I remember my final year of undergrad had a very distinct rhythm of work, school, thesis, homework, and (if there was time) social life. An important component of these last three things revolved around a weekly visit to the Sarasota downtown farmer's market, which was held right next to the bus depot. My friend Alex, who was the only other proud morning person in our friend group, and I would go to the farmers market every Saturday morning. If we were feeling adventurous, we would take the bus straight into the heart of the market (but if we were lazy and slept in a little too late, we would head there in her car). "Going to the farmers market," by the way, mainly consisted of getting empanadas and coffee. These empanadas are the best I've ever had; a delicious, seasonally changing mix of fillings surrounded by homemade bread. Alex and I would gather together our brunch supplies, sneak them into the nearby public library, and spend the morning working on our theses, doing homework, and applying to grad schools and grants, all while dodging the one librarian who always yelled at us for eating inside the library. The empanadas and Alex's company, a near constant stream of interruptions, encouragements, and jokes, made my stress about school and our futures infinitely more bearable. After spending a few productive hours hitting the books, we would leave the library with enough time to buy late-day, leftover produce at a discount. Usually, we would return home around 3:30 or 4 and start making a leisurely dinner with whatever we had bought, right around the time the rest of our friends were just starting their days. Whenever I think about applying to this program, or finishing up the last bit of work on my undergraduate thesis, it is always intertwined with memories of the farmers market, fresh, local coffee, and delicious empanadas. Our Saturdays had rhythm and purpose, a mixture of work and pleasure, and it all revolved around the farmers market.
Therefore, this week's readings about farmers markets, and their importance in building social relations and networks as well as contributing to the local food system, are very real to me. Gillespie et al. explain how the weekly and yearly change of the seasons is reflected in the farmers market: "The regular weekly rhythm of a farmers market is itself marked by fare that shifts with the progression of the seasons." For me, this progression of the seasons also meant something else: I was graduating and moving on to the next major stage in my life. Pumpkins were just starting to appear when I finished up the last chapters of my thesis and turned in my grad school applications. The market was chilly but the kale was plentiful the month I defended my thesis. And when I found out I got into FSU and Alex was accepted into her PhD program, we celebrated with fresh-cut flowers, spinach empanadas, and iced coffee in a warm spring right before a typically hot Sarasota summer. The farmers market, more than just being a hub of activity, food distribution, community revitalization, and social interaction, was our weekly reminder that outside of our daily reality of work, school, applications, and stress, another world was constantly humming along and waiting for us to join.
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Week 10: Think of the children!
The Farms to School initiative discussed by Valianatos and Cobb presents an insight into the efforts being taken to connect students with food and counter growing obesity rates. If a Farm to School program is done right, such as at Asheville's Abernethy Elementary School, then the benefits not only include students, but also the local farmers.
The main idea here is to meet schools' healthy and fresh food demands with the local food supply. Local farmers throughout the country struggle to simply break even. But with the ability to tap into the constant demand for food provided by schools, farmers can have a continued source of revenue, giving them some certainty in a very uncertain career.
Students benefit by engaging in different forms with their food. They not only eat healthier school meals, but they learn about healthier diets and are more willing to try new foods. Plus, if the Farm to School program includes implementation of school gardens and/or farm field trips, students can learn about gardening and the agriculture system. This can even lead to student interest in future careers in agriculture, which is extremely important since the average age of American farmers is at 57 and climbing. Furthermore, Farm to School programs include added curriculum to health classes, visits from in-school chefs and farmers, and farm tours. The food and health education of these young students will continue to stick with them throughout their lives.
I particularly liked this quote from Cobb, "If we give children access to healthy food in the cafeteria, nutrition education in the classroom, and hands-on learning through school gardens, a lifetime of healthy eating can take root."
Farm to School programs, of course, have challenges in getting implemented. As Valianatos points out, the logistics of organizing and actually getting the food to the cafeteria is extremely difficult. In addition, schools are reluctant to step away from the convenience and price predictability of traditional school food. The USDA has policies in place that have to be reviewed extensively by the schools if they want to use locally sourced food. Therefore, strong leaders to push the initiative are needed and the schools' child nutrition directors must be heavily involved to actually change the cafeteria menu.
