EGGS!

We have an abundance of eggs - $2.50 per dozen on the Farm, or $3 per dozen at Sweetwater Market. The chickens are loving all this warmer weather, fresh greens, sunshine. They have increased production!

Farm Update

Calves are being born! Fields are getting tilled! Maple Syrup set-up is cleaned up. It was a bust year for syrup - we made 5 gallons and should have made 25. It just got too warm.

Onion plants and lettuces, mustards, kales are all getting moved in and out of the greenhouse to harden them off. They need to gradually be conditioned to the outside weather after growing in the warmed and protected greenhouse.

Paths are getting trimmed back. The gardens are getting composted and tilled and ready to plant. We plan to start setting out onions (sets and plants) on Wednesday and also hope to plant peas that day. We need to prune the raspberries and some of the perennial shrubs still. The last of the wintered-over parsnips will be dug today.

The past few days

I planted 300 sweet pepper seeds yesterday! Reds and greens and lilac and yellow. Long ones, blocky ones. I also planted a lot of hot peppers - some interesting varieties.

I also picked enough kale for dinner. Oh my, it was so tender and yummy! We can pick salad about every 2 - 3 days. Spring is here!

Beef Testimonial!

"We love it, Patrice! I have bought beef quarters/halves before, and have sometimes gotten ....shall we say, less than good quality. Not only is your beef great, but it is also good to know that it isn't coming from some commercial feed lot where the cattle are treated like meat machines! I am also glad to feed my family ground beef that isn't coming from a mix of a bazillion different steers."

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/switching-to-grass-fed-beef/

Almost Spring Update from the Farm

The hoophouse is producing the first spinach and lettuces. We'd have more, but some little critter burrowed into the hoophouse about 3 or so weeks ago and ate almost all the spinach and some chard! I planted some small rows of radishes and carrots for us.

The greenhouse is filling up. All the allium family is planted: all the red and yellow onion seeds, leek seeds, the first full tray of scallion seeds, and it's time to start another tray. All the celeriac is seeded in cells, even though we haven't yet harvested all of last year's crop! It's probably the longest season veggie we grow. Lettuces were already large enough to transplant into the hoophouse. More are started, including head lettuces. The earliest plantings of kale, chard, mustards, sprouting broccoli, celery, about 60 early varieties of tomatoes, some hot and sweet peppers, parsley, basil and cilantro are all growing. More trays are planted almost every day. It's time to start kohlrabis- about 250 cells will be planted. We start a lot of the seeds indoors to transplant out in April and May so that you will have CSA veggies sooner. It's more work, but you are paying for that. To give you some idea of scale, here's some numbers of veggies planted indoors: 144 celery cells, nearly 300 celeriac cells, 144 cells of broccoli, over 200 head lettuces, etc etc etc.

We are also making maple syrup now - drew off the first few gallons today. We bought new pans and are still figuring out this system.

The sunny weather has been fantastic! It's so appreciated after snow and cold and especially cloudy days.

The Spread of Superbugs

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Until three months ago, Thomas M. Dukes was a vigorous, healthy executive at a California plastics company. Then, over the course of a few days in December as he was planning his Christmas shopping, E. coli bacteria ravaged his body and tore his life apart.

Mr. Dukes is a reminder that as long as we’re examining our health care system, we need to scrutinize more than insurance companies. We also need to curb the way modern agribusiness madly overuses antibiotics, leaving them ineffective for sick humans.

Antibacterial drugs were revolutionary when they were introduced in the United States in 1936, virtually eliminating diseases like tuberculosis here and making surgery and childbirth far safer. But now we’re seeing increasing numbers of superbugs that survive antibiotics. One of the best-known — MRSA, a kind of staph infection — kills about 18,000 Americans annually. That’s more than die of AIDS.

Mr. Dukes, 52, picked up a kind of bacteria called ESBL-producing E. coli. While it’s conceivable that he touched a contaminated surface, a likely scenario is that he ate tainted meat, said Dr. Brad Spellberg, an infectious-diseases specialist and the author of “Rising Plague,” a book about antibiotic resistance.

Vegetarians are also vulnerable to antibiotic resistance nurtured in hog barns. Microbes swap genes, so antibiotic resistance developed in pigs can jump to microbes that infect humans in hospitals, locker rooms, schools or homes.

