Farm Challenge Day 6

So we come to the end. Last Saturday was the last day of Farm Challenge here at ECHO‘s Global Farm. What a week of gastronomically delightful self-sufficiency it was! Some of my faves included farm sushi by Elliot and Brian, polenta with pigeon peas by Rebecca and Vanessa, juevos rancheros by Craig and Amy and of course grilled fish by Tim and I. But all good things have to end. The gentlemen at my house started our final say of farm food with some of this magic:

Fried plantains and duck eggs, with fresh-squeezed orange juice!

For lunch we cobbled together some baked sweet potato and fresh avocado for a quick meal.

But what we were really waiting fro was dinner. Our first non-farm meal of the week. But first, we had to concoct one last piece of farm deliciousness:

Goat milk sweet potato honey ice cream!

So yes. It was over. And we ate pizza. And it was good. But Farm Challenge really encouraged me to be more resourceful in utilizing what we grow here at ECHO. Sure, we’ll never be totally self-sufficient. And that isn’t our goal. But using the resource of our land to fuller potential is an important part of our stewardship. And we have so much food! There is an amazing diversity of crops here at ECHO. It astonishes me everyday that I get to live here. I am beginning to believe that the amazing diversity of cultivated species is a reflection of the diversity and grandeur of the image of God in humanity. From amaranth to oranges, the foreign and the familiar, the broad range of food crops represents human culture–what is culture if not what we have cultivated?–at its most creative. It is a blessing to here among this bounty.

Farm Challenge Day 5

The 2nd-to-last day of farm challenge was a Friday, which is the day when we interns have breakfast  together, so Hannia, Vanessa and Rebecca made us a farm safe breakfast:

On the morning menu:

Entree: scrambled eggs (both duck and chicken) topped with cilantro

Sides: sweet potato hash browns and steamed greens

Drink: papaya smoothie

Next, for lunch, Brian and Elliot pulled off one of the most complex meals of the week. Farm sushi!

This consisted of:

Entree: Sushi rolls made of steamed mustard greens and farm rice, filled with avocado, jicama, tomato, carrots, chives, sesame seeds and (a few) habanero peppers. Topped with an olive oil/jalapeno sauce.

Sides: Broccoli tempura and rice.

Salad: Esmerelda lettuce, carrots, hard-boiled eggs.

Finally, for our evening meal, Rebecca and Abby produced a marvelous stir-fry:

 

On the menu:

Entree: sweet potato, onion stir-fry in rice, served in cabbage bowls.

Side: Fresh avacado

Salad: Red fire lettuce, nasturtiums and grape tomatoes

So that was day 5! Only one day left…

 

Farm Challenge Day 4

On day 4 of Farm Challenge, it was my turn again to help out with lunch:

Entree: Pumpkin soup, flavored with galangal, curry leaves and bay rum leaves.

Side dish: Sweet potato fries

Salad: Red fire lettuce, cabbage and grape tomatoes

Dessert: Papaya

Then, for dinner, we had the best, and the most bittersweet meal of the week. It was time to eat Gideon the Goat. Goat is hard to cook well, so for a special event, Stan (ECHO’s CEO) and Beth (our  intern manager) Doerr asked some of their friends from church to come help cook the meat:

These guys know how to cook a goat, let me tell you. First they washed the meat in boiling water and sour orange to take the goaty flavor out (believe me, goatiness is a distinct and unmistakeable attribute. It’s amazing they could remove it from the meat). Then they cooked it in a special sauce with carrots and served it over rice. We didn’t ask any questions about the provenance of their ingredients, but the meat itself was 100% farm. And oh so good.

Oh, and they made potato salad. Yeah, it did seem a bit like cheating. But Gideon would have wanted it that way. We enjoyed him to his fullest potential.

 

Farm Challenge Day 3

On day 3 of farm challenge, Amy and Craig served us lunch outside (this being balmy Florida):

It consisted of:

Entree: Corn tortillas and eggs, topped with ranchero sauce, avocado and cilantro

Side dishes: Fried green tomatoes and starfruit

Drink: “Carrotbola” juice. Carrot+carambola (starfruit).

Dinner for day 3 required a little effort:

Yes, Tim harpooned a fish. I tried to get one, but when the crucial moment came, I missed. Blame it on the refraction. Anyway, with that, and a few others caught on a line, Tim and I made our meal:

Entree: Tilapia, bass and bluegill, seasoned with kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, garlic chives and galangal, served over rice.

