Food Projects

A ten week course designed to revive backyard dairy and to expand local, artisan production of healthy and wholesome milk!
It is time to regain and reclaim the age-old practices of raising dairy animals and providing for our communities. This course is designed for those committed to starting a backyard dairy. If you are serious about caring for, raising, feeding, breeding and milking dairy goats, this is for you! A doe & kid for your new dairy is included.
Course Schedule: 10 Saturdays, April 21st thru June 23rd ;10:00 am to 3:00 pm ~ Green Uprising Farm, Willits Valley
For price, registration & more information contact 707 216-5549. Sponsored by Little Lake Milkers Association.

Gleaning season will be upon us soon and promises to be bountiful, given the abundant rains this year. We hope some of you will make 2011 the year to join our project and help surpass our good harvest in 2010.

The Grateful Gleaners started up in 2004 as the noble idea of collecting excess fruit, nuts, and vegetables from local orchards and individual gardeners and distributing it to those in need through community organizations such as the Community Food Bank, Willits Daily Bread, Harrah?s Senior Center and local schools. Pioneer Gleaner, Karen Gridley, remembers WELL’s early activities inspired her to expand the gleaning efforts she and her friend Esther Faber had initiated: “We thought it was a shame to let all
that fruit go to waste when so many couldn’t afford to buy fruit, and gradually we organized a group of volunteers.” Veteran Team Leaders give training and direction to volunteer Gleaners and pitch in to harvest as well, of course. However, too often, of late, the “old hands” are the only ones who show up to provide backbone to their good intentions. Hence, the call for scions, i.e., new wood grafted to mature trees. In our case, we need fresh ideas, enthusiasm, vigor and strong backs to assist us in this important community endeavor. If you are inclined to participate, please look at your busy schedule and see where you can find a few hours a month –usually between late June and end of October – to help out your community. In addition to a good fresh-air workout and good company, you may also receive a portion of the bounty for your family.

To join the Gleaner team, prior to June 1st, please contact Sara O’Brien at 456-1293 for more details.
After June 1st, please call our voicemail box:
459-5490, mailbox # 555. Leave your name, phone number and best time to be reached so we can get back to you.
If you have an orchard, are a long-time donor or new to the area, please let us know whether you will continue with your generosity, and keep us posted as to probable harvest times.

Gleaners Annual Plant Sale, June 5th (moved to the 12th)
The always popular Gleaners plant sale will be held on Sunday, June 5th from 10 am until 4 pm at the corner of West Mendocino and Spruce Streets (on the Spruce St. side across from the Seventh Day Adventist Church). Any of you with extra plant starts, perennials, shrubs or trees are encouraged to donate them to our fund-raiser. This year we?ll also accept used garden tools in good condition, ceramic pots and garden art, so this is the perfect opportunity to clean out that garage or garden shed.

Call Karen Gridley (459-2101) or Sara O?Brien (456-1293) for more information on drop-off locations for the Plant Sale or any other questions.
Thanks to your ongoing support, the Gleaners have been able to purchase useful and much-needed harvesting equipment such as safe orchard ladders, fruit pickers, bags, and our latest addition, ingenious walnut collectors. We have more ideas for promoting local sustainable food production in the planning stage, and we would welcome your ideas to expand our efforts.

By Ellen LaConte

30 March, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Spring has sprung—at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it—and the grass has ‘riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food—all of which are also becoming more expensive—or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can’t afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it’s 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops twenty percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!

In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and steak to fresh veggies and bread—and even the flour that can usually be bought cheaply to make it— will be temporary. But over the long term the systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity and quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as reliable as they were. [Read more]

In 2009 North Coast Opportunities and Willits Economic Localization with support from the Community Services Block Grant and Cal-Endowment created a local food backed currency and called it Mendo Food Futures now called Grange Grains. It’s mission was to provide markets for local farmers, increase community food security, and provide an alternative currency to be used in the community. In one year the project created and distributed $10,000 worth of Mendo Food Future notes, sold over 10,000 pounds of local organic grains and provided grain storing and preparation materials to consumers at Farmers Markets. (Read entire article at gardensproject.blogspot.com)

Just as students are enjoying the waning weeks of summer soaking in the Willits sun, the crops of Brookside School Farm are relishing the rays and showing their first signs of ripening. Bursts of red tomatoes poke through thick green rows at the one acre farm, tucked behind Brookside Elementary School, awaiting the arrival of the new school year because this year Brookside Farm’s produce has a special destination: the school cafeteria.

