Allium Sativum L.

Posted on July 17, 2009 by Petra Derkzen

The grain elevator, a corn symbol in every town

I drove to Minburn yesterday where I spent a great day at the Small Potatoes Farm. I past the road to the farm without noticing and stopped at the post office, next to the grain elevator, to ask for directions. A good choice because the post office, I soon realized is the epic center of this tiny town. So a few minutes before my arrival, the news was announced by the post office, calling to the farm that a tall Dutch lady was coming over.

We harvested more than 5 different varieties of garlic. If it would have been not such wet weather so far, the harvest would have been in already around the 4th of July. And even now, the land was quite wet, which meant that the garlic bulbs came out with big lumps of soft black earth hanging in their roots. We pulled, collected, cleaned and trimmed the garlic bulbs after which they were let to dry hanging in the barn, in bundles of eight. Each variety had its own place in order not to mix them up, and we indicated what we hung on a map. Of some varieties we only harvested a basket full, just to grow more seed.

The Small Potatoes Farm grows an incredible amount of different vegetables and different varieties. These include different kinds of: squash, melon, potato, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, lettuces, unions, leek, cabbage, beets, kale, beans, strawberries, asparagus and herbs. The total amount of hectares available for production is around 4.5, however at any point in time, there is 1.5 hectares in production while the other acres have a cover crop such as buckwheat to increase soil quality and organic mass.

When you see the rows of different crops weaving in the wind, you wouldn’t think there is much mathematics involved. However, the production planning system is a complicated multi dimensional puzzle. While rotating land out and into production and rotating the right kind of crops after one another to minimize disease, there also has to be a certain kind of yield available every week throughout the season to give the CSA members their vegetable share. And, of course, this share demands a certain kind of diversity too. A puzzle for winter times, when a thick pack of snow is covering the land.

Buying fresh local organic sustainable and just food….

Posted on July 12, 2009 by Petra Derkzen

: Corn! The first harvest of sweet corn at the farmers market in Des Moines

While I am staying in Ames, I am enjoying the fresh fruits and vegetables of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in which the Flora’s have a share. All throughout the growing season, the weekly share can be picked up at the church, organized by the Farm to Folk Collaborative, which serves as an intermediary organization in order to connect the local producers and consumers. Different CSA farmers and other local producers offering ‘a la carte’, deliver each Tuesday after which the Farm to Folk people take care of assembly and payment handling.

Now I know my way around, I picked up their share at the church this week. It is a share of the Small Potatoes Farm, based in Minburn, southwest of Ames. I had onions, kohlrabi, carrots, squash, potatoes and kale. All the certified organic produce of the Small Potatoes Farm finds its way to the customer through CSA shares. The nature of the CSA model, based on a direct and trusting link between producer and consumer is the closest you can get to an unambiguous ‘honest’ product. It is both organic ánd local. But in the market place both ‘organic’ and ‘local’ can obscure different meanings and practices.

Organic can be produced in an industrial way within the limits of the label. Much of the organic produce in supermarkets is coming from industrial-size farms or companies with farms, which often have an organic line next to conventional production; organic is just another market. The local, at the other hand, has no regulation as to what sustainability standards should be applied. Local produce can come from small scale, but conventional farms, can include the use of pesticides and herbicides for example.

Des Moines Farmers Market

Since organic production has become an industry too, the ‘local’ is often elevated above the organic because the local – by its very nature – cannot be incorporated easily into the centrifuging forces of global commerce. Buying local is an act of opposing corporate food chain powers by going back to a less asymmetrical peer-to-peer relationship between buyer and seller.

A popular platform for these relationships is the farmers market. There are 18 farmers markets in Greater Des Moines (the city and the surrounding counties including Story County in which Ames is located). Saturday, together with Rick, Stacy and Tillie from the Small Potatoes Farm, their worker Brian and his friend, we visited the Des Moines farmers market, one of the biggest in the country. It is huge. Over 200 stands with a variety of products, from vegetables to ‘Dutch letters’ (??), a peculiar S-formed pastry letter, from clothes, to ‘Frisian Gouda’ cheese and from bread to garden equipment.

The beets are 'chemical free'

Vegetables are promoted as ‘fresh’, ‘without pesticides’ or ‘local’. But that does not necessarily apply to all vegetables at one particular stand. I bought some tomatoes, thinking that I bought local produce. I found out later that it will take a few weeks more before tomatoes can be harvested in Iowa. I have no idea where my tomatoes came from. Being a conscious consumer is hard work.

Knee-high by the 4th of July

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Petra Derkzen

Independence Day, the 4th of July is of course an important day in the US. And it therefore serves as a marker in time, if the corn is knee-high by the fourth of July, you can be happy. Well, here in Ames, one can be satisfied. The corn is more like shoulder-high already. Maybe this is caused by the “black gold of Iowa.”

A series of glacial events (Quaternary) delivered an extremely black and fertile soil throughout the middle of the state Iowa. Soil like this can deliver an abundance of fresh and varied produce. But driving through Iowa this weekend on my way to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, I actually drove through a food desert. The corn, grown at each side of the road, cannot be eaten.

The various F1 hybrids which are grown here are not essentially vegetables but an industrial raw material. During the eighties, the integrated farm made way for the integrated agro-industry. The nutrient cycle at farm level broke once the diversified farm specialized into different and geographically separated monoculture operations. The nurturing cycle in which there was no such thing as ‘waste’ was replaced by a system producing at least three new categories of dangerous waste.

