Uh. I just got busy. Really busy. I’ve been mentioning on and off for years, the work of the Oakland Food Policy Council (OFPC). I have had high hopes for this advisory body. In fact, I have had high hopes in general for the ability of the city of Oakland to be a national leader in developing alternative food systems and creative food entrepreneurship.  Putting my beliefs into action, I have now taken on the role of Coordinator for the Oakland Food Policy Council.

This is a fascinating development in the “urban farm experience” as it is taking my action out of my backyard and into my city and beyond. OFPC is being incubated by Food First, an inspiring, highly credible and deeply informed think tank on global food justice. I am now surrounded by motivated thinkers schooled on social theory. Love it.

What’s going on at the farm: The rain came and yet again I did not prepare by digging a drainage ditch in the chicken run, damn it. Also, I just decided that I’ll never actually make time to tan my rabbit pelts so I just started doing it. They are defrosting now. Following Kitty’s lead, I will follow the steps of the Mother Earth News article on the topic. Or more likely, text Kitty constantly to find out what to do next. Thank god we urban farmer folks are now connect via text! This could not have happened a year ago.

Upcoming posts: Kate Marie, I am going to follow up with the Mexican Herbal Remedies you asked about. I’ll also post about the tanning process once I’ve completed it.

I love mapaches (raccoons). They are such specialized and excellent scavengers. Ultimate bandits really. I recently read about a friend losing a hen to a raccoon. While such events can be deterred with predator proofing, it helps to stop and consider the animal you are dealing with. For example, consider this- Animals that have a brain with a cortex have a region that is devoted to somatic (body) sensation. Human, primates, and other mammals have localized regions to process this information. This are a can be mapped to determine regions associated with particular stimuli.

In a raccoon, the forepaw (hands) occupy 60% of their primary sensimotor area.¹ While I did not find a like statistic for human hands, we do not even come close to this degree of sensory specialization. In fact, one distinct difference between human hands and raccoon forepaws is that in humans each finger sensation is processed in the same region, while in raccoons each digit is represented in individual cortical regions.²

What this means: Raccoons have incredibly intelligent hands.

While a human can tinker with something to figure it out, a raccoon is a Master Tinkerer. So if you think you’ve raccoon proofed your animal enclosures think about a creature that can open, lift, pry, unlock, reach an arm in and figure out how to make things happen. My coop is located within an enclosure (the run) covered in poultry wire. We dug a ~18″ trench around the run and extended the wire into it, curving it upward and covered it with soil. The have a lockable automatic gate latch on our door about 4′ off the ground. While we have lapses on actually inserting a lock in the mechanism, I think the location off the ground has deterred unwanted visitors.

For those of us outwitted by a determined raccoon, take solace. While El Mapache has flipped you the proverbial finger, at least it was one very smart finger.

¹Herron, P. (1978). Somatotopic organization of mechanosensory projections to SII cerebral neocortex in the raccoon (Procyon lotor). Journal of Comparative Neurology. 181: 717-728.

²Robinson, CJ, Wurster, RD. (1997). Testing Peripheral Somatosensory Neuroprostheses by Recording from Raccoon Cortex. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. 5 (1): 75 – 80.

I’m wishing I planted more than six peanut plants now. Turns out the dry summer in the south has caused a shortage of peanuts. I recently read that peanut butter will go up in price by as much as 40%. Its alarming. I have always looked to peanut butter as a dependable survival food. I spent childhood as a latch key kid eating government program food. We would get boxes of food that always included a huge metal can of government branded peanut butter. I lived off that stuff. So in my mind peanut butter is what you can turn to when there is nothing else.

I am not a doomsayer…not at all. I don’t grow food because I think the world is going to collapse. I do it because I think it is essential. I think we need to recall our human knowledge about where food comes from and how to produce it. We need to keep it active and strong. I believe that by doing so, we have a better chance at developing appropriate alternatives to a food system that has been failing us. That said, I cannot help but be alarmed by the ever increasing prices of basic foods.

I am feeling glad to be in a community of active local food producers working with others to teach them how to grow food and to distribute excess food throughout the region. That said- those of you in the East Bay, don’t forget you can get a winter garden in place for food through the coming months. You can extent your summer crops by using floating row covers, plastic or other heating trapping techniques. General rule of thumb, cover crops will grow in two hours of sun or less; leaf vegetables need two to four hours; brassicas and root vegetables need four to six. Direct sow your roots. Do it now!

What to put in the ground now: Read more…

Originally featured at Civil Eats, the Olivia Sargeant article on how to create a new food economy is very well thought out, read on:

The DIY craze has shacked up with the local food movement to produce some inspiring examples of entrepreneurialism: Mason jar magic made by suburban fruit salvagers powered by pedals; workshops on wild-crafting, axe-making, rooftop bees and city-living chickens; lecture series that focus on the how-to rather than just why, when and where; and more.

But we can’t just take pictures of these ingenious innovators for the glossies and call our work finished. We have so much creativity (and cabbage) fermenting at the intersection of craft, food, and agriculture–now we need to connect the dots.

Our spirit and gumption produce marketable ideas and we must distill the unique and visionary experiences into capacity-building structures to create long-term stability for our farmers,  eaters, and land. Our pet projects and pop-ups can morph into replicable systems, operations, and communications strategies so our movement can evolve into a true revolution.

An economy is a system of production and consumption and distribution. The local and organic food movement has developed a solid set of best practices for production, as exemplified by our National Organic Program standards and older, more venerated third party certification programs. We have proven the power of consumption of our wares with sales of organic food reaching almost $25 billion in 2009. Now we need to focus on the system of distribution, which is not simply the means of transportation. For our revolution, distribution is the act of transporting our objectives, mission, and human capital.

