Vermont farmers who raise goats for milk have no use for the male babies their animals produce, and often ended up euthanizing them. Meanwhile, immigrants to Vermont from Africa and Southeast Asia were importing thousands of goats a year from Australia and New Zealand to use in preparing familiar dishes from their home countries. These two facts made a light bulb go off in the head of Karen Freudenberger, who volunteers with refugee communities and conservation groups.
One day when she was mentoring a Somali family, Freudenberger noticed that an older man named Mohamed seemed depressed. She asked him if he’d ever kept animals, and he immediately began telling her about his days raising goats, camels, and cows in his home country. “His eyes just lit up, and he was a different person. It hit me harder than any day since…what a hugely important piece of people’s lives is missing when they come here,” she told Kathryn Flagg of Seven Days.
Working with two immigrant goat farmers from Bhutan, Freudenberger formed the Vermont Goat Collaborative in Colchester, Vermont two years ago. She contacted goat dairy farmers, many of whom were glad to supply the project with kids. The farmers raise the baby goats until they are big enough to eat, and then immigrant families come to the farm to pick out the animals they want to buy, which is a lot more convenient than the trek to Boston many Vermont immigrants were making to find goat meat. Last year they sold 100 goats to immigrants from 15 different countries.
Several groups have come together to support the project, including the Vermont Land Trust, which supplied the farmland that was too flood-prone for crops but perfect for grazing, the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which gave the collaborative a $20,000 grant to pay for fencing and feed.
“The whole project is really designed around trying to meet this particular niche demand that this community has…in a way that meets the particular cultural and taste desires of their communities,” Freudenberger told Lisa Rathke of the Portland Press Herald. Meanwhile, it’s making the farming dreams of some new Americans come true. “I never thought, when I lived in Nepal, that I could be a farmer in America,” Chuda Dhaurali, one of the goat farmers involved in the project told Flagg.
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Tag: Farming
This Little Girl’s Science Experiment Led Her to Question a Standard Farming Practice
Nine-year-old Elise wanted to do a science experiment to find out how long it would take a sweet potato to grow vines. So she went to the grocery store with her grandmother, bought a sweet potato, and put it in a glass of water. But, as she explains in this video posted to YouTube by Suzanne Bartlett, no matter how long she left the sweet potato in the water, it wouldn’t sprout vines, even after she tried multiple potatoes.
Elise says, “We talked to the produce man at the store, and he said, ‘Well, these will never grow vines. At the farm, they spray them with a chemical called Bud Nip. You should try one of our organic sweet potatoes.” She did, and in a month it sprouted vines. She tried the experiment with an organic sweet potato from another grocery store, and it worked too. Before she knew it, a simple science experiment had turned into an important lesson about pesticides for the precocious little girl.
But Elise didn’t stop there—she continued her research, reading up on Bud Nip, also known as Chlorpropham, and learned that it’s routinely applied to onions, blueberries, tomatoes, and other produce, and that some experiments have shown it to cause tumors in animals. According to the Pesticide Information Project, long-term exposure “may cause adverse reproductive effects.” Elise concludes her video with the question, “Which potato would you rather eat?”
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The Eco-Friendly Plan to Quench Central California’s Thirst
There are billions of gallons of water in California’s parched Central Valley. But the problem is this water is filled with salt, toxins and heavy metals, making it useless for irrigation. As we’ve mentioned before, traditional water desalination plants can be costly and use up a lot of energy. However, San Francisco-based start-up WaterFX has come up with a solution that uses heat to turn salty water into freshwater, and is sure to help the region’s water-pinched farmers.
WaterFX’s Aqua4 project, currently in phase one, is humming along in California’s agricultural hub that’s especially feeling this year’s awful drought. As Clean Technica reports, though small at 160 x 40 feet, this solar-powered plant is capable of turning otherwise unusable water into 65,000 gallons of freshwater a day. And here’s more good news — it also converts all that leftover brine and other minerals from the saltwater for reuse (such as calcium compounds for drywall or nitrates for fertilizer). You can watch the video above to see how it works.
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This water desalination plant could solve multiple problems. First, because it runs on solar power, the energy is cheap and clean. Second, local farms no longer have to pipe in water from other locations. Thanks to this project’s success, there are plans in the works to expand the facility later this year to quench more of California’s thirsty cities.
How America Is Investing in Local Fruits and Veggies
America’s Midwest is still best known for its corn fields, but apple orchards are making a comeback. Across the plains states, farmers are tearing down fields of corn — the high-starch variety commonly used for ethanol and cattle feed — and instead planting fruits and vegetables. According to crop analysts, because of the surplus of corn in the country — a record 97 million acres of farmland were devoted to it in 2012 — an acre of this crop is projected to net farmers only $284 this year after expenses. Compare that to apples, which will net an average of about $2,000 or more per acre, and it’s no wonder that farmers are ready to trade in corn stalks for more profitable fruit trees. And unlike other times in American history, the market for local produce is ripe for the picking. The federal government has urged Americans to double the amount of fruits and vegetables they eat, even as farmland for these healthy foods has decreased over the last decade. About 1.8 million acres of farmland were devoted to the top 25 vegetables in 2012. For fruits, including citrus, that number has dropped from 3.2 to 2.8 million acres in 10 years.
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And it’s not just corn growers who are hopping on the fruit wagon. As dairy farmers continue to face financial hardships, nearly two dozen Organic Valley Co-op members are now growing fruits, veggie, or both on their land. In North Carolina, 200 to 300 tobacco growers are now planting produce, according to the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project. In Iowa, the sons and daughters of corn farmers are returning and starting their own produce businesses. “The children of corn farmers are coming back to the farm, and carving out 5 or 10 acres to grow fruits and vegetables,” Craig A. Chase, food and farm coordinator at Iowa State University, told the New York Times. “They can easily make $30,000 to $40,000 a year.”