1. Nitrogen in (drinking) water from artificial fertilizers. Hybrid corn consumes more oil – that is, fertilizer – than any other crop. And since it is corn after corn each year, more fertilizer is needed to keep production figures high. Much of it ends up in the rivers. Rivers which provide drinking water. Iowa has the largest nitrogen filter in the world in their Des Moines River water treatment facility. They take out so much nitrogen for which they do not have a storage place that they dump some of it into the river again downstream.
2. Antibiotic residue’s in (drinking) water. Over half of all corn grown in the mid west goes into animal feed. Much of it goes to the cattle in the feedlots or to hog CFO’s. After half a year of grazing, the beef cattle are confined for over half a year more in feedlots to be fed nothing but corn. In this last phase, they are fast fed into steaks and burgers, but there is no need to say that the cow’s stomach is not made for an exclusively low structure energy rich diet (despite the difference in stomachs, much like humans). Moreover, the amount of animals per square meter standing in their own dirt is just the kind of environment for whatever disease to arise. Their feed contains therefore a standard amount of preventative antibiotics which pollute the animals as well as the environment; not least the water. Ultimately a danger to all of us creating resistances and superbugs.
3. Toxic manure. The large concentration of animals in a feedlot produce a large and concentrated amount of manure, stored in pits, tanks or open air lagoons. Manure leeks from these types of storages into the ground water, or as emissions in the air. And the level of concentration of the manure is often so high that it is useless as fertilizer. Existing feedlots are often exempted from many water and air regulations.

Taken from: http://www.friendsoffamilyfarmers.org/?page_id=525

Food democracy

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Petra Derkzen

Nothing but corn in Iowa. So I did some serious weeding and hoeing of corn this weekend……..Of white corn. Not the regular uneatable corn which goes into feed fodder, energy production or corn sweetener. These immense fields are round-up ready anyway. The corn grown in the community garden in Marshall town (see blog) can be eaten, it will be used to make corn flour tortillas.

my garden in wageningen

It has been a wet summer so far. So weed is quite a challenge for the starting community gardeners. I was glad I could help out; a sort of substitution for missing my own 20 m2 in Wageningen.

Self sustenance in food. Once a dismissed and declining (if we could help them) ‘farming system’. Bound to disappear under influence of progress; by ever increasing economies of scale and market integration. However, self sustenance or small scale production is loosing its negative connotation of backwardness. It is being redefined and revalued in both developed and developing countries, in both urban and rural circumstances (see yeomanry).

Our global agro-food industry has not been able to reduce hunger as it privileges capital accumulation for already wealthy elites while externalizing environmental and social costs to societies. The consolidation of power in the food chain, the world food crisis and environmental degradation have instigated a variety of movements towards self reliance and community focus, towards returning to a scale which can be influenced. It can be seen as a re-appropriation of a sense of self determination and autonomy to increase resilience of livelihoods and to reduce dependence on situations with high levels of power asymmetries.

While we do not accept anything less than democracy to rule our societies we are nearly being ruled by autocracy in the food chain, hidden behind the myth of ‘consumer choice’. The diversity of food and farming initiatives emerging, points to a process of democratizing food, the people’s right to

“healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (Food First)

Sioux City and Community Development

Posted on June 9, 2009 by Petra Derkzen

Monday, I embarked on a 15 day travel with Cornelia and Jan Flora, stopping by various meetings, projects and conferences in a south west direction from Ames, Iowa to Arizona and back. The amount of car miles involved would get me twice around the Netherlands I suppose. We started with a meeting in Sioux City, a city in the north west of Iowa bordering Nebraska.

We are meeting in a recently restored old boiler building which once served 46 building in this neighborhood. This old industrial neighborhood is being redeveloped as Sioux City tries to reinvent itself as an arts and cultural city. However, its history is tightly connected to agriculture through the stock yards, the traditional trading place for farm animals. Therefore it stays as somebody said “a cowmen’s town with an opera”.

Well, I heard last night that it was not only about men. Traditionally, the stock yard was surrounded by cowboy saloons and brothels. The brothels, where a Madame ruled, were important places for local business and access to capital.The Madame had a very powerful position and was often involved in providing micro loans and other financial services in a time where banks were not easily accessible.

However, we are here for another type of community development…. Faculty members of 5 Midwestern universities discuss here the Community Development On-line Master’s Program in which they are involved together. This is quite a unique situation, a full online course offered jointly by the universities of Iowa State, North Dakota State, Kansas State, South Dakota State and Nebraska-Lincoln under the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance.

The Community Development Program began in the fall of 2005, and it was initially funded through a National Higher Education grant. Since the grant has ended, the program continued and supports itself. Students in the program are from all over the United States, as well as other countries. Many of them combine the Master with their (community) work and/or family. The program won two awards in 2008, a state and a national award. Jan and Cornelia Flora are both involved in the Program as teachers and Jan Flora won two grants in 2008 which allow for the development of two new courses within the Master, one on Sustainable Communities and the other on Immigrants in Communities.

Online Bachelor and Master programs are becoming rapidly popular. For universities, such as those in the Midwest it represents an opportunity to new attract students to universities in States which show a downward demographic trend. And the online – placeless programs also attract new categories of students, such as those who are forced to come out of retirement because of financial problems and need to ‘rewire’ themselves.

Rural Sociology Wageningen University

Tag Archives: Iowa