You ask how?.....
......The answer is simple. A healthy environment, economic profitability and socially economic equity. When people in many different capacities, from farmers to consumers, have shared this vision and contributed to it, despite the diversity of people and perspectives, these themes commonly weave through definitions of sustainable agriculture.
REAL FOOD - Stone Barns is home to Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant and Blue Hill Café.
Blue Hill at Stone Barns has no menus, at least not the traditional kind. Instead, the kitchen creates multi-course “farmer’s feasts” around the day’s harvest (and around the diner too). Guests experience the freshest possible ingredients, virtually yards from where they were grown or raised.
The restaurant is a critical part of the Stone Barns community. Blue Hill contributes to the Center’s financial sustainability as the largest customer of its livestock and four-season-farm operations. Cooks walk the farm and collaborate with the farmers. They are as excited about helping to dig sunchokes from partially frozen early-spring fields as they are about pureeing them for the restaurant’s guests. Blue Hill staff members also teach an in-the-kitchen class every month featuring seasonal ingredients.
Dan Barber, executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, puts it this way: “The menu is dictated by the farmers. Stone Barns Center grows what is best for this locality and raises the animals the pasture can support. It’s a wonderful way to cook and a wonderful way to be involved in food. For our guests, this type of eating is not only delicious, it’s participating in the farm—and that is the whole point.”
(For more info visit: http://www.bluehillfarm.com/)
EDIBLE SCHOOLYARD - What is that?
In 1996 ALice Waters started the Edible Schoolyard as part of her commitment to education. Sitting in the center of a one acre garden at a California Middle School, Waters's kitchen-classroom, and an “eco-gastronomic” curriculum lives on. By actively involving a thousand students in all aspects of the food cycle, The Edible Schoolyard is a model public education program that instills the knowledge and values we need to build a humane and sustainable future. The program is nationally recognized for its efforts to integrate gardening, cooking, and sharing school lunch into the core academic curriculum. Alice established the Chez Panisse Foundation in 1996 to support the Schoolyard and encourage similar programs that use food traditions to teach, nurture, and empower young people. The success of The Edible Schoolyard led to the School Lunch Initiative, whose national agenda integrates a nutritious daily lunch and gardening experience into the academic curriculum of all public schools in the United States.
(For more info visit: http://www.chezpanisse.com/)
WATER - This Natural Resource and Farming
According to UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, University of California, Davis - Gail Feenstra writes.... When the production of food and fiber degrades the natural resource base, the ability of future generations to produce and flourish decreases. The decline of ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean region, Pre-Columbian southwest U.S. and Central America is believed to have been strongly influenced by natural resource degradation from non-sustainable farming and forestry practices. Water is the principal resource that has helped agriculture and society to prosper, and it has been a major limiting factor when mismanaged.
Water supply versus use - In California, an extensive water storage and transfer system has been established which has allowed crop production to expand to very arid regions. In drought years, limited surface water supplies have prompted overdraft of groundwater and consequent intrusion of salt water, or permanent collapse of aquifers. Periodic droughts, some lasting up to 50 years, have occurred in California. Several steps should be taken to develop drought-resistant farming systems even in "normal" years, including both policy and management actions: 1) improving water conservation and storage measures, 2) providing incentives for selection of drought-tolerant crop species, 3) using reduced-volume irrigation systems, 4) managing crops to reduce water loss, or 5) not planting at all.
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| Results from the Vortisand Filtering System |
Water quality. The most important issues related to water quality involve salinization and contamination of ground and surface waters by pesticides, nitrates and selenium. Salinity has become a problem wherever water of even relatively low salt content is used on shallow soils in arid regions and/or where the water table is near the root zone of crops. Tile drainage can remove the water and salts, but the disposal of the salts and other contaminants may negatively affect the environment depending upon where they are deposited. Temporary solutions include the use of salt-tolerant crops, low-volume irrigation, and various management techniques to minimize the effects of salts on crops. In the long-term, some farmland may need to be removed from production or converted to other uses. Other uses include conversion of row crop land to production of drought-tolerant forages, the restoration of wildlife habitat or the use of agroforestry to minimize the impacts of salinity and high water tables. Pesticide and nitrate contamination of water can be reduced using many of the practices discussed later in the Plant Production Practices and Animal Production Practices sections. These days, many engineers, architects and consultants are turning toward high efficiency filtering systems like the Vortisand to accomodate environmentally friendly alternative water systems.
(For more info visit: http:// www.emcosystems.net )GREEN FARMING - Farming Practices and Philosophy
A growing movement has emerged during the past two decades to question the role of the agricultural establishment in promoting practices that contribute to these social problems. Today this movement for sustainable agriculture is garnering increasing support and acceptance within mainstream agriculture. Not only does sustainable agriculture address many environmental and social concerns, but it offers innovative and economically viable opportunities for growers, laborers, consumers, policymakers and many others in the entire food system.
Green String farming defies categorization: because it always refers back to the land for guidance, it is necessarily a local endeavor and one which will be different depending on the farm and the farmer. The primary focus of what we do here is on growing food for people while simultaneously improving the land we grow on.
By staying in step with natural processes, we are able to produce beautiful food crops with very low input; this works because plants that grow up without the influence of outside or artificial assistance learn how to fend for themselves by creating or attracting substances in their bodies which are equally beneficial to our bodies (things like vitamins and minerals, as well as all-important anti-oxidants).Secondly, by maintaining an important balance between crops grown for human consumption and crops grown to improve the soil, Green String farmers always give back to the earth the same amount the earth gives to us. Unlike conventional produce which is grown in conditions specifically designed to put out the highest and fastest possible yields (and without room for anything but the food crop), Green String produce grows under more natural conditions, with the help of farmers who are listening to what their land tells them throughout the year.
We live and grow by the motto, "one for humanity, one for nature"; anytime we plant a food crop at Green String, we plant at least one soil improvement crop along with it. Cover crops improve the soil by adding structure to it and by bringing in minerals. In general, the higher the number and diversity of crops we grow, the better chance each crop has of thriving. This is because each plant requires good soil structure to grow, and good soil structure depends upon the introduction of organic matter.
The soil here in Petaluma has a very high clay content and, because of past use for large-scale dairy farming, much of the farmland here is extremely compacted (meaning it holds a lot of water, and doesn't let much air in). Cover crops represent one tool we use to create a balance between air and water in the soil, and to add minerals. When we let cover crops grow to maturity, die, and then reintroduce themselves into the ground, these crops add much-needed nitrogen, while also providing the root structure that holds the soil together. Some examples of cover crops we use are barley, wheat, triticale, fava beans, and clover.
Another aspect of farming with cover crops is time space sharing: by planting a variety of crops with a variety of maturing times in one space and letting them grow up together, the Green String farmer achieves a steady food supply and soil improvement all at once, and uses less land in doing so.
(General inquiries: info@greenstringfarm.com)