Salad: Red fire lettuce, esmerelda lettuce, grape tomatoes and nasturtiums, topped with dressing from olive oil, lemon juice and garlic chives.

Dessert: dried sapodilla, muscadines, starfruit and persimmons

Beautiful stuff, right?

Tim read to us from Genesis, when God gives man dominion over the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. This is something we’ve been contemplating a lot in the past week as we’ve slaughtered a number of our animals. Stewardship means care and right use. And that involves death that is useful and not in vain. The meat we’ve eaten this week is a gift not to be taken lightly. It is a provision in a fallen world, to be taken consciously, with eyes open.

 

Farm Challenge Day 2

It’s the first full day of purely farm food! Started the day off with a little breakfast with the boys. Some sweet potato hash browns and eggs courtesy of my ducks. Then, for lunch, Vanessa and Rebecca cooked this feast:

The Menu:

Entree: Baked polenta with pigeon peas

Salad: Esmerelda and Red Fire lettuce, tomatoes with some starfruit and dressing made from lemon juice, garlic chives and peanuts

Dessert: Fruit salad with papaya, starfruit and grapefruit

Then for dinner Abby and Hannia produced this:

Entree: Roast rabbit, with tomatoes, jujube and carrots, spiced with sage, tumeric, galangal and bay rum leaf (spices from my rainforest area!), served over sweet potato.

Salad: steamed swiss chard

Dessert: More starfruit and papaya!

So thus ends day two. So far it’s been a feast for the senses. Today at lunch Rebecca read Isaiah 58 to us:

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

During this time we are considering our abundance more intensely than usual. We are not fasting. Not by any means. We are feasting on what God has provided through this land. But in the midst of this harvest we are called to remember that we live in a world of injustice, hunger, ecological devastation and pain. And the God of potentiality, of community and peace, requires us to honor him by seeking  prosperity and freedom for the poor.

Farm Challenge Day 1

Farm Challenge, the week where we only eat what we grow on our own farm began on a stellar note with this evening’s dinner, held aloft by its architect, Mr. Elliot Toevs:

The menu:

Entree: Chicken, slow cooked with carrots and onions, seasoned by orange peel, basil, parsley, rosemary and cilantro. Served over rice.

Salad: Esmerelda lettuce, starfruit, strawberries, katuk and moringa leaves, with a lime juice dressing.

Dessert: Canistel, or “Eggfruit”

My plate!

Canistel, in case you were wondering

So that was our first meal. Elliot prefaced it with a reading from Acts 2:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.  And all who believed were together and had all things in common.  And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.  And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts,  praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

For us here at ECHO, Farm Challenge is a time to remind ourselves of the rich communal significance of food. Our meals are shared out of the abundance of the land God has given us to steward. Meals should be a reminder of this at all times, but this week is special. This week we are eating what we have sown, watered, fertilized and harvested. We’ve seen all this food from seed to table. So we have an extra opportunity to take that harvest and use it, not only to nourish our bodies, but to strengthen our community.

Farm Challenge!

So this week at ECHO we’ll be doing something called Farm Challenge, where we spend a week eating nothing but food from our own farm. We’ll be allowed to import salt and oil. But other than that, we’ll be 100% self-sufficient. We already live off our own produce for a good portion of our diet. But usually we buy staple grains and pulses, since our demonstration rice paddy and corn fields are not enough to truly sustain us. But this week it’s all farm all the time. We’ve already started getting prepared by slaughtering three chickens and two rabbits for some upcoming meals. And a goat is going down Wednesday. So it should be an exciting week. I’ll use this opportunity to let out my inner food blogger and update you on the menu as the week progresses.

Book Review: Stolen Harvest

photo from ecofilms.com.au

Last week I read Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, by Vandana Shiva. These days I only read books that make me angry. It’s my new thing. Stolen Harvest is an impassioned critique of the Green Revolution, a flurry of innovation that introduced dwarf grain varieties (and the chemicals needed to grow them optimally) to Latin American and India. If you’ve been paying attention, the Green Revolution is exactly what the authors of Enough–the last book I wrote about–are promoting. That book profiled Norman Borlaug, the “father” of the Green Revolution, and wrote positively about his efforts. And they were probably right to do so. Maybe.

