Buy Fresh, Buy Local!

LOS LOMAS
Rebecca Thistlethwaite
Age 30
Occupation program manager for the non-profit organic farm ALBA
Agriculture and Land-based Training Association
“We provide marketing and technical assistance to minority farmers. We’ve helped over 500 in the last twenty years.”

Jim Dunlop
Age 36
Organic chicken Farmer
Ex marine
Winner of 1998 Turkey Testicle Festival “Biggest Pair” division in Turlock California.
Hero is Joel Salatin, author of Pastured Poultry Profits
“This guy is an amazing public speaker, he tied world politics, abortion, and chicken farming all together”

We drove up a muddy dirt road, and I had no idea what to do when I met a car coming down. There was no place to go, the RV really should only go in one direction, and that is of course straight ahead. The little gold Saturn put it in reverse and backed up the hill about twenty yards and pulled into a turnout. Mighty neighborly of him. We passed a stand of Douglas fir, a tree farm that was never harvested, and now thirty foot tall trees are lined up, like a mathematical forest, Christmas trees gone wild. The directions read, “Turn left at the mailbox on 79 Los Lomas road, head up the gravel past a horse ranch. Stay straight through an oak grove. (they assume I can identify an oak grove. Country people!) The driveway is the paved one on the right.” Parts of it were paved, and parts had run back down hill in chunks last winter when the rains came. But we found it just fine.

Rebecca was moseying in the yard, and told us her husband Jim was “doing the chicken chores.” The funny thing about leaving the city, everything people say in the country is astonishing. She could have told us Jim ran down to the store for cigarettes and it would have felt like we were in Arkansas, on a moonshine farm, and no one around here had heard of microwave ovens yet. The reality was both Jim and Rebecca had college degrees. Of course the internet connection was dial up, operating at a peak of 47 kps. They hitched two head of oxen to a combine to generate bandwidth. So the country is still a little slower than the financial district of S.F.

I will admit right here the documentation of this project is totally covered. I have a cameraman, a soundman, and a writer, and each one captures a different perspective. That is what makes this an art project, not a walkabout. A few photos and a page in a journal is the normal amount of documentation. I have to take this thing out of the realm of ordinary. How else can I bring the education back? I need to have a different perspective and by combing all three of my friends, along with my own, it becomes very rich.

“To be a farmer today requires a high level of education, I have my Master’s from UC Davis. It requires innovation and entrepreneurialism to make it work nowadays. Maybe in the past you could be stupid, but not anymore.”
Organic farming requires a lot of troubleshooting, since you can’t just spray poison on a problem, then dump fertilizer chemicals back down so something can grow again. During the rainy season fava beans are being grown on one field just to hold the soil in place, and in springtime, it will be turned under to feed the soil. Giant rolls of black plastic are not rolled out for weed/erosion control.

By being disconnected from your market, you don’t mind selling food or milk you wouldn’t personally consume to someone else. “Jim and I have read lots of stories about people afraid to eat the crops in their fields, and a dairy farmer said he had his own private stash of milk cows that he allowed to range on grass pasture and didn’t feed them the growth hormone RBGH. “

Spending time with organic farmers means a lot of talk about the personal relationship of food. These are people who don’t shop for an organic label; they buy food from a source they know. They are so involved in the food production end, they have seen personally “cage free” chicken farmers who just keep thousands of birds in a warehouse and cut the beaks off the birds so they don’t fight each other. The conditions are both heartbreaking and dangerous to the consumer. Jim has no problem killing chickens; it just means a paycheck to him. But he does worry about what he sells to the public. He hand guts the bird, instead of running it through a processor that will spread the intestines and feces all over the meat. This means he doesn’t have to dip his chickens in a chlorine bath to disinfect it. It means when you buy chicken from Jim, it doesn’t have that little absorbent towel underneath it to sop up the excess water from the chlorine bath. So now I have to look at supermarket chicken as bleached meat with dead feces bacteria totally covering it.

A lot of news comes from the AP wire. It is a subscription service most news outlets pay for. A story is written up by their journalists, and then sold to who ever wants it. Small towns and big cities have put it in their papers.

You wouldn’t believe what happens when your phone number is placed on the AP wire. Imagine if your home phone number was on CNN.com. You would have a lot of people calling. Here is a breakdown of the call frequency on my cell phone on Monday FEB 14th, 2005.

1:17
1:05
1:05
12:40
12:35
12:16
12:14
12:11

That’s the power of the AP. I love to hear my cell phone ring, everyone likes to be called, but this is crazy.

I have a feature on my cell that tells me where the call is coming from, and there were calls from Washington State and Washington DC, Texas, Canada, Maryland, Ohio, just all over the country. It really is something to have the whole country know about my little idea.

Short mail

Hi! My name is alex a. I think you are doing a great thing and I was wondering if you would have lunch with me in Iowa.

Good evening Mr. Horowitz. I read an article stating what you are doing, and would like to commend you for your services to humanity.

E-Mails:
+++ “u can stay here, I have an extra couch, and I can probably help you w/ a hundred bucks or so.” J. R. Dayton Florida
+++ “I’m not lonely or insane.” V.F. Vancouver B.C. Canada
+++ “We have a big house and can accommodate you if you would like to sleep in something other than the RV.”
A.L. Newark NY
+++ “With a house/mortgage and especially 2 little girls, that dream (of traveling) is on hold indefinitely, needless to say. But hey! What if one of these people were to come here?” P.H. Frederick MD

WHAT WE LEARNED

Brown eggs come from North American breeds

White eggs come from European breeds

Green eggs do exist, (I saw two of them) and they come from South American breeds like the Auracana

jim in the marines: