Words Don’t Cook Rice

It’s been a rough week.  Last Saturday after the Clintonville Farmers Market, I headed out to ASE Feed & Supply in Plain City to get some desperately needed chicken feed before they closed at 2:00.  On the way there, I heard a terrible noise under the hood and the battery light came on.  When I arrived at the feed store, I left the truck running and popped the hood.  The serpentine belt had broken and was wrapped around the fan.  That meant that in addition to having no power steering, which had gone out several weeks earlier, the alternator was no longer charging the battery and the fan was no longer cooling the radiator.  The coolant reservoir cap had popped and a little steam was coming out.  Leaving the truck running with no air passing over the radiator put the engine at risk of overheating, but I feared that if I shut the truck off, I wouldn’t get it started again since the battery was discharging.

With the truck still running, I had the boy at the loading dock start loading the feed bags into my truck while I went inside to pay.  I dashed out and started to drive home.  I wasn’t seeing any steam as I drove, but the temperature was off the gauge.  The engine started getting loud.  I was hoping to make it to the highway so I could go faster and get some air rushing over the radiator, but just before I did, I came to a red light. I stopped, and the truck died, blocking traffic at the intersection.

I had the truck towed back to Woodland where I’d be able to work on it easier.  I put on a new power steering pump (the old one had seized, causing the belt to break) and a new serpentine belt, then attempted to jump start the truck.  Nothing.  I chased wires around under the hood and spent a day or two doing tests and reading things on the internet to try to diagnose the problem.  Eventually, I just took the battery, the starter, a suspected bad cable, and the solenoid switch in to Auto Zone to be tested.  The battery tested fine, but the starter didn’t, so I bought a replacement.  That was Wednesday, and by the time I left Auto Zone, it was too dark to do any more work on the truck.  I mucked out a broiler house in the dark, raked up the grass I had cut for bedding and put it in there, fed all the chickens, watered the chicks, gathered eggs, went home, cleaned up, ate dinner, and went to bed.  It was about 3:00 a.m.

Yesterday, just before the Easton Farmers Market, I installed the new starter.  As I was tightening down the mounting bolts, the mounting foot snapped right off the starter housing.  This meant I wasn’t going to have a truck to drive to the farmers market.  After a quick shower to remove the engine grease from my arms and face, I moved everything from the freezer into coolers, stuffed the coolers table, and signs into our tiny hatchback, and drove to the market, arriving in the nick of time.  Fortunately, I was able to keep the coolers in the shade and everything stayed frozen.

After the market, I took the broken, never-used starter back to Auto Zone, and it turned out they had given me the wrong one in the first place!  The correct one was about $15 more, but they gave it to me without charging me the difference.  I’m glad the wrong one broke!

You might have noticed above that I said I was using grass clippings for chicken bedding.  I normally use sawdust from a local sawmill, but they recently started milling plastic along with the wood.  Since I compost the soiled chicken bedding and use the compost on my gardens, I can’t use any sawdust with contaminants in it.  The owner, to his credit, did warn me of this ahead of time, so I was able to grab a few bags of sawdust between other chores a couple weeks ago, but since then, I’ve been without a source of clean bedding for the chickens.  He recently told me that it would be some time before they quit milling composites.  I emailed another nearby mill but haven’t heard back from them.

This leaves me in the position of having to buy bags of wood shavings from a store for about $5 a bag (I’d need 15 bags, minimum, at least once a week) or straw at the same price for about the same amount.  If it were fall, I’d just get leaves, but it’s not.  What I do have are a lot of tall weeds, so I’m cutting them like hay and using that for now.  This takes time, though, and I can’t mow bedding and fix a truck at the same time.

Meanwhile, I still have planting, weeding, and tilling to do, fences and water pumps to repair, new fences to install, more feed to buy, duckweed to harvest, fish to move, vegetable scraps to pick up, and a few weeks’ worth of pallets to pick up (a warehouse gives me the pallets, which I tear apart for lumber and firewood).  As those who follow the Frijolito Farm page on Facebook already know, I also have some trees to trim.

I have electric fence wire along the top of a fence around one of my hen runs.  The hen’s water is out in the run, and I leave the door to their house open to this run all the time.  Raccoons used to climb the fence and attack the chickens before I ran the electric fence wire, and now they’re doing it again.  To get around the wire, they’re climbing onto the roof of the hen house and climbing down a tree that’s inside the hen run.  I tried hanging a radio inside the hen house to scare the coons away.  It worked for a couple days, but they’re back now.  I can count on losing between one and four hens every day until I trim that tree’s branches away from the hen house roof and/or put electric fence wire along the edge of the roof.

Early Tuesday morning, I have to take another load of chicks to the processor in Bradford, a little north of Dayton.  I need to have a running truck by then.  I also need to pick up a new batch of chicks next Wednesday or arrange to have them delivered.  I was hoping to have an open house, maybe on July 24th, but I frankly doubt I can be ready by then.

