The potluck will be this coming Friday, Jan 20 with dinner at 6 PM and discussion from 7 to 8 PM, bring some food to share for the dinner and ideas to share for the potluck.

The location will be 900 Idaho Ave, Ames, IA.

We'll have a discussion about technology: what it means, what is appropriate technology, and how we deal with the risks that technology presents. This potluck, we're making an explicit effort to move away from expert-driven discussion, so be sure to bring ideas, opinions, and examples about technology to the group.

To get ready for the discussion, perhaps you would like to read an essay by a German person:

http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~xinwei/classes/readings/Heidegger/heidegger_t...

or watch a video by some French people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoPplpBPQxQ&ob=av2n

Sorry, I couldn't figure out how to embed either of these. Hope to see people there!

Guided by Shari Reilly, we'll talk about the ideas of charity, service, social justice, and the compatibility and conflict of these ideas, with a focus on food.
The potluck will occur on Dec 9th, at 6 PM, with a discussion to follow at 7PM.
The potluck will be at 320 Ash Ave, a few blocks south of Iowa state university.

Bring some food and ideas to share!

As noted before, most of our harvests increased this year. In terms of major crops, we had several that increased over 50% from the previous year, in terms of food exported from the farm:

Beets, edemame (immature soy), fennel, green beans, peas, largely because we did a better job of planting, fostering germination, and maintaining these crops.

The improved weather also helped the above crops, but definitely helped the leeks, onions, tomatoes, and greens which increased from last year largely because last year's plantings of these crops were severely hampered by water-related death and disease-onion harvest increased fivefold.

Berries and rhubarb increased from just a few pounds last year to about 80 lbs of berries and 60 lbs of rhubarb this year, as our plantings matured.

There were a few major crops that declined in yield:

Butternut squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, zucchini all dramatically declined in harvest from the previous year, some to zero, as insects, powdery mildew, and other plagues quickly killed off all of our plants, as seen in the picture at right. In response, we'll probably avoid growing most of these crops next year.

Eggplant, okra, and sweet peppers declined in yield somewhat. It's not clear why-perhaps we planted fewer, perhaps the soil where they were planted was less fertile, or nearby plantings shaded these crops.

Honey harvest was cut about in half, as our more productive hive from last year got diseased. Hopefully next year the hives do better and aren't already dead.

Leaf lettuce production dropped to zero as we decided not to grow it. Sweet potato harvests declined somewhat, again because we didn't plant quite as many as last year.

If you got a box of vegetables from us this year, go to this site to fill out a survey about it: what you liked, what you didn't, etc.

http://tinyurl.com/2011MSF

Guided by Shari Reilly, we'll talk about the ideas of charity, service, social justice, and the compatibility and conflict of these ideas, with a focus on food.
The potluck will occur on Dec 9th, at 6 PM, with a discussion to follow at 7PM.
The potluck will be at 320 Ash Ave, a few blocks south of Iowa state university.

Bring some food and ideas to share!

Guided by Hannah and Leif, we will learn about the Bahai' faith and perspective on community, sharing perspectives on community connections, commitments, and engagement.
The potluck will occur at 6 PM, followed by a discussion from 7 to 8 PM.
The location will be 322 N Russell Ave, to the south east of Brookside Park.

The graph shows the cumulative harvests, such that the end of the graph is shows what the total harvest for the year were, in pounds. The blue line is vegetables that have been paid for, mainly our CSA shares. The red line is vegetables used by workers, including our working CSA shares and people that live or were living on the farm. The yellow line is vegetables used by people that generally didn't pay us or work on our farm.

There's still a few things that haven't been weighed, such as probably 20 or so pounds of dry beans and various brassicas that might have survived the frost on Thursday, but they won't really impact the final totals that much.

This graph obscures a lot of things, which are probably worth talking about further than I will here. Quickly, though, there's first the fact that a pound of potatoes isn't the same as a pound of kale or a pound of raspberries. We could approximate the value of each of these using their price, though this presents its own problems, a good example being the fact that stinging nettle is quite healthy, but most people wouldn't pay any money for it. We don't do much work to grow stinging nettle, but then the question becomes should we value nettle more because it's easy to produce, or less because it requires less labor. Beyond this, our mission isn't to produce the maximum amount of goods and then dump them somewhere, as this food aid strategy doesn't really work great at "creating a community in which everyone can participate in growing and eating delicious, healthy, locally produced food." So the actual pounds isn't the final measure, its whether we're helping to create that community. I think we're doing a pretty good job of distributing our food in a way that does that, though we'll be sure to talk about it at the roundtable discussion in December, seen below.

This saturday, we'll be having our last harvest at Mustard Seed Community Farm, combined with a general workday, focused on winterizing, bean shelling, and cleaning. I just got done with a class, and one of the teachers there said that "cleaning as a group is a great way of showing people how successful collective action can be." So come get inspired about collective action! You might also get to see and play with this turkey.

The workdays will be from 9-12 and 1-4, whichever you want or both if you'd like.

If you plan on coming, call Nicholas at 515-520-9691 so that we can make sure to divide the harvest equally!

This Friday, Oct 14, 6-8PM we'll be sharing dinner and ideas about the Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker. The dinner and discussion will be att Larrison and Brian's house: 138 Main Street, Ames, IA 50010.
Alice McGary will be returned from the national Catholic Worker gathering tonight and several of us have just gone to the midwest Catholic Worker gathering. Alice will help facilitate a discussion about the Catholic worker movement and its goals, using the Aims and Means as a starting point.
Come share food and insights!