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Community Supported Agriculture
I’ve changed my blogroll to link (under Washington) to Choice Earth’s Blog. Lori and I buy a share in Choice Earth each spring and get locally grown vegetables all summer long. Think how much energy is saved by buying food grown here, rather than diesel-hauled from a thousand miles away! Jocelyn has links to help you find a CSA near you if you’re not from “these parts.” But her blog is worthwhile in itself. Here’s a sample:
Choice Earth CSA
Choice Earth is a Community Supported Agriculture group growing fresh, local, organic, heirloom vegetables for members in Fairfield and Washington area communities. … The mission of this blog is to tell all the day-to-day stories and action that happen on an organic vegetable farm…
Sunday, May 20, 2007:
What Am I?
Sometimes identifying a vegetable in the field can be tricky. Sure, we know what the vegetable looks like on the store shelf, but are we sure we know what it looks like in the garden? Frankly, I haven’t always been able to recognize the vegetables in their natural state. Here are some of my favorite “clueless vegetable” moments …[read more]
Drop by! And I hope you find such a food source near you, too.
Tags: food, vegetables, Iowa farming, farming, food industry, community supported agriculture, green living, CSA, Choice+Earth+CSA, locally+grown, Fairfield IA, organic farming, Monte Asbury
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Pagan Abraham, father of three religions (part 1)
A sermon (and a worship gathering sequence— Proper 8 A), preached in June of ’05 at home at New Oaks Church in Washington, IA.
Monte: [God] brought [Abram] outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” (Genesis 15 NRSV)
But how? And when? Ancients thought of time differently than we do – what did it even mean? And why millions of descendants?
If you could have one thing from God, would you ask for millions of descendants? Is that what you were aching for as you came in this morning?
Abram’s world, 4,000 years ago, was almost incomprehensibly different from ours. The birth of Jesus, 2,000 years ago, in a world so different from our own, is only halfway back to Abram.
I wonder what God was really saying to Abram. I wonder how Abram understood it.
And now, after 40 centuries, I wonder how it could possibly speak to me?
The ethanol effect: When alt fuels go bad
Iowa grows corn. Miles and miles and miles of it. We don’t eat it, of course—it’s not that kind. We feed it to cattle and hogs, and we send it by the trainload to processing plants that make it into that “high-fructose corn syrup” that’s in everything else we eat. Read the labels in your pantry.
And, this year especially (the angst of the times being as it is), we plant corn in every available corner in order to save the planet (and make pretty good money) by selling it to ethanol plants.
Trouble is, it’s a little like tobacco and Kentucky: government subsidies contribute to the growth of something that we’d probably be better off without. Check out MotherJones excellent explanation:
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And it’s impact on soil conservation is not good.
Corn is a hot potato here in Iowa. Though not a lot of us are still farmers, our friends, our industry, and our economy are linked to corn in a big way. But in the long run, it’ll be a bust. We need another scheme for agriculture, and we need pioneers and politicians and professors who’ll help us get there.
Tags: corn, agriculture, farming, Iowa, ethanol, crop+subsidies, alternative+fuels, ethanol+bad, Monte Asbury