I personally never had any useful classroom training pertaining to healthy foods. Which isn't surprising when the middle school "health" teacher is extremely obese and eats donuts off his belly during class (welcome to Tennessee). I certainly never learned how to garden through school either.
What was your school experience like in terms of food? Did your childhood schools have a Farm to School program or anything similar to one? Was local food ever brought up in your class curriculum? Was gardening promoted heavily at your school?
The main idea here is to meet schools' healthy and fresh food demands with the local food supply. Local farmers throughout the country struggle to simply break even. But with the ability to tap into the constant demand for food provided by schools, farmers can have a continued source of revenue, giving them some certainty in a very uncertain career.
Students benefit by engaging in different forms with their food. They not only eat healthier school meals, but they learn about healthier diets and are more willing to try new foods. Plus, if the Farm to School program includes implementation of school gardens and/or farm field trips, students can learn about gardening and the agriculture system. This can even lead to student interest in future careers in agriculture, which is extremely important since the average age of American farmers is at 57 and climbing. Furthermore, Farm to School programs include added curriculum to health classes, visits from in-school chefs and farmers, and farm tours. The food and health education of these young students will continue to stick with them throughout their lives.
I particularly liked this quote from Cobb, "If we give children access to healthy food in the cafeteria, nutrition education in the classroom, and hands-on learning through school gardens, a lifetime of healthy eating can take root."
Farm to School programs, of course, have challenges in getting implemented. As Valianatos points out, the logistics of organizing and actually getting the food to the cafeteria is extremely difficult. In addition, schools are reluctant to step away from the convenience and price predictability of traditional school food. The USDA has policies in place that have to be reviewed extensively by the schools if they want to use locally sourced food. Therefore, strong leaders to push the initiative are needed and the schools' child nutrition directors must be heavily involved to actually change the cafeteria menu.
I personally never had any useful classroom training pertaining to healthy foods. Which isn't surprising when the middle school "health" teacher is extremely obese and eats donuts off his belly during class (welcome to Tennessee). I certainly never learned how to garden through school either.
What was your school experience like in terms of food? Did your childhood schools have a Farm to School program or anything similar to one? Was local food ever brought up in your class curriculum? Was gardening promoted heavily at your school?
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Week 9: Reflection
I remember going to Haiti when I was in third grade and was just fascinated by the presence of farm animals living among the people. Of course today I recognize this type of environment as both potential public health and environmental hazard, however, as a little girl the idea of little goats and pigs readily available pet throughout the neighborhood was my fantasy. The term "urban agriculture," initially seemed to be an oxymoron because I never imagined agriculture occurring in an urban environment.
Nonetheless, urban farming frightens me just a bit. Land use and property values have an undeniable relationship with one another. Thus, I am concerned about the potential outcome of urban agriculture to existing and future housing development for the poor. The article co-written by Professor Butler analyzed livestock in municipalities, with Tallahassee being one of the sampled locations. What interest me most from the list of cities, was the fact none of them were truly (forgive me Tallahasseeans) large urban cities except maybe Kansas City, San Antonio, and Seattle. How can something like this be implemented in New York City with limited green spaces? How do municipalities intend to control the waste products of livestock in cities? A recent trip to Wakulla Springs informed me that pets are very detrimental to a local/regional cycle as their wastes consists of nitrates, an extremely hazardous toxin to the environment, to be more particular, drinking water. While nitrates are great for fertilizing grass, they do not belong near water sources.
What goes up, must come down; so with that being said: what can planners do to assess the long term and short term impacts to the environment and public health?
