Old 99 farm, Week of Apr 19, 2015

We got the chickens moved to the ‘eggmobile’ so they are on pasture again, after the winter in Florida (the greenhouse). I wonder if you will notice any difference in flavour or colour of eggs in coming weeks?

Some new greens to offer: rapini, arugula mixed salad. Still lots of kale.

Now for your piece of the blogosphere that should unseat you. Because of the momentous Paris Climate Summit later this year, you can expect to confront reams of news and pseudonews on the topic of Climate Disruption, Adapation, Mitigation.

I am quoting advice from Joe Romm at Climate Progress on how to discern the substantive from the fluff and even intentional disinformation. (http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/17/3647947/climate-change-bs-guide/)
“This may turn out to be one of the most important years in world history. The leading nations of the world are finally making serious pledges to address the greatest preventable threat to health and well-being of humanity, leading up to the Paris climate talks in December.”

“In the interest of time, let’s cut directly to the second most important thing you’ll read on climate change this year, the time-saving secrets:

1. Skip climate articles by people who think the problem is hopeless or intractable — because it most certainly is not.
2. Skip articles written by George Will and his ilk.
3. Skip articles — especially longer climate essays — by authors who don’t explicitly tell you what temperature target or CO2 concentration target they embrace and how they’d go about attaining it.
4. Skip articles embracing Orwellian terms like “good Anthropocene.”

I encourage you to read the whole article, and yes, bookmark that website. We all need to become informed of what the scientists and policy makers are saying.

Healthy eating
Ian and Cami

ps we need more egg cartons and 750ml yoghurt tubs.

Rhubarb and lettuce from O 99

I should have listed salad greens and rhubarb, both now in the greenhouse, ready to harvest. Radishes and buttercrunch lettuce too.

Old 99 Farm, Week of Apr 12, 2015

More greens each week, though the quantities are still small. So be quick and get the greens you want. Seedlings are started for lots of lettuces, chard, peppers, tomatoes, onions, cabbages, and more.

Where to get credible nutritional information? I came across this essay and quote it below. It’s a blog post from Jan 30, 2015, by Tina Paxton, (“I live on .6 acres in a ‘sub-rural’ coastal community, NC. I have a BA in Human Relations and an MA in Nutrition but currently earn a paycheck doing research and adding info to a database.”)
You can read more at http://www.permies.com/t/2776/food-medicine/Weston-Price-Foundation.

Check out http://www.westonaprice.org/about-the-foundation/beginner-tour/ for more on WAFP.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at what the WAPF teaches/preaches as well as what Paleo/Primal teaches. There are many similarities (bone broth, the love of butter…) and there are a few disagreements (grains). It is one of those situations where I wish they would focus on their agreements and not separate on their disagreements.

Both camps have their dogmatism but I think WAPF is more entrenched and less flexible on their dogma (Fermented Cod Liver Oil and High Vitamin Butter Oil being their most dogmatic doctrines) than the Paleo/Primal folks are. I prefer the flexibility of Paleo/Primal perhaps for no better reason that I tried the FCLO and HVBO and as God is my witness they both made me ill! I’ll get my vitamin A and D in other forms, thanks!

Where they all agree:

1. Processed foods are killing us.
2. Animal fat and coconut oil are good for us.
3. vegetable oils are bad.
4. Soy – bad.
5. GMOs – bad
6. EAT REAL FOOD
7. Eat fermented food.
8. BONE BROTH ROCKS — drink lots of it!
9. Animal protein (pastured) is good for us (some disagreement in how much).

Healthy Eating,
Ian and Cami

Old 99 Farm, week of Apr 5th 2015

The lambs have started dropping, so far 12 from 5 ewes and they are fun to watch. You might bring your kids to the farm in next couple weeks to watch them.

Some of the first crops planted this year are now large enough to harvest limited quantities, eg kale, lettage, spinach.

As of Apr 5th, we can offer 40 items including the following crops: spinach, baby kale, early white cabbage (lettage), collards, celeriac, carrots, and green onions. There are lots of eggs. My flour mill is back in service so I can offer whole ground Red Fife Wheat flour.

Camelia is cooking prepared foods from our produce: garlic pesto, cucumber relish, quiches (on order).

Meats
I have sufficient ground beef, 5 lambs in the freezer, as well as veal. Folks are starting to ask about placing orders for roasting chickens for next summer. Yes you can, leave me a deposit of $11 a bird, minimum 5 birds.

