Hemp
|
Community Supported Agriculture Newsletter November 28, 2006 11/28/06 |
|
Hemp
|
|
TBIOFUELS UPDATE
A few years back I wrote a newsletter
focusing on the potential for our farm to run on biofuels, particularly
on biodiesel. I quickly learned that collecting used vegetable oil
and turning it into biodiesel was not something that we could justify doing
from an economic perspective, despite its environmental appeal. It
would simply take too much time —- a resource at Terra Firma which is even
more limited than petroleum — as well as creating the potential for logistical
nightmares. Visualize your boxes not being delivered because we didn’t
get the batch of biodiesel finished in time to fuel the truck…
I focused the limited amount of
energy I had to devote to the topic to lobbying our existing diesel supplier
to provide us with biodiesel. Assisted by several of our fellow organic
farmers in the area, we finally convinced them the demand was real.
They are now finishing a storage facility for biodiesel from the Midwest,
and promise to begin delivery of the fuel to us any day now. By next
summer, I hope to be able to make the claim that all our crops were grown
with biodiesel instead of petroleum.
GROW YOUR OWN?
Occasionally someone will ask me
why we don’t grow our own crops to produce biodiesel. This question
reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of biofuels.
Oilseed crops produce, at most, 350 gallons or so of oil per acre, which
becomes even less biodiesel. So to produce the 10,000 gallons of
fuel we use a year, we’d need to devote 30 of our 150 acres to fuel production.
At $3 a gallon, we’d be making just $1000 an acre of that land. As
a small farm, we need to grow crops that do much better than that.
Even big growers in California probably won’t be growing crops for biodiesel. Why? Because soybeans and canola don’t grow well here. And the oil crops that do, like safflower and olive, have higher values for food, so they are not competitive as fuel feedstocks. Cottonseed oil is a by-product of cotton production here, which is extensive, but realistically growers are not going to increase their acreage based on the demand for a byproduct.
One oilseed crop grows very well in California. It takes little fertilizer, needs little in the way of pesticides, and would provide a much-needed rotation crop for commodity crop growers. It is hemp — the non-narcotic relative of marijuana. Unfortunately, it is still illegal to grow hemp in the United States due to law enforcement concerns that it could be used by pot growers to hide their real crop. And although the California assembly recently passed a bill legalizing it as a crop for farmers here, the Governor recently vetoed the bill as a favor to his law enforcement supporters.
While it is unfortunate that California will not be producing feedstock for biodiesel any time soon, farmers here have already jumped on the need for corn for ethanol production. Several production facilities were constructed this year, and acreage of field corn — which has been in serious decline for years here due to low prices — is almost certain to increase.
Meanwhile, farmers in the nearby
Pacific Northwest will most likely take advantage of the cooler climate
there to increase their acreage of canola for biodiesel. And truth
be told, they need a new crop there more than we do here. Many counties
in Western Washington, in particular, currently have thousands of acreages
of farmland that is currently fallow or underutilized because of a lack
of economically viable crops. As soon as 2007, new biodiesel facilities
there may be using locally grown canola to make biodiesel. And Terra
Firma may be filling its tractors with fuel from just a little closer than
Iowa. Or Kuwait.
DECEMBER HOLIDAY SCHEDULE
Here’s our year-end holiday schedule,
which is also posted on the website:
Week of Dec. 18th — Normal delivery schedule
except for Sacramento/Davis, moved to Tuesday 12/19.
Week of Dec. 25th — no delivery
Week of Jan. 1st — no delivery
Remember too that December and January
payments should be made for the full monthly amount; the two week vacation
is factored into our subscription rates.
IN YOUR BOXES
Over the years, we’ve experimented with
growing many Asian vegetables here at Terra Firma: Long beans, daikon
radish, napa cabbage, and probably others. With most of them, we
found that some aspect or another was a deal-breaker — pest problems, lack
of customer interest, etc. Then we found one that did the trick:
Mei Quing Choy; otherwise known as Baby Bok.
Bok Choy is an approachable vegetable. It has a mild taste and soaks up other flavors readily. It cooks quickly, and provides lots of nutrition. While it is most recognizable in Asian dishes, it can easily be adapted to other cuisines. Unfortunately, standard Bok Choy is intimidating to most non-Asian cooks— it grows so large that a single plant can easily weigh 5 lbs, and most people are at a loss to use it all before it spoils in the fridge.
Baby Bok offers all the pluses of its bigger cousin in a smaller package, which means less sticker shock and lower potential for waste. Plus, it is simply a beautiful vegetable, both before and after it is cooked — a marvel of plant breeding. That must be why the seeds are so darn expensive; it is, of course, a patented variety.
If pre-washed baby Spinach is the tricycle of green vegetables, offering a way for non-cooks to include healthy greens in their diet, then Baby Bok is the training wheels. All it requires is a few minutes of trimming and rinsing, then it can be zapped for a minute in the microwave and added to a bowl of miso soup or (ack!) Top Ramen drizzled with your favorite Asian “Sauce in a Bottle”. My hope is that diners making this baby step into vegetable cooking will eventually feel comfortable braising chard or even kale with garlic. As a self-confessed “vegetable dealer”, I freely admit my hopes that Baby Bok will be the “Gateway Green” for a new generation of TFF subscribers.
Thanks,
Pablito
Please make sure to include your
account name, the one on the sign off sheet, in each and every correspondance.
Thank You! |
Recipes..............
..............
CSA membership fees ~payment due day is first of month
| Monthly | Quarterly | Yearly | |
| Small box | 52 | 150 | 580 |
| Medium Box | 86 | 245 | 959 |
| Large Box | 116 | 330 | 1294 |
**being offered only to existing everyother week subscribers, as the small box has better variety and is more tuned to the smaller household appetite. The weekly schedule is also much easier to remember, and saves us all a lot of problems at the pick up sites. |
46 | 131 | 513 |
| Vacation Credits: | Small | Medium | Large |
| Vacation credits are lower to discourage overuse, and to reflect actual cost to the farm For each vacation date you will be credited these amounts: There are no "temporary cancel" alternatives ;) We need seven days notice for vacation notices, and please be sure to include your full name and the date you'd like to skip delivery. | $8 | $13 | $18 |
We Up/downgrades are $5 per week per increment.
Vacations & Billing Inquiries
We need seven days notice before a vacation hold
or other change of service.
Contact Valerie through voicemail at (530) 756-2800,
or e-mail Goldenbell@aol.com. Include your account name in full (what's
on the sign off sheet).
Account Balance Inquiries The account sheet is hiding under the sign off sheet each week with your account balance on it. Mid month I've been e-mailing statments, so if you're not getting it send me an e-mail requesting to be added to the list. To be able to read the statements you need to be logged in as an administrator on a PC, and virus programs may corrupt the file. Some Mac operating systems do allow the file to be viewed. We can't resend them, and it wouldn't work any better the second time anyway.
MAILING ADDRESS:
Terra Firma Farms, Inc
P.O. Box 836
Winters, CA 95694
(530) 756-2800
www.terrafirmafarm.com
Goldenbell@aol.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Newsletter Archives |
Is it safe to eat Spinach?