Routine use of antibiotics to raise livestock is widely seen as a major reason for the rise of superbugs. But Congress and the Obama administration have refused to curb agriculture’s addiction to antibiotics, apparently because of the power of the agribusiness lobby.

The ESBL E. coli initially remained in Mr. Dukes’s colon, causing no particular damage. But then he suffered an inflammation that perforated his colon — and the bacteria escaped.

Mr. Dukes began suffering stomach pains and saw his doctor, who gave him Cipro, a strong antibiotic that had previously worked against the infection. This time, the pain grew worse. The next evening, he was in surgery to remove eight inches of his colon.

A culture attributed the infection partly to ESBL E. coli. Doctors inserted a tube to administer an intravenous antibiotic in an effort to save his life.

If ESBL E. coli is frightening, there are even more potent superbugs emerging, like Acinetobacter.

“We are seeing infections caused by Acinetobacter and special bacteria called KPC Klebsiella that are literally resistant to every antibiotic that is F.D.A. approved,” Dr. Spellberg said. “These are untreatable infections. This is the first time since 1936, the year that sulfa hit the market in the U.S., that we have had this problem.”

The Infectious Diseases Society of America, an organization of doctors and scientists, has been bellowing alarms. It fears that we could slip back to a world in which we’re defenseless against bacterial diseases.

There’s broad agreement that doctors themselves overprescribe antibiotics — but also that a big part of the problem is factory farms. They feed low doses of antibiotics to hogs, cattle and poultry to make them grow faster.

A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that in the United States,

70 percent of antibiotics are used to feed healthy livestock, with 14 percent more used to treat sick livestock. Only about 16 percent are used to treat humans and their pets, the study found.

More antibiotics are fed to livestock in North Carolina alone than are given to humans in the entire United States, according to the peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America. It concluded that antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise of antibiotic resistance.

Legislation introduced by Louise Slaughter, a New Yorker who is the only microbiologist in the House of Representatives, would curb the routine use of antibiotics in farming. The bill has 104 co-sponsors, but agribusiness interests have blocked it in committee — and the Obama administration and the Senate have dodged the issue.

After weeks of receiving intravenous antibiotics, Mr. Dukes is now recovering at home in Lomita, Calif. He must use a colostomy bag, but he hopes to be patched up and ready to return to work next month. Still, he knows that the ESBL E. coli remains in his gut.

“As long as it’s contained in my colon, I’m a happy camper,” he said. “But if it gets out again, I’m in trouble.”

Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of the department of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center, and a former president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, agrees that agricultural use of antibiotics produces cheaper meat. But he says the price may be an enormous toll in human health.

“You could have very lethal pandemics,” he said. “We’re brewing some perfect storms.”

Mom's Diet During Pregnancy May Alter Infant's Allergies

By Joene Hendry

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Feb 19 - Eating lots of vegetables and fruits during pregnancy may lower the chance of having a baby with certain allergies, hint study findings from Japan.

Greater intake of green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruit, and veggies and fruits high in beta carotene may lessen the risk of having a baby with eczema, Dr. Yoshihiro Miyake at Fukuoka University and colleagues found.

Foods high in vitamin E similarly may lessen the risk of having a wheezy infant, they reported online January 22nd in Allergy.

Beta carotene and vitamin E are two of many antioxidants thought to benefit health. But prior investigations of maternal antioxidant intake and childhood allergies offered conflicting findings. This area of research "is still developing," Dr. Miyake noted in an email to Reuters Health.

In the current study, Dr. Miyake's team evaluated vegetable and fruit intake during pregnancy in 763 women, as well as eczema or allergic wheeze in their infants.

The women were 30 years old on average and about 17 weeks pregnant at enrollment.. When their babies were between 16 and 24 months old, the women provided birth and breastfeeding history, number of older siblings, and exposure to smoke.

The team found that 21% of the youngsters wheezed or had a "whistling in the chest in the last 12 months," and fewer than 19% had eczema.

According to the investigators, mothers who ate greater amounts of green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruits, or beta carotene while pregnant were less apt to have an infant with eczema.

For example, after allowing for other eczema risk factors, eczema was more common among infants whose mothers ate the least versus the most green and yellow vegetables - 54 and 32 infants, respectively.

Likewise, higher intake of vitamin E during pregnancy was associated a reduced likelihood of having a wheezy infant -- a finding that supports previous investigations from the U.S. and U.K.