On the Climate

We may be witnessing the start of the long-awaited jump in global temperatures. There is “a vast and growing body of research,” as Climate Central explained in February. “Humanity is about to experience a historically unprecedented spike in temperatures.”

A March study, “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change,” makes clear that an actual acceleration in the rate of global warming is imminent — with Arctic warming rising a stunning 1°F per decade by the 2020s.
The fact that NOAA projects that the current El Niño could last most of 2015 means we are still on track for what is likely to be the hottest calendar year on record — very possibly beating 2014 by a wide margin (0.1°C).

And record global temps mean extreme temperatures and weather locally. So far this year, “five nations or territories have tied or set all-time records for their hottest temperature in recorded history,” explains meteorologist Jeff Masters.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/02/3640842/global-warming-jump-imminent/

Healthy eating
Ian and Camelia

Old99 Farm Week of Mar 31 2015

As of March 31, we can offer 45 items including the following crops: celeriac, carrots, and green onions. There are lots of eggs. My flour mill is back in service so I can offer whole ground Red Fife Wheat flour.

Camelia is cooking prepared foods from our produce: garlic pesto, cucumber relish, quiches (on order).

Meats
I have sufficient ground beef, 5 lambs in the freezer, as well as veal. Folks are starting to ask about placing orders for roasting chickens for next summer. Yes you can, leave me a deposit of $11 a bird, minimum 5 birds.

Eggs
My regular price is $6/XL doz. I sell mixed size dozens that weigh at least 588 gm (medium), 672 grams, the ‘large’ size dozen, and Extra Large, 770gm plus carton. Please bring in recycled cartons.

Raw Honey
There remains about 10L of 2014 honey. Will have again in June. You bring your jar and fill it here, or buy in prefilled mason jars.

A 2013 quote from Wendell Berry, American agrarian, writer and activist, now in his 80s,“The ruling ideas of our present, very destructive national or international economy are: competition, consumption, globalism, corporate profitability, mechanical efficiency, technological progress, upward mobility—and in all of them there is the implication of acceptable violence against the land and the people. We, on the contrary, must think again of reverence, humility, affection, familiarity, neighborliness, cooperation, thrift, appropriateness, local loyalty. These terms return us to the best of our heritage. They bring us home.” {http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/17778/local-economies-to-save-the-land-and-the-people}

Says permaculture educator Albert Bates in his recent post to www.peaksurfer.blogspot.ca/
“We list our tool kit: biochar, ecovillage design, permaculture, holistic management, keyline water systems, native agroforestry, alley cropping cell divisions, constructed wetlands and chinampas, leaf protein extraction, bioenergy crops that first produce food, and productive, satisfying and fun things for people to be doing together.”

I see a connection between these two: do you?

Healthy Eating,
Ian and Camelia

Old 99 Farm, week of Mar 15, 2015

This is the week of the spring Solstice, Mar 21, daylight hours now over 12 hours, sunrise 7:30, sunset 7:26 today.

Some folks have been asking about pork for next year. I am getting three weaners again to grow up for meat in the fall. A side of pork typically yields about 4 ham roasts, 1 pkg side ribs, 12 loin chops, 12 sirloin/butt chops, 2 shoulder roasts (4lb each), 2 hocks, 12 lb sausage/ground and 8 lb bacon. I ask for a deposit when you place your order of $50. When butchering time approaches I’ll contact you for details on how you want the side dressed.

I had this comment about the beef liver recently: “Cooked some of your cow liver tonight and, to my surprise, it was superbly delicious and tender (never having had much success cooking liver in the past) – soaked it in milk for an hour before pan frying – yum.”
Based on that Cami and I had liver for the first time in a while. And I agree!

I’ll run the special on stewing hens and ground beef for one more week, then back to normal price.

Healthy eating,
Ian and Cami

Old 99 Farm Week of Mar 9 2015

As of March 9th, we can offer 50+ items including the following crops: celeriac, carrots, squashes (delicata), mizuna and green onions. There are lots of eggs. My flour mill is back in service so I can offer whole ground Red Fife Wheat and Spelt flour.

Camelia is cooking prepared foods from our produce: garlic pesto, cucumber relish, quiches (on order).

