Michael Pollen Speaking

Michael Pollen returns to Colorado, to be exact Boulderado.

May 21, 2009, 7:30 PM @ Boulder Unity Church/ Boulder Bookstore, Located at 1107 Pearl Street Boulder, CO 80302

Michael Pollen is the quintessential botanical author. When an ex-girlfriends mother gave me a copy of "Botany of Desire," I immediately feel in love. Four books later, a letter to the president-elect and numerous lectures around the country his influence is becoming a movement. With the Westword launching a web feature called "Urbavore's Dilemma" a cleaver take on Pollen's Omnivores Dilemma, described by Westword as the movements bible, his impact is unmistakable.

If you want grow your perspective on the current food policies, ear Pollen's interview "When corn is king" By Matthew MacLean.

Think GlobalAct Local
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Pollan: Nutrition 'Science' Has Hijacked Our Meals -- and Our Health By Terrece McNalley Posted April 3, 2008

Farmer in Chief

I can't describe the excitement when I first read Michael Pollens letter to the President-Elect in The New York Times Magazine... For me it was monumental, he tied everything together the oil crisis, health care, food security, foreign trade, and you know what he offers as a solution.. local food economies. Mr. Pollen you are truly an American and an inspiration to us all. Not to mention that Erwan Frotin from The New York Times is a amazing photographer.

My favorite part. "Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we're not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized."

"Sipping on Petroleum"
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Dear Mr. President-Elect, 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. Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon's example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won't work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on -- but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain. http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=97

Denver's urban gardeners are digging their backyard farms

I have had the idea for Movement Victroy Garden since I graduated from CSU with a Landscape Horticulture degree. I honestly never knew what I wanted to do with my degree. Only that I loved plants. So I came up with MVG. I passed out flyers but the concept was so foreign to homeowners that I only a few ever showed intrest and fewer let me hired me to install Victroy Gardens. The following article found in Westword from April 30th has given me insperation to keep doing what I love, and that is gardening.

Here is my part of the article, "There is quite a movement," says Doug Kelley, director of Denver Animal Care and Control, which issues city permits for livestock such as chickens. "There has definitely been an upswing in permit requests. It seems like we have been getting at least a couple a week, if not more than that." In the first three months of this year, Kelley's department received eight chicken permit requests, two more than they received for all of 2008.'

Doug Kelly you are my hero!
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La Ferme de Beau à Manger is one of the most tidy and picturesque farms I've ever seen.

With the growing season just beginning, terrace upon brick terrace is primed and ready for a soon-to-be-lush sea of asparagus and strawberries and raspberries and pumpkin and spinach and lettuce and zucchini. Six-foot-tall wooden A-frames stand ready to support cucumber and snap-pea vines, while wire cages arch over seed beds in anticipation of the myriad tomatoes they'll accommodate.

And in the middle of it all, there's the penthouse of all henhouses: a stained and shingled beauty complete with a skylight, an easy-access egg door, a fully enclosed chicken run and cushy nesting boxes. Not too shabby for its feathered occupants: Annie, Marguerite, Charlotte, Rosie, Dolly and Mrs. Merriweather.

But La Ferme isn't located in some rural Colorado locale. It's in central Denver — Platt Park, to be exact — squeezed into a 2,500-square-foot back yard behind an otherwise unassuming mid-century brick bungalow. The incongruous location is a bit disorienting, especially when a fox crosses my path in the front yard when I first show up.

That's the neighborhood fox, explains John, owner of La Ferme de Beau à Manger. It's been poking around since December, when it got a taste for Charlotte: John was late one evening putting the hens into their fox-proof abode, and he found the hen in a pool of blood. Luckily, she made a full recovery, and John learned to be more diligent.

