Are Centre Region's Conscientious Omnivores Getting a Slaughterhouse They Want?

The locavore movement keeps growing. In the last few years, the small local farmer has reemerged as friend, hero, and businessman...actually it's more often a businesswoman. The smaller local farmer new shine has brought with them the other businesses. Seed savers and restauranteurs and brewers are integrating the market. And of course, the local slaughterhouse and butcher.

The last time I ate a fast food burger was the same day I watched Supersize Me. It was shocking. I don't think I was ever a fast food kid...well...I did work at Wendy's in high school. But I wasn't one of those every chance I get I'll eat a 99 cent burger types. Then when I read Fast Food Nation, I felt vindicated. And curious. Like a lot of people I know now, I started asking the question, "Where's my food come from?" I read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Francis Moore Lappe, and some others.

The industrial meat system terrified me. I read a piece, "Farmacology" in Johns Hopkins Magazine regarding the massive antibiotic inputs into chickens in industrial chicken, pig, and cattle farms called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Johns Hopkins researchers were finding that "nontherapeutic use of antimicrobials is building dangerous genetic reservoirs of resistance. If they are right, industrial agriculture is fostering and dispersing drug-resistant bacteria that impair medicine's ability to protect the public from them." It's an arms race. Eventually, we could lose. Rolling Stone's Jeff Tietz wrote a similarly alarming story on pig production (excerpts here) featuring the goriest details about manure lagoons and piles of dead pigs. And last month Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and Arizona State University researchers found evidence suggesting that previously banned antibiotics for poultry production are still being used by the poultry industry.

I've said nothing about the violence incurred on the animals across their whole lives. There are frequent reports of worker mistreatment and higher levels of drug and alcohol problems among such workers. And the enormous effluent waste CAFOs create lead to pollution on a scale unimaginable a century ago such that play into the expanding dead zones in our bays and gulfs.

So if you want to be a responsible omnivore, what can you do? Maybe we go back to that small farmer and that local butcher.

On Friday afternoon at 4:30 we will talk to the people starting Rising Spring Meat Company, a slaughterhouse and butcher shop in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania. They bill themselves as "your connection to a farming community that is dedicated to producing quality livestock and meat" including cows, pigs, sheep and goats expertly butchered to cuts of beef, pork, mutton and chevon.

So we'll be asking them about these things. How are they different from the big boys? Can I trace some mutton from the farm through the plant with any confidence the animal led a sheeply life? Will I get a good-tasting slice? Is money staying in our area?

Listen in on Friday from 4-5 pm. Call in (814) 865-9577 with questions and comments. You can also join us on Facebook and Twitter as well.

Searching beneath our feet, working with our hands, and moving from the heart.

Do you ever wonder why lawns sit empty? Have you looked at your neighbors' yards or pieces of the park and thought, "What else could be there?"

I know I often think about what it would be like to see stands of maples, oaks, walnuts, and cherry trees where sprawling lawns sit. And other times I envision lawns surrounded by wildflower meadows where bees and butterflies dance. Or I see beds of rich loam with intermingled vegetables in rows arranged in beautiful arrangements with compost chambers, piles of leaves, and jumbled pile of hand tools.

Do you wonder what it would be like to be invited into that place if it isn't your property? Or what if the people who owned the garden asked you to eat some produce by just putting out there for you? Or what if you wanted to do it with your own lawn but weren't sure where to begin? Maybe all you want is a beautiful place that nurtures your spirit and gives you peace of mind and, you hope, a smile to others. A food commons. A beauty commons. A peaceful commons.

Today's guests are taking some of those ideas and feelings and bringing them to life. Dana Stuchul started something she calls Veggie Commons, "is to join together (as kids, teens, beginning farmers and gardeners, dwellers, and elders) in the cultivation, harvest, and enjoyment of wholesome, locally nurtured food. Utilyzing food, labor, land, and love, we endeavor to fortify our community, transforming lawnscapes into foodscapes." [Garden pictured at right.] Dana, like our previous guests Asher Miller of the Post Carbon Institute, Katherine Watt of Spring Creek Homesteading and formerly of the Transition Town Initiative, is something of radical re-localizer. There is great promise in meaningful work with the land, something our mechanized and digitized society has lost but can regain through work in the commons.

And maybe you want to take a crack at creating your beautiful space but aren't sure where to begin. Woody Wilson has started Home Grown Farms (Facebook page here), a company that designs, installs, and manages residential and company gardens in State College. Wilson says, "Home Grown Farms bridges the gap between where food is grown and where people consume it."

Both are grounded (pardon the pun) in a love of our place, love of the land, and the possibility of local resilience. Rather than fret and kvetch about sprawl, climate change, peak oil, and the destructive nature of our stuffing and starving food system, they have gotten their hands dirty. Quite literally, this is labor of love and labor for love.

Dana posted the words of Ivan Illich on the Veggie Commons blog a few days ago. He said,

As philosophers, we search below our feet because our generation has lost its grounding in both soil and virtue. By virtue, we mean that shape, order and direction of action informed by tradition, bounded by place, and qualified by choices made within the habitual reach of the actor; we mean practice mutually recognized as being good within a shared local culture that enhances the memories of a place.

What is happening here with Dana and Woody? What if more of us recognized and nurtured our relationship with the soil to which all terrestrial life owes its existence?

So join us today on the Lion 90.7 fm. As always, feel free to call in (814) 895-9577 with comments and questions. You can also find us on Facebook where you can post articles and interact with other SN listeners and readers or join us on Twitter at SustainNowRadio.

My Farmer

I was sort of born into the local food movement. Not in a huge way. But sort of. Enough that when the local food movement started to flourish again a few years ago it was a natural fit. And I knew when I had found my farmer, John Eisenstein of Jade Family Farm. It was the carrots.

