The neighborhood farm is emerging… the Wine Punk taps our maple trees

Tapped silver maple tree

The second tapped silver maple

Our neighbor and collaborator - working with a group of us to increase ultra-local food production in our hood - the Wine Punk (aka Sam Vandegrift), tapped the two silver maple trees in our front yard this week. He identified over 30 trees in a 3-block area to tap and collect the sap from. It is really amazing to see all the trees with gallon milk jugs hanging off of the antique taps Sam found. It has created a bit of a buzz among our neighbors, which is exactly what we wanted to happen. We will increase our activities in the next months, bringing greater visibility and discussion in order to slowly transform how we, and our neighbors, think about our living and shared spaces and how they function on a daily basis.

Once the sap has been collected, Sam will boil it down to make maple syrup. We are currently planning a pancake breakfast in Sam’s driveway once the weather permits.

Seed Swap Success!

On Groundhog’s Day Eve we, along with a group of neighbors, organized a seed swap at the Common Ground Food Co-op in Urbana. We wanted the swap to be open to all, even if you had never saved seeds before. Kit Condell from Revolution Seeds spoke about the fine art of seed saving. There are many ins and outs if you want to reap the same fruit the following year. Kit gave a great talk. We were most interested in the idea that seeds should be shared, not patented, and used to grow food every year! Once you start saving seeds and growing, then you can learn more about the ways to cross-breed and preserve varieties.
The 1rst annual Groundhog’s Day Eve Seed Swap was about getting started. After Kit's talk, Lisa Bralts-Kelly gave a seed starting demo, complete with a giant lamp fixture, for regular fluorescent bulbs-no expensive grow lights necessary.

About 60 people attended the Seed Swap. Folks brought seeds that they had dumpstered, seeds that they had saved from purchased produce, seeds that they had saved from private gardens, seeds from collective gardens, and many more. There were seeds for edibles and non-edibles alike. We can’t wait to do it again next year.

Seed Swap!

Here in Urbana it’s cold and snowy, but a bunch of folks in our neighborhood are thinking about spring time, sunshine, green leaves, and growing things. To get ready, we are planning a Seed Swap to share seeds and tips for starting seedlings indoors. Many kinds of plants benefit from an early start indoors; then you can put them in the ground and reap fruit sooner. “Starting” simply means planting the seeds, watering then, and giving them light, usually from a fluorescent lamp. Most of us involved in organizing the Seed Swap are on the same level, beginning gardeners. We have organized the Seed Swap to build community around local food issues, in addition to learning about types of seeds and how to grow them.

Some of us have saved seeds from our garden, from vegetables we bought at the store. or extra seeds leftover from the last season that didn’t get planted. These are all good sources and trading seeds in a lot of fun. We are for gardening anytime, anywhere, and anyone can do it.

Important Event Information:
Day: Sunday, February 1rst, 2009 (Groundhogs Day Eve)
Time:1-4pm Location : The Common Ground Food Co-op Lincoln Square Village
300 S Broadway Suite 166 Urbana, IL 61801

( Thanks to the Co-op for hosting this event!)

Seed Swap Poster

Download the poster, with original drawings by Lilly Bralts-Kelley, and tips on seed starting from Lisa Bralts-Kelly, Urbana Farmer’s Market Manager and all around awesome lady.

Download the Seed Swap poster here!

The Book + download

A Call to Farms: Continental Drift through the Radical Midwest Culture Corridor is finished. The book collects writings and images from Drift participants and presenters together with the design work of Mike Koppa, of the Heavy Duty Press. A print copy of the book can be purchased from Heavy Duty Press currently. You can also download the book from the Heavy Duty Press website here.

I didn't mean to lead anyone down the garden path.

