December Greetings

Hello!

I hope you are well. We are staying warm on the farm while we are visited by winter weather already. We had an ice storm that coated our farmyard in a thick layer of smooth ice. Of course my two boys got out their hockey sticks and were very pleased.

Here are some winter photos from our farm.

obesity graphically represented

Hi Friends,
I just visited this link and was bowled over by the graphic representation on how obesity is growing over a short period of time. When you see this map of the USA, there is a time progression effect.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/fit.nation/obesity.map/

It makes a big impact, doesn't it! Oh dear.

I am going to go dig some carrots in my garden. We have a chance of snow next week.

Best Wishes,
Wende

view from the cupola

Hello!

We repainted our barns recently. Did any of you ever read the Eric Carle story where the father gets a VERY LONG ladder to get the moon for his daughter? Well, we got out the VERY LONG ladder! Not feeling so athletic this year, we also rented a bucket lift for the tricky spots. The panoramic view from the roofline is fantastic, so I snapped some pictures to share with you of the harvest season here in Colo Iowa.

We have a handful of organic turkeys unspoken for. If you want one for Thanksgiving, you may want to purchase it now. They are hen turkeys 11 to 14 lbs average, so if you are having a huge gathering, you will want more than one. If you don't want it shipped on the next opportunity (Monday October 22) then send me an email to hold your turkey until the Monday of your choice. The last Monday I suggest shipping them is Monday November 12 because the following week would have the turkey arrive on Wednesday, the day before the holiday and not give you enough time to thaw and prepare the turkey properly.

"Meat of the Month Club" members will get a turkey in their November shipment, so no need to buy one! Meat of the Month club is a great gift for the person who has everything, or someone you are helping make healthy choices. We can send a gift card with the first shipment, just let us know it's a gift. Every month is a different variety selection so it is a real culinary adventure! The variety and manageable size make it ideal for people with no freezer or small household size. On our website, the meat of the month club option is a choice under the "buy now" tab.

Buffalo

Hi Friends,

I hope you are having a good week.

My husband took this photo at the nearby prairie restoration state preserve.

I was able to look up, and wrote this poem.

Buffalo

The only thing scaled to match the prairie itself
the herds of white cumulous clouds
as clean and as slow as the Ice Age
Traveling in one direction,
unspoilable ghosts of the bison
unstoppable by us at that height now

The element wind invisible and dominant here
chewing our feeble constructions like cud
covering in giant grasses anything we build to ourselves
in a week or four decades
more fertility than all the chubby creatures of Iowa could ever hope to devour

Where will we migrate
who will remember us
how long will our wooden palace remain
where fecundity is meted out to mice and crickets and farmers

Antibiotic resistant bacteria in water

Hi Friends,
The Union of Concerned Scientists' newsletter this week mentioned a study in Science Daily. Scientists have warned for many years that the routine use of antibiotics in food animal production leads to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that makes it harder for doctors to treat sick people. Consumers are advised to cook meat well to kill off bacteria, but this measure does not eliminate the threat of antibiotic resistance.

The study by researchers at the University of Illinois found that bacteria in groundwater harbored antibiotic-resistant genes that could be linked directly to area hog confinement operations and to underground seepage of excess manure stored in large pits known as lagoons. The study illustrates that antibiotic-resistant bacteria originating in factory farmed animals can make their way to humans through the environment as well as on food. Researchers link antibiotic use at conventional hog confinement facilities to antibiotic-resistant genes in groundwater.

Organic meat production at Wholesome Harvest doesn't use antibiotics or lagoons. Our small family farms produce meat by hand in small quantities in low density, using organic pastures.

You can vote with your fork for good food and safe water by trying our organic certified Berkshire pork. Please tell a friend about this option. If two of your friends become new customers, we will give you a free sausage variety package with your next order! Just email us the names of the two friends who bought, and we will email you the coupon code to use!