Nonetheless, urban farming frightens me just a bit. Land use and property values have an undeniable relationship with one another. Thus, I am concerned about the potential outcome of urban agriculture to existing and future housing development for the poor. The article co-written by Professor Butler analyzed livestock in municipalities, with Tallahassee being one of the sampled locations. What interest me most from the list of cities, was the fact none of them were truly (forgive me Tallahasseeans) large urban cities except maybe Kansas City, San Antonio, and Seattle. How can something like this be implemented in New York City with limited green spaces? How do municipalities intend to control the waste products of livestock in cities? A recent trip to Wakulla Springs informed me that pets are very detrimental to a local/regional cycle as their wastes consists of nitrates, an extremely hazardous toxin to the environment, to be more particular, drinking water. While nitrates are great for fertilizing grass, they do not belong near water sources.
What goes up, must come down; so with that being said: what can planners do to assess the long term and short term impacts to the environment and public health?
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Week 9: Planning for Urban Agriculture
The
growth of urban areas, has caused us to become increasingly separate from where
our food is grown. Like, we have covered in class, there has been a huge push
to promote urban agriculture. However, while urban agriculture has the
potential to promote social and ecological sustainability, there has not been an
effective way to promote it. In the Mendes article, the aim was to identify
weather or not city land inventories can be used to support urban agriculture,
by looking at the capacity to support policy integration and the advancement of
ecological and social sustainability. There findings in both Vancouver and
Portland supported there purpose, however there was little public involvement
in Vancouver. In my opinion, I believe that public involvement hinders implementation
of different initiatives, I only say this because of the time involved on
informing stakeholders and supporting their interest. However, it is important
to receive public opinion, as it gives policy makers an indication of what the
citizens needs are.
In
the Kennedy article, the Growing Power Vertical farm gives major indication of
how urban gardening, can be implemented in certain cities like New York and San
Francisco. Cities like this do that have a ton of horizontal land mass that
other cities have. This system also incorporates ecological and social sustainability,
similar to what the case studies for Portland and Vancouver where attempting to
identify.
Week 9: Summary
In the Urban Agriculture research
paper, I appreciated the unique approach that was taken in order to analyze the
use of land inventories to plan for urban agriculture. Mendes explains how
the inventories represent the “practice” of suitable urban agriculture land
inventories. Also, how the stakeholders in the urban agriculture community don’t
only include farmers and gardeners, but also school principals and sanitation
workers, and public housing residents, especially foundations and city officials.
Researcher Mendes, et al. (2008)
describes urban agriculture as can include community and private gardens, edible
landscaping, fruit trees, food-producing green roofs, aquaculture, farmers
markets, small-scale farming, hobby beekeeping, and food composting
It is interesting how food system
has gone from a rural matter to now an urban issue, especially with in the
planning community. I
like how more people around the world are taking a look at urban agriculture,
which offers to make our food as "local" as possible. By growing what
we need near where we live, we decrease the "food miles" associated
with long-distance transportation. Also, urban agriculture can benefit a city
by developing the city into a more sustainable and environmentally friendly
urban space that increases shading and reduces harmful runoff.
Also, this research paper reminds me of a book called ‘Five Borough Farm: Seeding the Future of
Urban Agriculture in New York City’, because the book provides detailed
information and pictures on how urban agriculture contributes to health,
economics, social, and ecological benefits to the city of NYC.
Urban Agriculture
A few times in class and among our blog posts, there have been questions on how effectively urban planners can push to support urban agriculture. For this reason, I really appreciated the Hodgson reading on Facilitating Urban Agriculture through Planning Practice. It was interesting to see the technical side to urban agriculture, especially in comparison to the chapter from Farm City. While Hodgson gave the urban planning perspective, Farm City allowed the reader to understand the importance of a local network for a community- even one just within her eclectic neighborhood.
