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 Milwaukee, 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.)
But 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 the 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.
The 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 usualsampling 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