Boosting intake of green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruits, and antioxidants such as beta-carotene and vitamin E among pregnant women "deserves further investigation as measures that would possibly be effective in the prevention of allergic disorders in the offspring," the researchers conclude.

Reuters Health Information © 2010

CROP MOBS ~ TODAY'S GENERATION OF BARN RAISERS

By CHRISTINE MUHLKE

“Who brought their own wheelbarrow?” Rob Jones asked the group of 20-somethings gathered on a muddy North Carolina farm on a chilly January Sunday. Hands shot up and wheelbarrows were pulled from pickups sporting Led Zeppelin and biodiesel bumper stickers, then parked next to a mountain of soil. “We need to get that dirt into those beds over there in the greenhouse,” he said, nodding toward a plastic-roofed structure a few hundred feet away. “The rest of you can come with me to move trees and clear brush to make room for more pasture. Watch out for poison ivy.”

Bobby Tucker, the 28-year-old co-owner of Okfuskee Farm in rural Silk Hope, looked eagerly at the 50-plus volunteers bundled in all manner of flannel and hand-knits. In five hours, these pop-up farmers would do more on his fledgling farm than he and his three interns could accomplish in months. “It’s immeasurable,” he said of the gift of same-day infrastructure.

It’s the beauty of being Crop Mobbed.

The Crop Mob, a monthly word-of-mouth (and -Web) event in which landless farmers and the agricurious descend on a farm for an afternoon, has taken its traveling work party to 15 small, sustainable farms. Together, volunteers have contributed more than 2,000 person-hours, doing tasks like mulching, building greenhouses and pulling rocks out of fields.

“The more tedious the work we have, the better,” Jones said, smiling. “Because part of Crop Mob is about community and camaraderie, you find there’s nothing like picking rocks out of fields to bring people together.”

The affable, articulate Jones, 27, is part of the group’s grass-roots core, organizing events and keeping them moving. The Mob was formed during a meeting about issues facing young farmers, during which an intern declared that better relationships are built working side by side than by sitting around a table. So one day, 19 people went to Piedmont Biofarm and harvested, sorted and boxed 1,600 pounds of sweet potatoes in two and a half hours. A year later, the Crop Mob e-mail list has nearly 400 subscribers, and the farm fests now draw 40 to 50 volunteers.

The Crop Mob works well partly because the area around Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham is so rich in small-scale, sustainable farms, and the sustainable-agriculture program at Central Carolina Community College draws students from across the nation who stay put after graduation.

One of the biggest issues facing sustainable agriculture is that it’s “way, way, way more labor-intensive than industrial agriculture,” Jones said. “It’s not sustainable physically, and it’s not sustainable for people personally: they’re working all the time and don’t have an opportunity to have a social life. So I think Crop Mob brings that celebration to the work, so that you get that sense of community that people are looking for, and you get a lot of work done. And we have a lot of fun.”

“It’s good to get off the farm you’re farming,” said Jennie Rasmussen, a 25-year-old Indiana native who traded an office job for community gardening before moving to the area to farm. “It’s great to meet other people who have the same challenges and just network and build community.”

“Networking” and “building community” popped up in almost every conversation I had that day, and it never came across as slick or earnest. Both have real context here, as these mostly farmless farmers hear about internships, learn about affordable land and find potential dates. For those who don’t farm, it’s a way to explore getting their fingernails dirty. One woman, who recently moved to the area from New Jersey after losing her job in the financial-services industry, was eager to plug in to the vibrant local food scene. “I’m trying not to hinder the effort,” she said with a laugh as she distributed twigs on a hügelkultur bed made from dead trees.

The farmer Trace Ramsey, who is part of the Mob core as well as its documentarian, has watched the young-farmer phenomenon explode. “People are interested in authentic work,” he said. “I think they’re tired of what they’ve been told they should accomplish in their life, and they’re starting to realize that it’s not all that exciting or beneficial from a community perspective or an individual perspective.” At 36, Ramsey joked that he’s the old man of the project — remarkable considering the average American farmer is 57. But as people of all ages become involved, he said, “what started as a young-farmer movement is just becoming a farmer movement.”

By the end of the afternoon, the transformation was remarkable. The towering piles of soil and mulch had dwindled to child’s height. The greenhouse beds were filled and the walls framed out by older volunteers who knew what to do with the table saw. The Tamworth pigs had a new fenced-in grazing area to uproot. Thickets and trees were removed from the edge of a field, a bonfire built from the haul. Garden rows were tidied while someone sang. And the hügelkultur beds were handsomely finished. The dreary mess of winter had been cleared to make way for a well-ordered spring.

