July 22, 2010
Kristin
Today I picked up a magazine I get in the mail that had the headline “Green travel: Food lovers down on the farm”. As you can imagine, based on the title, my interest was piqued. I turn to the contents page and BAM – a large picture featuring none other than Joel Salatin himself. My little intellectual heart sank.
If you’ve followed any sort of food issues recently, you are familiar with his name. The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan – quite possibly the seminal book beginning the recent cultural critique of industrial farming – heavily features him and his farm, Polyface in Swoope, Virginia. Since the publishing of Dilemma he has also featured prominently in several food and farming themed documentaries, including Food, Inc and Fresh. But that’s not all. Magazine articles, international newspapers, speaking engagements, books, blogs, radio interviews – he’s ubiquitous. Here in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia he’s practically a celebrity. In fact, in 2009 he was Charlottesville’s Person of the Year. Personally, we’re a little sick of him. (more…)
July 17, 2010
Caleb
One thing we wanted to do this year is “sustainable farming,” according to the opening thomasFarmProject.com blurb. We’ve certainly done some gardening, and we’ve got some chickens; but we’d be hard pressed to call that farming. To be real farmers I think we’d have to (1) earn money from our labors and (2) increase our scale. (more…)
July 10, 2010
Matt
In my last post, I noted how we were introducing three new chickens into the coop. Our lone remaining chicken from the original four was given them a hard time, chasing and pecking at them. After three days of this nonsense (and three days of the smallest chickens burrowing under the coop into the “basement”), we decided to separate the big one from the others. (more…)
July 3, 2010
Matt
As you can see from this post, Kristin, Whitney, and Lucy purchased three new chickens from the good folks at Eden Farms: a grey Ameracauna, a brown Welsummer, and a tan Buff Orpington. The Ameracauna is about 10 weeks old, and the other two are about 7 weeks old. Our Red Star, Marcia, is over 20 weeks — a sizable difference. (more…)
July 1, 2010
Whitney
I know you’re all thinking to yourselves ‘I thought this was a local food YEAR not week’. As it turns out Virginia in January is not the best place and time to be eating local produce so for a while we were eating asparagus from Peru and bell peppers from California. Now that we’re well into the summer it’s possible to get lots of vegetables (and some fruit) from some combination of our garden, our CSA and farmers markets so we decided to challenge ourselves this week to only buy produce locally. (more…)
Today I picked up a magazine I get in the mail that had the headline “Green travel: Food lovers down on the farm”. As you can imagine, based on the title, my interest was piqued. I turn to the contents page and BAM – a large picture featuring none other than Joel Salatin himself. My little intellectual heart sank.