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Montgomery Victory Gardens Weekly Update - May 13, 2010

In this update:

* Urban Ag Superstar Will Allen Comes to Town!
* Manna Food Center Begins Composting
* Farmers Confronted by Roundup Resistant Superweeds
* Straw Bale Vegetable Gardening
* Michelle Obama Tackles Childhood Obesity
* Agrarians Make Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People" List

Urban Agriculture Superstar Will Allen Comes to Town!

In collaboration with key partners across the Chesapeake area, Engaged Community Offshoots, Inc. is organizing and hosting Sowing Seeds Here and Now!: A Chesapeake Area Urban Farming Summit on Friday, June 18th, 2010 at the Henry A. Wallace Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville.

The keynote speaker and inspiration is Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power in Will AllenMilwaukee, WI. Will Allen is a pioneering urban farmer whose organization Growing Power does exemplary work and who was named a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow in 2008.  (He also just happened to grow up on a farm near Rockville.)

The purpose of this summit is to educate attendees about the significant benefits of urban agriculture, showcase viable projects across the county, help identify specific policies and ordinances required to encourage urban agriculture in our area, and to bring together healthy food system advocates and practitioners throughout the Chesapeake area, along with policy makers and agency directors, for future collaboration.

For more information on Sowing Seeds Here and Now!, including ticket purchase, click here. (You will also find more information about Will Allen on this site, as well as a great film clip on his work at the growingSOUL site, see below.)



Manna Food Center Begins Composting

You would think that Manna Food Center has enough to do, given that they provide food for more than 3,000 Montgomery County families at 14 distributions centers every month.  (Not to mention the food they provide free of charge to 37 Montgomery County soup kitchens, food pantries, group homes, and emergency shelters, and the weekend meals they provide to 1300 school children at 39 schools.)

Manna compostingBut Manna's commitment to the environment is strong indeed, so they have partnered with growingSOUL in an effort to close the food life cycle, reduce our waste stream, and preserve our agricultural reserves by implementing a complete composting program for all of their food waste.  Every day Manna rescues food from area grocery stores that can be used to fill stomachs instead of dumpsters, and anything that is not useable is now being composted at local farms.

In just the first week of the program they composted more than 1/2 ton of food "waste."  We cannot stress the importance of this enough - composting is absolutely critical to creating healthy soils and healthy local food, as well as to creating a zero waste food cycle.  Thank you Manna, and growingSOUL, for taking this big step forward  to preserve our soil and support local farming now and for generations to come!



Farmers Confronted by RoundUp Resistant Super Weeds

As reported in this NY Times article of last week, farmers across the country are now struggling to deal with a new problem: "superweeds" that have developed resistance to the weed killer Roundup.

The problem is American farmers' "near-ubiquitous use" of Roundup, a product of theroundup resistance Monsanto corporation.  Nature is taking its course, and in the same way that our heavy use of antibiotics (particularly in livestock) is producing antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, the heavy use of Roundup is producing Roundup resistant weeds. (Click here to see a map of the superweeds' spread, which includes Maryland.)

To quote Omnivore's Dilemma author Michael Pollan, what a surprise!  The lesson should seem obvious enough, and yet the predominant industry response to this critical problem is to mix in new and different herbicides.  In addition to the certainty that this will create even more herbicide resistant weeds, what other effects could this be having on our soil, water and air, not to mention our bodies?  Has anyone considered the connection between our heavy use of herbicides and pesticides and bee colony collapse - to name one of many critical problems emerging in our biosphere? (Click here to read a range of responses to the super weeds, including those of Michael Pollan and Anna Lappe.)

Of course, the heavy use of petrochemical inputs is vital to industrial agriculture, as much a part of the system as vast monoculture crops. (Another industrial creation abhorred by nature, which always strives for biodiversity.)  Corporations like Monsanto, which controls 90% of the corn seed business in this country (all engineered to be resistant to Roundup), believe that more of the same is the right way to go.  But nature seems to have a differ agenda - as do a new generation of farmers, food activists and consumers who believe in working with nature to produce organic, sustainably grown food.  The outcome of this debate could well determine how - and if - we are able to feed ourselves in the years to come...



Straw Bale Vegetable Gardening

As a follow up to our information on container gardening, here is another great solution for those who want to grow some of their own food but have little or no land - straw bale gardening.

straw bale gardeningThe key here is that straw bales (that's straw, not hay!) are themselves compostable material - they break down over time, so in addition to providing an excellent medium for growing plants, at the end of the season you have some great compost to spread around your yard.  (The extra warmth they provide while breaking down also encourages healthy plant roots.)

Here are two good instructions for straw bale gardening, from No-Dig Vegetable Garden.com, and one from straw bale gardening expert Joel Karsten.  The Karsten site has a short video as well - and if you want others, just go to You Tube and search for "straw bale gardening" - you'll be amazed how many come up!



Michelle Obama Tackles Childhood Obesity

As part of First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" initiative to combat the epidemic of childhood obesity, the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has just released its full report to the President. 

Focusing on areas such as "Healthy Choices," Healthier Schools," "Physical Activity" and "Access to Affordable Healthy Food," the recommendations of the report are encouraging, and include, for instance:

Recommendation 4.2: "Local governments should be encouraged to create incentives to attract supermarkets and grocery stores to underserved neighborhoods and improve transportation routes to healthy food retailers" (page 54) and

Recommendation 4.4: "Encourage communities to promote efforts to provide fruits and vegetables in a variety of settings and encourage the establishment and use of direct-to-consumer marketing outlets such as farmers' markets and community supported agriculture subscriptions" (page 54). There is even a sidebar on "Land Use and Food System Planning," a discussion that surely needs to happen here in Montgomery County, where high land prices make start up farming all but impossible.

This is an impressive and critically important initiative - our congrats to First Lady Michelle Obama for championing this cause. To read more about the "Let's Move!" program and the White House Task Force report, click here.



Agrarians Make Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People"

While Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People" list for 2010 includes the usual100 Most Influentialsampling of politicians, sports stars and celebrities (how the heck did Glenn Beck get listed as a "leader?!?"), it also, very importantly, includes several notable sustainable agriculture advocates.

Included in the list are USDA Deputy Secretary (and former board member of the Organic Farming Research Foundation) Kathleen Merrigan, author Michael Pollan, and urban farming icon Will Allen, along with animal scientist Temple Grandin.

We are delighted to know that Time Magazine considers these folks as influential as we do! For the full list and bios of the individuals, click here.


That's it for this week, friends!  Don't forget to send us your feedback, as well as ideas for stories or local food events we can promote, by emailing us at [email protected].


Yours for sustainable local eating in 2010,

Gordon Clark,
Project Director
Montgomery Victory Gardens