Jill of Blackie with Newborn Piglets

“The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you,” said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author. “This has become fashion.”

Locally grown food, even fully cooked meals, can be delivered to your door. A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought to you, ready for the freezer — a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling. There is pork pooling as well. At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, the demand for a half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that people will not be seeing pork until the late fall.

Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes better. Depending on the season, local produce can cost an additional $1 a pound or more. But long-distance food, with its attendant petroleum consumption and cheap wages, is harming the planet and does nothing to help build communities, locavores believe.
-NY Times

That lead to a Massachusetts based NECNTV news crew coming out to our farm this morning. If you have high speed internet you can go to their web site to see the short video segment. Here’s the short bit of text from the video page:

(NECN: Anya Huneke, West Topsham, Vermont) - It is another lazy day at Sugar Mountain Farm in West Topsham, Vermont — for the animals, that is. Walter and Holly Jeffries are hard at work, trying to keep up with demand for their product.

The Jeffries used to be sheep farmers, but after a lot of time and effort, and limited reward, they ventured into pig farming.

Sugar Mountain Farm currently sells piglets and pastured pork to local residents, stores and restaurants. One of the benefits of pigs is their rapid growth rate. When they are born, they only weigh three pounds, but they gain one to one-and-a-half pounds a day. [Slight correction, “up to 2.4 lbs/day” -WJ]

And, as far as the animals go, Walter says pigs are pretty low maintenance. This has enticed more Vermonters into the business of pig farming. The “eat local” movement has played a part as well.

Despite the rising demand for their all-natural, free-range pigs, the Jeffries are intent on remaining a local business.
-NECN TV News

The NY Times article generated a lot of heated debate in their comments about whether it is valid to have someone else come to plant and weed your garden. Interesting question. Ideally people would get the exercise and enjoyment from gardening but not everybody likes it or has the inclinations. I came to the conclusion that it is just as valid as having someone else raise a pig for you, which we do for many people, someone else repairing your car (Thank you, Monty), someone else doing your dentistry (Thank you, Dr. V. & staff), someone else being your doctor (Thank you, Dr. J.), someone else delivering your mail (Thank you Beth, Don and Annie), etc. Like Mr. Long, I enjoy doing a wide variety of things, but there’s no rule that we all must do everything. Each to their own temperament.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects!

-Lazarus Long (of Robert Heinlein)

NY Times article also implies that local food costs more. Yes, sometimes that is true, but only if you’re contrasting it to commodity grown, pesticide coated, herbicide laden, antibiotic filled, conventional mass-produced ‘food’ one typically sees at the supermarket. If you compare apples to apples, that is to say local organic apples to long distance organic apples then the costs are comparable and the local apples may even be less expensive while still having higher quality. Local food, at least in these parts, is generally organically produced, be it with USDA approved big ‘O’ or real-world little ‘o’. The result is local food is generally not just better quality, better for you, better for the environment, better for your area economy but also a little less pricey since it hasn’t had to travel as far. This leaves the real question of organic vs non-organic which is a completely separate debate…

Outdoors: 70°F/56°F Mostly Sunny
Farm House: 72°F/68°F
Tiny Cottage: 66°F/62°F

By now you have probably heard that Vermont Compost Company (VCC) was ordered to shut down its Montpelier operation - they have been issued a “Cease and Desist” order and fined $18,000 from the Natural Resources Board on July 7th. VCC has appealed this order and the appeal is pending. The dispute stems from a question about how the state will regulate composting operations and whether they need Act 250 permits.

This past legislative session a bill was passed that called for a “time out” on enforcement around composting and Act 250 until the relevant agencies and departments could work out a regulatory scheme that makes sense and is clear in terms of the rules. Vermont Compost Company - because of a technicality in legislative language - was not included in that “time out.” We need your help to ask the Douglas administration to back off and allow VCC the same opportunity as other composters in the state to know what the rules are and to comply with them accordingly.

Stay informed! Check out nofavt.org for updates. You will soon also be able to download a petition to collect signatures and send in to NOFA to help VCC.

Here’s what YOU can do TODAY to help support Vermont Compost Company and the future of food grade composting in Vermont:

1) Write a LETTER TO THE EDITOR in support of Vermont Compost Company. Ask the Douglas administration to include VCC in the same two year moratorium extended to other compost producers in the state. Send it to your local papers and beyond. Contact information can be found at WriteIte.

2) Make a DONATION to the Vermont Compost Company Legal Defense Fund. Fighting the state of Vermont is an expensive battle, and VCC needs your financial support to cover the mounting legal fees. Make an online contribution to the Vermont Compost Company Legal Defense Fund at http://vermontcompost.com/.

3) Go to the Brunch! The Vermont Compost Company, in partnership with LACE, Rural Vermont, and NOFA, will host a brunch to benefit the Vermont Compost Company Legal Fund. Brunch will feature Vermont Compost Co. eggs and other local farm fresh foods, along with guest speakers and a silent auction.C ome out and show your support for the Vermont Compost Company!

Sunday, August 24th
10 am - 2 pm
LACE, Main Street, BARRE
$25 for adults; kids/family price TBD

For more info, to volunteer or to donate to the silent auction, contact:
Jessica Bernier
(802) 279-1261
jessicabernier@ymail.com

It’s an old, familiar not-joke. There’s nothing funny about what the government has done to tomato growers by falsely accusing them of spreading salmonella. Now the government says tomatoes weren’t the problem, it’s peppers. This has all the makings of a B movie and sounds like Mad Cow all over again. Frankly, I don’t trust the government this time, either. They can only cry wolf so many times - I hope.

