News & Events November 2012
Join Berkshire Grown here!
Berkshire Grown supports and promotes local agriculture as a vital part of the Berkshire community, economy and landscape. We do this by advocating for farmers, supporting good agricultural practices, fostering education and outreach, increasing food accessibility for the community, farm-to-table networking, promoting locally grown and produced food. Our goal is to keep farmers farming!
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Join us Saturday at the Great Barrington market! 
Barrington Bites, Bean Yarn, Berkshire Mountain Bakery, Berkshire Organics, Berkshire Wildflower Honey, BerkShore, Berle Farm, Broody Hill Cookies, Bug Hill Farm, Cedar Farm, Community Cooperative Farms, Cricket Creek Farm, Farm Country Soup, Farm Girl Farm, Foggy River Farm Vegetables, Fox Hill Farm Grassfed Beef, H.R. Zeppelin Handmade Chocolates, Hillhome Country Products, Indian Line Farm, Justamere Tree Farm, Klara's Gourmet Cookies, Leahey Farm, Markristo Farm, Mayflower Farm, Maynard Farms, The Meat Market, Naga Bakehouse, North Plain Farm, Ooma Tesoro's, Project Sprout, Raven & Boar, Sweet Brook Farm, Tortured Orchard, West River Creamery, and Zehr & Sons Mushroom Farm. Photo by Peter Cherneff of Indian Line Farm at the 2011 market
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Join us Sunday at the Williamstown market!
3-Corner Field Farm, , BabyCakes, Berkshire Organics, Berkshire Wildflower Honey, Berle Farm, The Berry Patch, Bug Hill Farm, Cedar Farm, Climbing Tree Farm, Community Cooperative Farms, Cricket Creek Farm, East Mountain Farm, Elmartin Farm, Farm Country Soup, Gammelgarden Creamery, Gramercy Bistro, Green River Ambrosia, Hawk Dance Farm, Hosta Hill, Ioka Valley Farm, Jaeschke's Orchard, Klara's Gourmet Cookies, The Meat Market, Mighty Food Farm, Mountain Sea Wearables, Naga Bakehouse, Ooma Tesoro's, Peace Valley Farm, Queen's Greens, Raven & Boar, Sweet Brook Farm, Tortured Orchard, West River Creamery, Wild Oats Market and Wildstone Farm.
photo by Peter Cherneff, Cricket Creek Farm, 2011
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Edible Education: ALL NEW Season 2
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This Wednesday November 14th
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7 PM "The Politics and Economics of Meat"
at the Lecture Center
at Bard College at Simon's Rock
"The Politics and Economics of Meat"
was taped at UC Berkeley, join with THE MEAT MARKET, of Great Barrington, to hear:
MIKE CALLICRATE who is an independent cattle producer, business entrepreneur, and political activist. In 2000, he formed Ranch Foods Direct, a value-added meat company, which markets his high quality, all-natural Callicrate Beef and other locally produced meats along the Front Range of Colorado and over the internet at The Ranch Foods Direct system of beef production includes several humane handling innovations, including mobile meat processing, which allows animals to be processed at the ranch and eliminates the stress of long-distance hauling. Earlier this year, he was named to the Colorado Agriculture Council for the Humane Society of the U.S.
BOB MARTIN, who is the senior policy advisor for the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) and a senior lecturer in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For the past seven years, Martin has focused on issues affecting food system policy, including leading a special commission on how industrial food animal production impacts public health, the environment, rural communities, and animal welfare.
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THANK YOU TO THE SPONSORS OF THE HOLIDAY FARMERS MARKETS!
November 17-18 and December 15-16, from 10 am to 2 pm
Saturdays in Great Barrington Sundays in Williamstown
SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS:
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NOTE: CHANGE OF DATE & VENUE
EDIBLE EDUCATION: SAVE THE DATE
7 pm MONDAY DECEMBER 3rd
KELLOGG CENTER
BARD COLLEGE AT SIMON'S ROCK  In person: Michael Klare
"The Global Food Crunch, Climate Change, Population Growth, Landgrabs, and Other Threats to Food Sufficiency"
His books include American Arms Supermarket (1984), Low-Intensity Warfare (1988), Peace and World Security Studies: A Curriculum Guide (Fifth Edition, 1989; Sixth Edition, 1994)
, World Security: Challenges for a New Century (First Edition, 1991; Second Edition, 1994; Third Edition, 1998), Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws (1995), Light Weapons and Civil Conflict (1999), Resource Wars (2001), and Blood and Oil (2004).
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Volunteer for Berkshire Grown:
e-mail Barbara@berkshiregrown.org if you can help stamp, seal and stuff envelopes, post flyers around the Berkshires, table and/ or set up at events .... thanks!
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What we are reading
Thrilled to read about Berkshire Grown farmer Bill Stinson, Peace Valley Farm, in Huffington Post:
"The Era of the Celebrity Farmer"
by Katherine Gustafson
"Bill Stinson, proprietor of the idyllic Peace Valley Farm in Williamstown, Mass., will be the first to tell you that his life has not been one of glamor. He encountered every type of difficulty imaginable as he plucked an agricultural life out of the New England woods for thirty years.
