’ll take pictures — sheep and chickens and goats and scallopini squashes, oh my!
My house was built in 1951 and my neighborhood followed along a few years later. It’s pretty woodsy over here, one of the characteristics I love most about Atlanta, but the tree canopy is a constant irritant for me the gardener.
In the spring I was still adjusting to my job and wasn’t devoting the time I could have been to the garden. I started close to fifty tomato seeds in February, but only a handful survived the hardening process as I raced off to the office and was often stuck there late.
I’m lucky to live in Georgia, where the climate allows summer crops to produce into October and sometimes November. Last night and today I’ve been setting out a few more things in containers (a new experience for me), and now have a couple of zucchini in a large pot, a watermelon plant (say what? Well, I’ve never!), a styrofoam cooler adapted to try another batch of Armenian cukes (my cukes aren’t thriving out back this year, even with fertilizer, even with a compost mulch), and I’ve got three buckets to which I added three different types of winter squash (one variety per bucket).
Behold: The driveway garden!
The Driveway Garden
No, it’s not much. I expect to collect more containers though. I can really see converting about half the length of my driveway to food production. I was hitting the yard sales bright and early today, but ended up buying the three buckets at Lowe’s (and branded, no less, so I can advertise their stores as I grow my winter squash!) since I guess this isn’t an ideal time of year for people to be downsizing their gardening equipment.
I finally had a chance to sit and read the article linked in the Tom Philpott piece I mentioned a few days ago. Heather Rogers provides a good overview of the issues facing small, sustainable farmers, and the whole thing is worth a read. Especially vital to learn was that one of my senators, Saxby Chambliss, overtly opposes USDA support for operations like these (Chambliss signed a letter with two other senators stating, “American families and rural farmers are hurting in today’s economy, and it’s unclear to us how propping up the urban locavore markets addresses their needs.” — I love how they’ve turned “small family farming” into “urban locavorism”, definitely a culture war dog whistle about those dastardly elites and their ridiculous eating habits.)
Rogers’ conclusions, as policy issues go, are roughly:
The regulatory issue is a big one, and has been addressed a little bit in other industries that confront an emergent small vs. large issue. In the renewable energy industry, hydroelectric power requires extensive review and permitting for operations larger than five megawatts, which makes sense since operating on this scale can require dam construction or rerouting waterways, to say nothing of the impact of huge turbines in fish and wildlife, impact to wetlands, and so on. There’s an emerging market for what’s known as micro-hydro, smaller, high efficiency turbine rigs that can operate in relatively shallow and even slow-moving waterways and which could provide a more decentralized energy infrastructure, especially in rural areas where a home, farm, or ranch may well have usable waterways on the property.
FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, spent a few years reviewing its guidelines and developed a less onerous (and less expensive) permit process for microhydro. (Full disclosure: I do freelance research and grant/permit writing for a small renewable startup from time to time.) The system isn’t perfect, but FERC and related agencies have taken important steps to support the notion of scaling down instead of scaling up, and given space for an emerging energy market to grow.
So there’s a model in place for how government can react, at least on the issues of small scale, locally focused dairies and abattoirs (i.e., slaughterhouses — I never know if I’m trying to conceal something potentially unpleasant when I get French with it.)
This is an interesting dynamic that’s playing out across many sectors in the economy. For a generation or two, American commerce has been scaling up to maximize efficiencies and regulations have been implemented to reflect massive-scale production, processing, and distribution. And in general, they’re effective. Americans don’t typically die of food-borne illness despite the fact that most of our food is processed and packaged in just a handful of plants — millions of bushels of produce all lumped together before being carted out to grocery stores nationwide. One infected batch could potentially sicken hundreds or thousands of people across a wide region. Tight regulations prevent that, and the costs associated with that are rightly considered a cost of doing business.
But when your scale is a few employees with low turnover instead of a few hundred with a lot of churn, and a few hundred or thousand customers instead of millions, and a handful of farms are supplying your operation, the equation is simply different. The regulations and guiding authorities for a restaurant kitchen and for a packing plant for processed food are not the same, but the goal is the same: consumer safety. So it’s up to consumers to insist that the regulatory environment recognize and accommodate scale.
As for me, I’ll be getting in touch with Senator Chambliss’s office to advocate for smaller government. He says he’s for that, but somehow that usually seems to mean smaller government for big corporations, and big government for the rest of us.
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