When I find the time to do so, I’ve also got a few poultry houses to build ASAP, and a dilapidated 4-bedroom, 2-bath house to rebuild, preferably before winter.  And if that didn’t make things hectic enough, my brother and his girlfriend are coming up from Mississippi for a quick visit this weekend, and my mother has decreed that the entire family is going to go watch the Winnie the Pooh movie together this Saturday evening.

Here’s the punchline: World-famous urban farmer Will Allen is coming to Columbus. He’s giving a speech tonight at Franklin Park Conservatory.  He and some of his staff members from Milwaukee will be presenting workshops Saturday and Sunday.  This is an exciting event for anyone interested in urban agriculture, and Frijolito Farm is probably the second-closest thing in Columbus (after Kwodjo Ababio of New Harvest Cafe) to what Mr. Allen is doing in Milwaukee, but I’m so busy doing it that I don’t have time to go listen to somebody talk about it.

And maybe it’s just me crying sour grapes, but even if I did have the opportunity to go to this event, I’m a little cynical about it.  Mr. Allen says he started Growing Power (the name of his organization in Wisconsin) to feed and employ poor people in food deserts.  First off, I challenge the notion of urban food deserts.  Except for when I was a poor college student in Kent with no refrigerator or cooking facilities other than a coffee maker and had to walk to the grocery store a mile away and walk a mile back with the day’s food in a backpack, I have never had to walk to a grocery store.  If I didn’t have my own car, I knew somebody who did.  Or there was a bus.  Or a bicycle.  And even if the grocery store was so far away as to be challenging to get to, I didn’t just resign myself to subsisting on Twinkies from the nearest gas station.  Frankly, I’ve never encountered anyone who has.  Living and working in some of the poorer parts of Columbus and having lived for 20 years in Scioto County, I’ve known an awful lot of poor people.  If anyone out there wants to eat vegetables and chooses instead to eat gas station candy bars because going to the grocery store is too much of a hassle, I’d probably have met them…and I haven’t.

More often, I’ve found people who simply don’t want to eat vegetables.  I knew one man who ate lunch from McDonald’s every day and wouldn’t touch any food that didn’t come wrapped in plastic.  The idea of whole foods grossed him out, and his wife put extra sugar on almost everything she cooked, even things that normally aren’t sweetened.  (The real irony is that he lived on a farm.)

I’m supposedly in one of these food deserts.  1.1 miles northwest is a Kroger.  Seven-tenths of a mile to the south is a small grocery store called Hudson Market.  A half-mile to the west–easy walking distance, say, three or four blocks–is an IGA.  All of these stores carry fresh vegetables.  Maybe not as vast an array as you’d find at stores in the suburbs, but they carry the things people in the area want–lettuce, cabbage, greens, potatoes, green beans, carrots, onions, tomatoes, maybe some zucchini or yellow squash.  The reason you don’t typically find radicchio, fennel, leeks, and kohlrabi in the ‘hood is because nobody here wants them.  And the vegetables they do buy, they want dirt cheap.  Store owners aren’t going to regularly stock a large amount of expensive, perishable items that most of their regular customers aren’t interested in buying.  Heck, even if you gave that stuff away, most people around here wouldn’t know what to do with it, no more than your typical upper-middle-class resident of Worthington or Upper Arlington knows how to properly prepare chitterlings or beef tripe.

Since the advent of modern agriculture, hunger is almost never about there being a shortage of food.  It’s about people not having the money to buy it.  Enough food is grown worldwide to feed the entire population of the planet more than twice, but if you don’t pay for it (or grow it yourself), you don’t get any.  Enough food is wasted to feed all the people who starve, but we have storekeepers throwing away mountains of garbage and then standing over their dumpsters to chase away the hungry.  We don’t want poor people eating processed food, but we perpetuate an economic system that makes those people poor and makes food processors rich.  The more corners you cut in cranking out processed food, and the greater the volume of cut-rate food you produce, the richer you get.  There is no incentive for distributing quality food to the starving masses.  Our whole system is rigged against it.