"For a long time, we were way ahead of the curve and we were shut out from the restaurants," he said. "People looked at us like we're crazy. Nobody wanted us."
"But then all of a sudden everything changed. A high-end restaurant in town started buying from him, followed by Williams College and a nearby hospital. People in cities became interested in where their food comes from.
"  The interns from Williams he had long hosted began to view his lifestyle not just as the age-old toil of food-production but as a daring political act, an anti-corporate stand to improve not just our food supply but also our democracy.
"What's most interesting to me is that the green movement has all of a sudden put me on a pedestal," he told me over a homemade pizza dinner with a handful of his interns. "All this hard work I've done is elevated and I'm kind of like a celebrity."
"We have indeed entered the era of the celebrity farmer. The grand pooh-bah of this new agricultural aristocracy is Joel Salatin, made famous by Michael Pollan's path-breaking work The Omnivore's Dilemma and the Oscar-nominated film Food, Inc.
Read more on Huffington Post
Katherine Gustafson is a freelance writer and editor based in the Washington, D.C., area. Her first book, Change Comes to Dinner, about sustainable food, was published in May by St. Martin's Press.
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What We're Reading
We're reading about the defeat of California's Prop 37 which would have required labeling genetically modified food -- what does the loss mean?
"Did Monsanto Win Prop 37? Round One in the Food Fight of Our Lives"
"Prop 37 has exposed the dark side of Big Ag and Big Food, and their desperation to keep U.S. consumers in the dark about whether or not our food has been genetically engineered.
By
 "...What did Big Ag and Big Food win on Nov. 6? A closer look reveals just how narrow their victory was.
"Pre-election poll results revealed that early voters and those who still planned to vote No on 37 supported Prop 37's basic premise: that consumers should have the right to know what's in their food.
"So why did so many vote No? Because they heard over and over, via $46 million-worth of TV and radio ads, that Prop 37 was poorly written, "made no sense," included special-interest exemptions, would trigger thousands of lawsuits, and would cost them money at the checkout counter. They were even led to believe, through blatantly fake voter guides mailed to their homes, that the Democratic Party urged them to vote No - even though the California Democratic Party had loudly and publicly endorsed the measure....
"...Prop 37 was the largest and most successful GMO labeling campaign yet, but it was not the first and it will not be the last.
"In the last two years alone, 19 states have made a run at GMO labeling, either through citizens' initiatives or legislative efforts. We've come a long way from the failed push for GMO labeling in Oregon 10 years ago, a campaign that barely made a ripple outside that state. We've put GMO labeling on the national map, and we've put Monsanto on notice: This movement is stronger than ever, and it's not going away....
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Posted below is Michael Pollan's question / and original article to put this question by Tom Philpott into context:
Did California Voters Defeat the Food Movement Along With Prop. 37?
Read more in Mother Jones
 "...Prop. 37 got crushed under fat stacks of cash: its supporters raised $8.7 million, vs. $45.6 million for its opponents. In other words, while Prop. 2 supporters managed to raise more than the industry it went up against, Prop. 37 got outspent by a margin of five dollars to one. The two biggest donors to the anti-labeling effort, Monsanto and DuPont (list of leading donors to both sides here), contributed a combined $13.5 million. ..."
Is this the year that the food movement finally enters politics?
By MICHAEL POLLAN
 "One of the more interesting things we will learn on Nov. 6 is whether or not there is a "food movement" in America worthy of the name - that is, an organized force in our politics capable of demanding change in the food system....
"Clearly there is growing sentiment in favor of reforming American agriculture and interest in questions about where our food comes from and how it was produced. And certainly we can see an alternative food economy rising around us: local and organic agriculture is growing far faster than the food market as a whole. But a market and a sentiment are not quite the same thing as a political movement - something capable of frightening politicians and propelling its concerns onto the national agenda.
"California's Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential to do just that - to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too. read here
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Quick Bites
DISCOVER THE:
Berkshire Grown Online Farmers' Market
a 24 hour Farmers' Market!
 Berkshire Grown has created a Facebook page
called Berkshire Grown Online Farmers' Marketplace - a central place for Berkshire Grown members to congregate and talk supply and demand.
Self-propelled by Berkshire Grown members, the page will benefit those of you who choose to participate in it. Farmers and food producers can post what they have available, and chefs and community members can comment or contact suppliers directly with requests for product or more information.
Thanks for the photo to Nicole Calero, taken at Hawthorne Valley Farm
Berkshire Grown offers this as a networking service and bears no responsibility for transactions.
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MASSACHUSETTS GROWN...and FRESHER!
If you are traveling through Massachusetts check out this map, support our local farmers throughout the state!
CHECK OUT MAP-O-LICIOUS FOR FRESH
LOCAL EGGS, CHEESE, MEAT & MORE
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 Stay In touch!
Berkshire Grown's e-newsletter comes out monthly. Please send information to barbara@berkshiregrown.org, thanks! Join Berkshire Grown here.
Barbara Zheutlin, Director
Sheryl Lechner, Outreach Coordinator
413-528-0041 |
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Michael T. Klare is the author of fourteen books, including