Have a great weekend,
Wende

llamas and coyotes

Dear Friends,
I hope you are well!
On Saturday August 25, I will be a guest on Phil Lempert's nationally
syndicated food talkshow, "Before You Bite." The program is carried
by Sirius satellite radio and my section is 11:45am Eastern time. I
am bit nervous! Please tell me what you thought of the discussion,
which will be on the need for traceable food. Phil is trying to share the truth behind food and help people make smart food choices, which is great.


I have been really busy canning vegetables, I am sorry I haven't added more posts in August. So far, I have made a couple different pickle recipes and tomato sauce. I have frozen beans and corn for the winter.

Here is a photo of our llamas, who guard the sheep from coyotes. Having llamas is a humane alternative for coyote control instead of trapping or shooting coyotes. The llamas are protective of the sheep and will defend the flock. My kids named the llamas "Baa Baa" and "Cuzco". Since they have come to live with us, we have had no successful attacks.

My husband eloquently describes organic farming as working with the ecology, not against it, so that all the natural inhabitants in the ecology continue to live there, but in balance.

Have a great weekend!

Rose Bowl here we come!

This weekend Wholesome Harvest entered its first float in the "Colo Days" parade. Colo is a town of 700 people and like most other small towns in Iowa, once a year it has a local festival. The weekend events bring us together with outdoor activities and communal meals.

The activities this year included "outhouse races" with teams of four pushing outhouses on wheels through obstacle courses and a pig wrestling contest. I sat in the back bleachers at the pig wrestling event, hoping to stay clean, but in the end I was still splashed with what we will optimistically call "mud."

Big thanks to the Wholesome Harvest farm kids that rode on the float. Most floats throw candy. We wouldn't do that!!!! Instead, we passed out packets of vegetable and flower seeds. People liked that. Our float was called "It's fun to grow and eat local food" to tie in with the parade's theme this year, "It's fun to play in Colo."

The Real Green Revolution

Some really interesting studies out. . .

The popular wisdom is that the introduction of chemically intensive farming was a "green revolution" that would feed more people and aid farmers. However data shows that the successful marketing of herbicides to farmers does not increase their profits. . .or their yields.

The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture recently released the results of their "Long-Term Agricultural Research" (LTAR) experiments. They found in Iowa that organic production increases yields and builds soil quality. By the fourth year in an organic crop rotation, they found that organic corn and soybean yields rose above conventionally gown fields. The improving performance in the organic plots is attributed to soil quality improvements that resulted form the organic certified land stewardship techniques. Thre was more soil organic matter, enhanced microbial activity in more diverse communities of organisms, and reduced soil acidity.

To further support these results, an unrelated study cited in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science" published on June 12 projects that pesticides and other soil contaminants are reducing crop yields by about one third because of impaired nitrogen fixation and plant signaling. The most widely used persticide in the US--glyphosate-- or "Roundup" is known to be directly toxic to a number of soil microorganisms, including some responsible for nitrogen fixation.

So much for chemical companies solving world hunger.

Farming as art

After the wonderful dinner on Saturday with a group of friends, my host asked me whether farming is an art. Being an artist who lives on a farm, I had a hard time initially answering his question. I mulled it over and formed this opinion:

Art is a compulsion, an involuntary process, like retching. Artists are compelled into their work like a pregnant woman is compelled to start a full term labor until the delivery of a new creation. Organic farming is not art.

The organic farmers whom I know enter into their work voluntarily and knowingly, like ecological missionaries. Farming (when not soldiering against the natural system) is a voluntary testimony of faith, an act of daily worship and submission to God’s natural system. The net result is not a new creation, but the stewardship of creation.

The artists whom I know channel something inside that must come out. The farmers in contrast orient themselves willingly to larger forces that flow around them symbiotically. Both farmers and artists become great by the degree of their compliance and humility in the process.

Thank you Jake!

Good Day!

I would like to tell you about Jake. Jake grew up in Iowa on a farm. Later his folks moved to town when it didn't work out how they wished. Jake went to Iowa State University and had a double major in anthropology and marketing. He is very interested in Fair Trade companies and wanted to work for one after he graduated, thinking they were all in Latin America, or at least really far away from Iowa. He was pleasantly surprised to see our internship posting for a Fair Trade Meat marketing internship, in Iowa and just 20 minutes away from campus so he applied.

