I’ve been thinking about joining Practical Farmers of Iowa for quite a few years now and finally did this winter.  PFI has been a leader in exploring environmentally friendly and economically successful farming approaches, and promoting local foods for years.  About a year ago I read their press release announcing the creation of the Iowa Food Cooperative and knew that I wanted to get involved.  I had been seriously looking at ways to evolve this Think Global Eat Local web site into an online ordering system but it was clear that I should see how I could get involved with the IFC instead.

The Iowa Food Cooperative is going to be a web based system that allows consumers to order locally produced products from local farmers on a monthly basis (to start).  Those orders will be collected and distributed from a central location (in Des Moines at the start).  It is modelled after similar systems in place in Oklahoma and Nebraska.  The IFC should supplement existing farmer’s markets and CSAs, by providing more staple products then those markets.

Bookmark this site or subscribe to the feed and stay tuned for updates.

I was asked to do a presentation on Permaculture at the Caucus of the Future being held today and tomorrow at the Drake Legal Clinic.  It went well and I enjoyed meeting a variety of people.

In particular, I enjoyed meeting Elton Davis.  Elton is heavily into permaculture and is working on a crop rotation of sorghum and sunflowers.  Sorghum is high in sugar and useful for ethanol.  Sunflowers are high in oil and useful for biodiesel.  I hope to learn more about his projects and share them with you.

I’ve uploaded my presentation as a series of web pages if you care to take a look.  I hope you’ll find it informative.  Special thanks to Bill Wilson over at Midwest Permaculture for putting together the majority of it.

We talked about Kris and Marty Travis’ success in harvesting thousands of dollars worth of wild edibles from their farm while they waited for organic certification.  A really good book to check out for identifying wild edibles is Steve Wildman Brill’s Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places. If you buy it after clicking that link I get a tiny commision from Amazon, or head on down and support your local bookstore.

I mentioned that one of my New Year’s resolutions is to add a post to this site each week so I how you will add comments and keep after me to get it done. 

You’ve heard of pub crawls, but farm crawls?  Well, five farms in South Central Iowa banded together and sponsored an afternoon of farm tours on October 7th.  You can read more about it at www.farmcrawl.com.  My family had a great time and managed to visit four of the five farms.  Check back soon for photos and more information on the food and fun.

I love fall — especially when it comes to food.  I love the hearty, filling nature of apples, potatoes, winter squash, carrots, parsnips…  It’s also nice to have some cool days when heating up the kitchen with cooking doesn’t seem counter productive to the task of trying to keep cool. 

I also love the colors of fall.  I visited the second-to-last Valley Junction Farmer’s Market to stock up on some items, and one stand really stood out: Circle M Produce from Martensdale Iowa.  I visited with Circle M’s proprieter Mike Misjak.  Mike is at a farmer’s market about every day of the week, except Sunday when he’s busy picking.  He helped start the Norwalk farmer’s market on Fridays.   On the day I visited, he had an abundance of winter squash, pumpkins, peppers, some summer squash, green beans, and watermelons.

You might be surprised to find an orchard in Urbandale (9875 Meredith Drive) and I was at first, until I considered just how fast the suburbs surrounding Des Moines have been growing.  I witnessed it first hand from my Grandparent’s house near Railroad and Grand, which 25 years ago bordered corn fields and now is likely near the population center of West Des Moines.

At the Iowa Orchard we met Bryan Etchen.  Bryan’s family purchased the orchard in 1974 and he took it over in 1991.  In addition to their Meredith Drive location, they have other orchards in the area.  This year’s late frost (freeze?) caused them to have about 90% fewer apples than normal.  Fortunately, Bryan has relationships with other orchards and had an ample supply of apples.  Some of the varieties available when we were there in September: Cortland, Johnathan, Ozark Beauty, Lura Red, Wealthy, and my favorite for fresh eating, Honey Crisp.  Varieties you’ve never heard of?  Don’t worry — Bryan and his staff are quick to hand out samples and provide recommendations.  We purchased a peck each of Honey Crisp and Wealthy.  As I write this a couple of weeks later, the Honey Crisps are nearly gone.  I’ve sampled a few of the Wealthy apples from the back of the fridge, and keep begging my wife to make this wonderful "Good Neighbor" apple cake recipe she has.  If I succeed, I’ll try to get the recipe and photos online to share.

Back to Iowa Orchard… this summer I purchased peaches on various occasions, hoping to find the perfect one — with little success.  Seeing that Bryan had Colorado peaches, I decided to give them a try.  Unfortunately, they were on par with the others.  Perhaps it was a poor year everywhere for peaches?

In addition to the fresh fruits, they offer apple butter, pies, fruit jams, marinades, and other fruits.  We purchased one of their cherry pies and it was wonderful (this coming from someone who typically isn’t fond of cherry pies). Fresh cherries, a hint of almond flavoring, flaky crust… it didn’t last long.

