Johnson and his crew grow organic produce for over a thousand community shared agriculture members on the 200 acres he converted from a historic dairy farm. On the day we spoke last week, Johnson and his crew were out there building a barn. Barnraising is a time-honored community-builder, where everyone comes together for a central purpose. It’s a time of both work and party, and you end up with something solid and real at the end of the day. It’s a nice metaphor for organic farming.

At a time when we’re all trying to find signs of economic life and bemoan the dearth of green jobs, organic farming is what we’ve been waiting for. In addition to growing the food we eat in ethical, sustainable ways and without chemicals and environmental toxins, organic farmers like Johnson help grow the economy and the community. According to the Organic Farming Research Foundation, farmers markets are the fastest growing job opportunites in communities and municipalities, and organic farming has grown in this sluggish job market by eight percent.

Maureen Wilmot is “an organic believer.” The executive director of Organic Farmers Research Foundation, Wilmot has a background in biology and ocean conservation, but “you don’t have to have dirt under the fingernails to really appreciate organic farmers,” she says.

When she became part of OFRF three years ago, Wilmot applied her background in policy and research to organic farming “and had a real aha moment. I support ocean conservation — I didn’t know organic produce is helping the ocean. If we converted every acre along the Mississippi basin to organic farming, we would reduce nitrogen runoff by fifty percent and clean up the dead zone. My son has asthma; I’m working for cleaner air. I didn’t realize organic farming leads to cleaner air,” she says. “It’s all interwoven.”

It’s true — many positive things spring from the same fertile, organic soil. If you care about your health or the health of the planet, you will have an organic awakening. In the same way, at some point, you’re going to have to come to terms with how much meat you eat. Even Mayo Clinic, not exactly the bastion of woo-woo new age stuff, is touting the health benefits of a meatless diet. And if you’re into protecting the planet, the fact that raising livestock takes up more than double the acreage and consumes double the resources plus pumping out a lot of environmental nasties is going to make you question cow. It will, I hope, encourage you to eat food that’s luscious, real, unprocessed, organic, healthy, and good for you, your karma and all of mankind.

Better Bites of Austin presents Local Food Holiday Gift Fair, hosted at The Domain II. Sample products from our best local food and beverage artisans and buy locally made treats for holiday gift giving. 4–9 pm.

And with a shortage of local food, the concern is that prices for consumers will go up and drive some consumers away. Says Peg McCoy, owner of Farm to Market Grocery on South Congress, “When calories are so cheap, people aren’t willing or able to spend more for local food.”

Hopefully Austin has enough of a base dedicated to locally grown food that these farmers will still be able to make something off what they are able to grow in these conditions.

Council members also asked staffers to gather information about a possible ban on paper bags, as well as plastic ones, and about possibly charging fees for so-called single-use bags instead of banning them outright.

Details such as whether small stores should be exempt and the penalties for not complying with a ban will be worked out during the four-month process.

Austin would be the first large Texas city to enact such a ban; Brownsville already has one.

Council members say plastic bags are an environmental scourge – polluting waterways, clogging drainage systems and taking up landfill space, where they don’t biodegrade.

Austinites use 263 million plastic bags a year, and they cost the city and taxpayers about $850,000 a year to clean up as litter and put in landfills, according to city estimates.

A voluntary effort by large Austin retailers, including Walmart and Target, to cut plastic bag use was not effective enough, city officials have said.

On Thursday , the nonprofit Texas Campaign for the Environment called on the city to ban both plastic and paper bags, saying that would achieve the larger goal of helping consumers get in the habit of using reusable bags instead of single-use bags.

Mark Daniels , vice president of sustainability at Hilex , a large manufacturer and recycler of plastic bags with locations in the Dallas area and across the country, said Thursday that the bags pose no environmental threat because they are fully reusable and recyclable.

It will be interesting to see what City Council staff find.  This is certainly turning out to be a pretty controversial topic, looking at the angry comments on this Statesman article.

I”ll be on vacation for the next 2 weeks! Stay green while I’m gone!

One big problem with the bus option: Buses, say many transit mavens, have a bad image. People who won’t get on the bus, they say, will opt for nice rail cars. The reasons are multiple. For some, it’s classism – buses are seen as a service for poor people. For others, it’s mode of travel – the General Accounting Office report said “the public sees rail as faster, quieter, and less polluting than buses, even though Bus Rapid Tran­sit is designed to overcome those problems.”

The Central Austin Transit Study projected that better bus would attract only 9,000 boardings per weekday by 2030, compared with 27,600 on urban rail. But maybe “better bus” is the problem – by offering that limited concept, rather than full-fledged BRT*, as the only alternative to rail, perhaps URS** gave short shrift to the potential of bus. What if Austin created BRT that approached the quality of rail?

