New to the life of farming, a middle-aged couple make a career change to becoming sustainable farmers. First mentoring under Joel Salatin, they now raise pasture fed cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, lambs, and sheep…

What a wonderful environment they’ve created for their animals. The pigs get to root under brush and tree, the chickens get to scatter, and the cows and lambs run at will. In fact, when Marilyn opened the gate for the cows to go to a fresh area of pasture, they ran and kicked up their heels! What a sight that was. I’m not an animal psychologist, but these are happy cows!

A website that is dedicated to news and facts surrounding grass fed food is EatWild. Yes, pasture fed meat is more expensive, but I believe it’s healthier to eat, and more humane for the animals as well.

Check out the recipes from this show: Mom’s Potato Salad; Easy Baked Chicken
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From SALON
via CULINATE

It’s not just kids and dirt. From indoor fish farms to business training for refugees, a slide show of 11 pioneers

Urban farmers are coming to the rescue in dozens of city neighborhoods where you’re about as likely to find a fresh tomato as you are to find a unicorn on the sidewalk. But if “urban farmer” calls up visions of an old hippie hoeing a quaint little patch of sunflowers in the shadow of high-rises, think again. Modern urban farming is about block parties with DJs and cooking lessons. It’s raising fish in indoor tanks and getting outdoor education in city schools. It creates meaningful jobs for inner city youth who learn to plan food systems and cultivate crops. But most of all, it’s about ingenuity. Urban agriculturists see potential where others sees blight, seeking out vacant lots and neglected open spaces, looking at what they have within arm’s reach rather than thinking about what’s missing.

This slide show is a tour of some of the country’s most innovative approaches to urban agriculture. These are farms and gardens created in the service of education and activism. Whether they’re training entrepreneurs, teaching kids to grow organic kale, or producing food from plots no bigger than your living room, the urban approach to farming is about feeding, not being fed. Slide show here→

Los Angeles Guerrilla Gardening

Los Angeles Guerrilla Gardeners see every highway median and balding patch of dirt as a potential urban oasis. The land may not technically be theirs, but the Guerrilla Gardeners take matters into their own hands, leading clandestine missions to plant and beautify tired bits of earth that are otherwise ignored. One of the group’s founders, who goes by the nom de guerre “Mr. Stamen,” explains that people are rarely upset by the Guerrillas’ efforts to fill the blighted patches of land with plants. “For the most part,” Stamen says, “everyone’s just really excited.”

To learn more, visit http://www.laguerrillagardening.org→
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See also Is Urban Farming Here To Stay?→
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From GENE LOGSDON

A publisher asked me to read a manuscript, the diary of an Ohio farmer during the depth of the Great Depression.  More accurately, it is a diary penned by a rather famous historian who spent a year trying to farm during the dirty thirties when he could not find a position in a university. I don’t want to jump the gun on the publisher, so I won’t identify the person or say much about the book except that it makes very absorbing reading.

One anecdote from the diary addresses what I like to call “farm irony.”  The author and his family pin their hopes of bringing in money on a flock of chickens. They sell their corn and wheat at a low price (this is 1933) and then buy mash— milled grain— for their hens. The cost of the mash is such that they barely break even on the eggs. They have a lot of bookish knowledge about chickens and do a good job of raising the hens and eventually get fairly good production from them.  But the author constantly complains that the income from selling eggs barely keeps up with the cost of feed.

So here’s the irony to my way of thinking. I have kept hens for over 30 years now, feeding them almost completely on whole corn and wheat. I could probably get a few more eggs if I fed commercial mash with all the supplements and vitamins that are supposed to be in it but I’m confident that the extra eggs would have been just about enough to pay for the extra cost of the purchased feed. My hens have the run of woodland and pasture, just as the diarist’s hens had. I am sure he would have made a profit if he would just have fed his own corn and wheat and accepted a few less eggs for doing so. Chickens can digest whole grains just fine. In fact I can make a case for arguing that hens eat too much on a mash diet and have a shorter life span.

So why, being obviously an intelligent man, didn’t the diarist at least try my alternative? more→

From GREG ATKINSON (2001)

I don’t know if it was the first time I ever dug a potato, but I do know that it was a revelation. The sun bore down on the dry ground, even though the air was already cold. The soil was piled in long, mounded rows and the withered potato vines were markers for where to dig. We plunged our hands into the piles of soft loamy earth and came out with balls of gold as big as goose eggs. They were Yellow Finn potatoes and they were pure golden sunlight when we boiled them and shook them in a pan with butter.

I was at a farm – not much more than a garden really – owned by the same man that owned the restaurant where I worked, and I was working with Greg Brickman, the gardener. A short man with a long beard, a sparkle in his eye and a impish grin, he was something like a leprechaun in the garden. He grew Yellow Finns, Purple Peruvians and Russian Bananas. I thought he was a little out there. I just wanted plain red “C’s,” small potatoes that I could brown in olive oil with rosemary and serve with my rack of lamb. But Greg had a penchant for the obscure, and he was always seeking out and finding unusual varieties of everything.

He introduced me to yellow beets, candy-cane radishes, purple green beans and weird greens like orick and mizuna. Eventually, I would come to cherish those vegetables, and coax other farmers into growing them for me, but at first I was a little dubious. “Will they taste good?” I wanted to know.

So he invited me out to the farm to see what was left of the summer’s crop – root vegetables mostly, and a few hearty greens. We dug those potatoes and he set up a camp stove and we boiled them in well water and shook them with butter and that was the beginning.

Now I grow potatoes of my own: Red Bliss, White Rose and Yukon Gold. I love them. I look for them at farmers’ markets when my own meager supplies have dwindled and I order them from wholesale distributors to keep the restaurant supplied. And I wonder why, for so long, have people grown only a few varieties, white Russet Burbanks mostly and a lot of red-skinned “new” potatoes like Red Pontiac and Sangre. The answer, of course, is high yield and reliability.

“Some Yukon Golds and various reds are being grown, and there’s a few blue potatoes being grown in Skagit Valley,” says Andrew Jensen of the Washington Potato Commission. “The vast majority of potatoes grown in Washington are the old familiar bakers.” more→

From LISA BARNES

Red, orange, and yellow bell peppers are ripe and sweet. All three colors are high in vitamin C and beta-carotene. This recipe adds protein-rich goat chees to the peppers, yielding a creamy puree that is delicious by itself or can be used as a sauce for rice noodles or as a dip for steamed vegetable sticks.

Makes 1 cup

Organic red bell pepper, 1 large
Organic fresh goat cheese, 1½ oz

Preheat broiler. Line a roasting pan with aluminum foil. Place whole pepper on pan and roast turning every 3 minutes, until evenly charred and blackened on all sides, 12-15 minutes.

Remove pan from oven, put pepper in a covered container, and let sit until cool enough to handle. (The steam inside the container will loosen the skin.)

Using your fingers or a paring knife, peel off skin. Cut pepper in half lengthwise and remove seeds and stem. Cut halves in half again lengthwise and puree in a food processor until smooth. Additional liquid will not be needed. Spoon goat cheese into processor and process with pepper puree until well blended and creamy.

To store: Refrigerate puree in an airtight container for up to 3 days.
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