When I was a kid, we were part of a local food co-op. My mom tells this story of how at about two and a half I picked up a carton of eggs and methodically dropped the eggs one by one on the floor. As a father now, I recognize the classic moment. It was probably great and dreadful at the same time.

We had a big garden in our backyard. A strawberry patch, cucumbers galore that went into salad and became pickles, tomatoes fresh and some canned into sauce, green beans, raspberries along the back fence, and squash I couldn't stand if my 6-year-old memory serves at all.

At the garden's edge by the low stone wall behind the back porch was our big two-chamber compost. It was a classic railroad tie design. How many pounds of coffee grounds and grapefruit rinds went in there? My dad, bandanna wrapped around his head, turned it with the spade.

My best friend Elliott's family two houses down had a comparable garden. His mother was a canning machine and she made so many pickles, jams, and sauces all summer long. Emma's pickles were the ultimate. They are the apotheosis of pickles, the ideal pickles that the denizens of Plato's cave can only dream about.

As a boy I had to weed. I liked it as much as most 6-year-olds do which is to say not really at all. I'd have rather been climbing trees and riding bikes. My sister hated it more than I did. Sometimes we got out of doing it. Sometimes not. But it was great to have fresh fruit and veggies.

My mom is one of twelve children from a New York farm family. Every summer and Christmas we traveled to "the farm" to stay with my uncle and grandmother. I played in the barn with the cats, pet the cows, and climbed in the rafters of the hay mow. It was great. As a youngster I got to steer the tractor in the high fields on my uncle's lap. Even as a punk-ass teenager more interested in Slayer, skateboards, and the girls who tortured my very existence (you remember them forever right?) than the farm's operations, I still loved it. During summer visits I wandered the 100 acres alone or with a visiting cousin.

And then I went to college. I think it nearly totally separated me from food and nature. I'd occasionally go to the friday farmer's market. The summer peaches and blueberries were about all I cared about. I think I got my girlfriend Emily sunflowers and wildflowers a couple of times.

But it wasn't until my wife and I joined a small community supported agriculture group with Reeger's Farm Market when we lived in Indiana, Pennsylvania that we started getting back to local food. When we came back to State College and I started my Ph.D. program, we were ready for something more. That's the year Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle came out. In a class I took we read Kingsolver, Francis Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet, some essays by Wendell Berry, and Eric Schlosser's rather terrifying Fast Food Nation. I wrote some stories for Voices of Central Pennsylvania on local food and farmers, started a club for future teachers who wanted to embed ecological literacy and sustainability into their education, attended a PASA conference, and worked with Mike to launch this show. Our moniker, courtesy of Mike, has been, "We believe sustainability is best when it's fresh and local."

For two and a half years on the air I've brought up my farmer, John Eisenstein and his family's farm, Jade Family Farm. I call him my farmer (that's his hand, shirt, and jeans on the right) because from May to October we get most of our produce from Jade through our share of the farm. Why did he become my farmer? The carrots. It was very simple. I'd never had a carrot like that before. If I try to describe the taste I will mangle the flavor profile so I will just say that it's about as close to heaven as I think occurs from vegetable consumption. Maybe you know what I mean. The scent of soil is still on it and the sugars and the bitterness pop. See...I mangled it. Just try some Jade carrots and you'll get it.

Tomorrow, we'll have John on the show. He's a sort of romantic prone to making jokes, not serious and serious. We'll talk about his experiences as a farmer and how he's gotten there. As someone with a bit of familial history with sustainability pedigree, he'll have some good things to share we're sure. Carrots are out I suppose so we aren't likely to be crunching on the air.

As always, listen in on The Lion 90.7 fm from 4-5 pm and feel free to call in with questions or comments.

Dairy Farm Protests in Butler County

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports that Butler County residents are protesting drilling operations at a dairy farm (pic at right from Marcellus Protest).

They report:

"There's no way this drilling can contaminate our milk," Larry Wendereusz, general manager of the dairy operating facility, said in an phone interview Friday. "Our milk is tested for everything ... we run all kinds of tests."

Members of the advocacy group Marcellus Outreach Butler believe otherwise. They chanted slogans and complained that the planned underground hydraulic drilling will put crops, livestock and milk at risk for contamination. The group gathered in front of the drilling rig that sits next to the Marburger property along Mars-Evans City Road.

"They're not being a good neighbor," Alex Stehman of Saxonburg said about the farm. She said she no longer buys Marburger milk in an attempt to send a message to the farm's owners. "Organic farmers are more responsible."

On last week's show we touched this issue briefly. There are some farmers leasing their land while many organic farmers allege their operations are threatened by gas operations' because of possible groundwater contamination, air pollution, methane migration into wells, and other issues. But gas companies and some farmers argue these worries are unfounded and possibly hysterical.

In 2010, 28 cows were quarantined after exposure to fracking fluid. This year a Chesapeake Energy well blew out in Leroy Township sent thousands of gallons of frack water into a nearby stream for at least 12 hours. Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has said that the stream was not compromised and fined Chesapeake over $1 million. DEP said:

“It is important to me and to this administration that natural gas drillers are stewards of the environment, take very seriously their responsibilities to comply with our regulations, and that their actions do not risk public health and safety or the environment,” DEP Secretary Mike Krancer said. “The water well contamination fine is the largest single penalty DEP has ever assessed against an oil and gas operator, and the Avella tank fire penalty is the highest we could assess under the Oil and Gas Act. Our message to drillers and to the public is clear.”

Protesters have some warrant given some recent history. But what are the chances that cow's milk could be contaminated with gas drilling pollutants? Does anyone even have this data?