Of course, growing fruits and vegetables is a lot more work than raising corn, especially for those with no experience. With that in mind, Richard Weinzierl, a crop sciences professor at the University of Illinois, started a series of classes teaching the basics. The first class, which was held in three locations around the state, had about 90 students, all of whom were interested in growing a variety of crops. This is good news for grocers, especially in the Midwest, who are becoming more interested in stocking local produce, and of course, for consumers, who are looking for healthier options for their families. And in many cases, the local produce is just as cheap, if not cheaper. “It’s a good feeling,” Tim B. Slepicka, an Illinois farmer said. “Especially knowing that one in six people are using food stamps. They’re looking for the least expensive calorie possible, and why should a pound of tomatoes — which are basically seed, dirt and water — have to cost as much or more than a frozen meal?”
ALSO: Why You Should Care About a Crop You’ve Never Heard Of
How One Rice Farmer Ensures No One in His Community Goes Hungry
Every year since 1984, a Brazoria County, Tex., rice farmer has been donating a portion of his rice harvest to the Houston Foodbank. According to Houstonia magazine, 70-year-old John Travis ‘Jacko’ Garrett of Garrett Farms has provided more than 11 million servings of rice each year thanks to his nonprofit, Share the Harvest, that bands rice farmers in the region together to help fight hunger. To date, the organization has donated nearly 6 million pounds of rice. “It is a huge donation that isn’t replaceable for us,” Houston Foodbank CEO Brian Greene said.
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Although the big-hearted septuagenarian has fed millions, he remains concerned about the future of his organization. Garrett hopes that young rice farmers will step up and continue his legacy. As Houstonia reported, Garrett is also working with the Foodbank to promote farmland purchases. A tiny investment can go a long way, as Garrett said, “If you wanted to buy an acre of rice to provide the funds for Share the Harvest, for about $1,200 you could provide nearly 80,000 meals.” If you’d like to support Garrett and his organization’s fight against hunger in Houston, you can check out the link here.
Teach Her to Raise a Goat, And She Just Might End Up a Scientist
If you want your daughter to study science or engineering in college, maybe you should start by enrolling her in an organization that can teach her how to raise a prize pig, put together a photography portfolio, or sew a quilt. Membership in 4-H, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture-sponsored organization for kids and teenagers (a staple at county fairs), has been shown to increase girls’ participation in science and technology activities. A Tufts University study found that 10th grade girls in 4-H are two times more likely to take part in science programs, and 12th grade girls in 4-H are three times more likely to do so. Now 4-H has joined the Million Women Mentors initiative that aims to match a million mentors with specialties in science, technology, engineering and math to girls across the country. Women make up 48 percent of the workforce, but only 24 percent of them hold jobs in STEM fields, numbers that 4-H aims to improve with this program, along with continuing to help kids raise some prize-winning goats.
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How a Town’s Lettuce Fields Are Spurring a Tech Boom
The city of Salinas is located just an hour south of Silicon Valley, but technologically speaking, it’s eons away. The farm town, known for growing some of the best lettuce in the nation, doesn’t have adequate technology to produce and harvest it efficiently. So, in an effort to bring its agriculture industry into the modern age, this midsized city’s officials are doing something unprecedented. They’ve hired a venture capital firm — and invested nearly $300,000 of the city’s own money — to try to fund a startup incubator and attract talent from Silicon Valley. The goal is to foster new agricultural technologies that will modernize the city’s farms, and in turn create jobs and spur an economic revival. “We’re actually setting up a new business model, actually, for … most local governments, for most cities,” Ray Corpuz, Salinas’ city manager, told NPR. “None of them, that I know, in the state of California are doing this.” Other city managers think the venture capital fund is risky move, he said, but hey, there’s potentially a lot of green in the lettuce industry.
MORE: Why You Should Care About a Crop You’ve Never Heard Of
You Won’t Believe Where These Bostonians Grow Their Vegetables
Two guys from Boston are taking farming to a whole new level: stackable shipping containers that can grow produce anywhere. Freight Farms sets up boxes with LEDs, climate control systems and hydroponics, turning them into modular farms capable of producing 900 heads of leafy greens per week. It’s a one acre farm in a 320-square-foot box!
Why You Should Care About a Crop You’ve Never Heard Of
When it comes to food, variety is as important on farms as it is on dinner tables. Growing different types of food together preserves soil health and helps crops grow. But with biodiversity declining and about a third of the world’s plant diversity on pace to disappear by 2050, groups like FoodTank are working to make sure that a wider variety of plants go into the ground. Enset, a lesser-known crop related to bananas, is one such candidate for biodiversity, packing a nutritional punch while also proving valuable for clothing, shelter and medicine in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Harvests in the U.S. and elsewhere could help reduce global hunger and improve farming.
The Ingenious System to Grow More Food With Less Water
If there’s one high school competition I’d love to see, it would be schools competing for which one can do the best job of teaching students how to live more sustainably. Third generation farmer Kaben Smallwood has my vote for creating an aquaponics greenhouse at a rural public school in Kiowa, Oklahoma. Kids are harvesting crops for their school lunches while learning about water-thrifty systems that combine fish and plant farming. His company now has $40,000 and mentoring support to keep growing, with an award from the 2013 Hitachi Foundation Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneurs Program.