There was even time for a pecan-tree-planting demo before the buffet lunch. (Farmers are required only to feed the workers; no money is exchanged.) Tucker, bleary from exhaustion, thanked the smiling gang. The group then threw around ideas for which farm should be Mobbed next. When it was agreed that a volunteer’s employer would win the reciprocal-labor lottery, she hopped around in excitement.

The idea is catching on, Jones said. Requests for advice on starting mini-Mobs have come in from around the state. Two Crop Mobbers are traveling to Spain to talk to farmers. In cities, Jones added, there’s no reason that backyard and community gardeners can’t mob, too. Because anywhere there’s dirt, a community can grow.

Mia and Grace ~~ Great Restaurant in Muskegon

Just wanted to let everyone know that Mia & Grace will start serving dinners on March 3rd, on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. If you haven't heard of Mia & Grace you need to check them out. They are located in downtown Muskegon on Third Street. They purchase from local food sources as much as they can.

Let them know you saw this on our blog!

CSA Update soon!

We will get our CSA info up on the blog soon. Seeds are purchased and I'm getting the early things planted. We have a lot of plans, just haven't finalized anything yet.

Greenhouse work

I planted 144 cells of celery and 288 cells of celeriac today. Whoohoo! Lots of tiny tiny seeds, 1 per cell. It was hard to do even with my reading glasses on. They take about 3 weeks to sprout, and have to grow for 10-12 weeks before transplanting outdoors.

Onions are sprouted and growing well. And a few lettuces and other greens are growing. I have a lot more to plant in the next week.

FACTORY FARM SUPER BUGS

A band of radicals

Along with their usual rations of grain and prepared feed, factory-farmed hogs and chickens in the United States also dine on a steady diet of antibiotics. The animals are given the drugs, not to prevent or cure illness, but simply because low-level doses of antibiotics stimulate them to grow faster than untreated animals. This may be good for agribusiness’s bottom lines, but an increasing body of research shows that it might be very bad for public health.

Several scientific examinations of pork and poultry operations in this country have shown that anti-microbial-resistant “superbugs” such as flesh-eating methicilin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) and certain tough-to-kill strains of E. coli are showing up, not only in farm animals, but in the humans who tend them—and even in members of their families who don’t work on the farms.

Now, a group of researchers at Boston University has discovered a mechanism that causes these superbugs to develop. It could mean that the problem with antibiotic-resistant bacteria is even worse than previously imagined. Their results are reported in the current issue of the journal Molecular Cell.

In earlier studies, the scientists had found that drugs which kill bacteria do so in part by stimulating the production of free radicals in those bacteria—not unlike the ones in humans that contribute to heart disease, cancer, and other maladies. However, when antibiotics are administered to the bacteria at low levels, as they are on factory farms, instead of killing the bugs, the free radicals cause genetic mutations—far more than would normally occur. Some of those mutations lead to new strains of bacteria that can survive what were once-lethal doses of drugs.

“Our work indicates that it is much more dangerous than previously thought,” said Jim Collins, a professor of biomedical engineering and one of the paper’s authors. “The low-level antibiotics are boosting up the mutation rate and not killing off the bacteria. As result, you have created a zoo of mutants.”

Before the Boston study, scientists generally viewed the mutations that led to resistance as chance events. “A mutation would emerge randomly in a bacterial population, and the antibiotic would kill off everybody but that guy, and that guy would breed, creating a resistant strain,” Collins said. “We now know that the antibiotics are acting as mutagens themselves.”

But it even gets scarier. The brave new bugs that result from these mutations can carry resistance not only to the antibiotic that had been administered, but to others as well and even to multiple antibiotics. “You could have antibiotic A being delivered to the bacteria and have a mutant bug arise that could still be killed by high levels of antibiotic A, but now has mutations that give it resistance to antibiotic B, antibiotic C, and antibiotic D,” said Collins.

There is a simple solution to agriculture’s contribution to this problem: Outlaw the use of subtherapeutic antibiotics on farm animals. The European Union did it in 2006. Somehow they still manage to produce hogs and chickens there. So a ban here is hardly what I’d call a radical idea.

This is from this blog.

Our Local Harvest Listing

Please check out our listing at Local Harvest and add a review of our farm and products. Thank you! Click here

New calf!