Jake worked with us during his Junior and Senior year, helping us very conscientiously. After graduation, he and a friend decided to set out on an adventure to a big city, so we lost him to the allure of Chicago. We are thrilled to learn he attained a job in the organic food industry, for an organic food research company in Chicago.

I want to thank Jake here for his contributions and wish him the very best in his future endeavors!

Garden Update

Last week brought the first day of summer and first serious tornado watch for our area. No tornado touchdown in our neighborhood, just some much needed rain.

My evening pasttime is working in my vegetable garden. The vegetables are to feed my family. We eat most of them fresh. This year, we are raising potatos, radishes, cucumbers, brussel sprouts, lettuce, kohlrabis, onions, snap peas, herbs, cutting flowers, filet beans, pumpkins, sweet corn, popcorn, brocolli, zucchini and turnips. I do a little canning, mostly tomato sauce, pickles, jam and applesauce.

Here are some photos of the great view I have while I am weeding. I learn so much from weeds, especially in July. In May and June, I feel competent, current with weed pulling. Then in July, they seem to become monstrous overnight. As I pull these big ones out with all my strength, they remind me that selective vision or lassitude brings on bigger problems that are harder to clean up than little issues that could be resolved on a daily basis.

I hope your week is a good one,
Wende

Children's Studies on effects of Organic Diet

Hello Friends,

I hope your week has had the fair weather that mine has.

I read two studies which encouraged me to keep at my work.

The first was a report by The Center for Advancement of Health. It reported that school age children who ate organic foods instead of conventional foods had six times lower levels of pesticide by-products in their bodies.

The second study was by The National Institute of Health. The study had 23 children aged 3 to 11 who ate their normal diet for the first three days. Researchers found all 23kids had metabolites of malathion and chloropyrifos pesticides in their urine when they enrolled in the study.

For the next five days, the children ate organic replacements of many foods in their usual diet. As soon as they switched to organic diets, these pesticide metabolites dropped and remained at zero levels until "conventional" food was reintroduced. In the final week, the children resumed their normal diet and the metabolites of pesticides returned.

The authors of the study "Environmental Health Perspectives" wrote: "We were able to demonstrate that an organic diet provides a dramatic and immediate protective effect against exposures to organophosphorus pesticides that are commonly used in agricultural production."

Planting seeds in the dark

Hi Friends,

I was driving home in the evening, one of those days where you wonder what you have less of....time or money...and I drove by a field. There was a tractor with its headlights on, in the field.

Now, in the autumn, you will see tractors in the fields in the dark, harvesting the corn, using their headlights to navigate the tall jungles of corn that we plant here in Iowa.

But this was the first time that I recall seeing a farmer out so late, planting in the dark. This made a big impression on me. He had a huge 12 row planter and the task of driving back and forth in the dark, being able to see the scratches of the last pass in the dark, and getting the rows straight and spaced right seemed impossible.

Farmers take operating loans out in the spring, that they can only repay with the sale of their harvest. The seeds are very expensive. The breath was knocked out of me, to imagine the situation the fellow was in, to have to plant in the dark. He had less time, or at least less patience, than even me. The sight drove home how we all feel leveraged and short of resources, and how I can be thankful for what I do have.

It also made me impressed again by the sheer grit that farmers have to hang on to their way of life. His act of planting in the dark may have been an act of defiance against the odds, or pure optimism. I don't know him, but I think of him often this month.

Do you have any recipes you want to share? I would like to feature one of your recipes each week. It would be neat to share the reasons that you eat organically and farmer direct, along with the recipe.

Have a very happy holiday weekend,
Wende

earth day 2007

Hello,

I celebrated Earth Day by planting a tree in between rain showers. How did you celebrate? It was wonderful to feel the dirt and dig holes with my 4 year old daughter.

I designed this T-shirt for our staff and board tonight. It is for our annual retreat. We are going to be talking about the "whys" and the "now" at our retreat, but I hope that as we wear it around in public later, that it will provoke a dialogue or make people think about stewardship quietly to themselves.