The Green Revolution is also what Bill Gates and co. are hoping to bring to Africa through the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa. So what is the Green Revolution? Why is Bill Gates excited about it, and Vandana Shiva against it?

The Green Revolution, as stated above, centered around dwarf varieties of grain which could support a larger seed head (the part you eat) without falling over. These varieties are capable of producing much more grain than most traditional varieties. But. They require a lot of fertilization, a lot of water, and since they are typically grown in large monocultures to utilize economies of scale, they need a lot of pesticides. But what gets Vandana Shiva particularly worked up is the way these commercial varieties push aside the biodiversity of traditional rice seeds, which have been passed down from farmer to farmer for centuries.

All of these things make the Green Revolution model extremely difficult for small-holders. The capital intensive nature of large-scale monocultures requires a lot of borrowing. Shiva documents an epidemic of suicides among Indian rice farmers linked to default on loans for seed and fertilizer. Moreover, the introduction of soybeans and soybean oil has pushed aside the  production and processing of mustard oil, thus putting countless small-scale processors out of business in favor of large-scale soybean oil processing plants. in general, Green Revolution-style agriculture favors capital-intensive large-scale production and processing. So often, the rich get richer and the poor are competed out of the market when the Green Revolution comes to town. That’s Vandana Shiva’s analysis anyway.

And that’s not even mentioning the next step in industrial agriculture’s development: genetically modified organisms. Shiva reserves particular scorn for GMOs and the companies (especially Monsanto) that produce them. Genetically modified grains have the same downsides as the previously mentioned hybrid dwarf varieties. But the GMOs on the market today are not just created for maximum yield. In fact, the most commonly used GMO in the world is Monsanto’s Round-Up Ready Soybean. This soybean can be sprayed with Monsanto’s Round-Up herbicide (glyphocate) and suffer no ill effects, while the weeds around it die off. The advantage to farmers is easier weed control. The advantage to Monsanto is increased Round-Up sales. Win-win, right? Except that extensive use of any herbicide is bound to result in resistant weeds. And extensive use of any one commercial variety is bound to push out the biodiversity on which our food supply may very well depend in the long run. So says Vandana Shiva, who is (I think rightly) angry that Monsanto is modifying the gene pool of a food plant so it can sell more chemicals.

But what’s the final verdict here? Should we cast aside the Green Revolution, GMOs and industrial monocultures? Is Norman Borlaug a hero or a saint?

The answer, like most things in life, is complicated. First of all, we should consider the Green Revolution varieties separately from the subsequent developments by the increasingly monopolistic seed companies (Monsanto and Dupont effectively control a majority of the market). So. What did Norman Borlaug do? He created the most quickly replicable solution to the grain shortage problem. Since it was replicable (in the short term) to a wide variety of circumstances, this solution spread quickly in Latin America and India. And it is extremely likely that this saved the lives of millions of people. But it also strained aquifers, increased income inequality and decreased the use of organic matter for soil fertility. The other possible solution to the grain shortage problem would have been the widespread use of biointensive, labor-intensive, soil conservation agricutlure. This would have looked differently from region to region, and even from farm to farm. There would be no silver bullet, no one variety and little to no profit to be made by corporations, therefore no incentive for the rapid spread of information.

The road not traveled may be the way forward, now that breeding of staple grains has brought us near the edge of maximum possible yields. And it is likely that the monopolies currently held by companies like Monsanto are directing innovations toward corporate profit, rather than food security. So is Vandana Shiva right? Mostly, I think so. The Green Revolution may have bought us some time by keeping global food production ahead of population growth. But it cannot be sustained as rising oil prices make chemical fertilizer more expensive. And if the future involves a more biodiverse, sustainable system we need as many of the traditional varieties that Shiva supports as we can get. The potentiality of the gene pool may be our best bet for food security in the future.

More on GMOs later. They deserve their own discussion.

Echo Conference Highlights

Happy New Year! Here are some highlights from ECHO‘s 2011 Tropical Agriculture Conference:

Dr. Hamado Sawadogo of Burkina Faso spoke about innovations in semi-arid farming, including zai holes, half-moons and rock walls. These sort of techniques are designed to conserve water and lengthen the period in which water is available to plant roots.

Roland Bunch, development hero and author of Two Ears of Corn, introduced what may be the most troubling problem facing sub-saharan Africa today: pervasive loss of soil fertility across the Sahel region. He predicted that another major famine would strike the Sahel within three years, and this time it could extend much further and last longer if soil conservation is not pursued vigorously. In response to this crisis-in-the-making, Mr. Bunch promotes an approach called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, or FMNR. This is a technique for identifying trees which have been cut down, but whose roots are still alive, then working with farmers to preserve the new shoots within their fields, instead of cutting them down. This new tree growth provides dispersed shade and helps prevent erosion. Combined with cover crops it could produce enough organic matter to restore the soil.

Ravi Jayakaran, the Senior Director of Global Programs for MAP International, presented MAP’s Total Health Village approach to development. This approach grew out of MAP’s gradual realization that supplying medicine was only fixing one symptom of a village’s deeper need for transformational development. So instead of simply bringing medicine, MAP began a more holistic approach, treating poverty as a complex series of broken relationships a la Bryant Myers, with whom Dr. Jayakaran has collaborated on the recent book, Working with the Poor.

Roy Danforth, a long-time missionary and development worker in the Central African Republic, shared his experience from 30 years of agricultural development work, both in CAR and the Democratic Republic of Congo. His first-hand insights into work on the field were incredibly valuable, as was the humility with which he shared the mistakes he made. The central lesson I took from his presentation was the need to seek the empowerment of local people. He is currently working to develop a Small Farm Research Development Project in CAR, which he hopes will put information in the hands of small farmers so they can improve their own lives.

Dusty Reynolds, of Sababu Conscious Clothing, presented his rational for–and personal experience with–replacing aid with trade. He established a factory in Mali with local partners and now contracts with them to produce t-shirts. His presentation raised a lot of questions in my mind, so I went to a “meet the speaker” event later in the day. I found him to be very respectful of his Malian partners, who now run the entire operation in Mali, and concerned that his business consider its employees as whole people. With that in mind they are establishing literacy and health classes as a part of their employees’ benefits. I would definitely encourage anyone to support Sababu’s business.

The final plenary presentation on the last day of conference came from David Evans, the president of Food for the Hungry US. His title was Recovering the Eden Mandate: A Christian response to climate change, food price crises and other challenges. This was more related to public policy than any of the other presentations. He encouraged the audience as Christians and voters to consider the way public policy effects global hunger. And a big part of that could be climate change, as rising temperatures make marginal farmland even more vulnerable. Mr. Evans spent some time addressing global warming skepticism, including referencing the research done by Richard Muller and the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, which was an independent survey confirming that temperatures have in fact risen over the past century. Evans also covered food price fluctuations, which have wreaked havoc on grain-importing nations over the past few years. The only way to prevent these fluctuations from hurting the poor is to help these nations, and the farmers in them, to become more food self-sufficient. Over all, Evans was more cerebral and policy-focused than others in the line-up, but I thought he brought an important reminder of the macro realities facing agricultural development.

That’s just a sampling of some of the heavy hitters at the conference. Other highlights included learning about community needs assessment from Robert Sanou, who will be leading the ECHO West Africa Impact Center, a talk on underutilized food species by botanical explorer Joseph Simcox and a post-conference workshop with Dr. Martin Price, ECHO’s founder, on the challenges of growing food in the tropics.

 

 

My Rainforest

My domain. My kingdom. My own little part of ECHO‘s Global Farm. The Rainforest (cue obligatory creaking frog jungle sound effects). This is the part of the farm where we grow ube, a purple yam from the Philippines. That’s it, trellising all the way up the palm tree:

And that’s winged bean on the left, going up the bamboo poles. It’s a Sri Lankan trellising bean, with edible leaves and roots.

The idea of the Rainforest is to demonstrate “slash and mulch” agriculture. This is an alternative to slash and burn, where instead of burning the organic material, you mulch with it, keeping the soil covered at all times. The hope is that with improved farming techniques, farmers in the real rainforest won’t have to keep burning it down to survive.

The Rainforest also demonstrates multistory agriculture. The yams are a case in point. They go all the way up the trellises and into a tree without killing it. And another crop can be grown at their base while they are small. We also use the Glyricidia tree as a living trellis for our cucumbers to grow up. The shade from the Rainforest’s trees are its biggest challenge, but trees are also an asset, so it is important to learn how to farm in conjunction with trees, an idea called agroforestry.

So that’s the Rainforest.