Now that the autumn foliage is turing all kinds of impossible colors, many people are “hitting the trails” to enjoy some brisk outdoor exercise while viewing the autumnal crazy-quilt as it brightens day by day. Both city dwellers and rural denizens have embraced the union of the Rails to Trails projects locally, across their states, all over the nation and crossing international boundaries with the recently popular pastime known as Geocaching.

What, readers may ask, is this “geocaching” thing? According to its official website, geocaching is “a real-world outdoor treasure hunting game. Players try to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, using GPS-enabled devices and then share their experiences online.” Because of the unique location of my homestead within ‘spitting distance’ of the Mount Mitchell trail from Graphite, abutting the Pisgah National Forest and comprising the interior of the primary omega loop of the Round Knob loops of the Norfolk-Southern grade over the eastern continental divide, we have known about this geocaching phenomenon for years. There are at least three caches within 5 miles of us, and there are summer camps just up the road near the trail-head that ‘specialize’ in organizing geocaching expeditions for teenage campers. Thus for geocachers to join with the Rails to Trails projects is a match mae it… natural world heaven!

According to the geocaching website there are 1,540,286 active geocaches at various obscure spots worldwide, and more than 5 million active geocachers who spend time seeking them out. Some are bikers, some are hikers, all enjoy the outdoors and being able to pinpoint their position on the globe via satellite device. How these interests work with the Rails to Trails projects is to enlist dedicated geocachers to help the Conservancy produce GPS-accurate maps of various landmarks along their converted trails. Once mapped the trails then become popular destinations for geocachers, who just might set up some caches here and there for others to find. Win-win situation all around.

The Rails to Trails Conservancy offers a site called TrailLink that uses your current GPS position to return a map overlay leading to its trails in your immediate area. Or it can be searched for any area you may be planning to travel to for an autumn break and some dedicated leaf-looking. In my neighborhood a mountain biking group recently purchased a lodge nearby educated to the many mountain bikers who use our trails and bikeways and such during the ‘nice’ 9 months of the year, including the annual “Assault on Mount Mitchell” and the later descent from, which makes those days not a very good time to try hiking. They have a nice geocaching station with its own GPS and really nice heads-up displays, and regularly updates its trail and road maps with GPS data collected by bikers who stay there.

Almost every state has a Rails to Trails organization working to buy up the right-of-ways to old, no longer used railroad lines that are converted into trails. This gorgeous October weather beckons, and the trees are busy putting on their most colorful gypsy costuming for your delight. So grab a pack and some hiking boots – or your handy-dandy bicycle – and your cell phone GPS, and head out into the countryside to enjoy the season’s fine offerings. Some of you may enjoy it so much you start thinking seriously about joining us homesteaders out in the boonies where we get to enjoy all the seasons and all the ‘best-of’ our regions have to offer.

Happy trails!

Links:

Rails to Trails Conservancy
Geocaching.com
TrailLink
Good Roads, Rails & Trails

The current collapse of the world financial system has revealed some structural problems in our national economy that have flourished over a period of decades as corporate interests bought politicians and lobbyists to craft legislation to remove legal roadblocks to mass theft and market manipulation. And despite some changes in the D.C. political landscape, our government remains apparently helpless to do anything about corporate malfeasance on any level. With all the bad economic news dominating the public consciousness, some issues in the food supply sector are having a difficult time being properly correlated and attended to despite the serious level of danger they present to public health.

The food supply issues didn’t begin with the market manipulations on Wall Street and from there to exchanges all over the world. Though for many people the first alarms went off as the CDS fraud crashed the economy in 2008 and the financial players went looking for other markets to wreak havoc on. They seized on commodities – staple foods from the agricultural sector increasingly dominated by multinational corporations like Monsanto, ADM and Cargill. As a traceable beginning in 2008 to what this year became the “Arab Spring” movement across North Africa and spreading to the Middle East and southern Asia, food riots broke out in Egypt and Syria and portions of India as well as elsewhere when people could no longer afford to feed themselves and their families. Things have only gotten worse in the years since, and Americans are slowly waking up.

In 2011 a full quarter of the U.S. population are dependent on food stamps. As unemployment keeps on rising, the government strangely keeps slashing the food stamp budget to appease nutty Republican radicals who insist those hardest hit by the Great Recession are just “lazy” and undeserving of aid that might require corporations and billionaires to pay taxes. Why one of the political parties in our nation believes that Americans will quietly and without complaint starve to death in the streets in order to protect billionaires from paying as much of their income in taxes as their chauffeur does has never been explained by the financial sector’s pundits at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Major cognitive disconnect.

But serious food supply issues encompass much more than just market manipulation and governmental paralysis. Consider some of these issues while attempting to get a picture of how dire the overall situation is…

Honey Laundering: China’s at it again – Adulterating pet and human foods with melamine wasn’t bad enough – though one corporate scapegoat was executed by the Chinese government hoping to save its place as cheap ingredients supplier to the world – the latest food scam involves honey. Not just fake honey in those little bee-shaped plastic bottles, Chinese honey brokers are creating honey by mixing sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn/rice syrup, barley malt and a variety of unrefined sugars. Failure to police storage requirements has resulted in heavy metal contamination as well, primarily lead.

If you’ve been thinking about beekeeping for honey (and handy pollinators), this is the year to get busy on it. Extension services in many rural counties offer literature, evening classes, and instructions on building hives. Agents often know who in the area builds hives for sale, and aren’t shy of giving out that information. Many people who are trying hard to eat better and healthier are being taken in by the Chinese honey scam, and big food processors using that fake honey in their supposedly ‘natural’ food lines are risking their markets. Grow your own honey or buy locally from someone honest.

Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector – Late July brought the second largest tainted meat recall so far, when Cargill’s meat packing division recalled ~36 million pounds of ground turkey products tainted with a multi-drug resistant strain of Salmonella. The biggest recall was in 2008, when a slaughterhouse in California recalled 143 million pounds of beef due to allowing downer cows into the mix. The dangers to public health from e.coli, salmonella, listeria and other bacteria, and from adulterants and contaminates are high, yet our government doesn’t give the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] the power to force food recalls. Companies have to do this voluntarily, and they don’t often volunteer until people start dying and CDC tracks the source down.

If your family eats meat, now is the time to seriously consider raising your own or contracting with a neighbor who raises meat animals. A side of beef from a calf pastured for a year, dressed whole chickens raised happily free range, maybe rabbit stew meat, a slab of locally smoked bacon and/or ham… buying from known sources or doing it yourself could easily save your family’s lives. The more that control of our commercial food supply gets concentrated into the greedy hands of a few, the more danger is present overall. Avoid it like the plague it truly is.

The Nation has a good article looking at How change is going to come in the food system despite united resistance of the big corporate players to cater to public demands for better, less adulterated and far less fattening foods. There is a lot of good information in this article’s analysis to arm yourself with when next you try arguing with a friend, relative or acquaintance about the importance of healthy food and the severe shortage of it in our commercial food supply.

And finally, the good news. The New York Times informs us that vegetable gardens are booming in a fallow economy. We homesteaders have of course known this all along – and have done more than our share to get more people digging and grow the local markets – but we should always welcome mainstream coverage that helps to spread awareness. Recent movement in many states to allow the use of food stamps at farmer’s markets and bulk purchases straight from farmers are helping more people to get more and better food than they could purchase in the grocery store.

Many localities are also sponsoring seed exchanges through the Lions or Ruritan, sometimes through local Chambers of Commerce, 4-H and FFA clubs at high schools. These have committees in charge of getting open-pollinated seeds from local gardeners and farmers, packaging them, and then distributing them free in the late winter and early spring to local residents planning their season’s garden crops. Local schools and civic clubs are offering gardening classes and contacts to suppliers of tool exchanges, equipment like chicken coops and bee hives, and farmers who sell chicks, calves, kids and kits to those wishing to raise their own meat animals. Local butchers are making a comeback, and in many states the Extension Service offers classes all the way up to Master Gardening certification. So get busy, and get your neighbors busy making best use of all these developing local alternatives to Big Ag and Big Food, Inc. We will be a much happier and healthier nation for it, and probably much smarter as a people for our awareness and direct involvement in this most important aspect of everybody’s lives.

Links:

NYT: Vegetable Gardens Are Booming
How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System
Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector
Honey Laundering: tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey
Risks of tainted food rise as inspections drop

Sigh. As the Kabuki in D.C. continues into yet another week/month of grandstanding on the budget and raising the debt ceiling, a good many of us homesteaders are watching our state governments engaging in the same kind of bad budgetary theater as summer hits hard (and early). This year it looks a lot like neither the weather nor government policies care to offer any help to rural America, where the ‘Great Recession’ is a whole lot more like a Great Depression.

In Washington the drastic budget cuts are of course not hitting ADM or Cargill or any other giant Agribiz subsidies – mostly used to grow bioengineered corn, soy, etc. for animal feed. Rather, cuts in the USDA, EPA and FDA budgets are targeted at conservation, extension, research, renewable energy and rural development programs. Less money for inspections and enforcement, less for policing big livestock operations, less for wetland set-asides, etc., etc., etc. The slashing goes on and on, and bodes ill for just about everything that counts in this world. As if this wholesale gutting of all programs geared towards sustainable agriculture, responsible land use, regulation of pollutants and development of alternative crops isn’t bad enough, they’re also slashing food assistance programs like WIC and food stamps.

The Rodale Institute has a very good overview of how the Republican’s scorched earth policy is targeting small-scale farmers, organic growers and specialty farm/homestead programs that have been important to those of us actually engaged in trying to live sustainably on the land. With $39 billion in cuts to conservation programs aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive areas and $350 million for the Organic Transitions Research Program, it seems quite obvious that today’s politicians don’t have much of an appreciation of what it takes to grow and market nutritious food.

Meanwhile, here at my homestead where the summer crops were planted late due to too much rain and some concern about fallout deposition of cesium from Fukushima (which was high in this area), the rain finally did slack off. To nothing. Haven’t had more than a few drops in over a month, and issues with the cistern have us on water rationing in the household – there’s nothing to irrigate with. That hasn’t been an issue most years given that average rainfall here is ample, but this year’s shaping up to be hellishly hot and dry. I can do nothing but wait and see which crops make it through to the next rainy spell, keep some potted seedlings in reserve to plant REALLY late if need be. If it’s to be a super-hot summer, it could last well into November. That’s enough time for most things, even if planted late.

Below are some good articles and resource collections so that we who will be most affected by what Washington (and our state governments) do about the coming second dip of the Great Recession. I urge all my readers to educate themselves to what’s happening nationally and locally, and get involved. Call your representatives. Write letters to the editor. Bring up the important issues at the farmer’s market and at church and at any other community meetings where people who are also affected can be found. Money is just paper and computer data these days. Wall Street’s paper is even less than that. But everyone has to eat, and if there are no food producers people will starve. Our land, our labor, our crops are much more imp We must speak out. We must speak loudly. And we must enlist all the help we can get.

Links:

Agri-Pulse Communications
Rodale Press
Rural Resource Guide [NC]
American Farmland Trust

Never heard of anything called “agroecology?” Don’t feel alone, it’s not a very familiar term. Yet it could as easily be called “organic” or just plain “sustainable” and we’d easily recognize it.

Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has a nice website explaining what agroecology is all about and how it’s being put to work in the developing world to help people supply food for their families and communities in a sustainable way. Working WITH nature, not against it.

Jill Richardson also has a great report on agroecology on Alternet, New UN Report on How to Feed the World’s Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture.

Those of us who are just starting – or always expanding – our means of doing for ourselves should pay serious attention to the many projects all over the world attempting to empower people to do the very things that we’ve decided to do. Big Changes – and let’s face it, we all know that Big Changes are in the offing for the future if humanity is to have any future – are coming. We’re on the leading edge for reclaiming the “mysteries” of life that the modern industrialized world tried so hard to breed out of us. They can start small, just as we’ve been beginning for ourselves. Bottom-up will be the only way sustainable changes can come unbeholden to multinational gigacorps and Big Biz. Monsanto’s World Vision isn’t a world I’d like to leave to my grandchildren.

So do check out the links for agroecology. Then, if you’re already somewhat established, look around for some of the latest regional doings related to agritourism. I’ll have more of that in future posts, so stay tuned!

Links:

Oliver De Schutter SRFood

New UN Report on How to Feed the World’s Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture

Agroecology.Org

Most committed modern homesteaders try to keep up with the many issues of concern to us personally, our country, and our chosen way of life. Things like rural development policies, governmental agricultural and energy policies, self-sufficiency (and roadblocks to that), management of forests and water sources, etc. It’s because we care that we are who we are and do what we do. And a good many of us try to keep up daily or weekly with the best sources of information we need to keep abreast of those issues.

One of my favorite sources is the Organic Consumers Association [OCA], which is tireless in its efforts to follow and disseminate necessary news and useful resources for homesteaders like us. If you haven’t signed up yet for their newsletters, go on over to OCA and do so. You sure won’t be sorry!

In my newsletter this week I was again informed that OCA’s website has been under sustained hacker attack, operatives for the ‘usual suspect’ [Monsanto] notwithstanding. Somebody out there doesn’t want us to have the good information OCA delivers to us for free, and is actively attempting to thwart the effort. Show ‘em some love if you’ve got some love (or money) to spare!

One of the issues OCA is on top of that should be of serious concern to all of us who grow organic fruits and veggies or raise free-range chickens, grass-fed beef or offer organic dairy products is the Obama administration’s alliance with Monsanto in matters of developing policy. The new proposals for “food safety” have proven positively draconian for small value-added producers, many of whom are having their farms raided by gestapo-type goon squads and their equipment, animals and food products seized, and are facing astronomical legal bills all in the name of corporate agribiz profits and total control of the food supply. I mean, it’s not like these people care about toxic substances, unsustainable practices, mad cows or melamine in baby formula or anything. What they want to eliminate are your choices, access to markets, and ability to make a living by sustainably tending and preserving the land instead of raping it wholesale.

Knowledge can be our most effective weapon beside our commitments to the land, our families, our way of life and our hard work to make it work. If readers have more sources for keeping up, please offer them in the comments and I’ll check them out and report back.

In these times of Wall Street collapses, banking bankruptcies, massive unemployment, homelessness and increasing deprivation, we in the rural sector are already living in Great Depression-II even as the city folk and DC denizens keep talking about mere recession. We have a new President who has promised “hope” to Americans, and who appointed a Monsanto apologist to be Secretary of Agriculture, thereby slapping every struggling small farmer and ardent homesteader in the face.

Hope is all very nice in a made-for-TV movie or light novel, but we all know you can’t eat it, live in it, pay your doctor with it or drive it to a day-job. We’re going to need more than hope and slaps in the face to get through all this piper-paying. And despite Obama’s lousy choice for SecAg, there are some people in DC who do seem to understand that while cities are where the bread and circuses are distracting the population from their deprivations, if we allow the rural backbone to disintegrate people won’t just be deprived. They’ll be starving to death.

Many of us modern homesteaders came to our lifelong labors of love from those cities and megaburbs, once living large with boom economy jobs and the whole rat race. Then gave it all up very much on purpose so we could build new lives for ourselves and our families that really mean something. Those of us with college degrees (some quite advanced), may have even taken a few courses in basic business management and/or economics and/or marketing to help us get those city jobs we left behind when we moved to the hinterlands where the farmers live.

As the various tentacles of the economic stimulus package reach into the states, some state legislatures are working hard to earmark some of the funds for rural business development. Rural, farm-based businesses that produce not just raw materials but finished (or partially finished) products for sale are what is called Value Added Agriculture.

