Exploring the Details

This summer, the HECUA class "Environment & Agriculture: Sustainable Food Systems" was responsible for supplying a steady stream of new ideas and experiences to my brain. From the opening day of hearing about the lens through which my classmates view the food system to the closing days of my internship with Mhonpaj Lee, the class planted seed after intriguing seed. Some have germinated, but a lot I haven't even watered.

Through this final project for the internship, I get deeper into the practicalities of the food system. I have spent plenty of time reading books like Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, by Raj Patel, and Remaking the North American Food System, eds C. Claire Hinrichs and Thomas A. Lyson, that gave me an overview of food system issues. The field portion of E&A showed me that my knowledge of how systems like dairy farms and small towns work day to day is limited.

For example, at the Symposium for Small Towns at Morris, I attended a breakout session entitled “Local Governments: Doing more with Less – LGA, Leadership, and Communications.” In case you don’t know, as I didn’t, Local Government Aid is a critical source of revenue for cities whose property tax revenues cannot cover the costs of services. In 2009, St. Paul received $62.6 million in LGA, Morris $2.3 million, Delano $179,684, and Inver Grove Heights, zilch (numbers found here).

When LGA from the state drops, towns are left wondering if they can increase revenues and where they can cut the budget. And if the state issues a mandate about storm drains at airports, towns are in an even greater bind trying to come up with the money to pay for it. During the session, I was so caught up placing these new concepts into context that I missed the bigger picture of how to grapple with budget woes.

This project then, is about stepping back from a top-down view of food system issues and getting closer to the problems that actors in the food system face, specifically, organic farming, nonprofits, and farmers markets. I explore these issues at personal, organizational, and ground (pun sometimes intended) levels through interviews, personal experiences, handbooks and other publications. Stay tuned for the next couple of weeks for the inside scoop on organic pest management techniques, 501(c)(3)s, and the St. Paul Farmers Markets.

Soil Improvement Wordy Wednesday

This week I am gearing up for a series of posts that will constitute the final project for my HECUA internship. Mhonpaj's Garden is certified through the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association, so I looked into what it takes to get certified. I was not prepared for the 16-page handbook, the 14-page Organic Producer Questionnaire, or the depth of management planning required, but slogged through them anyway.

One goal of my final project is to have a handle on the management techniques used by organic farmers, some of which the Organic Producer Questionnaire mentions. To jump-start that goal, I present this week's Wordy Wednesday, taken from Section 5: "Soil & Crop Fertility Management." Definitions of crops are taken from ATTRA's Overview of Cover Crops and Green Materials.

“The producer must implement a crop rotation including but not limited to sod, cover crops, green manure crops, and catch crops that provide the following functions that are applicable to the operation: maintain or improve soil organic matter content; provide for pest management in annual and perennial crops; manage deficient or excess plant nutrients and provide erosion control.”

Sod: a section of grass-covered surface soil held together by matted roots.

Cover crops: any crop grown to provide soil cover, to prevent soil erosion by wind or water. Try hairy vetch, rye, clover, medic (legume related to alfalfa), or field peas.

Green manure crop: any field or forage crop incorporated into soil while green or soon after flowering. Use legumes like cowpeas, soybeans, annual sweet clover, sesbania, guar, crotalaria, and velvet beans; or non-legumes like sorghum-sudangrass, millet, forage sorghum, and buckwheat. Green manuring will improve biomass, smother weeds, and improve soil tilth (physical structure).

Catch crops: a cover crop planted after the main crop’s been harvested with the intent of reducing nutrient leaching. Rye after corn, for example, helps “scavenge” leftover nitrogen, which could otherwise contaminate groundwater.

Picture of hairy vetch from Jarrett.

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!).