The first building block of our new food economy is defining our roles and job descriptions, so we can divide and conquer, and share each others’ workloads. Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, has identified that consumers must be “co-producers” in order for good, clean, and fair food to permeate our markets. In practice, I’d say that means our eaters must turn into farmers, our chefs into ranchers, our butchers into distributors–and we all must teach each other. We have the demand, we have the supply, now we need to get out the pencil and craft paper and rewrite the distribution, starting with our jobs.

Here are our jobs as defined in the old food economy:

The farmer farms
The butcher processes.
The distributor moves product and creates new markets.
The chef prepares and cooks.
The consumer eats.

Here they are in the new food economy:

The farmer farms, processes, prepares, and teaches distributors.
The butcher processes, creates new markets, and teaches consumers.
The distributor moves product, processes, farms, and teaches chefs.
The chef prepares and cooks, farms, creates new markets, and teaches butchers.
The consumer eats, moves product, processes, and teaches farmers.

Let’s bring back the guilds, the grange, the purveyor, the merchant, and the artisan, so we have both craft and community intrinsic to our livelihoods again. Let’s renovate these old world terms for new world applications. Let’s redefine the jobs together, and imbue teaching in each role. Our revised positions will become the foundation of a truly functional new food economy. But wait, there’s more…

The Environmental Protection Agency has launched a website for urban agriculture projects.

The website provides information for people pursuing agriculture projects as a part of brownfield redevelopment and reuse.

Before a property can be redeveloped, contaminants must be removed, capped or contained in ways that limit exposure risks. Urban agriculture projects can help bind contaminants while providing further benefits to the property and surrounding community. An urban farm or community garden can improve the environment, reduce greenhouse emissions, and improve access to healthy, locally grown food. Other possible benefits include promoting health and physical activity, increasing community connections, and attracting economic activity. For more detailed information, please read our basic Information page.

Visitors to the Urban Agriculture web pages will find:

• Information on how to start an urban agriculture project;
• Success stories and information about ongoing urban agriculture projects;
• Resources & related links for information from EPA, other federal agencies and non-governemental organizations;
• Frequent questions about urban agriculture and the answers to them;
• Presentations and additional educational materials.

I had an opportunity to speak with Chef Jennifer Booker in Georgia about urban farming an Basil Talk Radio. Ms. Booker is the host for the online show affiliated with Basil Magazine.

The Grand Lake Ace Garden Center allowed the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance to use their site for a group feed order drop off. It went swimmingly. We got the best price in town on organic animal feed. The staff was super friendly and helpful. It made for a very rewarding community experience.

Also, thanks to the Urban Farm Hand, Jeanette, for all the help!

Jeanette by the way is an entrepreneur with a burgeoning Bay Area Urban Farm Sitting business. She is a wild life biologist with a variety of experience in an urban farming setting. She has worked with goats (mini and standard), rabbits, chickens, ducks, turkeys and horses, as well as dogs, cats, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and pet birds. She has limited experience with pigs, sheep, and cows, and a lot of experience with game species such as pheasants and quail. She also has over 2 years experience as a veterinary technician in a conventional practice and a holistic practice. She can be contacted at: brewmiss96 at gmail dot com.

Its time to clear out summer crops that won’t make it past October and make room for starts for a winter garden. The summer has been a busy one so some crops have gotten passed their prime. The truth is, it is incredibly hard to keep up sometimes.  People frequently ask me “how much time does it take to keep up with the food and animals?” Through out the year, not nearly as much as you would think but at harvest time, you have to respond, clear out what is fruitless or lose what you have been working towards.  Quite a metaphor for life in fact.

Since our planting season out here is year round, it truly is an endless cycle- a blessing and a curse. That said, today’s gorgeous Harvest Moon is an excellent inspiration to get out there to harvest, save food, and replant. We have a chance of some light rain (just a chance) this week which means the weather will not be too hot and rainfall after planting (as long as its not torrential) works like magic on the plants to help them establish. It is the best condition to plant in.

Good winter crops for this area: leafy greens, winter squash, beans, and brassicas. There are many more but these are easy to start with.

Animal updates: Expect your hens to begin their molts so don’t freak out over dropped feathers. My rabbits already went through their fur molt. They looked pretty ragged when they went through it. Its amazing to me that even in light California weather their bodies know to go through the molt in preparation for winter. I love these rabbits!

The bees- I am woefully delayed in harvesting my honey but it must be done before the weather turns.

A while back several Bay Area folks participated in a mini web documentary on urban farming being produced by Whole Foods. I posted my own episode when it was launched. I am now excited to share the next episode of Rachel and Tom at Dog Island Farm in Vallejo! They have a fascinating story because they have gone an entire year without buying groceries. You can read about it, here.

A few years ago I wrote about innovative findings for remediation of lead in soil. It is amazing to see that what was initial research has blossomed into practices that are changing large scale soil remediation. A recent New York Times article described the use of fish bonemeal as a source of phosphate that serves as an antagonist to lead specifically. It is one the most inexpensive and effective ways to reduce lead uptake into plants. This method is being applies in Oakland by EPA official Steve Calanog. Another news piece in the East Bay Express provides a greater information on implications of lead contamination and the pending law updates that would allow for various levels of crop growing and selling within the city. Its a really well done and a recommended read.

Now that we seem to be getting a handle on lead contamination in soil, I would like to know more about persistent bioaccumulative toxins and particulates in the air from highways and gas stations.I was told by a representative from Pesticide Watch that California does not require testing for either of these for farms. In fact, as I know from experience, many farms are located along freeways.