So I reject the idea that the reason more poor people don’t eat more vegetables is because we’re too dumb or incapable of traveling to find a place that sells radishes.  It’s a patronizing view, really.  Don’t give poor people the food you think they ought to be eating.  Give them a source of income so they can go to the same grocery stores you go to.  When you can’t afford entertainment like sporting events and concerts, travel, cable TV and movies, or $35 keynote speeches by Will Allen, you take what indulgences are available.  For some people trapped in soul-grinding poverty, self-indulgence comes in the form of tobacco, alcohol, or harder drugs, or risky, possibly criminal behaviors that bring an endorphin rush and a sense of accomplishment.  For the rest, something salty, fatty, sweet, and possibly carbonated or caffeinated is sufficient self-indulgence.  All the well-intentioned moralizing and “education” (cultural exportation) in the world doesn’t change the fact that when all the cards are stacked against you and your life is miserable and hopeless, a cigarette or a beer or a Big Mac can take the edge off enough to get you through.  I’d rather see a fundamental change in the situation than simply putting different food on people’s plates.  Foodies coming along and showing poor people that “grilled calamari couscous with albino artichoke hearts and baby coconuts” is way, way better than anything at Burger King doesn’t fix anything if it costs five times as much or takes three hours to prepare after another three hours chasing down all the ingredients.  That’s just upscaling the indulgence, like going from off-brand beer to 60-year old scotch.  It doesn’t fix the problem; it aggravates it.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that food deserts are a very real phenomenon and the whole reason poor people eat bad food is because we’re physically incapable of traveling more than a block away and we’ll subsist on chewing gum and antacids if that’s all that the nearest corner store sells.  Let’s further assume that we’ll change our eating habits if a college-educated hero on a white horse rides in from the suburbs and teaches us not only to enjoy a higher class of cuisine, but to prepare it as well.

Okay, so let’s get crackin’!  Is Will Allen coming to the St. Stephens community center to teach all the poor folks how to grow cipollini onions and chioggia beets in their glass-and-gravel-strewn vacant lots?  Is admission free, since the event is being sponsored by Scott’s Miracle-Gro and a host of other sponsors?

Um, no.  The keynote and reception are being held at Franklin Park Conservatory.  The keynote is $35.  The reception is $50.  The two days of workshops to be held in someone’s back yard in Blacklick are $170 per person.  This is an event for upscale hobbyists with money to throw around and weekends off.  That is, it specifically excludes the very people Mr. Allen’s mission intends to help most.

The good news is that if you have to miss this event, you can get most of it elsewhere for free.  There’s plenty of information online about what Will Allen has done.  It’s quite inspiring.  I encourage you to go read the articles and watch the videos.  I suspect that in so doing, you’ll get the bulk of what will be covered in Mr. Allen’s speech tonight.  And the topics of the workshop?  Hoop houses, composting, vermicomposting, aquaponics, micro-green production.  With the exception of aquaponics, you can find copious literature on all of these subjects in the public library.  The Columbus Metropolitan Library does have books on aquaculture, too, but all the ones I’ve seen seem to be geared for the rural pond owner.  I’d have enjoyed some personal instruction in how to adapt it to urban production, but at $170, I figure I can send the man an email.

Aside from books, there are also lots of people you can consult for help with these topics.  The Urban Farming Guys in Kansas City, Missouri, are raising food fish in the inner city, mostly feeding them duckweed that they grow on site.  RainFresh Harvests in Plain City, near Dublin grows basil for Columbus restaurants in addition to raising fish.  Dr. Dave at Freshwater Farms of Ohio in Urbana can also help you get into aquaculture. Hoop houses?  Everybody’s got ’em these days.  Ask the OSU Extension service to point you toward more information.  I had one, but found it more useful as a poultry barn than as a growing tunnel…at least until the stray dogs ripped into it.  If you want to talk with someone who’s had more success growing in them, check with Joseph Swainway of Swainway Urban Farm in Clintonville or Four Seasons City Farm on the Near East Side.  For vermicomposting, Kellie and Jeremy Gedert of One20Farm are the people to ask.  Composting without the worms?  We have some huge composting operations around here.  SWACO has composting facilities in Groveport, Upper Arlington, and Lockbourne.  I think Kurtz Brothers has their own in Westerville, and I read about some guy in Delaware County who composts all the manure from the zoo.  Ask these folks how to compost.  OEFFA has had workshops on composting, one of which was held at the community garden I manage on Maize Road.  There are plenty of people around who can tell you how to pile stuff up so it rots.

For instruction in micro-greens…just jump in with both feet.  Take a flower pot.  Plant some lettuce or spinach seeds.  When it’s just a few inches tall, very tender and not looking anything like a mature, ready-to-harvest plant yet, cut it off at the base.  When you go large scale, they make fancy serrated cutters with bags attached, but for your flowerpot full of lettuce, a pair of ordinary scissors will do.  There.  You have microgreens.

Oh, one last point before I forget: Scotts? Really??? A lawn chemical company is putting this on? Most of the people attending this event, many of whom I respect and admire, wouldn’t touch anything grown with chemical fertilizers, let alone use such chemicals in their own food gardens.  The irony here is beyond words.  You’d have to have Monsanto sponsoring the event for it to be any more shocking.

So on the one hand, I’m disappointed I’m missing this, but on the other hand, I doubt I’m really missing much other than the opportunity to meet a great man.

Well, enough writing.  Lunch break is over.  Time to get back to work.