Daniel Tucker just sent out an email with this article from Alternet that deals critically with some of the ideas of self-sufficiency and food production. It also comes from someone who's participated in Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates project. Basically, Stan Cox argues that most of our calories come from grains, a crop that depends largely on monoculture farming, so produce growing is great, but we shouldn't kid ourselves about its radicality in environmental and political terms.
The author points to an older piece in the NYT by Michael Pollan on the tension between individual actions, like gardening, and the need for larger political initiatives. Pollan ends with something that has come up in conversations here in Urbana, as we plan some neighborhood level activities:

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools.

Food, the Final Frontier

So, this isn't Midwest specific, but relates to our explorations of issues we're addressing here in the context of global neoloberalism. The ETC Group put out a press release about some (more) potential bad news for global food systems, coming out of the 2008 World Food Summit.

June 2008
ETC Group Translator
Ciao FAO: Another "Failure-as-Usual" Food Summit

Contrary to the opinion of many, June's Food Summit actually did something. It signaled the beginning of the end for the multilateral system as we know it. Over the next six months the food emergency - and the international institutions designed to address it - could get worse.

The full text offers a line-by-line interpretation of the Food Summit's final declaration. Go here to view ETC's Translator.

Issue: During the 3-5 June 2008 World Food Summit, governments patched together sufficient funds to keep the lid on food rebellions for a few months but all the fundamental and long-term institutional and financial problems remain. In Rome, governments opted for a mythical "techno-fix" led by agribusiness in collaboration with the Gates Foundation and other philanthro-capitalists. These "klepto-mandates" are usurping the multilateral system. There is also a clear power shift away from the much-maligned Rome-based agencies to the U.N. in New York and the Bretton Woods institutions in Washington. A series of "High-Level" meetings in the final quarter of 2008 could decisively impact the world's ability to respond to the ongoing food emergency.

Stakes: Failure to redress the failed policies of the past 34 years (since the last major food crisis) is already making a mockery of the Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger by 2015. Instead of reducing the ranks of the hungry to around 415 million, the immediate crisis could grow the numbers from today's 862 million to 1.2 billion by 2025. A new report from Oxfam claims that biofuel policies in OECD countries have already dragged more than 30 million more people into poverty.

On the front lines are 450 million smallholder farmers who are being told by the U.N. Secretary General that food production must increase by 50% by 2030 - while coping with the uncertain perils of climate change. An FAO report released in March 2008 warns that a temperature increase of 3-4 degrees Celsius could cause crop yields to fall by 15-35% in Africa and west Asia and by 25-35% in the Middle East. Nothing that happened in Rome in June changed these figures.

Takes: The real focus in Rome was fuel not food. With even conservative agencies like IFPRI and the International Monetary Fund estimating the impact of agrofuels on food prices around 30%, Brazil's sugarcane companies and Southeast Asia's industrial oil palm producers were as anxious as the U.S. and Europe to protect their green credentials and gross subsidies. The agrofuels industry had to convince poor countries that devoting a growing chunk of the world's arable land to feed cars will have no impact on food security. Shamefully, they succeeded.

Fora: The food emergency moves onto the G-8 in Japan in July and then to the High-Level meeting of the U.N./FAO Food Security Committee in Rome in mid-October and then to the FAO Conference November 17-21. However, along the way, the U.N. Secretary-General's task force reports in September and the third High-Level meeting on Aid-Effectiveness in Ghana in September could also pronounce on the ineffectiveness of the U.N.'s food/agricultural architecture. Finally, Spain's offer to host a follow-up meeting later this year could trump other fora.

Policies: Beyond short-term funding, everything depends on the final restructuring of the U.N.'s food and agricultural system. The experience of the 1974 food crisis shows that fundamental structural change is dangerous in the midst of an emergency. As much as change is vital, governments, farmers' organizations and other CSOs need to come up with their own plan by the mid-October high-level meeting.

For the Immediate Future

So, our last discussion left us with the goal of producing a small reader/zine of sorts, based on our locational and discursive travels. Somebody correct this if I'm wrong, but here's the plan:
each person/group that coordinated our site visits will produce and commission 2 page spreads of 8.5x11 that will be placed into a book that we will either self print or use print-on-demand services to publish. The expected deadline for this is August 1.