In my International Transportation Planning class, we had a guest speaker from the Florida Department of Transportation. One of his main duties was facilitating conversations with stakeholder who would be navigating or investing in Florida's various schemes of transport. This included the public and private sectors as well as incorporating interested nongovernmental organizations. When Hodgson mentioned the importance of educating different stakeholders to appeal to a variety of needs, I realized how crucial this is to planning in general. If you do not assess the perspectives of the people you are trying to cater to, you could easily make poor policy decisions that would result in a negative push-back from those people. When it comes to agriculture, I would see community leaders, local and related nonprofits, nutrition or dietary figures, environmental and public health officials, as well as interested planners working well collaboratively in affected positive change. Besides the stakeholders, the report also pointed out issues that we have discussed in class that need to be evaluated such as household food security, culturally appropriate food, the number and location of food sources, etc.
It also responded with what assessments could best hone in on the greatest issues of the community:
In my International Transportation Planning class, we had a guest speaker from the Florida Department of Transportation. One of his main duties was facilitating conversations with stakeholder who would be navigating or investing in Florida's various schemes of transport. This included the public and private sectors as well as incorporating interested nongovernmental organizations. When Hodgson mentioned the importance of educating different stakeholders to appeal to a variety of needs, I realized how crucial this is to planning in general. If you do not assess the perspectives of the people you are trying to cater to, you could easily make poor policy decisions that would result in a negative push-back from those people. When it comes to agriculture, I would see community leaders, local and related nonprofits, nutrition or dietary figures, environmental and public health officials, as well as interested planners working well collaboratively in affected positive change. Besides the stakeholders, the report also pointed out issues that we have discussed in class that need to be evaluated such as household food security, culturally appropriate food, the number and location of food sources, etc.
It also responded with what assessments could best hone in on the greatest issues of the community:
- Community Food Assessments
- Comprehensive Urban-Agriculture Studies
- Studies of Land Resources
As someone trying to understand the different technicalities of the planning world, it was quite effective to read about the different levels of comprehensive plans in comparison with climate change policy action. Hodgson also examined ways these goals could be accomplished on these different levels. Local level has the capacity to create tax incentives for urban agriculture, while regional level has the ability to identify working agriculture land to understand the flow of produce better. Relating specifically to climate change action, environmental threats caused by green house gases and global warming lead to municipalities including urban and periurban agriculture as a shadow recommended strategy in planning docs.
My only questions for this reading would be:
How do we identify these stakeholders well? How can we make these comprehensive plans more than an ambiguous ideal by creating a call to action? In an area where there is not a strong food justice movement, do planners have the right to try to instigate that effort without much community involvement?
My only questions for this reading would be:
How do we identify these stakeholders well? How can we make these comprehensive plans more than an ambiguous ideal by creating a call to action? In an area where there is not a strong food justice movement, do planners have the right to try to instigate that effort without much community involvement?
Monday, March 14, 2016
This post is about chickens
 |
| [RIP Big Rick] |
Depending on how much time, energy, and money you put into raising chickens, it may or may not be cost-effective. In my experience, it was slightly more expensive keeping chickens than buying eggs at the store, since chicken feed was expensive. However, the major benefit (in my opinion) was being able to control the chickens’ diet and lifestyle. Also, once I started making the chicken feed myself and selling some of the surplus eggs, I was closer to breaking even. I usually mixed a bunch of rice, greens (edible weeds), fallen fruit, some type of protein, and leftover oyster shells from the oyster men by the beach. If a chicken became sick, I also threw in some garlic to ward off disease. Every once in awhile, I bought a giant sack of (probably GMO) corn, to help keep costs low, but I tried to provide the homemade feed as often as possible, though it was more work to make it.
Reading the excerpt from Novella Carpenter’s City Farm brought me back to my first blog post, about the importance of sharing food stories. I think it’s important to intersperse narratives and stories among the more academic readings, because it allows us to personally connect with the content. The chapters in this reading reminded me of the joys and nuisances of raising animals, but also offered the interesting perspective of doing so in the urban environment. I enjoyed Carpenter’s juxtaposition of city and farm elements, which made me want to look into chicken keeping options in Tallahassee.____________________________________________________________________
3/17/16 Update:
There are free baby chicks on Craigslist!: https://tallahassee.craigslist.org/zip/5495481961.html
...In case anyone is considering keeping chickens after this week's readings and class discussion :)
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