There's a lot of learning to do when it comes to backyard farming, and it's something more and more people are learning to do, John explains while sitting on the patio with a roundtable of other green-thumbed Denverites.

http://www.westword.com/2009-04-30/news/denver-s-urban-gardeners-are-digging-their-backyard-farms/1

Obamas to Plant Vegetable Garden at White House

WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of the South Lawn on Friday to plant a vegetable garden, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets — the president does not like them — but arugula will make the cut.

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at a time when obesity and diabetes have become a national concern.

“My hope,” the first lady said in an interview in her East Wing office, “is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.” Read

Yes we can
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Iraq and Washington’s ‘seeds of democracy’

‘The reason we are in Iraq is to plant the seeds of democracy so they flourish there and spread to the entire region of authoritarianism.’ - George W. Bush

When George W. Bush spoke of planting the ‘seeds of democracy’ few realized he might have had in mind Monsanto seeds.

Listen Now

Iraq is part of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, where the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers created ideal conditions for crop cultivation. Iraqi farmers have existed since approximately 8,000 B.C. and had developed the rich seed variety for almost every variety of wheat used in the world today. They did this through a system of saving a share of seeds and replanting, developing new naturally resistant hybrid varieties through the new plantings.

For years, the Iraqis had held samples of such precious natural seed varieties in a national seed bank, located, ironically, in Abu Ghraib, the city made infamous as a US military torture prison site in 2004. Following the US occupation and various bombing campaigns, the historic and invaluable seed bank in Abu Ghraib vanished, a possible further casualty of the Iraq war.

Bremer’s Pentagon advisers had very different plans for Iraq’s food future.

Iraqi agriculture was to be ‘modernized,’ industrialized and reoriented away from traditional family multi-crop farming, into US-style agribusiness enterprises, producing for the ‘world market.’ Serving the food security needs of hungry Iraqis would be purely incidental to that plan.

The CPA’s Order 81, behind the cover of complicated legal jargon, in effect, turned the food future of Iraq over to global multinational private companies, hardly the liberation most Iraqis had hoped for.

Order 81 on Intellectual Property Rights, was not negotiated between a sovereign government and the WTO, or another government. It was imposed on Iraq without debate, from Washington. According to informed Washington reports, the specific details of Order 81 on plants were written for the US Government by Monsanto Corporation, the world’s leading purveyor of GMO seeds and crops.

Iraq's new patent law: A declaration of war against farmers

Get Rich Slowly

Here are a couple of pieces from getrichslowly.org. The first is an autobiographical blog from 2008, the second a guy in boulder makes a mess in the front (what use to be) yard, not quite sure what he was thinking, what if it rained that would be mess, and the last link is on finances.

Gardening 101: Plan Today for Summer Success

The Rise of Suburban Farming

The Year-Long GRS Project: How Much Does a Garden Really Save?

I know what I get out of my garden. A few years ago I ‘did the math’ for a couple years and the garden was worth roughly $14.50 per square foot to me. I make extensive use of [TALL] trellises and trellising varieties (climbing beans, indeterminate tomatoes, vine-forming [as opposed to bush-forming] versions of cucurbits. Each is planted directly beneath the trellis with companion plants surrounding them. (PS, for a great slicer tomato, try “Mortgage Lifter” … but only if you have an outlet for the excess!)

There are, as others are noting, just a ton of things to consider. I’ve done enough math to convince myself that my time in the garden is actually worth more per hour than my time at my former job.

comment was submitted by BillinDetroit
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Human Transition

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, in their book Origins, explain the human transition from cooperative and sharing communities, to agricultural settlement:

"Why then, is recent human history characterised by conflict rather than compassion? We suggest that the answer to this question lies in the change in way of life from hunting and gathering to farming, a change which began about ten thousand years ago and which involved a dramatic alteration in the relationship people had both with the world around them and among themselves. The hunter-gatherer is part of the natural order: a farmer necessarily distorts that order. But more important, sedentary farming communities have the opportunity to accumulate possessions, and having done so they must protect them. This is the key to human conflict, and it is greatly exaggerated in the highly materialistic world we now live in."

What happens once the farmer stops farming?
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