You can swing by their store seven days a week, or find them at many of the farmer’s markets.

• Taste. Local food is fresher and tastes better than typical supermarket food that travels 1,500 miles to get to you.  Varieties that taste wonderful but don’t travel very well can be grown in your backyard or purchased from local farmers.
• Environmentally Friendly. In season, local food is better for the environment, especially if it is also organic.  Less energy is used to transport it, less packaging is needed.
• Healthy.  Incorporating a larger amount of fresh fruits and vegetables in your family’s diet is an excellent way to improve your family’s health.  Research is also showing the benefits of grass feed and naturally produced meats.
• More Diversity.  Local farmer’s are likely growing a wider variety of cultivars than the standard ones larger commercial operations are growing.  More diversity in an ecological system reduces the risk that a whole segment of the biological community will be wiped out by insects, poor weather or a disease.
• Food Security.  If terrorists blew up a major oil installation or some other event (look up peak oil) caused a dramatic cut to oil supplies (and a dramatic increase in oil prices), wouldn’t you like to have a lot of your food available closer to home?
• Local Economy.  Spending your food dollars close to home will help your local neighbors and those dollars will be closer to flowing back to your pocket.
• Exciting. Trying new varieties and new foods is fun and exciting.

I’d bet that if you said “farmers market” to someone in the Des Moines area they would immediately think of the Downtown Farmers Market in downtown Des Moines on Saturday mornings.  Well a close rival to the Downtown market is the Valley Junction Farmers Market on Thursday evenings.  It’s at Fifth and Railroad in West Des Moines and runs from 4:00 to 8:00PM until September 27th.

My family and I visited the market yesterday evening.  We arrived rather late, which is a mistake this time of year as local farmer’s crops are not quite up to full production and a lot of items were sold out before we arrived. 

We met Amy Boyer, who with her husband Jason, own The Harvest Barn in Osceola.  The Boyers had vegetables and fudge to sell but Amy was quick to point out that their main focus was on their Limosine/Angus natural beef and natural pork products.  She was very excited when I mentioned that I was looking at ways to create a local food distribution business.  She mentioned that they had been debating about how to sell to metro customers once the farmer’s markets close for the season… this reinforced my feeling that their is a need to provide local food distribution options especially in the winter months. 

You can find out more about the Boyers at their website: www.theharvestbarn.com

Well, my permaculture class at Mark Shepard’s farm in Viola, Wisconsin was excellent.  We covered everything from the philosophy of permaculture to the challenges that real people were facing as they started farms/businesses with permaculture approaches.

Our first tour was of Mark’s own farm.  He has approximately 100 acres of ground that he has swaled (small water retaining terraces) and planted in hazelnuts, chestnuts, cider apples, berries, annuals and more.  He is testing various intercropping approaches and trialing numerous varieties.  He has created a non-profit foundation and developed a hazelnut cracking machine.  He will soon have hard cider available for sale.

Another of our tour stops was at The Trout Palace Fish Farm.  We saw how Jim Pierce is making the best use of his site conditions with trout aquaculture and how he used a discarded whey tank as the basis of his root cellar inserted into his hillside.  While many aquaculturists attempt to maximize their profits by adding electrically powered aerators, Jim is limiting his production levels to what his natural spring water flow can support.

Dave and Erin Varney started One-Sun Farm and Bakery five years ago.  They are intercropping garlic, raspberries, annuals, and hazelnuts.  We heard first hand the struggles that a small farmer can go through… the Varneys had their income slashed this February when the State Department of Inspections notified them that they can’t wholesale the meat pizzas that they have been producing in their licensed food processing kitchen without a meat processing license.  They are struggling to make up that income with their veggie pizzas, bakery items, berries and other crops. 

I have many more photos to share, I’ll soon be putting them on my Flickr page at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bburnett71

So have you heard of permaculture?

Wikipedia describes permaculture as a “moral and ethical design system applicable to food production and land use,” as well as community design. It seeks the creation of productive and sustainable ways of living by integrating ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture, agroforestry, green or ecological economics, and social systems. The focus is not on these elements themselves, but rather on the relationships created among them by the way they are placed together; the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts.”  Here is a good book written by one of Permaculture’s creators Bill Mollison: Introduction to Permaculture.

Permaculture can be applied to a tiny yard to a large farm.  I am lucky enough to be signed up for a permaculture class at Mark Shepard’s farm in Viola, Wisconsin this June.  It is being put on by my friends at Midwest Permaculture.

I am planning to post photos and info from the class.

If you are reading my blog about local food then you have probably already heard about Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s year of eating food solely produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver 1 bedroom apartment.  They have a web site at: www.100milediet.org

They were featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning (you can listen online): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10219029

You might be interested in their book: Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally (if you buy it through this link you’ll be supporting this site).