Woo-ee canning tomato season

This year at Oasis we planted four 75 foot rows of a variety of tomatoes. Berkeley Tie Dye an heirloom, Oregon Spring an open-pollinated Bush variety, a paste tomato and Coeur de Bouaf, a French variety often called ox heart. Most of them are staked and trellised and I'm loving my new system which has the tomatoes well under control.

My new kitchen full of stainless steel sinks counters and a big 8 burner stove is able to handle three or four big pots all at once. One of them is 38 quarts and it's full of tomato right now.

The first pot of Berkeley tie dye is 38 quarts full to the very top and then stomped down once or twice to make them fit.  I used to make this first cook short so that I could strain them out and get more in the pot but now with the bigger pots it makes more sense to cook them longer with skins on. This should make the sauce richer and more flavorful as well as imbue it with more of the beneficial from the skins. Each of the varieties was quite different in cook time the longest being over three hours.  My method on sauce I call the slump test -- just take a couple of ounces and put it on a plate and see if the center pile holds up a bit and the edges don't just run watery.  

Straining is always the hard part because strainers that are available to me are all small kitchen varieties and we're too small and operation to get anything commercial. I'm leaning towards inventing some sort of Amish apparatus.  All total in this batch I processed about 168 pound representing about 21 gallons of crush and netted 23 quarts of sauce (a ratio of 3.7 to 1).  About 6 hours turn around but worth it as the sauce is exceptionally tasty.

Agrarian Games Video for You

Doesn't that look like fun?  It is sponsored by Farmers Guild

A family moment

Granddaughter, Morgen Star doesn't come by much but we lover her and am proud of her work.  Listen!

https://t.co/QMUYterGzC

— wmorgenthaler (@wmorgenthaler2) August 5, 2017

Corporate Agricultural Dumping: Growing the Wealth Gap & Harming Farmers

Big Ag harms farmers all over the world and gets rich off of your tax dollars.  Although on its face it would seem obvious that you can't sell at a loss forever and stay in business.  However nobody cares if the farmers stay in business as long as there is money to be made in the highly financialized commodities market.  That's where this Big Ag move is played.  It has long been standard US foreign policy practice to harm the stability and sustainability for lesser countries and in this way creating opportunity for exploitation and lots of profits to be made off the misery.

     The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) has used World Trade Organization formulas to document the systematic dumping of US grown agricultural commodities (specifically wheat, soybeans, corn, cotton, and rice) for two decades. They found that in the wake of the volatile commodity markets that dominated in the period from 2007 to 2013, export prices largely exceeded production costs. In recent years, however, US agricultural commodity dumping has started again. According to IATP's calculations, in 2015 US wheat was exported at 32 percent less than the cost of production, soybeans at 10 percent less, corn at 12 percent less, and rice at 2 percent less.
     Dumping clearly increases inequality between farmers in the global North and South. Less visibly, dumping also worsens incomes and increases inequality within rural America.

Corporate Agricultural Dumping: Growing the Wealth Gap:



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Cultivate.Coop

Cultivate.Coop:

PDF  http://cdi.coop/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/start-up-packet-2015-web.pdf

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Degeneration Nation: Connecting the Dots Between Factory Farms, Roundup, GMOs, and Fake 'Natural' Foods

What's in that box of food on the grocery shelf you plan on feeding your family for dinner tonight? Maybe you can look on the label.  Maybe not!

And, that would include thanking your government.  And, every one's favorite, Obama for selling you down the toxic river that goes on and on with no end.

     After decades of trying to reform public policy on food and farming, including an intense four-year battle to force mandatory labeling of GMOs (rudely terminated in 2016 when Congress and the Obama administration rammed through the outrageous DARK Act), food activists and conscious consumers find ourselves wondering “what’s the use of lobbying the government?”
     Do we really think the Trump administration, the Republican Congress, and farm state and Establishment Democrats care about the toxicity, exploitation and environmental destruction of our food system?
     The culinary directive from Congress and the White House this summer goes something like this: Don’t worry. Shut up and eat your Frankenfoods, cheap junk foods, and factory-farm meat, dairy and poultry.  Don’t worry about Monsanto’s Roundup or Dow’s neonic residues in your food and water. Don’t worry about the dubious fare at your local supermarkets, including thousands of products fraudulently labeled or advertised as “natural.”--Ronnie  Cummins, Organic Consumers Assoc.