“…it’s possible that people are now looking for an experience that can’t be found in a McDonald’s: the experience of eating in a restaurant that’s not owned by a multinational corporation, a restaurant where we can thank the owners for the fine meal and help support their families and employees, who just might receive a living wage. That might be the real “happy meal” we’ve been waiting for."
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/as-sales-slump-at-mcdonald-s-the-fast-food-icon-takes-a-walk-on-desperation-row

Well, you don’t say! I hadn’t seen any news about fastfood restaurant sales trends for many months, so this one popped out. The tough door to door campaigns of getting citizens to vote with their dollars and eat out less, buy basic ingredients, eat local, in season, organic if possible, may be gaining some traction. But it’s got a long way to go.

How to make sense of the world, it’s contradictions, violence, inaction on blatantly compelling issues? I’m coming around to the idea of ‘thinking in systems’ after reading a basic book by that title by Dana Meadows, lead author of Limits to Growth study in the 70s.
For we now have the computational models to reflect much of the complexity of hte natural world and the basic reality that ‘everything is connected’. She has a list of 12 leverage points, places to intervene in a system, that she distilled from decades of study of many different kinds of systems. The least potent is Numbers: such as stats, subsidies, taxes and standards. The second most potent is "Paradigms: the mindset out of which the system – it’s goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters, arises. We all can work here she says, quoting Thomas Kuhn: keep pointing out the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm and keep speaking and acting boldly from the new one. Work with the vast middle ground of people who are open minded. And so on, I encourage you to read the book, only 200 pgs and visit www.thinkinginsystems.org. for more tools and perspectives.

We have planted flats of long germination root crops and some salad greens, prepped more of the greenhouse and created a wish list for the summer garden. If you are thinking you’d like a place to plant some veggies of your own, come here and do it. If you might need someone to grow your transplants, bring us the seeds.

Specials still on for stewing hens and ground beef, a dollar per kg off the usual price.

Healthy Eating,
Ian and Cami

Old 99 Farm, week of Mar 1st 2015

Apparently this blog has not been transmitted for the last two weeks. If you did get a post from me, pls send me a reply.

Here is what I sent out last week:

Specials this week: stewing hens: a dollar off per kg ($6/kg) and ground beef, a dollar off ($13.40), both pasture raised and finished.

Looks like we’re in for below normal temperatures for the rest of the month, about 15dC below in fact. While Alaska and the North face a heat wave. See a powerful interactive site put out by U Maine showing graphics on global climate changes. http://cci-reanalyzer.org

Furthermore, about 10 percent of the world’s food is produced by overpumping groundwater. In essence, we are using tomorrow’s water to meet today’s needs — a theft from the future likely to grow as droughts worsen and spread. [due to climate change, says National Geographic]
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/17/climate-change-poses-existential-water-risks/

Is there too much ‘apocalyptic climate news’ and is it counterproductive? Joe Romm at the best-of-class website, ClimateProgress, has tackled that one several times. He says no, and shows why here: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/02/22/3617410/oscars-doomsday-climate-messages/, “The two greatest myths about global warming communications are 1) constant repetition of doomsday messages has been a major, ongoing strategy and 2) that strategy doesn’t work and indeed is actually counterproductive.” In fact there is not nearly enough information getting out to the public (that would be us_) for informed policy action.

But here at Old 99 we try our best, and bring you a couple of snippets so you can talk the kids at breakfast (or to the parents, as the case may be ).

Cami and I got started on greenhouse planting this weekend, with three greens crops in the ground: lettuce, arugula and mesclun mix. Not that they’ll germinate any time soon, but when the soil does heat up to about 10dC, they’re be waiting!

We have many pork, beef and lamb cuts in the freezers, eggs, flour and root cellar crops. Plus the specials mentioned above.

Old 99 Farm, week of Feb 21 2015

Specials this week: stewing hens: a dollar off per kg ($6/kg) and ground beef, a dollar off ($13.40), both pasture raised and finished.