Value added agriculture makes a different kind of business out of the usual small farm business of growing basic commodities and then selling them to buyers representing big food producers and conglomerates. It’s not just selling milk from your cows to the local dairy, but making cheese out of the milk and selling that to grocery stores, restaurants and sometimes directly to retail customers. Instead of just being the raw resource miner, the farmstead becomes the producing ‘middleman’ in the chain of getting raw resources processed and to consumers all over the world.

State land grant universities in all states are beginning to offer these business management courses through their agricultural departments to farmers and homesteaders. Some extension agencies are also offering classes free or very cheap, so a farm family can learn the details and develop their ideas over time while still maintaining their dirt-based day jobs.

Some of the better resources I’ve found out on the web to help homesteaders take this next step toward better income and community job resource come from various sustainable agricultural organizations. Keys to Success in Value-Added Agriculture is a 20-page booklet that offers a very good overview of the issues and solutions involved in adding value to your commodities. The USDA’s Rural Development branch has information and applications for their value-added producer grant program to provide funding for farm-based entrepreneurs.

The Ag Marketing Resource Center, a national partnership of land grant institutions and state departments of agriculture, offers a portal to their gathered resources for those interested in value-added agriculture. These include market research, business development grants and success stories from all over the country.

So if your family would like to expand your homestead’s horizons this year, check out these resources and don’t hesitate to use them as portals to more information and more help in getting started. It’s our lives and chosen lifestyles on the line, and none of us should lose these to the failure of political and economic leadership in recent years. If readers have their own success stories or ideas to share, please do!

Links:

Disconcerting: Tom Vilsack at USDA
Legislation introduced to invest money in ag industry
USDA: Value-Added Producer Grants
Agricultural Marketing Resource Center

There is a resurgence of hope across America in the wake of Tuesday’s election of Democrat Barack Obama as President, promising a new direction of change for the future of our nation. Those of us who have been paying attention to the global financial meltdown, increasingly severe food shortages in the wake of global warming, and the outrageous poisoning of our citizens and livestock/pets by corrupt Chinese producers (a glaring example of globalization’s failures), are hoping that a new dawn in America will bring with it the serious changes to our agricultural policies that have grown increasingly necessary through decades of decline.

Now, politicians don’t generally talk much about agricultural policies while they’re stumping for votes in big cities. And they’re often so ignorant of agricultural issues that even rural dwellers – actual farmers – get nothing but pablum and platitudes in response to their questions. Luckily, journalist Michael Pollan wrote a great ‘open letter’ in the New York Times in October entitled, Farmer in Chief. This is a must-read for all of us committed to self-sufficiency, locally grown foods, the viability of family farms and homesteads, and the future health of an environment we all depend upon for life.

Pollan begins his letter to “Dear Mr. President-Elect” with an honest caution -

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Pollan goes on to explain issues like climate change, energy independence, health care and the general health of the economy in terms of our dependence on food depend crucially on sound agricultural policies. He explains very well what ‘went wrong’ with our food system over the past several decades, and how the antiquated, fossil fuel dependent system cannot be sustained. We no longer have cheap fuels and unlimited water supplies, our policies are haphazard, our subsidies unfair, our planning non-existent. Pollan then offers his particulars in this 9-page article, and the reasoning behind them is fascinating reading. He offers a complete rationale for organic farming many of us have been promoting and practicing for years, in three not at all ‘simple’ steps…

1. Resolarizing the American Farm
2. Reregionalizing the Food System
3. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

I’ve added my voice to the growing calls for our leadership to pay serious attention to the many complex issues of our food supply – which IS our ‘national security’ – by sending this article as a link in a congratulatory email to President-Elect Obama. This is an immediate action issue, as Obama is right now choosing his cabinet and advisors. Agriculture and food policy issues must not fall to the back of the line. So add your voice to the calls for sane policy and firm leadership today!

You can also sign petitions and keep up to date on incoming news at the Organic Consumers Association. Don’t forget while you’re there to sign up for their email newsletter too!

CSA – Community Supported Agriculture. The CSA ‘movement’ in my state (North Carolina) organized, promoted and maintained per resources and educational materials by the state’s Cooperative Extension Service, the outreach arm of the state’s Department of Agriculture and land grant universities. It’s all about small farms, sustainable agriculture, natural and organic methods, and best marketing practices for what is produced.

CSA member farms offer fruit and vegetables, flowers and landscaping plants, eggs, milk (dairies specialize in cows or goats) and cheese, pasture-fed meat, and some even participate in the AgriTourism initiatives to bring urban families and tourists out to the farms for tours and work opportunities. Consumers can purchase from favored producers at local farmer’s markets, or do what we do – buy a “share” of the coming season’s crops in the spring when the farmer needs the funding to cover seeds and the costs of getting the crop in and going.

Different producers work differently for their shares, so choose a CSA close to home in case you are expected to come to the farm to pick up your boxes and bags of goodies. At some CSAs you’ll get to pick your own strawberries, peaches, apples, etc. when they’re ripe, the farm will let you know when that happens so you can make plans. Some have workshops that let you get some close-up training on bee keeping or cheese making, even learn how to milk a goat!

There’s nothing better than getting to know your food producer personally, and getting some important hands-on opportunities to learn how it’s done, maybe put that to work in your own garden. Even better, the ability to purchase good, natural or organic produce, meat, eggs, milk, cheese, etc. from local producers will cut your food budget significantly. Prices are rising fast at the supermarket, and supermarket produce isn’t very tasty anyway.

Joining a CSA or two every season allows the homesteader to focus on producing just what they can’t get easily or cheaply from other producers in their area. It also allows the homesteader to hook up with other homesteaders and old-timers who know everything about everything in your particular area. In my experience the old-timers love nothing better than to answer questions from committed newcomers, and will often offer practical advice and encyclopedic knowledge of what it takes to survive on the land.

I easily found the CSAs in my area by doing a Google search on “CSA NC” which returned the Extension Service’s useful website. The same should work for your state too, so make use of it! Now’s the time to buy your shares, or get the lowdown on what will be available through the farmer’s market in your area, where to find your favored growers. So get on it, gang!

“Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.” [1794]

It was the #1 cash crop in the 13 new states just as it is the #1 cash crop in 50 states today. As a fast-growing “weed” that requires no pesticides or herbicides and very little fertilizers or irrigation, the close-packed stands of 8-9 foot tall plants provided more biomass per acre than any other crop ever discovered, bred or engineered. Its fiber content is 2 to 3 times as great as cotton per acre, and is both softer and stronger than cotton. Hemp paper lasts hundreds of years and can be recycled more often than tree pulp papers.

Hemp’s high cellulose content is a fine base for plastics – composites made with hemp are now used by Mercedes Benz to produce auto bodies and dashboards. Hempseed oil is both more nutritious and more economical than soybean, peanut, sunflower or canola oil. It burns brighter than any other plant oil, and can be used to produce non-toxic diesel fuel, paint, varnish, detergent, ink, home heating oil and lubricating oil. It is as easily converted into ethanol as corn, but can be grown in a much wider range of climates and conditions.

News organizations warn that we are facing a worldwide food shortage in part brought about by the diversion of staple food crops to ethanol and biodiesel fuel production, worsened by reliance on unsustainable agricultural practices and chemical pollution of once-rich “breadbasket” farmland. Our reliance on foreign oil has caused 2 wars in this first decade of the 21st century and killed more than a million people with violence. America alone has sacrificed more than 3,000 soldiers and left some 30,000 returning veterans with life-crippling injuries. Pollution from fossil fuel burning contributes to another few hundred thousand premature deaths worldwide every year. Global warming, if unchecked, will eventually kill tens or hundreds of millions more.

The answers we seek for the future may require a re-examination of our past. Perhaps George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were right. What might be accomplished if we did NOT spend 4 billion dollars a year trying to prevent farmers from growing industrial hemp?

Links:

Fossil Fuel Cuts Would Reduce Early Deaths, Illness, Study Says
1997: Canada Repeals Hemp Prohibition
Energy Farming in America
Hemphasis: Hemp as a Fuel/Energy Source
Vermont House Approves Hemp Bill
Hemp-based biodiesel, NOT ethanol