Does this look like a source of food?
I suggest you get to "Know Your Farmer"

(Note: This is the first post in an series of what will be original articles on the subject of "A Solution to the Food Crisis: Know Your Farmer".  It will be edited in the near future with an introduction and over arching framework that will stress that we already know the way and yet we must also know the colonizer.  Keep in touch and please comment or add content.)
Degeneration Nation: Connecting the Dots Between Factory Farms, Roundup, GMOs, and Fake 'Natural' Foods:



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Current Vegetable & Fruit List

Available now for u-pick  7/14/17

Genovesi Basil -- Row #14  -- $3/8oz bunch

Ovations greens -- Row #15  -- $3/12oz bunch

These are young, tender and make a wonderfully spicy salad mix.  We eat them more than lettuce.  We also chop them small and use them as a sauteed green with eggs and polenta.  They contain 2 types of mustard, tatsoi, arrugula

Arrugula -- Row #16  -- $3/12oz bunch

Long Green Pimento Peppers -- Row #19   -- $3/pound

Santa Rosa Plums -- in campground -- $4/pound

These are at their peak of tree ripe perfection 

Yellow "Candy" Storage Onions -- Basement -- $2/pound

Kiowa Blackberries -- Next to house -- $4/basket

Nearing the end of the season

Giant Black Figs -- near little house -- $4/pound

This crop is wonderful but will be gone soon.  We well have another in a couple of months

Kohlrabi -- Row #18  -- $3/pound

The greens make a wonderful green much like collard but sweeter and the globes are bright and crunchie julienned in salads or stir fried 

Fennel -- Row #18  -- $3/pound

I do not find this to be a mysterious vegetable like many do.  Just saute it as a substitute for celery and a fried of ours made a wonderful fennel frond pesto.  Of course you can shave it into salads for a bright aromatic accent. 

Bring your own bags, use the wash up sink and scale behind the house, leave the money in the cash box at the front driveway.  But, of course we would like it if you stop and visit a bit.

Long-time Iowa farm cartoonist fired after creating this cartoon

According to the article:

     Friday received an email from his editor at Farm New cutting off their relationship a day after the cartoon was published.
     Friday’s editor said a seed dealer pulled their advertisements with Farm News as a result of the cartoon, and others working at the paper disagreed with the jokes made about the agriculture corporations.
     “When it comes to altering someone’s opinion or someone’s voice for the purpose of wealth, I have a problem with that,” said Friday. “It’s our constitutional right to free speech and our constitutional right to free press.

Orrazz: Long-time Iowa farm cartoonist fired after creating this cartoon:



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This shipping-container farm could someday solve the food desert problem -- NOT!

The Washington Post strikes again.  A uniquely bad idea as a solution to hunger, although I have no problem with it as a research project.  Our neo liberal government of the past 35 years has been unwilling to give the poor the means to be independent (like a few acres and a mule or stable housing or free child care or a minimum wage, or voice and teeth on a community board,) The state seems happy enough doling out billion dollar contracts for Katrina emergency housing that never arrive, multi-million dollar settlements to the victim of its police abuse when they prevail in court, while letting the cops go free, and encouraging speculation and gentrification with dollar signs in their eyes but with no thought nor care of the displaced.  I am especially dismayed by the heroic tone of the quote by company spokesperson, “I think simply helicoptering a farm into a food desert could be part of the solution,” as if we don't already know how to run a food pantry, a soup kitchen or a farmers market, all of which put volunteers, local farmers and staff to rewarding work rather than making a million for a company to provide a high tech, high cost, unsustainable and possibly radioactive head of lettuce. (just kidding on this last one but just look at the photo.)


The media has an unhealthy appetite for technological miracles and is not grounded in critical thought.  In essence this is just a puff piece, promoting a new business, Local Roots passing as news or real solutions. Local Roots is a hot startup with more than a million dollars of seed money competing in a rapidly growing niche market with other modular competitors like PodPonics.  It has nothing to do with helping the poor with access to food.  Otherwise they would have asked the poor first, rather than the investors.

This shipping-container farm could someday solve the food desert problem - The Washington Post:



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Americans Favor Raising SNAP Benefits, But Not Allowing Them for Candy and Soda

An overwhelming majority of Americans support food stamps.  Although we think of this as a partisan issue, in truth....Republicans are actually out in front on candy, cookies, cake, doughnuts and Soda and a majority supports the program.

The survey found overwhelming bipartisan support for limiting what SNAP benefits can be used for. Seventy-six percent (Republicans 85 percent, Democrats 68 percent) favored disallowing the purchase of candy with SNAP benefits, while 73 percent (Republicans 82 percent, Democrats 67 percent) wanted to disallow sweetened soda. A majority overall (59 percent), but not a majority of Democrats, favored disallowing cookies, cakes and doughnuts. On the other hand, a majority favored allowing chips and snack crackers and ice cream.

One problem not addressed of course is that in the food deserts where poor minorities live don't sell anything but junk food so disallowing them is disallowing food.  Obviously another solution is needed.  I would go for community run non profit food distribution centers.

This article can be read in full here:
Americans Favor Raising SNAP Benefits, But Not Allowing Them for Candy and Soda | Voice Of the People | Campaign for a Citizen Cabinet:



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