(*The article earlier explains “BRT” as “bus rapid transit” – a loosely defined term that usually means high-quality buses running on busy corridors at greater frequencies and with fewer stops. Beyond that, however, BRT systems vary widely in quality, ranging from buses that simply have traffic signal-changing technology (currently being considered by Cap Metro) to buses running in high-occupancy-vehicle lanes or even on exclusive bus highways, with fancy stops resembling rail stations.” **Also URS is an Austin company the city paid to do the Central Austin Tran­sit Study.)

The article goes on to talk about the costs of better bus versus urban rail, quoting former Tracor CEO Jim Skaggs:

“Fort Worth just went through this consideration in December and decided against rail as being the solution,” says Skaggs. “They decided that buses, which they could do for 10 percent of what the rail cost was, were perfectly adequate to do what they wanted to do, and give them more flexibility. They had $25 million in their pocket from the feds already and had to give it back, because they decided that [with the remaining costs], they couldn’t justify it.” (Actually, the Fort Worth City Council’s discussions of a downtown streetcar aren’t completely dead and buried, but it did halt a streetcar study in December over cost concerns.) Austin’s “alternatives studies from the very beginning have been based on rail,” Skaggs says. “[They've asked only] ‘What alternative rail are we going to use?’ They have really given lip service to alternative studies and haven’t really looked at the differences.”

I can see both sides of the debate of bus v. rail and it will be very interesting to see how this plays out as the election draws closer.

Here’s a pic of the contents of the box (a cost of $32): 

It came with 5 or 6 small turnips, probably 15 very sweet carrots, a small bag of lettuce mix, cilantro, parsley, 2 grapefruit, 4 oranges, a small bunch of spinach and  rainbow chard, brussel sprouts, and scallions. 

The grapefruit was really good. I don’t think I had ever eaten a whole grapefruit before, but I’m trying to be healthier and I don’t want to waste any of the food. It was a messy but delicious experience. I used the cilantro in chicken tikka masala I made for my husband, and then made a couple of Indian side dishes -one with the carrots and one with the turnips. One night we sauteed the spinach and it turned out well.  And my husband made this dish with the brussels sprout greens (we still have the actual brussels sprouts left over): 

1 bunch brussel sprout greens (or any greens)
2 T butter
salt, pepper, pinch nutmeg
2 T flour
1 c milk
4 oz (about) cream cheese
1 c orzo, uncooked 

Cook orzo according to package directions.  While it’s cooking, bring about 4 c salted water to a boil.  Roughly chop the greens, add to the boiling water, and cook until tender (about 2-4 minutes).  Immediately transfer cooked greens to an ice bath to stop the cooking process.  When the greens are cool enough to handle, squeeze the water out by hand.  Puree greens in a food processor.  

Melt butter in a large saucepan (the one used to boil greens, cleaned).  Add pureed greens.  Sprinkle with flour and stir to keep from sticking.  Slowly add milk, stirring the entire time.  This should leave a thick green mixture.  Add cream cheese and stir over low heat until melted.  Add orzo.  Top with bacon crumbs or Parmesan.  

It looks a little funny but it was good!

 

One really nice thing about JBG is their website. My husband found the above recipe on their website – prior to this we didn’t know that brussels sprouts had greens or that you could eat them, but here was a recipe that made use of the greens. Plus every Tuesday they post a picture of what will  be included in your box (pretty accurate quantity depiction of what you will get) which is very very helpful, and you can click on each item in the box you are going to get and find tips on how to wash/prepare/store that item and how to cook it.  It’s a very well designed website 

Starting today , Whole Foods customers can sign up for Greenling via electronic kiosks in the Austin and San Antonio stores.

Both companies say the partnership is a way to help strengthen the local food supply — a core mission they share.

For Whole Foods, the initiative is a way to support local growers, giving them another avenue to sell their goods, said Chris Romano , produce and floral coordinator for Whole Foods’ Southwest region.

Small farms that can’t supply enough to stock a Whole Foods store could sell that smaller amount to Greenling, Romano said.

“If we make the local food economy stronger, that benefits all of us as a community,” Romano said.

This is the first time Whole Foods has partnered with a local home delivery service, although it has other programs to help local food providers, such as a loan program.

It’s also a way for Whole Foods to tap into Greenling’s network of local farms. Although Greenling doesn’t exclusively stock local produce, it gets produce and other goods from about 40 to 50 local farms throughout the year.

Through the partnership, Greenling co-founder Mason Arnold said his company can now commit to purchasing certain quantities of goods and then sell the excess to Whole Foods.

So basically, it sounds like Greenling will still buy from the same farmers as it has been, but Greenling can now  place larger orders from those farmers with the safety net of knowing that if they buy too much and can’t sell it all through their own business, Whole Foods will take the excess.

To learn more about Greenling, click here.

I made some shrimp gumbo with all of the okra I’ve been getting from my garden.  I had to buy all of the other ingredients I used, so it was only a slightly “local” dish, but still exciting since usually I don’t get enough from my garden to make much.