Looks like we’re in for below normal temperatures for the rest of the month, about 15dC below in fact. While Alaska and the North face a heat wave. See a powerful interactive site put out by U Maine showing graphics on global climate changes. http://cci-reanalyzer.org

Furthermore, about 10 percent of the world’s food is produced by overpumping groundwater. In essence, we are using tomorrow’s water to meet today’s needs — a theft from the future likely to grow as droughts worsen and spread. [due to climate change, says National Geographic]
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/17/climate-change-poses-existential-water-risks/

Is there too much ‘apocalyptic climate news’ and is it counterproductive? Joe Romm at ClimateProgress has tackled that one several times. He says no, and shows why here: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/02/22/3617410/oscars-doomsday-climate-messages/, “The two greatest myths about global warming communications are 1) constant repetition of doomsday messages has been a major, ongoing strategy and 2) that strategy doesn’t work and indeed is actually counterproductive.” In fact there is not nearly enough information getting out to the public (that would be us_) for informed policy action.

But here at Old 99 we try our best, and bring you a couple of snippets so you can talk the kids at breakfast (or to the parents, as the case may be ).

Cami and I got started on greenhouse planting this weekend, with three greens crops in the ground: lettuce, arugula and mesclun mix. Not that they’ll germinate any time soon, but when the soil does heat up to about 10dC, they’re be waiting!

We have many pork, beef and lamb cuts in the freezers, eggs, flour and root cellar crops. Plus the specials mentioned above.

Healthy eating,
Ian and Camelia

Old 99 Farm, week of Feb 15 2015

Just finished a 485 page book, The Third Plate, by well-respected chef/author, Dan Barber. Yes, it’s about food and food production, and it’s provocative.

For example,“At the heart of today’s optimistic farm-to-table food culture is a dark secret: the local food movement has failed to change how we eat. It has also offered a false promise for the future of food. Our concern over factory farms and chemically grown crops might have sparked a social movement, but even the most enlightened eating of today is ultimately detrimental to the environment and to individual health.”

He’s a permaculturist, without using the word, and, judging by the encyclopedic range of quotes and books listed in the bibliography, he hasn’t heard of it. No matter. It’s wonderful when ‘earth care, people care, fare share’ can be invoked without mentioning the ‘p’ word.

Example: “Food production is a disturbance, but the goal is to “disturb feelingly,” to disturb in a way that mimics natural systems. Whether you’re talking about a goose, a fish, or raising wheat, you’ve got to intimately know the environment from which it is coming and mimic nature to produce the best flavor.”

My point? Most people here on this list are interested in healthy food that tastes good. But care less about the systemic consequences of how that food is produced. We should, because if we don’t, one household at a time, we’re just as responsible as Monsanto, laggard politician or any monocrop farmer of ruining the world we live in. And that to such a degree that our children will curse our graves.

The solution, Barber says, lies in the “third plate”: an integrated system of vegetable, grain, and livestock production that is fully supported—in fact, dictated—by what we choose to cook for dinner. The third plate is where good farming and good food intersect. See his TED talks at http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish

And in other news…

In its most recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated how much carbon we can emit and still keep a decent chance of limiting warming to two degrees above pre-industrial levels. This is known as a carbon budget. Two degrees is the internationally-accepted point beyond which climate change risks become unacceptably high.

As of 2010, we could release a maximum of about 1000 billion more tonnes of carbon dioxide and still have a 50:50 chance of staying below two degrees, according to the IPCC.

A very recent paper (published online in Nature, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v517/n7533/full/nature14016.html on Jan 7 2015) compares this allowable carbon budget with scientists’ best estimate of how much oil, gas and coal exist worldwide in economically recoverable form, known as “reserves”.

Were we to burn all the world’s known oil, gas and coal reserves, the greenhouse gases released would blow the budget for two degrees three times over, the paper finds.

The implication is that any fossil fuels that would take us over-budget will have to be left in the ground. Globally, this equates to 88 per cent of the world’s known coal reserves, 52 per cent of gas and 35 per cent of oil, according to the new research.

For us Canadians, that means 75/24/82 percent of oil, gas and coal respectively. Just consider how THAT will affect your standard of living???

Here at the farm, we had the mercury dip to -30dC last night; it’s finally in a range where Celcius sounds a bad as Fahrenheit! Frozen water lines, tractors that won’t start, frozen combs on roosters. Global warming is a misnomer, it should be climate weirding, because even these deep freezes are a consequence of global climate balancing.

Yes we have food. Delicious food, tho perhaps not as good as Dan Barbers. You will enjoy the carrots for sure. Pre cut squash in one kg bags, frozen, celeriac, leeks, and green onions, as well as eggs, flour and meats.

Healthy eating,
Ian and Camelia