Previously it was spinach. They blamed all sorts of things for the spinach contamination but never did find a cause. The real reason for all of this is overly large scale farming and massive distribution. This creates too large a single source and too much cross contamination. So far it’s all been “accidental” but imagine if a terrorist figures out that they can easily spread disease via the mega-farms… The solution is diversification, local production and small farms.

What is especially scary is that the government wants farms to become sterile factories:

On Saturday, Carolyn Lochhead wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about the toll the outbreak is having on California agriculture, and how overreaction could lead to farms becoming massive sterile zones, where anything that isn’t the crop of interest — pollinator-attracting plants, beneficial insects, birds, or mammals — will be wiped out. Lochhead talks to Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm in Yolo County about her reaction:

“It involves things like the FDA going to a cantaloupe farm and saying, ‘Oh, there’s a telephone wire above your farm, you’re going to have to reroute that because birds could perch on that wire,’ ” Redmond said. “People in Salinas are putting up fences that are supposed to keep deer and (wild) pigs out at great expense and a huge disruption to wildlife corridors.”

She said auditors are now asking for “clean strips - in other words, herbicides. No weeds, no plants, no nothing.”

-Ethicurean

The government wants a sterile lab. A factory for food. Apparently they have not heard of the dangers of mono-cropping never mind all the other reasons for a healthy environment.

Reaction to the spinach scare was so acute that large produce buyers, including restaurant chains and supermarkets, imposed harsh and often arbitrary demands on their suppliers that have caused collateral damage to water-quality and wildlife-habitat improvement efforts, organic growers said.

The goal is to eliminate all mammal feces by erecting big fences to prevent wildlife from entering fields and by ripping out vegetation used to buffer fields and streams, even though there is no evidence that wildlife caused the E-coli contamination.
-SFGate

This has all the fixings for a Government Made Disaster - perfect for pushing programs like NAIS down our throats. Scare the people and they’ll jump, right over the edge.

Falls Church, Virginia, (July 14, 2008) — Attorneys for the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund today filed suit in the U.S. District Court – District of Columbia to stop the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA) from implementing the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a plan to electronically track every livestock animal in the country.

The MDA has implemented the first two stages of NAIS – property registration and animal identification – for all cattle and farmers across the state as part of a mandatory bovine tuberculosis disease control program required by a grant from the USDA.

The suit asks the court to issue an injunction to stop the implementation of NAIS at either the state or federal levels by any state or federal agency. If successful, the suit would halt the program nationwide.

“We think that current disease reporting procedures and animal tracking methods provide the kind of information health officials need to respond to animal disease events,” explained Fund President Taaron Meikle.

“At a time when the job of protecting our food safety is woefully underfunded, the USDA has spent over $118 million on just the beginning stages of a so-called voluntary program that ultimately seeks to register every horse, chicken, cow, goat, sheep, pig, llama, alpaca or other livestock animal in a national database–more than 120 million animals. It’s a program that only a bureaucrat could love.” she added.

Meikle noted that existing programs for diseases such as tuberculosis, brucellosis and scrapie together with state laws on branding and the existing record keeping by sales barns and livestock shows provide the mechanisms needed for tracking any disease outbreaks.

She said the suit charges that USDA has never published rules regarding NAIS, in violation of the Federal Administrative Procedures Act; has never performed an Environmental Impact Statement or an Environmental Assessment as required by the National Environmental Policy Act; is in violation of the Regulatory Flexibility Act that requires the USDA to analyze proposed rules for their impact on small entities and local governments; and violates religious freedoms guaranteed by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

“Other mandatory implementations, which weave NAIS into existing regulatory fabric and programs, have occurred in the States of Wisconsin and Indiana where premises registration has been made mandatory; in drought-stricken North Carolina and Tennessee, where farmers have been required to register their premises in order to obtain hay relief; and in Colorado where state fairs are requiring participants to register their premises under NAIS,” explained Judith McGeary, a member of the Farm-to-Consumer Fund board and the executive director of the Farm and Rancher Freedom Alliance.

“We are asking the court to immediately halt implementation of the program nationwide before more farmers and ranchers are strong-armed into participating in a program that the USDA has called voluntary.”

McGeary also questioned the accuracy of the existing database noting that an attempt by the USDA to make the information in the NAIS database subject to Privacy Act safeguards thereby removing them from public scrutiny was suspended indefinitely in a ruling last month by the same federal court that will hear arguments in the current suit. That suit had been filed by a journalist seeking access to the database to determine its accuracy.

About The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund: The Fund defends the rights and broadens the freedoms of sustainable farmers, and protects consumer access to local, nutrient-dense foods. Concerned citizens can support the Fund by joining at farmtoconsumer.org or by contacting the Fund at 703-208-FARM. The Fund’s sister organization, the Farm-to-Consumer Foundation (farmtoconsumerfoundation.org), works to support farmers engaged in sustainable farm stewardship and promote consumer access to local, nutrient-dense food.

Editor’s Note: A copy of the suit filed against the USDA and MDA is available at farmtoconsumerfoundation.org

###

Contacts:

Taaron G. Meikle
President, Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund and Farm-to-Consumer Foundation
703-537-8372
tgmeikle@aol.com

Brian Cummings
Cummings & Company LLC
214-295-7463
brian@cummingspr.com