The Willits School District, in a partnership with The Gardens Project of North Coast Opportunities, and Little Lake Grange are committed to getting healthier food into schools through a farm to school program. Recent years have seen a boom in farm to school programs nationwide as a means to provide an alternative to the subsidized commodity, high-calorie, low-nutrition food typically found in school cafeterias. The goal is to make fresh, nutritious food available to students at an affordable price, while concurrently supporting local farmers and the local economy.

“The whole farm to school program in Willits is new and we’re just figuring it out,” says Antonia Partridge, manager of Brookside Farm, “the goal during the school year is that the majority of the food will go to the cafeteria.”

Established four years ago by Jason Bradford, the farm was initially funded by a grant from the Post Carbon Society to find the best method for producing food in this region in a post peak oil society. In the fall of 2009 Bradford transitioned out as farm manager and Partridge, then assistant farm manager, stepped in to the position. With funds drying up and not enough hands on the farm she describes that time as “very challenging.” People invested as Community Supported Agriculture members wanted to see the farm go in various directions but after several meetings, Partridge said, they decided to go with the farm to school model, made possible through a grant from North Coast Opportunities using American Recovery and Reinvestment Fund.

“I think everyone has their heart in the right place, but the school just doesn’t have the budget to make nutritious food available,” Partridge says. “There are so many links between the quality of nutrition and academic performance.”

Research collected by the non-profit Action for Healthy Kids has shown that students who eat healthy, nutritious meals learn better and perform better in school. With childhood diabetes and obesity on the rise it may seem obvious that better nutrition supports better health and learning, but with the corn dogs and pizza pockets of a typical school lunch, farm to school programs are a huge step towards reconnecting children with healthy food while supporting local production and distribution networks. These Stiff budget restraints and limited spending money leave the school district with many difficult financial decisions and virtually no option for purchasing affordable, nutritious food. Currently Brookside Elementary has only two part time staff members working to feed the students. Partridge has worked closely with the food staff to coordinate crops with items used most frequently in the cafeteria.

“I planted a Roma type tomato of the heirloom variety that grows great in the Willits climate,” Partridge said, referring to the Amish Paste tomatoes beginning to ripen at Brookside. “It is a more complex and robust tomato with higher solids and lower water.” This type of tomato is ideal for paste and sauce that can be used in pizza and pastas, two dishes served often in the school cafeteria. In addition to tomatoes, several hundred heads of garlic have been harvested from the farm, and potatoes, which can provide healthy alternatives to sides like tater tots, are beginning to be harvested.

Brookside Farm has growing crops and a staff eager to implement the farm to school program but what it needs now is helping hands, and that is where the community of Willits comes in to play.

“What we need is help,” says Partridge, “farming is a very time consuming activity . . .we have activities for people of all skill levels and there are a dozen different ways that people can plug in and help the farm.”

Partridge estimates pulling in around 100 pounds of tomatoes between now and late October-depending on the first frost. Since tomatoes cannot be stored for long, they will need to be processed at the brand new certified commercial kitchen at the Little Lake Grange, just a few blocks away from Brookside Elementary. Ursula Parch will be leading canning classes, open to the public, in which participants will gain real-time experience by canning the tomatoes from Brookside Farm for future use in the school cafeteria. Classes will be held Tuesday mornings from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. For more information on the canning classes, or to participate, contact Alison Petro at 707-456-9005 or apetro18@gmail.com. The Farm to school project will also need canning jars for this program. If you have any gently used jars to donate, please contact Alison.

If you interested in learning about ways you can lend a hand to help get nutritious, certified organic food into our local school system please contact Mason Giem at 707-841-0464 or Antonia Partridge at antoniap@mcn.org for information on volunteering at Brookside School Farm.

John Jeavons and Ecology Action are featured in the March ODE magazine. Link to article on-line

“… I made the pilgrimage up from San Francisco to sit at the feet of John Jeavons, who has probably spent as much of his life thinking about building soil as anyone who has ever lived. Jeavons started his career in the 1960s as a systems analyst at Stanford University. When the spirit moved him to pursue agriculture as a vocation, he brought that kind of analytical thinking with him. These are the questions that drove him: How many calories does a person need to survive? What is the smallest plot of land needed to grow those calories for one person for one year? How much land do we need to feed all the people on the planet?

Jeavons has devoted his career to answering these questions and spreading that information around the globe. A small but significant chunk of that learning can be found in his book How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, first published in 1974, which has sold half a million copies and gone through multiple editions. “

Also if you are interested there is a nice interview with John Jeavons in the March/April 1980 edition of Mother Earth News