My blog post yesterday was admittedly a bit doom and gloom. But, today is a new day and I'm awake (not sure how after a late night after hours at the restaurant learning how to make beer) and inspired anew. Let me give you a little back story as context, because a few different things have come together to brighten my morning.
First off, I recently started a twitter account after making fun of it and all my friends who used it for about two years. I'll admit that I did it as a way to try to route more traffic to the blog, which to a small degree has worked. I will also admit that I find twitter to be a very useful online tool. I'm embracing the times, confessional over.
I mention twitter because this morning I noticed I had a new follower, a rare occurrence, so yippee! I immediately logged in to learn more about them and it turned out to be the NOFA-NY's Beginning Farmer Coordinator Rachel with whom I staffed the publications table at the conference as part of my volunteer duties (as a brief side note, the community and network building I've already experienced in the week following the conference has been pretty amazing).
I clicked around a bit until I ended up on the blog she writes, on behalf of NOFA, about and for beginning farmers, aptly located on the interweb at nynofabeginningfarmers.wordpress.com. Much to my initial delight - particularly the delight of my ego - she had some nice things to say about my blog in her post Showing everyone the new face of farming. She goes on to disclose that the USDA - who I more or less accused of being down right terrible in my post about the conference and again, and more so, yesterday in the wake of the GE alfalfa ruling - some facts that very clearly illustrate how convoluted food policy is in our country. I didn't realize this until I read her post, but the USDA's Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Project provides some funding for NOFA-NY's Beginning Farmer program, through which I received a scholarship to attend the conference. As Alanis Morssette would tell you, that's a little too ironic.
More importantly, and to the point of what I'm actually trying to blog about, she mentioned a very cool project she's getting together. Rachel is calling out to farmers - beginning, aspiring, experienced, patio, roof-top, windowsill farmers, foragers, whoever, whatever you are - to submit pictures, possibly in the style of Grant Wood's American Gothic, to compile a visual for the new face of farming. So, if you are growing something, have a plan to grow something, making jam, whatever, I encourage you to send a picture to Rachel at rachel@nofany.org.
The last thing I'll mention, that Rachel's most recent post alerted me to, and that I'm super-psyched about it, is this new farming software nearing release. AgSquared will allow farmers to manage their farms and their farm data with a number of valuable record keeping and organizational tools. From devising planting schedules and inventorying seeds and transplants, to analyzing market profits and organizing on farm labor, to using google earth to map out your fields, the software should be an invaluable asset to streamlining small farm management. Honestly, I can't do the product justice, so you should check out this demo video on their website. Whether you have a potential use for it or just read this blog for Tamara's pretty pictures, you should watch the demo and see some of the foundational technology that will be crucial to the future of sustainable agriculture.
Michael Pollan talks about the need for a new breed of tech savvy, educated farmers, and he is right on point when he does. The new face of farming is a diverse one, it needs to continue to grow and take advantage of technological innovations to streamline operations and maximize efficiency. We are young and ambitious, there is a growing number of us and we are gaining momentum, we have a hoe in one hand and an iPhone in the other.
I saw it first hand at the conference last weekend. Small farms are the most productive and sustainable, but they require a lot of hard work. This work can be simplified with the use of newer technologies. Social media sites, like facebook and twitter are great tools to connect the farming community to each other and to their consumer-base. Software like AgSquared can help the good food revolution grow exponentially by helping to make our farms run smoothly. Local oriented online distribution outlets - like CNY Bounty and Harvestation in our area - are further augmenting brick and mortar farmer's markets, cutting out the middle men, and diversifying the ways we can get our produce to the people.
So, despite the serious, downer attitude I had yesterday, there are actually many reasons to be hopeful. Don't let GE alfalfa get you down, let's just do something about it. The more we - small farmers and our supporters - embrace these new tools the more useful they will become, and the more time we can spend growing good food to feed the future sustainably. Somebody at the NOFA conference mentioned how we have to relearn all the things that our grandparents generation grew up knowing through experience. Nothing could be more true. By using that knowledge and combining it with modern technology, we can create an elixir capable of expanding the local food movement to levels where it begins to nourish significant populations. Once we achieve that crucial step, the sky is the limit.
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