Now how did that happen?? How did the bull get with that heifer 9 months ago??

Ah well. It's nice that Mike and Bill cleaned out the grey barn yesterday. They made a huge compost pile and then bedded down the barn with fresh straw. The smart Mama had a nice dry place out of the wind to have her first calf. We don't think the rest are due to start being born till March.

Beef for sale by the quarter

We have beef quarters for sale. Email or call us for more info.

We do a mixed half so you get a variety of cuts - steaks bone in or out, short ribs, ground beef, roasts, cubed or round steak, stew beef, organ meats if desired.

The quarters we have available now are $384, $389, and $450 depending on size. It is all vacuum packed and frozen. That price is picked up at the Market or our Farm.

Check out Ebels Market . They are a great family-run business and appreciate serving you all and us.

January 2010 photos

Our friend Chris Mccarus from michigannow.org took these pictures at the Farm last week. Check out his website!

Our chickens have access to the outdoors all year round.

Ear corn, grown and harvested on the Farm, fed to our chickens, cows, pigs.

These steers are almost 2 years old, born and raised on our Farm. They will be butchered in the next few months.

In winter, chickens lose feathers, quit laying and hunker down for a month or so. That's why egg production drops. It's called moulting.

Yum. This is a good way to make friends.

Save the Planet: Eat More Beef

Monday, Jan. 25, 2010

Save the Planet: Eat More Beef* By Lisa Abend

On a farm in coastal Maine, a barn is going up. Right now it's little more than a concrete slab and some wooden beams, but when it's finished, the barn will provide winter shelter for up to six cows and a few head of sheep. None of this would be remarkable if it weren't for the fact that the people building the barn are two of the most highly regarded organic-vegetable farmers in the country: Eliot Coleman wrote the bible of organic farming, The New Organic Grower, and Barbara Damrosch is the Washington Post's gardening columnist. At a time when a growing number of environmental activists are calling for an end to eating meat, this veggie-centric power couple is beginning to raise it. "Why?" asks Coleman, tromping through the mud on his way toward a greenhouse bursting with December turnips. "Because I care about the fate of the planet."

Ever since the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization released a 2006 report that attributed 18% of the world's man-made greenhouse-gas emissions to livestock — more, the report noted, than what's produced by transportation — livestock has taken an increasingly hard rap. At first, it was just vegetarian groups that used the U.N.'s findings as evidence for the superiority of an all-plant diet. But since then, a broader range of environmentalists has taken up the cause. At a recent European Parliament hearing titled "Global Warming and Food Policy: Less Meat=Less Heat," Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, argued that reducing meat consumption is a "simple, effective and short-term delivery measure in which everybody could contribute" to emissions reductions. (See the top 10 green ideas of 2009.)

And of all the animals that humans eat, none are held more responsible for climate change than the ones that moo. Cows not only consume more energy-intensive feed than other livestock; they also produce more methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — than other animals do. "If your primary concern is to curb emissions, you shouldn't be eating beef," says Nathan Pelletier, an ecological economist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, N.S., noting that cows produce 13 to 30 lb. of carbon dioxide per pound of meat. (See a graphic about where cows eat and how the environment is affected.)

So how can Coleman and Damrosch believe that adding livestock to their farm will help the planet? Cattleman Ridge Shinn has the answer. On a wintry Saturday at his farm in Hardwick, Mass., he is out in his pastures encouraging a herd of plump Devon cows to move to a grassy new paddock. Over the course of a year, his 100 cattle will rotate across 175 acres four or five times. "Conventional cattle raising is like mining," he says. "It's unsustainable, because you're just taking without putting anything back. But when you rotate cattle on grass, you change the equation. You put back more than you take." (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)

It works like this: grass is a perennial. Rotate cattle and other ruminants across pastures full of it, and the animals' grazing will cut the blades — which spurs new growth — while their trampling helps work manure and other decaying organic matter into the soil, turning it into rich humus. The plant's roots also help maintain soil health by retaining water and microbes. And healthy soil keeps carbon dioxide underground and out of the atmosphere.

