Serve Your Country Food young farmers group

Serve Your Country Food is a fascinating project to illuminate the growing movement of young farmers in the United States The creators encourage the use of data visualizations and maps (soil maps, agricultural areas, superfund sites, etc.) to find opportunities and identify challenges. The overall aim is to encourage "thousands of new growers of fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains, dairy, and livestock to transform the landscape of sprawling development and corporate control into a dignified, livable, and culturally rich mosaic of ecological farming." It makes me want to start a vegetable garden. Seriously. From Serve Your Country Food:

The young farmers now emerging onto the land seek to reclaim, restore, and resettle the deserted rural towns of America. We are similarly poised to revive the fabric of urban life with markets, gardens, bees, corn patches and waterways. Motivated by a force of intention that cannot be rationalized economically, with lives driven by an instinct for direct action and stewardship that honors the planet, people, and place, we are the allies of every American. Our instincts are emboldened by the mercury shatter of dew on the broccoli plants at dawn, by the roar of pollinators in a flowering crop of buckwheat, and by the river of neighbors streaming through the farm-gate clamoring for “real” tomatoes and happy chickens. The hands of young farmers on the land seek to push forward an agenda of sustainability on a human scale.

Serve Your Country Food (Thanks, Mike Liebhold!)

• [fltndboat]

  I am old enough to remember Victory gardens from the “Great War”
  The hall-mark was that there were no available Pesticides, Herbicides, G.M. seeds, fungicides, etc. Neither Federal subsidies, or controlled market forces dictated your choices. I earned my first money working in my neighborhood collecting local chicken shit for the corn farmer. The chickens ate table scraps and bugs. Not Purina drug laced chicken chow. The corn made big sweet kernels.
  I ran into my first re-alley big spider there. Interested in eating bugs, not me.

  • [Antinous]

    You remember World War One?

• [wolfiesma]

  The Young Farmers have a nice manifesto. Best of luck and godspeed…

• [fltndboat]

  #5 Not directly. The corn patch was on the biggest free land in my urban neighborhood. It had an absentee owner that needed nothing from it. They allowed the house to be occupied by a man named Harry, who never recovered from being gassed in WW1. As a kid , while my Father was working in the Pacific Theater of the War, I learned from Harry as a substitute Father.

  • [Antinous]

    Not directly.

    Ah. My next door neighbor’s great grandmother when I was growing up remembered the Civil War. It’s a bit freaky when you think about it.

• [fltndboat]

  I did a brief overlook of the links. and see the usual scary stuff about donations. I simply do not trust donor supported programs.

• [fltndboat]

  #9. Not freaky, that used to be how we remembered stuff. Listening to our old ones. Trusting the memories. Now what we got?” I know it is real because I saw it in a Movie”?

• [batchild]

  Thank you so much for posting this. There are a lot of people who feel that local agriculture is as close to a cure all as we can get for many of the ills that we see. Environment, jobs, improving general health of people by encouraging the consumption of less processed foods, food security, food safety, etc. It’s such an uninteresting subject to most people, sadly. Most people don’t think much at all about what they eat. If you’re looking for a sign, here it is… read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Lest Michael Pollan get overused and pointed at like a food-Jesus, he breaks it down in a great way.

• [Casey Sorrow]

  People interested in this may also enjoy my this site, BeginningFarmers.org.

  From their site:

  “…an effort to create a knowledge and networking resource for farmers and potential farmers, educators, activists, and policy makers interested in promoting small, diverse, locally-based, sustainable farm enterprises.”

• [jphilby]

  Nice.

  The dreams of the 60s … good food, peace, good government, good energy … seem to be jelling.

  New Salon piece: An apology to Boomers everywhere

  http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/11/07/havrilesky/print.html|@

• [freeyourcrt]

  Young farmers = Yay!

  The possibility that soon they will only have a genetically modified or otherwise patented seed stock at their disposal = Booo!