April Rains

Hello Friends!

This is the view of our valley with our farmstead in the distance. Do you like the writings of Wendell Berry? I was so excited to meet him last week! He was in town to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. (Please check out their good work at www.leopold.iastate.edu.) So I drank in his poetry last week to commemorate the occasion. He signed a book for me: "To Wende Elliott with pleasure --Wendell Berry"!

We are quite wet here in Iowa. Here is my poem of the week:

Prairie Schooner

Six inches of rain
furious at the house
for being unbending and larger than the grasses
so unrelentingly pelts us

Gravel roads impassably soft
we laugh at the white capped waves that chop
the farm fields forming unlikely coastlines.

As frightened as the children of the howling
wind and house that fairly pitches and rises
our schooner on the prairie

limitations are a blessing

Good afternoon,

Since I live in a house where poultry look in my windows too, I have to share this quotation I read about an artist:

“Who was the wisest person I ever met in my entire life? … It was the graphic artist Saul Steinberg, who like everybody else I now, is dead now. I could ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl. He was born in Romania, in a house where, according to him, “the geese looked in the windows.” …Saul said, “There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself….what you respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.” --Kurt Vonnegut, Man Without a Country, p. 135

So, the visual of the geese looking in the windows, and the humans looking back, made me chuckle, but this section really moved me for another reason.

It made me think about my limitations, as a person and as a manager at Wholesome Harvest. Normally I wrestle with my personal limitations, and this passage made me realize how they are a gift that refines us and teaches us to improvise, survive, and build capacity from where we are today. So as I work my piece of art-- my life and my life work at Wholesome Harvest, I hope I can "get over" the shortages and make art with what I do have.

Then I thought about how this is true for all people: the organic consumers are struggling with how to buy the safest, best food for their families on limited budgets with limited information, while the organic farmers have grand plans and ideals for improving their farms but have limited funds and time to pursue their dreams.

I am glad we are part of the same masterpiece in progress!

ABCs for Grown Ups

Hello Folks,
I would like to thank Lindsey for working as our intern last semester. We are located close to Iowa State University and have the good fortune of having a college intern every semester. We have had many interns who had a farm upbringing, but Lindsey is our first intern to have been raised on an organic certified farm. It was really exciting to have a second generation organic community member in our midst! Here is a photo of Lindsey outside our offices (did I tell you we have a rural location?)

I read these ABCs for Grown-ups and wanted to share them with you. Unfortunately, the author wasn't listed. Do you know who wrote them? Extra credit if you know what xeriscape means and practice it!

Accept differences
Be kind
Count your blessings
Dream
Express thanks
Forgive
Give freely
Harm no one
Imagine more
Jettison anger
Keep confidences
Love truly
Master something
Nurture hope
Open your mind
Pack lightly
Quell rumors
Reciprocate
Seek wisdom
Touch hearts
Understand
Value truth
Win graciously
Xeriscape
Yearn for peace
Zealously support a worthy cause

Harmony in the Dog house

Hello Community,

I hope your springtime has sprung. The songbirds came back to the farm last weekend, and it is truly glorious to hear their songs again.

Here is a funny photo from my farm. Our farm dog, Lucy is very gentle. She is a big Bernese mountain dog, with a big dog house that my kids play in. The hen laid some eggs in there, and Lucy obliged to loan the house out to her for the duration. Then the kittens decided they liked it in there too. Since the name of our farm is "Harmony Hill", we got a kick out of the multi-species harmony occurring in the dog house.

Have a great week!
Wende

O Pioneers!

I read Willa Cather's book this week, O Pioneers. I heartily recommend it. Here is a passage that resonated for me. Living on the prairie, it reminds me daily how flimsy and fleeting our individual lives are....

"Suppose I do will my land to their children, what difference will that make? The land belongs to the future; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's childrenn. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while."

What moved me even more was her poem that she used as a preface:
Prairie Spring

Evening and the flat land,
Rich and sombre and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading;
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity;
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.