Farm (team) Update
The farm is currently covered in snow, but we are starting to get warmer, and we're getting thing ready for our coming year. We've bought a lot of seeds, some tools, some new bees to replace the hives that died last summer, and hopefully we'll be buying some land soon, expanding our farm to 11 acres. Other than buying things, we've also been getting ready to get chickens, attending various conferences, and making farm plans for our expanded size. As I think we've told you before, we're planning on growing about a third of the vegetables we have in recent years, shutting down our CSA and most of our vegetable exports for a year in order to focus on designing our expanded farm and better connecting with our community. We'll still have plants on all of the land, as it helps the soil stay more alive and in one place. Rather than vegetables though, we'll be planting red clover in a few weeks in a good portion of our land area, and filling most of the rest of our farm with other cover crops to add nitrogen, carbon, and habitat to the soil, and also provide habitat and food to above ground life, such as chickens and pollinators. By focusing less on vegetables this yearhis, we will be better to organize our farm for the coming years, and hopefully give ourselves more time to form new and different connections with the community. This will likely take many forms, including the organization of food education classes, connecting with the people and organizations that get our food, and the continuation of our potlucks and roundtable discussions, which will start being every week around mid-May. We still have a few more once a month winter potlucks, see below.

Fundraiser
As mentioned above, we're buying our farm, which is great, but we are still doing fundraising to pay off loans which we got to buy this farm. Our last fundraiser was super successful, I think at least eighty people came, there was maybe 20 gallons of soup ( a bit too much for one night, but that's okay), and there was an active swap and a successful craft sale. Also, people gave our farm lots of money, I believe about 3500 total, which was nice. We'll be having another fundraiser, this one sponsored by Worldly Goods, a cool store at 223 Main Street, in Ames Iowa: http://www.worldlygoods.org/ . It will be March 14, 5-9 PM. Come buy some cool stuff, and a portion of the purchase price will go to us! Also I think there will be treats made by our farm team there.

Potlucks
We have three more winter potlucks, The location for each of them will be 704 Duff Ave, Ames, IA, 50010, and they will all be the first Friday of each month, with dinner at 6 and a discussion at seven. topics below, feel free to bring a friend!

March 1 Reading!: Agrarian politics
As a test of a potential format for some of our summer potlucks, we'll be reading a passage from books we think are cool, and then discussing them. Tomorrow, we'll either be reading from the Platform of the People's Party, an early 1900s agrarian party in the US, or "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman. Probably the first one.

April 5 Oscar Romero
We'll watch some film clips from a movie and have a discussion about Oscar Romero, a bishop and human rights activist in El Salvador: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%93scar_Romero

May 3 Property:
As we're buying a farm, it seemed a good time to have a discussion about the nature of property and things associated with it, like theft, resources, work, money, economies, and the government!

after this, probably in late May, we'll start our summer potlucks out at the farm. Stay tuned for our summer schedule!