Compare that with the estimated 99% of U.S. beef cattle that live out their last months on feedlots, where they are stuffed with corn and soybeans. In the past few decades, the growth of these concentrated animal-feeding operations has resulted in millions of acres of grassland being abandoned or converted — along with vast swaths of forest — into profitable cropland for livestock feed. "Much of the carbon footprint of beef comes from growing grain to feed the animals, which requires fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, pesticides, transportation," says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. "Grass-fed beef has a much lighter carbon footprint." Indeed, although grass-fed cattle may produce more methane than conventional ones (high-fiber plants are harder to digest than cereals, as anyone who has felt the gastric effects of eating broccoli or cabbage can attest), their net emissions are lower because they help the soil sequester carbon.

See the top 10 animal stories of 2009.

See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2009.

From Vermont, where veal and dairy farmer Abe Collins is developing software designed to help farmers foster carbon-rich topsoil quickly, to Denmark, where Thomas Harttung's Aarstiderne farm grazes 150 head of cattle, a vanguard of small farmers are trying to get the word out about how much more eco-friendly they are than factory farming. "If you suspend a cow in the air with buckets of grain, then it's a bad guy," Harttung explains. "But if you put it where it belongs — on grass — that cow becomes not just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative." Collins goes even further. "With proper management, pastoralists, ranchers and farmers could achieve a 2% increase in soil-carbon levels on existing agricultural, grazing and desert lands over the next two decades," he estimates. Some researchers hypothesize that just a 1% increase (over, admittedly, vast acreages) could be enough to capture the total equivalent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions.

This math works out in part because farmers like Shinn don't use fertilizers or pesticides to maintain their pastures and need no energy to produce what their animals eat other than what they get free from the sun. Furthermore, pasturing frequently uses land that would otherwise be unproductive. "I'd like to see someone try to raise soybeans here," he says, gesturing toward the rocky, sloping fields around him.

By many standards, pastured beef is healthier. That's certainly the case for the animals involved; grass feeding obviates the antibiotics that feedlots are forced to administer in order to prevent the acidosis that occurs when cows are fed grain. But it also appears to be true for people who eat cows. Compared with conventional beef, grass-fed is lower in saturated fat and higher in omega-3s, the heart-healthy fatty acids found in salmon. (See pictures of the world's most polluted places.)

But not everyone is sold on its superiority. In addition to citing grass-fed meat's higher price tag — Shinn's ground beef ends up retailing for about $7 a pound, more than twice the price of conventional beef — feedlot producers say that only through their economies of scale can the industry produce enough meat to satisfy demand, especially for a growing population. These critics note that because grass is less caloric than grain, it takes two to three years to get a pastured cow to slaughter weight, whereas a feedlot animal requires only 14 months. "Not only does it take fewer animals on a feedlot to produce the same amount of meat," says Tamara Thies, chief environmental counsel for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (which contests the U.N.'s 18% figure), "but because they grow so quickly, they have less chance to produce greenhouse gases."

To Allan Savory, the economies-of-scale mentality ignores the role that grass-fed herbivores can play in fighting climate change. A former wildlife conservationist in Zimbabwe, Savory once blamed overgrazing for desertification. "I was prepared to shoot every bloody rancher in the country," he recalls. But through rotational grazing of large herds of ruminants, he found he could reverse land degradation, turning dead soil into thriving grassland. (See TIME's special report on the environment.)

Like him, Coleman now scoffs at the environmentalist vogue for vilifying meat eating. "The idea that giving up meat is the solution for the world's ills is ridiculous," he says at his Maine farm. "A vegetarian eating tofu made in a factory from soybeans grown in Brazil is responsible for a lot more CO[subscript 2] than I am." A lifetime raising vegetables year-round has taught him to value the elegance of natural systems. Once he and Damrosch have brought in their livestock, they'll "be able to use the manure to feed the plants, and the plant waste to feed the animals," he says. "And even though we can't eat the grass, we'll be turning it into something we can."

A great article

We provide many of these veggies in our CSA. Wish we could grow the exotics, too!

HEALTH

Well: The 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating

By By TARA PARKER-POPE

Published: June 30, 2008

An unusual list of foods that probably aren't in your shopping cart.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/the-11-best-foods-you-arent-eating/

Beet Salad Dressing

My current favorite. Thanks, Hop and Lila! We miss you!

1 beet grated

3-4 cloves garlic

1/3 cup good olive oil

3 TB cider vinegar

1/3 cup water

2 tsp salt

1-2 pitted dates

1/2 tsp rosemary

I also add some honey, and usually more vinegar. Play with it till it tastes best to you. The color is vibrant and it really dresses a salad.