Wordy Wednesday in the Amazon

This week's Wordy Wednesday is a double-header because I won't be able to update next Wednesday. Today's theme is the Amazon, where my friend Ranelle will be spending some time this winter. Winter for us, that is. It'll be the middle of the summer for her. As before, this words are from Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. I'm on the last section, which is about the Native American's ecological management, and I'm fascinated. Definitions brought to you today by the Oxford English Dictionary.

[Amazon terrain] is pullulatingly alive: howling insects, hot and humid as demon’s breath, perpetually shaded by mats of lianas and branches. (281)

pulluate: “2.b. To teem, swarm.” Latin pullulus young nestling or chick

liana: “The name given to the various climbing and twining plants which abound in tropical forests.”

Behind the canoe armada was a floating orchestra of horns, pipes, and rebecs like three-stringed lutes. (284)

rebec: “A musical instrument played with a bow and typically having three strings; an early form of the violin.” Probably after Middle French bec beak, on account of the shape of the instrument.

Like their confreres elsewhere in the Americas, Indian societies had built up a remarkable body of knowledge about how to manage and improve their environment. (286)

confrere: “A fellow-member of a fraternity, religious order, college, guild, etc.; a colleague in office.”

Amazonia was not a dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their cradles. (297)

ineluctably: “irresistibly, so that one cannot escape from its grip.” Latin ineluctabilis to struggle out.

Like strawberries, peach palm throws out adventitious shoots. (303)

adventitious: “3. Nat. Hist. Appearing casually, or out of the normal or usual place, esp. in Bot. of roots, shoots, buds, etc. produced in unusual parts of the plant.”

There was the same cool green light from the canopy, the same refulgent smell, the same awe-inspiring sense of variety. (304)

refulgent: “2. Fig. and in extended us in various contexts: resplendent, glorious, illustrious, sumptuous, etc. Formerly freq. applied eulogistically to a woman.” Latin refulgere to radiate light, to shine with reflected light, to be conspicuous.

Dude’s reaching with this one. An illustrious smell? That's like C. S. Lewis's pale voice (name that chronicle!).

Beans for Hungry Bellies

My classmate Kelly Wilson is interning on Voss Farm in Paynesville, MN and she's working both in the field and on marketing. One project is Beans for Hungry Bellies: for every dollar you donate, Doug and Beth Voss will donate 2 pounds of organic pinto beans to Second Harvest Heartland.

Here's the backstory: Doug and Beth grow pinto beans and have for last 2 or 3 years. Last year, the crop yield was lower than expected and they ended up with a semi-load and a half of beans. The elevator bought the first load, but wouldn't take the half. As a result, about 20,000 lbs of lovely organic pinto beans have been sitting patiently for about a year on their property.

So Doug and Beth looked for a solution and came up with the idea to donate them to people who really need it through Second Harvest Heartland. They've teamed up with Grace United Methodist Church to raise funds to cover cost of production and transportation, and one dollar just barely does it. The pinto beans will stay in the area, going to food shelves in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin.

How do you give? You can send a check, payable to Grace United Methodist Church with "Beans for Hungry Bellies" in the memo line to

Voss Farms
27725 Hwy 23
Paynesville, MN 56362

Or, talk to me. I'll be collecting cash and sending a check at the end of August.

Driven by tradition, mission

Last month, I said I’d talk more about Mhonpaj’s approach to farming. Before we start, I’d like to point out that while I refer to Mhonpaj a lot, it would be more accurate to refer her entire family. I have met or at least spotted a dozen family members so far that pitch in an unknown amount of labor, and after having spent more time with Mhonpaj’s mother May, I understand better her crucial role as Chief Farmer at Mhonpaj’s Garden.

Mhonpaj’s Garden was born out of a combination of tradition and necessity. Mhonpaj says that her family gardens because that’s just what they do. It’s their lifestyle. When I asked her if they had any employees, she laughed. She reassured me that there are no employees; family members do most of the work, with occasional outside help from neighbors and a mission trip. They don’t strive to make a profit, she said, just to make enough money to buy seeds for the next year. Still, they won’t budge on $3 a tray for their organic potatoes because of the work that goes into picking off bugs by hand. They know how much their produce is worth and they don’t undersell themselves.

On the one hand, this mindset releases Mhonpaj from the treadmill of continually trying to increase profit for the sake of “growth” and “shareholders,” but on the other, it makes an off-farm job a necessity. I’m not sure how Mhonpaj manages to balance work at HCMC with all the work generated by the farm and her ambition, and I have no idea how her parents spend their time in the winter.

I’ve heard hints of the challenges Mhonpaj’s Garden faces. Marketing is a challenge common to all farmers who realize its necessity, and there’s always room for improvement. In one of our first conversations, Mhonpaj mentioned that her goal for the CSA was a hundred members. At the St. Paul Farmers Market this weekend, a customer asked May how many members they had. "Fourteen," May said. At the White Bear Lake Farmers Market, another customer told us we needed more signage proclaiming our USDA Organic certification. “You need signs out here,” she said, “not just that little one back there,” indicating the seal on the banner behind us.

Another challenge is finding land to own. David Washburn, from whom they rent, has no plans to sell his land. According to Mhonpaj, he knows that the value is going to keep increasing and thinks that whoever would buy it wouldn’t be able to keep up with property taxes. Eventually, he believes, they would be forced to sell the land and it would be “developed.” From what Mhonpaj said, it sounds like his long-term goal is to build up a community of farmers who rent from him and show commitment to the land. Then, someone (Washburn himself? A community member?) would create a nonprofit that would own the land, keeping the taxes down.

So it seems to me that Mhonpaj’s Garden is a curious blend of subsistence, organic, and mission-driven agriculture. It started as the traditional way to make a living, but Mhonpaj has adapted to the Minnesota food system. The farm is certified organic, which is a big deal to some customers. They operate a CSA, which is a hallmark of a regional food system (I’m not sure that it should be, but that’s another topic entirely). They donate to the Emergency Food Shelf Network, our culture’s preferred method for disposing of leftover produce (versus throwing it away). They have a website (maintained by yours truly) so that customers can learn more about the story behind the produce.

In these ways, Mhonpaj’s Garden distinguishes itself from other Hmong farms and integrates itself into the dominate culture’s local food movement paradigm. I think I need more exposure to other Hmong farmers to draw more complete conclusions. Too bad I don’t speak the language.

Photo by Joan Benjamin, from the Summer/Fall 2009 Issue of the Newsletter of the NCR-SARE.

Updated 8/30/10.

The closest I've gotten to a manifesto

The following is an excerpt from my final project for HECUA's Environment and Agriculture: Sustainable Food Systems class I took this June.

I feel like I’m on the brink of something big and important. Everyone says it’s an exciting time to be in food systems. Am I “in food systems”? As long as I’m eating, I suppose I’m in the food system. But what am I supposed to be doing in food systems? What’s my work? Considering the state of the food system right now, I have my work cut out for me. But what does it look like?

Right now, it looks like bringing local food to schools. School lunch has captured my passion in a way that not much else has. The reasons for improving the quality of what we serve our children are clear and oft-repeated: we are feeding our most vulnerable population our worst food, teaching them to accept meat patties, reject overcooked vegetables, and enjoy industrial pizza. Eating habits are formed early in life and the longer people eat processed foods, the sicker they will be and the harder it will be to make a change.

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) intrigues me. Like the Food Stamp Program, it connected the need to dispose of the Depression-era dirt cheap commodity products with the need to avert malnutrition. Over the decades, it grew and spawned offshoots such as the School Breakfast Program, the Special Milk Program, and the Summer Food Service Program. Now it is an institution, a given, here to stay through the Great Recession.

Seventy years later and are we still filling empty bellies with dirt cheap commodities?

Any program that affects forty percent of children under eighteen seems like a program that needs careful management and foresight, first because 30.5 million children is a huge number and second because they are the future of our nation.

We are filling the empty bellies of a significant proportion of our future with dirt cheap commodities. That is not foresight. That is a recipe for disaster. This recipe will persist. The NSLP is here to stay and commodities are going to stick around like a bad cold.

I am painting a bleak picture with broad strokes, only because I want to inspire parents and farmers and students and policymakers to brighten the picture with regional color. I want to see small farmers thrive by growing native foods and selling them to schools so that students can thrive on them. The NSLP is positioned to accomplish both these goals. The NSLP provides a stable market for farmers, especially vulnerable farmers, and has an obligation to feed children nutritious food, especially vulnerable children. For this reason, we must carefully manage the NSLP to provide a stable market for more than just commodity farmers and to feed children more than just food whose nutrition labels have the right numbers.

Enter the question central to the E&A experience and pertinent to the NSLP issue. Why is it important to know where your food comes from? I have to admit that I did not have a ready answer. What does it matter that we visited Cedar Summit Creamery or that students know where their apples are from? But once I turned my mind to matter, the answers came flying in. I had learned all the answers, but they finally all collapsed gracefully together.

The popular question as it stands, I realized, is too narrow. Not just where, but who, how, why and when? Understanding the journey from seed or sperm to plant or animal to a meal on our plate allows us to evaluate the decisions made along way. We decide what is important in the journey, whether it’s the health of the land at the source, the human and animal rights involved, or the numbers on the price tag or nutrition panel.

Knowing your sources adds personal accountability to the transactions that take place. If Kent Solberg wants to continue to sell fresh milk, he has no choice but to keep his milking parlor squeaky clean. In contrast, if your hamburger from Beef Products, Inc. makes you sick, tracing the contamination would be a nightmare.

Knowing your sources connects you with the rhythms of farming, appreciate the gifts of the seasons, and understand that the vagaries of weather or the price of oil will have an impact on food availability and cost.

Where do we learn about the source of our food? Parents teach through action. Take your kids shopping and the source of food is the grocery store. Grow a garden and the source is dirt and air and water. Rely on school food service and the source is… unknown. Teaching children that their apples come from the orchard 50 miles away prepares them to ask where the oranges come from, who picked the pears, why Red Delicious tastes so inferior.